Context is All, or Polly Wanna Cracker NOW

(The way James Nicoll [of the English language quotation] would put it is "Context is for the weak." Unfortunately there are a lot of power-seekers who have decided that context is a stumbling block on the path to power.)

• The report on the Baltimore City Police Department, in case you haven't seen it. Please read the whole thing, even though it's on the long side.  Linked from Walk On, cited next.
• If it's not on video, did it happen? did it happen that way? did it happen within a particular narrative?  (Jesse Curtis, Walk On.)  

  This week the Justice Department released the report of its investigation of the Baltimore Police Department. See Radley Balko's review of the report, or check out German Lopez's summary. Or read the report for yourself. It deserves more attention than it is getting. But it's not going to get that attention because it's 164 pages of text written by government lawyers. It's not bleeding. It's not on video.
  
  And that's a problem for us. We don't know how to deal with systemic failure. When institutions go to rot, responsibility is defused. When something goes wrong, who is to blame?

  Links in original.
• Echolocation.  (Steve M., No More Mister Nice Blog.)

  Republicans and Rupert Murdoch never entertained the possibility that someone who actually believed all the nonsense peddled on Fox could win the presidential primaries, even after Sarah Palin became a know-nothing superstar, and even after the Tea Party slipped the leash and started a mini-civil war within the GOP. But here we are, with a nominee who imbibed and believed all that crazy talk is now repeating it.
  
  Trump can't see what harm can come from his rhetoric -- after all, Sean Hannity's been saying the same things for years. [...] Trumpism is Murdochism without the safety valves. And Trump doesn't get that, because he probably thinks the safety-valve stuff is boring. [...]

• Ground troops not on ground.  (Tom Sullivan, Hullabaloo.)

  This is classic rookie thinking. Novice candidates (and cheap ones) sometimes believe that the party exists to raise their money and run their campaigns for them. Uh, no. The party assists with GOTV efforts. Candidates run their own campaigns and raise and spend their own money. And if they cannot manage that, how can they be expected to manage anything else?

• Katrina Pierson:  Everything She Knows is Wrong.  (Reading the comments, aside from historical snark [Obama defenestrated Jan Masaryk and then designed the bikini in Paris] and misogyny, yielded her Wikipedia entry [she was apparently Obama without his advantages], which gave me the impression that a biology degree from University of Texas did not require some history along the way.  And she's a Tea Party person; no, I don't get that either.)