Shamelessly, in defense of his 1994 crime bill, which both he and Hillary Clinton vigorously campaigned for, Clinton declares, "Maybe you thought they were good citizens ... you are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth. You are defending the people who cause young people to go out and take guns."

But it is shameful -- shameful because the lives of so many who were ravaged by that bill was the bridge that Clinton attempted to walk over in order to appeal to white voters who may have otherwise favored Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

It's shameful because it was just a year ago that both Clintons acknowledged the flaws in the 1994 crime bill that helped lead to the crisis over hyper-incarceration and the resulting boom of the private prison industry. The crime bill was part of a national effort that resulted in the reality that black people, who comprise approximately 13% of the nation's population, represent 40% of the people incarcerated in this country.

Speaking in front of the NAACP convention last July, Bill Clinton said he deeply regretted sending minor criminals to prison for far too long. "I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it," he said.
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Last week, Vox published an article titled “This simple calculator tells you how each presidential candidate’s tax plan affects you.” It couldn’t be more manipulative.

Vox’s calculator, despite its catchy headline, does not show how your overall economic situation might change under each candidate’s policy agenda. What it presents is a number Vox calls “your tax liability,” which includes things you would never think of as part of your tax bill—like the payroll taxes your employer pays on your wage or the tax you pay on a bottle of wine. Using Vox’s approach, which draws on a narrow, but largely correct, analysis from the Tax Policy Center (TPC), simply getting a raise from your boss would look like a larger tax bill—bad news. As a result, Vox’s calculator overwhelmingly favors Trump and Cruz, while suggesting that Sanders’s plan would have a negative effect on disposable income for the majority of Americans.

This is all a bit misleading. Final take-home pay—the amount of money you get to spend after the government takes its share and you have paid the cost of health insurance—has an exponentially larger effect on your life than your tax rate. Contrary to what is implied in Vox’s calculator, TPC finds that under the Sanders plan, middle-income the take-home pay of earners with employer-provided healthcare increases.

Taxes, in other words, don’t exist in a vacuum—what the government does with those taxes matters quite a bit.
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Bill Clinton says that he “almost” wants to apologize for his remarkable episode yesterday — you know, when he embraced long-debunked, racially coded "super-predator" rhetoric, compared Black Lives Matter protestors to Republicans and insisted that they support murderers, and blamed his crime bill on black politicians. Personally, I am not demanding an apology from Bill Clinton. Instead, I would like to say thank you. Thank you, Bill, for giving the nation a ten-minute tutorial on everything that was wrong (and apparently remains wrong) with the “New Democrats” and their approach to racial politics.

Unfortunately much of the mainstream media seems to be buying (yet again) much of what Bill was selling yesterday. So to recap what should be obvious by now: Black politicians and activists were not asking for "get tough" measures and nothing else back in the 1990s. Some black politicians opposed the Clinton crime bill, and those who supported it weren’t seeking punishment and nothing more; they desperately wanted massive investment in jobs and schools so the young people trapped in communities where work had suddenly disappeared would have some hope of survival. It is a gross distortion to suggest that black people wanted billions of dollars slashed from child welfare, housing and other public benefits in order to fund an unprecedented prison building boom. It was Bill Clinton's deliberate political strategy -- one he championed along with the "New Democrats" -- to appeal to white swing voters by being tougher on struggling black communities than the Republicans had been, ramping up the drug war and gutting welfare. That strategy of "getting tough" while at the same time eviscerating the federal social safety net was NOT supported by many of the black politicians he seeks to use as cover. Rep. John Lewis (who Clinton referred to yesterday as the "last remaining hero of the civil rights movement" fiercely opposed welfare reform, accurately predicting that it would thrust more than a million more kids into severe poverty.

John Lewis said back then: “How can any person of faith, of conscience, vote for a bill that puts a million more kids into poverty? What does it profit a great nation to conquer the world, only to lose its soul?”

The young people challenging Bill Clinton yesterday were asking these very same questions. You may not agree with their tactics, but they were, in their own way, fighting for the soul of the Democratic party and American democracy itself. Whether our nation can be redeemed in the long run remains to be seen.