E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The Supreme Court fight is about democracy:
There’s a reason beyond garden-variety partisanship that Senate Republicans resist even holding hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Their gambit evades a full and open debate over the conservative judicial agenda, which is to use the high court in an aggressive and political way to reverse decades of progressive legislation.
The central irony here: The very conservatives who use “judicial activism” as a battering ram against liberals are now the aggressive judicial activists. It’s precisely because Garland’s record reveals him to be a devout practitioner of judicial restraint that an intellectually frank dialogue over his nomination would be so dangerous to the right. It would expose the radicalism of their jurisprudence.
Miles Kampf-Lassin at In These Times writes—How Black Youth Helped Unseat Anita Alvarez and Transform the Face of Criminal Justice in Chicago:
In the minutes after Chicago media outlets called the Cook County State’s Attorney’s race for Kim Foxx on Tuesday night, a young African-American man wearing a t-shirt reading “Adios Anita” took the stage at her victory party, beaming, chanting out to the exuberant crowd “two down, one to go!”—a reference to the firing of former police chief Garry McCarthy as well as Foxx’s ousting of Anita Alvarez, both coming in the wake of the video release of Laquan McDonald’s killing by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. [...]
Of course, Foxx also owes much of her victory to the hard work of her team of staff and volunteers—dubbed “Team Foxx”—as well as the support of Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, progressive groups like Grassroots Collaborative and United Working Familes, and major endorsements ranging from the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times to Sen. Dick Durbin.
But by organizing youth of color in the city around a transformational racial justice program, and by relentlessly participating in actions highlighting what they see as a broken criminal justice system led by Alvarez, these groups helped create the political space for Foxx’s campaign to grow into a city-wide movement to unseat an incumbent prosecutor in a primary—a remarkably unusual feat.
Marsha Coleman-Adebayo at The Guardian writes—Flint's best hope for justice? The streets:
If there is to be justice for the people of Flint, it will not be found inside the halls of Congress. It will come from where it always does: the street. In Thursday’s hearings on the poisonings, residents sat in the audience of the hearing room looking to their coiffed representatives for answers, for redress of grievous harm. Amid all the decorum they did not see that they have more courage – and integrity – than those whose help they sought.
A seasoned ear may have heard the nuance, the faint drift among the many accusations leveled during the recent hearings. For the EPA, it was the state. For Michigan, it was the stark budget. For the former mayor, it was the emergency manager. For the Republicans it was President Obama’s EPA. For the Democrats, it was the Republican governor, his omnipotent managers. For all of them it was the cameras. It was the Colosseum. And for the residents of Flint, it was the Ides of March – the community got it in the back.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—Learning Lessons From Outrage:
We have learned that the Republican establishment has no clue who the Republican base is anymore, or if they do, they thought wrongly that they could control them by feeding them crumbs of obstruction and vague aspirationalism from their table of excess. In fact, that base has been gorging itself on fear and anger, vileness and the possibility of violence.
As Rolling Stone reported last week in the following exchange with the Republican pollster Frank Luntz:
“Republicans didn’t listen,” says Luntz. “They didn’t hear the anger because they spent too much time in Washington and not enough in the rest of America. The Republican finance people, the donor class, they didn’t see it and didn’t hear it, and by the time they did, it was too late.” Luntz compared it to a horror film: “You know something’s out there, but you don’t see it until you’re getting stabbed.”
When you compare your own base to the killer in a slasher flick, you know you have a problem.
D.D. Guttenplan at The Nation writes—Why Bernie's Revolution Has Just Begun:
Hillary Clinton has always been the favored candidate of the party establishment. And unlike 2008, when the powerful Cook County portion of that establishment broke for Obama, a favorite son, this time the establishment remains unified in the face of the Sanders insurgency. Which would be reason enough for Sanders to carry on his fight all the way to Philadelphia, even if it really were mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination—a point we are still unlikely to reach before California votes on June 7. The strength of Sanders’s challenge, and the enthusiasm of his supporters, have already pulled Hillary Clinton off dead center on police violence, trade policy, access to education, and making the wealthy pay their share of taxes.
As long as he stays in the race, and stays true to his beliefs, Sanders will keep winning those arguments, even if Clinton’s willingness to steal her opponent’s best ideas—and even some of his best lines—help her to win voters who will be crucial in defeating Trump in November. Turnout remains the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel: In Ohio, where Trump came second, he still got more votes than either Democrat. Clinton herself seems to get this, and yesterday declined to endorse calls for Sanders to drop out. Any other course would leave Trump in sole possession of the media for the next four months.
Speaking of the Donald, it also seems odd that while his impact on the Republican party is endlessly analyzed, almost nothing has been said about the way Trump’s likely nomination has influenced Democratic primary voters. My own guess is that fear of Trump probably carried Clinton over the line in Illinois and Missouri.
Ali Gharib at The Nation writes—Ted Cruz Is an Anti-Muslim Bigot, Too:
This is a frightening time for Muslims in America. One of the country’s major parties is in thrall to anti-Muslim ideologues.
If this was not clear before—and it should have been—it is now. Yesterday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is in second place in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, announced his foreign-policy team. As Matt Duss, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, put it on cable news, the advisers “run the gamut from Iran-Contra conspirators to anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists.” Duss was referring, on one side, to the sometimes loopy warmonger Michael Ledeen and the convicted liar Elliott Abrams, both of whom were implicated in the Reagan administration’s dirty dealings of the 1980s, and, on the other, a cadre of Islamophobes whose bigoted andMcCarthyite ideas would be laughable if they hadn’t gained so much traction among GOP elites and voters.
Chief among the latter cohort stands Frank Gaffney, perhaps the most notorious anti-Muslim activist in America today. Gaffney is the author of a long list of incredible hypotheses about not only the ills of Islam—the faith of about a third of the world’s population—but particularly about what Muslims are trying to do here in the United States. One of those Muslims, Gaffney suspects, is Barack Obama. That’s why, his twisted logic goes, the Obama administration redesigned the US Missile Defense Agency logo so that it “appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.” Sounds like an open and shut case.
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes—On Invincible Ignorance:
Appalled Republicans may rail against Donald Trump’s arrogant ignorance. But how different, really, are the party’s mainstream leaders? Their blinkered view of the world has the veneer of respectability, may go along with an appearance of thoughtfulness, but in reality it’s just as impervious to evidence — maybe even more so, because it has the power of groupthink behind it.
This is why you shouldn’t grieve over Marco Rubio’s epic political failure. Had Mr. Rubio succeeded, he would simply have encouraged his party to believe that all it needs is a cosmetic makeover — a fresher, younger face to sell the same old defunct orthodoxy. Oh, and a last-minute turn to someone like John Kasich would, in its own way, have similar implications.
What we’re getting instead is at least the possibility of a cleansing shock — of a period in the political wilderness that will finally force the Republican establishment to rethink its premises. That’s a good thing — or it would be, if it didn’t also come with the risk of President Trump.
Finland was one of the places Michael Moore visited in his excellent new film Where to Invade Next—about stealing good ideas from other countries.
William Doyle at the Los Angeles Times writes in Why Finland has the best schools that he was a guest university lecturer there for five months and got a look at the school system because he enrolled his 7-year-old in primary school. :
In Finland, children don't receive formal academic training until the age of 7. Until then, many are in day care and learn through play, songs, games and conversation. Most children walk or bike to school, even the youngest. School hours are short and homework is generally light.
Unlike in the United States, where many schools are slashing recess, schoolchildren in Finland have a mandatory 15-minute outdoor free-play break every hour of every day. Fresh air, nature and regular physical activity breaks are considered engines of learning. According to one Finnish maxim, “There is no bad weather. Only inadequate clothing.”
One evening, I asked my son what he did for gym that day. “They sent us into the woods with a map and compass and we had to find our way out,” he said.
Finland doesn't waste time or money on low-quality mass standardized testing. Instead, children are assessed every day, through direct observation, check-ins and quizzes by the highest-quality “personalized learning device” ever created — flesh-and-blood teachers.
In class, children are allowed to have fun, giggle and daydream from time to time. Finns put into practice the cultural mantras I heard over and over: “Let children be children,” “The work of a child is to play,” and “Children learn best through play.”
Karen Klein at The Los Angeles Times writes—Decisions on SeaWorld's orcas and Griffith Park's puma reveal a dramatic shift in how we view nature:
Southern California witnessed wildlife evolution this week. Not genetic changes to animals, but, rather, an evolution in the thinking of zoos and that giant aquarium company, SeaWorld.
Two important decisions were made at nearly the same time: SeaWorld announced on Thursday that it would end its captive breeding program for orcas in all of its water parks and phase out its trained killer whale shows as well. The whales — which are actually large dolphins — will live out their lives at SeaWorld, on exhibit but not performing in shows. The day before, the Los Angeles Zoo said that it would not ask for P-22, the Griffith Park mountain lion, to be killed or relocated after it apparently got into the koala exhibit and killed one of the marsupials on display.
Both developments are encouraging signs that animal-display parks are beginning to mature.
Mrill Ingram at The Progressive writes—Here Comes the Sun! A Broad Constituency Emerges in the Battle for Solar:
State-level legislation to make solar more costly for consumers was introduced in nearly two dozen states between 2013 and early 2015. Some of the proposals were virtual copies of model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Angry solar customers from across the political spectrum have organized, accusing utility companies of serving narrow, for-profit interests, and pointing to close connections between state politics, the commissions that run utilities, and lobbying campaigns against solar. The people who sit on the commissions overseeing utility companies are elected in a handful of states but most often appointed by governors in the state. [...]
Grist blogger David Roberts points out that utility resistance to solar is a necessary outcome of the very restricted electricity market utilities operate in, and their obligations to maximize profits. He suggests, and it makes a lot of sense, that those of us interested in changing utilities change the people on public utility commissions who make the rules utilities live by. In most states (all but eleven) the public utilities commissioner is appointed by the governor.
But even in states with governors hostile to renewables, solar is making headway.