I don’t know which there are more of at Whole Foods, pigeons scavenging for scraps or petitioners seeking signatures. The difference between them is that the pigeons are cute, while the petitioners are scungy.

Imagine if Adolf Hitler had formed a commission, say around 1938, to study solutions to “the Jewish problem.” Imagine if he had begun his announcement by saying, “Our commission is not here to debate whether or not Jews have caused harm to the Fatherland. It is to decide what to do about it.”

“Listen, Liberal” is not a very good book. The author, Thomas Frank, a freelance journalist, doesn’t have the gift of gab. But I forced myself to read it because it’s remarkable in its own way. It’s a political analysis written by a liberal for liberals, during the second Obama administration, well before Donald Trump took his now-infamous escalator ride down to the lobby of Trump Tower. It’s an admonition by Frank to his fellow Democrats that they’re not perceiving what’s right in front of them: the steady alienation of the working class away from the Democratic Party, toward Republicans.

Once again—it seems like always—the Oakland Unified School District is suffering a budget crisis of unprecedented size. But then again so is Oakland itself. In case you’re wondering why Oakland is always running out of money, it’s because the city is corrupt. Top to bottom, left to right, inside and out, it’s run, as it has been for forty years, by racial agitators who represent—or claim to represent—one demographic group: Black people (occasionally broadened into the more politically-appealing “People of Color”). They jury-rig everything in the city for the benefit of Black people, whom they see as especially needing support. But the ironic, and tragic, thing is that the group they’re actually hurting the most, through their meddling, is Black people.

Parcel taxes are once again in the news, as money-hungry cities look to the regressive home levies as a newly fool-proof way of padding their budgets.