In a statistical analysis that controlled for a host of other influences, we found this: Negative racial views about blacks were the single most important predictor of white opposition to paying college athletes.

The more negatively a white respondent felt about blacks, the more they opposed paying college athletes.

To check our findings’ validity, we also conducted an experiment. Before we asked white respondents whether college athletes should be paid, we showed one group pictures of young black men with stereotypical African American first and last names. We showed another group no pictures at all.

As you can see in the figure below, whites who were primed by seeing pictures of young black men were significantly more likely to say they opposed paying college athletes. Support dropped most dramatically among whites who expressed the most resent towards blacks as a group.

As I did in an earlier piece about white supremacists and the new Star Wars film, what follows are some comments (selected out of a total of approximately 200) about the killing of Tamir Rice (most were written in response to ) from the Right-wing, de facto, white supremacist website known as the Free Republic.

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1. My child would never have been dumb enough to pull a toy gun - or any gun - on cops with real guns.

2. Racism won’t end until we stop looking at people by race. Such as when they lecture us about the evils of white America.

3. A boy who looks like a man, not that silly photo that has been posted, and who points a realistic looking gun at strangers and pretends to shoot, deserves exactly what he got.

4. My children would never think of roughing up storekeepers, brandishing weapons, charging cops, rioting, committing mayhem, or any of the other things these idiots do. So I for one will never look at a Trayvon and see, frankly, anyone I know.

5. “Until White America looks at Tamir Rice and sees their own children, there will be no racial justice in the U.S.” Much of “White America” raises their children so they in no way resemble Tamir Rice. We pay law enforcement to keep Tamir Rice at arm’s length.

OMAHA, Neb. —After gun violence led to many calls for the community to work together, a "blacks only meeting" was held at 32nd and Pinkney.

When asked why he called a black folks-only meeting, North Omaha community activist Willie Hamilton responded, "I don't mean to laugh, but the reason why I called this meeting is because our problems need to be worked out behind closed doors. No excuses. No apologies. Our problem needs to be worked out behind closed doors. We cannot have an honest conversation with white folks in the room."

Hamilton said it's time for the people who live in North Omaha to get a handle on its problems. He took to Facebook and called on his community, advertising a meeting for "black folks only."

....However, the access logs do show that Sanders staff pulled not one but multiple lists—not searches, but lists—a fact that shows intent to export and use. And the lists were highly sensitive material. News reports have indicated that the data was "sent to personal folders" of the campaign staffers—but those refer to personal folders within NGPVAN, which are near useless without the ability to export the data locally....Even without being to export, however, merely seeing the topline numbers of, say, how many voters the Clinton campaign had managed to bank as "strong yes" votes would be a valuable piece of oppo.

...This doesn't mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn't, in David Axelrod's words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign....Still, the Sanders camp's reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton's data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn't honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord.... What's very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.

Read the whole thing for more detail. Overall, though, this gibes with my tentative view of the matter. The DNC may have overreacted, and maybe NGPVAN is incompetent. I'm agnostic on those issues. But there's not much question that the Sanders campaign acted badly here, and then tried to pretend that they were merely "testing" the system's security—which is, as Atkins says, laughable. They pulled dozens of lists from the Clinton campaign and, according to news reports, never notified anyone they had done it.

This was stupid, and Sanders has been ill-served by his team. He's rightfully fired the guy who did it, and probably ought to fire the subordinates who joined in. And that should be the end of it.

It all started when the best question of the night came from Facebook: A student from Georgia Tech called Donald Trump on his suggestion that he would kill family members of ISIS in order to deter terrorists from attacking us. "So my question is: How does intentionally killing innocent civilians set us apart from ISIS?"

No surprise here, Trump doubled down: "I would be very very firm with families. And frankly, that will make people think. Because they may not care much about their lives, but they do care, believe it or not, about their family's lives."

And ... you guessed it: the audience broke into applause.

With the help of an almost 2-1 advantage among women, Hillary Clinton leads Bernie Sanders 51 - 40 percent among Iowa likely Democratic Caucus participants, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday.

Martin O’Malley has six percent with three percent undecided. This compares to the results of a November 25th survey by Quinnipiac showing Clinton over Sanders 51 - 42 percent.