Bernie Sanders, Ferguson, and Black Lives Matter.

Thought I would talk about the other long shot candidate doing surprisingly well today.

Bernie spoke at the Moda Center today to a crowd of something like 22000 people, the campaign said 28000,but I am pretty sure you can't actually fit that many people into the arena, there was an overflow crowd who watched via TV screen in the courtyard though, which they may be counting as well, either way it was by far the largest crowd he's had to date.

I bought a shirt, it was reasonably priced.

I was working during the event so was unable to catch a lot of his speech, which saddens me, but I have read up on it and looked at some of the recent changes to his campaign and I think he is doing a fairly nice job.

First some background, this is going to be tricky. Yesterday he had two speeches in Seattle, the first was outside and open to anyone, the second was inside an arena and had an attendance of around 15000, it was the first speech that was hijacked by three people claiming to represent the #BlackLivesMatter movement, they proceeded to take over and harangue the crowd for a while, comparing the event to a white supremacist rally for some reason, which I feel was a tad unfair to old Bernie, who probably didn't deserve to be talked about that way.

I am torn though, on the one hand, I have said repeatedly that protests aren't supposed to be convenient, they only work when they disrupt, and it seems churlish of me to criticize when they happen to disrupt something I am in favor of, hypocritical even. I also believe that however right they might be to do what they do need to get their message out, doing it in this way might be worse publicity for the movement than it needs at the moment. It is perhaps fortunate that it isn't up to me.

Following that, Bernie announced the hiring of Symone Sanders(No relation) as his national press secretary, she has spent time as a volunteer organizer for the Coalition for Juvenile Justice, previously worked for Ralph Nader, and is herself a black woman, she seems qualified on paper and is a good choice due to her sex and race, which I know shouldn't need to be a consideration in this way, reducing her is some ways to the "token" on the team, but it will still help with his public perception.

Her speech was pretty good, she did a very nice job warming the crowd up, spoke passionately and knowledgeably, and introduced Bernie Sanders.

Sanders spent more time focusing on race, an specific actions he would take against racism, than he has at most of his rallies leading up to this, he has also expanded his dialogue beyond addressing economic inequality specifically as his solution, including things like changing the sentencing for drug users, demilitarizing police, and suggesting allowing (some?) convicted felons to vote.

This comes at an appropriate time, it is one year since Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, and statistically we haven't really seen a change in how the police operate in this country, there was even gunfire tonight at the otherwise peaceful march that has put one black person in the hospital in critical condition during a "police involved shooting". I hate to say it, but I almost hope it was a justified shooting, and can be immediately verified as such, I fear that any other circumstance will lead to riots, it might anyway.

The point is, this is not going away, and it isn't getting better, police in Ferguson may be under more scrutiny than any other force in the country right now, and still people are getting shot, odds are when they didn't need to be. But it is on a pretty much weekly basis when "unarmed black teen killed by police - watch video" can be seen on news feeds all over the country. The Republican party line on this seems to boil down to the idea that talking about racism is deepening the divide, and we should all just shut up and let things happen, literally, it came up during the debate on Thursday, and it was pretty terrible to watch them all say the same damn thing.

Both Bernie and Hillary have spoken out on the issue, and both have plans on their websites that will attempt to address it, they are largely similar but of the two I think Bernie's is more comprehensive and I think he will push harder for it if he is elected.

But hell, just about anybody would be less harmful than any of the GOP candidates, the problem is waiting until the presidential election to make an issue of it doesn't help, so all these protests, counterprotests, Twitter Hashtags, and rallies for long shot presidential candidates at least keeps the issue in the public eye, the worst thing we can do as a country is "forget" that there is even an issue, we are pretty good at doing that, so if preventing that means I am late to work sometime, or if a speech by a politician I like is interrupted, then I am willing to live with that, I mean, the alternative is staying quite while literally hundreds of human beings a year are killed when they probably didn't need to be.