The article lacked empathy to the point of myopia, and misused a number of statistics - most blatantly, the government's job seeking numbers, that is heavily massaged to keep the unemployment figures appearing as low as possible.

It was just above the level of a hit piece.

The Washington Post is currently an arm of the DNC, to the point where they run their articles past the DNC prior to publication and where they hold clandestine fundraisers together that the DNC's own lawyers forbade.

While this is readily apparent from reading the DNC email leaks, I've seen very little discussion of it.

EDIT: Might as well cite sources.

Here's the original email from the Wikileaks DB with the mangled formatting: https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699

Here's a copy of it properly formatted on some news site I've never heard of before: http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-berni...

That's a reasonable claim, but do you have the numbers to back it up?

...and to encourage the hiring of felons.

Yeah, exactly. Ending the war on drugs doesn't change that the US has fucked millions of people, prevented them from getting employed, then blamed them for most of this. Drug testing prior to/during employment doesn't help the matter, either. A cook as a McDonald's doesn't need to be drug tested. Neither does a programmer. The country is full of this moralistic and paternalistic garbage, as is parts of the world within its sphere of influence (like the worst offenders in SE Asia (Singapore, Phillipines, Thailand, etc.)).

A big part of ending the drug war needs to be some form of restitution and reconciliation.

Commuting non-violent felony drug charges to class A misdemeanors would be a huge first step.

Im not sure it's possible to legislate that (iirc it's in article 1 of the constitution, ex postfacto I think it's called). The executive branch could do it because that has near unlimited power to pardon.

I'm not sure any of this is politically viable because of the moralistic bullshit and the "hard on crime" bullshit. I have few hopes that any of this will change. Plus, many of these people have more offenses added on in prison because of what it does to and potentially requires of people. It seems to make a non-violent offender into a more violent person with no hope because of the bigotry we have towards former prisoners.

I really want step one to be cleaning up prisons so they actually help people, instead of being crucibles of hatred staffed by sadistic meatheads. Step two can be getting rid of immoral laws and trying to get these people out.