"Happy Bloody Sunday" seems like the worst greeting ever.
Leonard Pitts on Selma + 50. The event and President Obama's speech are inspiring, but...
There were no commemorative t-shirts for sale here in 1965.
There were none the first time voting rights activists sought to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a march to Montgomery, only to be clubbed and brutalized in a police riot that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.” Nor the second time they tried, when Martin Luther King led marchers from all over the country out onto that bridge, prayed, and then led them back into town, an event that came to be known as “Turnaround Tuesday.” Nor the third time when, under federal protection, they crossed the bridge and marched four days to the state capital, where King gave one of the most inspired orations of his life ...
No t-shirts for sale back then bearing likenesses of King or Malcolm X or, obviously, President Barack Obama. It is an oversight they seem intent on rectifying at the 50th anniversary commemoration. There is an unmistakable air of the carnival to this affair. You can buy t-shirts not only of those men, but also, for some reason, of Michael Jackson.
Nor is that all. You can also buy buttons, candy apples, lipstick, fruity drinks in frilly plastic glasses, barbecue, roasted corn, fish, dresses, earrings and glow sticks like you’d find at the circus. It cost $20 just to cross a barricade to within a couple blocks of the bridge.
One is loathe to criticize citizens of a poor and hardscrabble town for turning a buck any legal way they can. Still, all that unrestrained commerce feels ... odd. It has the effect of turning the day into not just a commemoration of America then, but a wry commentary on America now, on the seriousness, or lack thereof, of its people. We celebrate the courage of those who crossed the bridge 50 years ago, but how many of us, walking down Broad St., sipping fruity drinks and wearing our Michael Jackson t-shirts, would have the resolve and firmness of purpose to do the same thing now?
In a nation where the deaths of men and boys like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin are fresh wounds and the Justice Department just quantified the blatant racism of the police department in Ferguson, Mo., the question is not an idle one.
That question: would you put yourself on the line for the rights of others, is one that we should all face. Often.
Ok. Spring forward past the squiggle to read more punditry.
Dana Milbank says Hillary Clinton is so careful, she makes mistakes.
So it turns out Hillary Clinton will face a serious challenger in the primaries, after all. Her name is Hillary Clinton.
This week’s revelation that she used only private e-mail to conduct her public business as secretary of state is not a knockout blow to the likely Democratic presidential nominee; she has weathered worse. But it is a needless, self-inflicted wound, and it stems from the same flaws that have caused Clinton trouble in the past — terminal caution and its cousin, obsessive secrecy.
In trying so hard to avoid mistakes — in this case, trying to make sure an embarrassing e-mail or two didn’t become public — Clinton made a whopper of an error. What’s troubling is that she’s been making a variation of this mistake for nearly a quarter-century.
Truthfully, the email thing is extremely minor. More fitting of the ghazi ending (-ghazi: a "scandal" that is entirely the dream of political opponents with no substance) rather than being a gate (-gate: you are
not a crook). But email-ghazi is just one of a hundred or so tentative attacks that will be floated between now and election day. Opponents hope that one will graduate to gateness, or that the sum total of all the nonsense will just wear voters out.
Anne Applebaum says the UK is about to become a lot less U.
Britain is changing with surprising speed.
For one, the discontent with “establishment” politics that has convulsed so many European countries has finally reached the British Isles. There have been no mass marches here, as in Spain, and no anarchist riots, as in Greece. Instead, large numbers of Britons are cheerfully telling pollsters that they aren’t planning to vote for the Conservative Party in May’s general election, and that they don’t like the Labor Party or the Liberal Democrats, either. If they are Scottish, they might be planning to vote for the Scottish National Party, which hopes to immediately reinvigorate its campaign for Scottish independence. If they are English, they might vote for the anti-European, anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), or maybe for the Greens.
Nothing wrong with that in principle, but it’s hard to imagine how a four- or five-way split could produce a stable government, especially in a country that has been ruled by Labor or the Tories for most of the past century.
A partnership with a UK where UKIP plays a major role in the government, would be... let's just hope we don't see it.
Frank Bruni on the religious twist behind Bibi & Boehner's excellent screw up.
The presence of Pat Boone was a key to understanding why John Boehner was playing a smart game of party politics to stand so solidly with the Israeli prime minister.
I’m referring to Boone the singer. But I really mean Boone the churchman. He’s a prominent figure among, and megaphone for, American’s evangelical Christians, who listened to Netanyahu's remarks as closely and adoringly as any constituency in this country.
For the speech, Boone wore a tie on which the flag of Israel, with its Star of David, was conspicuous. Just afterward, he told David Weigel of Bloomberg Politics that he’d known Netanyahu personally for years and had held some hope that the prime minister would give him a special shout-out during the remarks. ...
Yes, Boehner's invitation to Netanyahu, rendered independently of the White House, was a way to get under President Obama’s skin and in President Obama’s way. And, yes, that provocation was manna to the most conservative House Republicans, who sometimes chafe under Boehner's leadership.
Wait. Was that a blue-suede star on Boone's lapel?
Ross Douthat looks into the future, future, future.
Soon, if not tomorrow, the rich may be able to re-engineer bodies and minds, making human equality seem like a quaint conceit. Meanwhile, the masses will lose their jobs to machines and find themselves choosing between bread and circuses (or drugs and video games) and the pull of revolutionary violence — with the Islamic State’s appeal to bored youths possibly a foretaste of the future.
But Douthat has a solution that will save us from Uberclone ISIS Land. It just happens t0 be the same solution Douthat thinks will protect us from rowdy fraternities and R-rated movies.
When technological progress helped entrench slavery, the religious radicalism of abolitionists helped destroy it. When industrial development rent the fabric of everyday life, religious awakenings helped reknit it. When history’s arc bent toward eugenics, religious humanists helped keep the idea of equality alive.
More religion... to defeat ISIS and... whatever.
The New York Times on the GOP efforts to start a rumble with Iran.
Congressional critics of an emerging international agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program moved with uncommon speed last week to force a vote that could have blown up the negotiations, which are now at a delicate stage. Cooler heads prevailed, and action was delayed. But Congress could still sabotage the deal.
Apparently hoping to capitalize on the fiery denunciation of Iran by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech to Congress, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, on Tuesday pressed for a vote this week on a bill that would require congressional review of any deal. But he backed down when the bill’s supporters insisted on delaying any vote until after March 24, the target set by the United States, five other major powers and Iran for reaching a framework agreement.
Don't worry. I'm sure Ross Douthat and Pat Boone can come up with something that will defeat this obstacle of common sense.
Victoria Esses on why immigration isn't a threat to non-immigrants.
IN September 2014, the US faced a crisis. Tens of thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America had crossed the Mexican border illegally and were being held in detention centers. There were polarized, angry debates on how to respond. President Obama called the issue a "humanitarian crisis" and worked to house and feed the children. Others opposed using US resources to care for them. ...
International migration is one of the major social issues of the day. More people live outside their country of birth than at any other time in history – 232 million in 2013 – and this number is expected to carry on rising. ...
Opposition to immigration is widespread in many Western nations. Anti-immigration activists, the media and political elites have created a crisis mentality in which immigrants are portrayed as "enemies at the gate". Immigrants – particularly non-whites – are blamed for all of society's woes. Such depictions encourage support for more extreme political platforms.
Read this piece to see why groups like the UKIP folks mentioned above are both wrong and wrong-headed.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the turmoil following the death of state Auditor Tom Schweich, who committed suicide after other GOP officials (including the head of the state party and the leading gubernatorial candidate) lead a whisper campaign that he was... Jewish.
With his departed friend lying in the closed casket before him, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound delivered early in an already combative Republican primary race for governor, the Rev. [and former Senator] Danforth laid out the state of Missouri politics on a bare oratorical slab, covered it in a pyramid of dry timber like a Viking funeral pyre, lit a match and sent it out to sea to sink forever.
“Words do hurt,” the Rev. Danforth told a stunned and silent crowd of hundreds after recounting his last conversation with Mr. Schweich, last Tuesday, in which the auditor told the same story he had told to Associated Press reporter David Lieb and Post-Dispatch editorial page editor Tony Messenger, about the “whisper campaign” Mr. Schweich worried was being mounted by his opponents about his connections to the Jewish faith. The Rev. Danforth told of his friend’s hurt feelings over a vicious radio ad in which the announcer made fun of Mr. Schweich’s appearance and said he would be crushed “like the little bug that he is.” ...
In his death, he has spurred a righteous anger in his closest friends and family, some of whom gathered at his home the night before the funeral, comforting each other, but also sharing their common belief, laid out plainly by the Rev. Danforth, that suicide didn’t kill Mr. Schweich.
Missouri politics did.
The auditor might have pulled the trigger, but the bullies who were campaigning against him held the gun to his head.
The leaders of the Missouri GOP apparently felt that smearing a potential candidate as having Jews in his family history was enough to move conservative Christians out of his column. Because while Boone and company may love to see Israel going through the military steps they view as necessary to bringing on that fun, fun Armageddon, they don't actually love Jews enough to let them into heir own
political party country club.