"I am a woman of color running in a state that has no women in any elected federal or statewide offices."

"But you have now twice, without ever having met or interviewed me, attacked and mocked me on your opinion page ('Is Kim Klacik running for Congress, mayor or chief Trump enabler?' Aug. 19). What gives? Not that it should matter, but I’m a moderate Republican.... As for my commitment to Baltimore, for nearly a decade, I have run a nonprofit, Potential Me, based and operated out of South Baltimore, which helps predominantly inner-city Black women prepare for careers, providing them with business attire and interview prep. But, you are right, I do not live in Baltimore. I have a young daughter I love and would not dare subject her to the blight, soaring crime, broken schools and low expectations of the city. You know who else would not? The tens of thousands of Black families who have moved from the city — half of my district — to the Baltimore County and Howard County half. I presume you’ve written me off because President Donald Trump has brought unsolicited attention to my race and Baltimore’s ills. I agree with some of his policies; I disagree with others.... How many corrupt, failed leaders have you failed to vet and, over and over, even endorsed?"

Writes Kim Klacik in "What gives, Baltimore Sun editorial board?," published in The Baltimore Sun.

Klacik has received some very high-level attention, and the ad is quite viral (and hard to refute):

Kimberly will work with the Trump Administration and we will bring Baltimore back, and fast. Don’t blow it Baltimore, the Democrats have destroyed your city! https://t.co/PDdjgxbIHu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2020

"So far this morning, you’ve mentioned Frank Zappa, Ric Ocasek and the Talking Heads. I’m sure there are lots of musical threads that attach the three. But..."

"... there’s something else, too: Baltimore childhoods. Frank Zappa and Ric Ocasek were both born in Baltimore and David Byrne moved to town when he was in elementary school. I grew up just outside the city and live here now. It’s a challenging and frustrating place on a lot of levels but it’s also a town that celebrates creativity and inspires a lot of loyalty."

A reader writes.

I wrote about Talking Heads in the context of saying goodbye to Ric Ocasek, who always reminded me a bit of David Byrne. Maybe it was the Baltimore connection! I often think of Frank Zappa, but until now, I don't think his connection to Baltimore ever figured in my musings. I wrote about him yesterday as I contemplated the NYT story about Brett Kavanaugh:

And I'd like to know... When can people get naked at parties and waggle their genitalia at each other?... I'm inclined to believe that people at private parties can get naked. We were just talking about Woodstock, that revered historical event where young people got naked. In the words of Frank Zappa:

There will come a time when everybody who is lonely
Will be free to sing and dance and love
There will come a time when every evil that we know
Will be an evil that we can rise above
Who cares if you're so poor you can't afford
To buy a pair of mod-a-go-go stretch elastic pants?
There will come a time when you can even take your clothes off when you dance

Another song for this morning: "What's New in Baltimore?"

Hey! What's new in Baltimore?
I don't know!
Hey! What's new in Baltimore?
Better go back and find out

By the way, did you see that the NYT, promoting its Kavanaugh article, tweeted "Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun…"? and then deleted the tweet and apologized because nobody they cared about identified with the notion. I hope you don't think that what I wrote indicates that I am the kind of person the NYT was tweeting about. The Kavanaugh article doesn't say a penis was thrust in anyone's face! It says "thrust his penis at her" — just "her," not "her face." So that's another thing wrong with the deleted tweet. It worsened the allegation — having the penis thrust at the face — which makes the allegation sound much less like dancing and more like an outright sexual assault. In making that aggressive move — that journalistic thrust in the face — the tweet undermined itself. We might think that getting naked and dancing at a party is harmless fun, but we won't think that way about a penis thrust at a face.

"So sad that Elijah Cummings has been able to do so little for the people of Baltimore."

"Statistically, Baltimore ranks last in almost every major category. Cummings has done nothing but milk Baltimore dry, but the public is getting wise to the bad job that he is doing!Someone please explain to Nancy Pelosi, who was recently called racist by those in her own party, that there is nothing wrong with bringing out the very obvious fact..." that Congressman Elijah Cummings has done a very poor job for his district and the City of Baltimore. Just take... a look, the facts speak far louder than words! The Democrats always play the Race Card, when in fact they have done so little for our Nation’s great African American people. Now, lowest unemployment in U.S. history, and only getting better. Elijah Cummings has failed badly! Speaking of failing badly, has anyone seen what is happening to Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco. It is not even recognizeable lately. Something must be done before it is too late. The Dems should stop wasting time on the Witch Hunt Hoax and start focusing on our Country!"

Trump keeps up his effort to turn the subject of the day to Baltimore. I've combined tweets that all went up this morning — here, here, here, and here.

He's doubling down after being called a racist for what he tweeted yesterday: "Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen? Investigate this corrupt mess immediately!" And: "So sad that Elijah Cummings has been able to do so little for the people of Baltimore. Statistically, Baltimore ranks last in almost every major category. Cummings has done nothing but milk Baltimore dry, but the public is getting wise to the bad job that he is doing!"

Trump is also retweeting video showing degraded living conditions in Baltimore:

Elijah Cummings spends all of his time trying to hurt innocent people through “Oversight.” He does NOTHING for his very poor, very dangerous and very badly run district! Take a look.... #BlacksForTrump2020 https://t.co/seNVESZUht

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 27, 2019

Trump critics are forced to take the position that it's racist (at least for Trump) to call attention to the poor conditions in a place where black people live. Here are some headlines I'm seeing collected at Memeorandum:

Baltimore Sun: Better to have a few rats than to be one...

Jonathan Chait / New York Magazine: Why Trump Spent His Summer Vacation Sending Racist Tweets

David Zurawik / Baltimore Sun: Trump's Twitter attack on Cummings and Baltimore: undiluted racism and hate — After three years of denouncing President Trump's use of media to attack, denigrate and, yes, spew racist hate, there are days when I think I do not have a drop of vitriol left for Trump and what he's doing to this country.

Peter Baker / New York Times: Trump Assails Congressional Critic, Calling His Majority-Black District a ‘Disgusting’ Rat-Infested ‘Mess’...

The Trump critics should know by now that calling Trump racist will not cause him to back down. In fact, this newest reason to call him racist has the tendency to make us forget the last thing that made them call him racist — seriously, I've forgotten! — and to dilute the meaning of the epithet. Trump is pointing at something concrete — living conditions in Baltimore — so news reports will need to show pictures of living conditions in Baltimore and interview residents.

I had to stop and think for a while to remember the previous Trump-is-a-racist topic. It was those tweets about Congresswomen who should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Actually, that controversy is thematically related to the Baltimore topic: There are some terrible places where people unfortunately live.

So my question is: Who will help... or are Trump and his critics all hammily performing in the age-old theatrical tradition of caring for poor people?

"For weeks, [Baltimore mayor Catherine] Pugh, a Democrat, has been the focus of criticism surrounding her Healthy Holly children's book series about a black girl who promotes nutrition and exercise."

"Just before she announced her leave of absence, The Baltimore Sun reported that health care giant Kaiser Permanente was seeking a contract to provide coverage to city employees and paid $114,000 to purchase some 20,000 copies of the books between 2015 to 2018. The city's spending panel, of which Pugh is a member, awarded a contract worth $48 million in 2017 to Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States Inc., according to the Sun.... Last month, the Sun also reported that Pugh profited from business contracts with the nonprofit University of Maryland Medical System, which runs hospitals around Baltimore. Pugh was a board member of UMMS until her resignation on March 18. Two other board members resigned a day earlier. According the Sun, the medical system paid Pugh $500,000 for copies of the Healthy Holly books, and the payments were made for a number of years."

NPR reports.

Holy hell — Healthy Holly....

Is forced prayer the answer to the National Anthem problem?

I'm watching the opening ceremony for the Ravens vs. Steelers game on TV right now because I wanted to see how they'd handle it. The plan was in place, with an announcer on the public address system saying:

Before the singing of the National Anthem, please join Ravens players and coaches and the entire Ravens organization to pray that we as a nation, embrace kindness, unity, equality, and justice for all Americans.

All the players shown on camera then took the position that we've seen players use in the protests during the National Anthem. So the position that meant protest was supposed to transform into meaning supplication toward God.

This was coercive prayer, and I don't know what kinds of religious-freedom objections the players and coaches and spectators might feel: Is there something wrong with using prayer this way, to fix a political (and commercial) problem?

The Ravens coach,  John Harbaugh — who is a vocal Catholic — made the sign of the cross, and I wondered if there were others whose religion impels them to pray in some special way that was not provided for here and still others who are nonbelievers and troubled by the burden of coerced prayer.

From the fans, I heard loud booing, which I interpret as calling bullshit on the instrumental use of religion to preserve the protest gesture they don't like. Management might have thought the prayer packaging would silence the crowd, lest they sound as though they are objecting to religion. Surely, religion will be respected. They thought wrong. Public displays of religion are often the insincere use of religion as a means to an end and sometimes it works, but it didn't work this time, judging by the boos.

But perhaps that was only a minority booing, the booers will be seen as disrespectful, and the pre-anthem kneeling in prayer will become the ongoing solution to the National Anthem problem. I kind of doubt that, because I associate political liberals with a longstanding objection to prayer before football games. Here, read what Linda Greenhouse wrote in the NYT about Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe, the football prayer case. (Yes, this was about teenagers and public school, so there are big differences, but the point is that political liberals tend to have strong compunctions against coerced prayer and little sentimental empathy about football prayer.)

After the prayer at the Ravens game today, there was a particularly patriotic version of the National Anthem, complete with a call to "remove your hats as we honor our nation" and the "military who protect us" and a flyover A-10s — with fireworks — as the anthem — which was "written right here in Baltimore" — was sung in luscious harmony vocal trio from the US Air Force Heritage of America Band. The crowd in the stadium responded to all of that with great enthusiasm.

The players and coaches, of course, rose from the kneeling position before the anthem-related section of the opening ceremony began.

"And I say this very regretfully as a liberal Democrat who has spent a legal career defending the indigent in criminal court..."

The "I" is The Kenosha Kid, writing what is the top-rated comment on the cover story in the NYT Magazine. The article is titled "Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby/In the midst of a national crisis of police violence, Baltimore’s state’s attorney gambled that prosecuting six officers for the death of Freddie Gray would help heal her city. She lost much more than just the case." Here's the whole comment, which begins with a quote from the article:

"When she started her campaign to become the city’s top prosecutor a year before, she was a 33-year-old corporate lawyer working for an insurance firm... In conversation with half a dozen prosecutors who worked with Mosby, no one could remember any of the cases she handled before her election."

Anyone who has spent a career in the criminal courts knows two things for certain:

1) a lawyer needs to be both very good, even brilliant, and must acquire the battle-tested seasoning of years of jury trials in order to be more than barely competent in that arena;

"The Baltimore police officer who drove the van in which Freddie Gray sustained a fatal spinal injury was acquitted on Thursday of second-degree murder and six lesser charges..."

"... leaving prosecutors still without a conviction after three high-profile trials in a case that has shaken this city."

In his ruling, Judge Barry G. Williams rejected the prosecution’s claim that the officer, Caesar R. Goodson Jr., had given Mr. Gray a “rough ride” in the van, intentionally putting him at risk for an injury by taking a wide turn while Mr. Gray was not secured with a seatbelt.

“The court finds there is insufficient evidence that the defendant gave or intended to give Mr. Gray a rough ride,” Judge Williams, said, adding that there had not been “evidence presented at this trial that the defendant intended for any crime to happen.”...

The state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, heaved a sigh and walked out, her head down, escorted by her security guard. The two prosecutors who tried the case, Jan Bledsoe and Michael Schatzow, followed, purse-lipped and looking glum.

ADDED: Remember last year, when The Huffington Post was enthusing about the "objectively badass" Marilyn Mosby?



I said at the time: "If the question is the abuse of government power in the form of the police, the answer is not mindless cheerleading for another form of government power, a prosecutor."

"Lessons From the Mistrial in the Freddie Gray Case."

"It isn’t enough to have officers on the beat, in the neighborhood.... Race is important, but it’s complicated.... It’s still very hard to prosecute police officers.... "

The prosecutors may have miscalculated. As soon as Mosby announced her set of charges, there were serious questions raised about them. First, she had brought them very, very quickly. Critics complained she’d done so under pressure, hoping to assuage protestors...  Second, many observers felt that Mosby had overcharged, bringing a stronger set of charges than she could really prove....

Prosecutors then made a second set of strategic calculations about how to bring the case. Rather than try all six officer at once, they opted to try them serially. And they began with Porter, apparently in the hope that he would be convicted and then could be compelled to testify against other officers. But whatever advantages Porter’s testimony might have given them in a future trial, he proved impossible to convict—at least on the first try....

After the Freddie Gray incident in Baltimore, police retreat and murder advances.

The NYT reports: "West Baltimore’s Police Presence Drops, and Murders Soar."

At least 55 people, the most since the early 1970s, have been murdered in Baltimore since May 1, when the state’s attorney for the city, Marilyn J. Mosby, announced the criminal charges against the officers. Victims of shootings have included people involved in criminal activity and young children who were simply in the wrong place....

At the time of her announcement, Ms. Mosby’s charges were seen as calming the city. But they enraged the police rank and file, who pulled back. The number of arrests plunged, and the murder rate doubled. 

55 (in 40 or so days) is only a doubling?!

"I am 80 and figure I can speak the truth as I see it. Ignorant I am not."

Said Duke professor Jerry Hough, defending himself after getting criticized for something he wrote in the comments section of a The New York Times editorial titled "How Racism Doomed Baltimore." Hough's I'm-old defense appears in a WaPo article titled "Duke professor, attacked for ‘noxious’ racial comments, refuses to back down."

Here's what Hough wrote in the NYT:

"The driver of the police van, officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., who is black, is accused of second-degree 'depraved heart' murder — the most serious charge of them all..."

"... which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison."

Other counts against the cops include involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault and false imprisonment. The five men and one woman posted bond and all but one reportedly were released.

“We are satisfied with today’s charges,” Gray’s stepfather, Richard Shipley, told a news conference. “These charges are an important step in getting justice for Freddie.”

"Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., 45... has been on the force since 1999..."

An African American, Goodson drove the van that transported Gray to jail. Goodson, whose bail was set at $350,000, is the only officer in the group facing a murder charge...

Goodson is the grandson of a police officer.... He lives in Catonsville in Baltimore County, where two of his neighbors said Friday that he had minimal interactions with them.

Frances Hubbard, who lives on his street, described the officer as a “family man, always polite, always speaks. I see him eating with the family.”

"Who Is This Objectively Badass Attorney Running The Freddie Gray Investigation?"

Headline at a Huffpo article that's teased on the Huffpro front page with "BALTIMORE BADASS":



If the question is the abuse of government power in the form of the police, the answer is not mindless cheerleading for another form of government power, a prosecutor.

Objectively Badass...

Yeah, let's be objective. Let's be level-headed and demand that all government power — police, prosecutors, the lot — operate within the bounds of the law.

My criticism is of the headline and the front-page teaser. The article doesn't contain the word "badass" or present Marilyn Mosby as anything that warrants the use of the word "badass." She herself is saying appropriate things like "I uphold the law" and "At the end of the day I’m here to do my job. It’s about applying justice fairly and equally to those with and without a badge. Did I treat this case any different in the pursuit of justice? No, I didn’t."

I wonder what pushed Huffpo to use that word "badass." I doubt if the word would have been chosen if Mosby were a white male.

"She gave us her word. I said, 'How will you handle police brutality?'"

"She said: ‘If you put me in this chair, I don’t care if they are in uniform or not. I come from a family of officers. Some are good, some are bad. I will hold everybody accountable to the law.’ And thank you, Jesus, she lived it out."

From a NYT article about Marilyn Mosby, the Baltimore prosecutor who has charged 6 police officers with homicide for the death of Freddie Gray. The quote is from a woman whose brother was killed by police and who strongly supported Mosby's campaign to oust the incumbent state's attorney for Baltimore City.

And here's a quote from  Lester Spence, an associate professor of political science and Africana studies at Johns Hopkins University: "Black power is about taking the office and using it to make government more humane for black people, and that’s what we see in her. She’s supposed to treat me, the corner boy in the Western District and the police officer exactly the same way when it comes to the law. Historically, because of racism, her predecessors have not effectively done that."

"David Simon, the creator of the iconic Baltimore-based HBO series The Wire, lashed out in a lengthy interview against Martin O’Malley..."

"... saying in the wake of this week’s riots and curfew that the former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland Governor was the 'stake through the heart of police procedure' in the city."

Speaking with The Marshall Project, Simon traces his wariness back to O’Malley’s time as Mayor between 1999 and 2007, when Simon says he made “mass arrests” of citizens for minor offenses to pad crime statistics. “[W]hat happened under his watch as Baltimore’s mayor was that he wanted to be governor. And at a certain point, with the crime rate high… he put no faith in real policing.”

Simon, a crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun for more than 10 years before he moved to television writing, has been an outspoken critic of O’Malley for years. He has even said that the Wire character Tommy Carcetti, an ambitious politician who manipulates crime reduction statistics, is partly based on O’Malley, a presumed Democratic presidential candidate.

Here's the whole interview. Excerpt:

"For a time in recent decades, it looked like the reform examples of New York under Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg and the growth of cities like Houston might lead to a broader urban revitalization."

"In some places it did. But of late the progressives have been making a comeback, led by Bill de Blasio in New York and the challenge to sometime reform Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. This week’s nightmare in Baltimore shows where this leads. It’s time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, 'broken windows' policing, and education choice."

A Wall Street Journal editorial titled "The Blue-City Model/Baltimore shows how progressivism has failed urban America." (Pay-wall protected, but if you Google some text, you can go in.)

Tonight's game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox will be closed to the public.

"The unusual decision to play the game before an empty Oriole Park at Camden Yards follows two straight days of postponements."

Lawprof Roger Groves comments:

Some have already blamed the youth who rioted as the sole culprits, the only cause of the problem. That reminds me of those who can’t understand why their weeds continue to grow when their lawn mower only cuts off the leaves. They didn’t see that the root of the problem requires digging deeper than what was on the surface....

That does not excuse bad behavior.... But as for the baseball aspect of this, playing a game without fans is not the answer.... Yes, a fan-free game minimizes the risk of a lawsuit for having a game in which they could get hurt. But even if it was more expensive to the owners and MLB, sacrificing fans for the profits and logistics is not a good idea. Ticket refunds may ameliorate the problem a bit. But I suspect the fans that paid that hefty ticket price would much rather see the game than have the same money back they already decided to spend.

I'll just add 2 things:

1. Playing before the empty stands makes a powerful visual statement that is entirely different from a postponement. If there's a postponement, there's nothing to see, and seemingly nothing is lost. Some later game between those 2 teams is turned into a double header. But when a game is played to empty stands, the disturbing spectacle will be on TV and radio. Many people will watch/listen and experience the theater of sadness. Fans will live through hours of What Has Happened to Our Proud City. On TV, there will be none of the shots of kids and weird guys and pretty girls to amuse us during the inevitable longueurs of baseball. You might think it won't matter so much on the radio, but it will. The crowd sound in the gaps in the chatter are integral to the beauty of baseball on the radio.

2. Groves's statement "That does not excuse bad behavior" will, I am sure, sound lame to many of you, but I happen to have my copy of Michael LaBossiere's "76 Fallacies" open to the precisely relevant page: "Confusing Explanations and Excuses":

"Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland and possible Democratic presidential candidate, is speaking out on the violence in Baltimore. O'Malley's rival, Hillary Clinton, is not."

Says the Weekly Standard, noting yesterday's tweets from the 2 candidates.

In fairness to Hillary, she was not the governor of the state that is having terrible trouble right now. She was not the mayor of Baltimore. O'Malley, if he is to be a plausible alternative to Hillary, needs to be able to flaunt his achievements as governor and mayor.

He's tweeting things like: "We must come together as one City to transform this moment of loss & pain into a safer & more just future for all of Baltimore's people." I wouldn't give him much credit for self-interested, anodyne statements like that. Baltimore is really hurting him. The man was mayor of Baltimore or Governor of Maryland from 1999 to just this past January. If Baltimore has big problems, he's responsible for them! His expressions of sorrow and hope for the future are fundamentally ridiculous.

Meanwhile, it might be nice if Hillary would show up and contribute something to the national political debate.

"When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself."

"When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con."

Writes Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Waiting for the sinkhole.

At the Baltimore landslide:



Scroll to 1:10 for the serious action.

"What's up with Cleveland?"

"Why so many high-profile crimes in such a short span? Why such violence against the metro area's women?"

Cleveland's police department declined a CNN request to talk about the recent crimes. But to those who study the city, some patterns do emerge: crushing poverty, dehumanizing unemployment and thousands of tumbledown vacant homes -- ideal places to rape and kill in the shadows.

"I hate to say this, but in a sense, to a large degree, we have an underclass in the city of Cleveland of those that truly are disconnected from the social fabric, from the mainstream economy and society," said Ronnie Dunn, an urban studies professor at Cleveland State University. "They're left without anything to grasp onto."

Who are "they"? The murder rate in Cleveland is lower than in Baltimore and Detroit, but the rape rate is more than double that of Baltimore or Detroit.