Bernie's In

Lonnie Phillips is filing for bankruptcy because he owes $203,000 to the company that sold his stepdaughter’s killer 4,000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet.

In a prolonged exchange Thursday afternoon, former President Bill Clinton forcefully defended his 1994 crime bill to Black Lives Matter protesters in the crowd at a Hillary Clinton campaign event.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1.05 million prisoners were held in federal or state facilities in 1994. By 2014, it was 1.56 million.

The victims didn't demand it and I know I didn't.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0X412G

The truth about Clinton's racist laws revealed.

Back in the 1990s, the leaders of the African American community were demanding these tough crime laws....

The easy slogan here is “Break up the big banks.” It’s obvious why this slogan is appealing from a political point of view: Wall Street supplies an excellent cast of villains. But were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?

Many analysts concluded years ago that the answers to both questions were no. Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers that weren’t necessarily that big. And the financial reform that President Obama signed in 2010 made a real effort to address these problems. It could and should be made stronger, but pounding the table about big banks misses the point.

Yet going on about big banks is pretty much all Mr. Sanders has done. On the rare occasions on which he was asked for more detail, he didn’t seem to have anything more to offer. And this absence of substance beyond the slogans seems to be true of his positions across the board.

You could argue that policy details are unimportant as long as a politician has the right values and character. As it happens, I don’t agree. For one thing, a politician’s policy specifics are often a very important clue to his or her true character — I warned about George W. Bush’s mendacity back when most journalists were still portraying him as a bluff, honest fellow, because I actually looked at his tax proposals. For another, I consider a commitment to facing hard choices as opposed to taking the easy way out an important value in itself.

Former Baltimore Raven Ray Lewis posted a passionate 10-minute video to his Facebook page in which he questioned how the Black Lives Matter movement could ignore black-on-black crime.

“I’m trying to figure out why no one is paying attention to black men killing black men,” Lewis said.

The video, which received about 43,000 likes and has been viewed more than three million times, was created to call attention to the recent surge of violence in Chicago.

“Why do we always find ourselves half the victims,” the 40 year old said. “Why do we always find ourselves half the victims, and now we have the separation once again that we’re being victimized because of one bad white cop, two bad white cops, three bad white cops, killing a young black brother. But every day we have black-on-black crime, killing each other? Police in Chicago reported 677 shootings this year. Last year, it was 359. The March murder rate rose by 29 percent, but we’re not rioting in the streets [when] black on black killing each other,”

The legendary linebacker seems to think with the recent rising in violence in Chicago, that (some) black people don’t appreciate other black people.

“I’m just asking this one simple thing: When will we appreciate who we are? When will our skin color start paying attention to our own skin color? “I’m trying to figure out how in the month of march there’s more murders in Chicago then there are then there are days in the month. Forty-five murders in the month of [March] in Chicago.”

While some people were in full support of Lewis speech, others felt as if he was a little tardy to the party. Activist Tamika D. Mallory to Instagram Saturday to respectfully disagree with the NFL champ.

“You’re asking me a very fair question, and if I had some paper in front of me, I would give you a better answer,” Sanders replied. “But I think if the expansion was illegal, moving into territory that was not their territory, I think withdrawal from those territories is appropriate.”

So, if the United States were to determine that some settlements are illegal under existing treaties and agreements, then a Sanders administration would expect Israel to pull back?

“Israel will make their own decisions,” Sanders replied.

The Daily News continued, asking him if he supports the Palestinian leadership’s efforts to drag Israel before the International Criminal Court over alleged war crimes.

No, said Sanders.

“Why not?” the Daily News asked.