The Jena Six case has underlined the way race and class bias continue to influence criminal justice in the United States. Long-haired celebrity civil rights attorney Tom Mesereau recently deconstructed the case to a full crowd at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. For white Americans, he argued, the bias is easy [...]

Add heartland rocker John Mellencamp to the headaches suffered this month by Mayor Murphy R. McMillin of embattled Jena, La. Mellencamp has taken on the Jena 6 story in his latest release, a contemporary “Southern Man” for his flatlander fans:
An all-white jury hides the executioner’s face
See how we are, me and you?
Everyone here needs to [...]

In what has become the latest Facebook fiasco, a group of college students recently joined forces to parody the Jena Six assault and then had the dramatization published on the social networking site. A freshman at the University of Louisiana at Monroe posted a photo album and a video showing her friends covered in mud, [...]

UPDATE: Mychal Bell was released on $45,000 bail this afternoon.
The Jena Six controversy continued today when a Louisiana prosecutor confirmed he would no longer seek an adult trial for Mychal Bell, a black teenager who once faced an attempted murder charge in the beating of a white classmate.
Bell has been in jail since December 2006, [...]

Who says public financing is dead? A bill introduced Tuesday is shaking up the way presidential campaigns are funded. It’s also making it a heck of a lot harder to comprehend an already complicated issue.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, it is important to understand how the system operates now. Spearheaded after [...]

Here at PopandPolitics.com, we really dig tag clouds - the feature we have off to the right of our posts under “Heat”. With tagclouds, more frequently used tags are displayed in a larger font, whereas less popular words/subjects appear smaller in the tag cloud. Selecting a single tag within a tag cloud will generally lead [...]

Perhaps the single most powerful, peaceful way to bring about social change is for people to stand together publicly on behalf of an important cause. After all, if you’re going to talk that talk, you better be able to walk the walk, right? Protest is a longtime part of political life, but just how successful [...]