Another Broken Commandment

• Legendarily, there was one rule that Republicans actually followed when on the hustings; it had the unofficial name of the Eleventh Commandment:
  

  "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."

  (There was no such guideline on the Democratic side, not that it would have mattered.)
  
  Apparently the Republican "united front" has ceased to be.  (There are other samples scattered about, but this link was there today.)
• *Ahem*.
• Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.
  
  One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?

• DeVega on Coates on Sanders on reparations;

  Reparations for harms done to a people because of their race, ethnicity, religion or other markers of difference are not bizarre or unusual justice claims. They have firm standing under international law as has been seen with survivors of the Holocaust, in some limited cases with First Nations peoples in the United States and other countries, Japanese Americans during World War II, and victims of political violence in Latin America, Brazil, South Africa and elsewhere,
  
  While public opinion research is clear that white Americans are extremely hostile to reparations for slavery in the case of African-Americans, many white Americans actually support the idea of reparations in the abstract.

• Michigan.  Michigan.  Michigan. [ETA:  Michigan.]  Notice anything?  Hint:  It goes back at least as far as Gerald Ford.  Let me be blunt:  Would this have happened in Grosse Pointe?  Or Hamtramck?