Baltimore Riots: I smell a rat

"BALTIMORE (WJZ) – Governor Larry Hogan has declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard to address the growing violence and unrest in Baltimore City. “I have not made this decision lightly. The National Guard represents a last resort in order to restore order,” Hogan said during a news conference Monday night."

The Guard arrived in Baltimore shortly after midnight.

I'll assume readers outside Maryland and the Greater Washington DC area don't know anything about Maryland politics and so can't imagine how ticked off the Democratic Party machine is that Larry Hogan is the governor. These quotes from a Washington Post report dated November 5, 2014, are a fast way to get a feel for the situation:

Republican businessman Larry Hogan pulled off a stunning upset in heavily Democratic Maryland on Tuesday, winning the governor's race against Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown by relentlessly promising to roll back tax increases and chart a new direction for the state.

Shortly after midnight, Brown conceded a race that he lost despite the strong support of the state’s Democratic establishment and visits to Maryland in the closing weeks of the campaign by President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Hogan’s victory — a repudiation of the eight-year tenure of Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) — means that Annapolis will return to divided government for the first time since 2006. It remains to be seen how much Hogan and his running mate, Lt. Gov.-elect Boyd Rutherford, will be able to accomplish with a Democratic-controlled legislature. Their victory sent a strong message that Marylanders had grown weary of the tax increases enacted under O’Malley ...

[...]
Brown, the son of a Jamaican father and a Swiss mother, was attempting to become the first African American governor of Maryland and only the third elected anywhere in the nation. ...

The White House sent these members of the administration to Freddie Gray's funeral, in a move that given the high tension surrounding Gray's death and his funeral yesterday was bound to pour fuel on the flames.

The White House sent Cabinet Secretary Broderick Johnson, chair of the Obama administration's My Brother's Keeper Task Force; Heather Foster, an adviser in the White House Office of Public Engagement; and Elias Alcantara from the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

See also Days of Protest Days After Freddie Gray's Death; Baltimore Sun, April 25

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