Leonard Pitts starts off the morning on the Walter Scott case.
“...You foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but do not see, who have ears, but do not hear.” — Jeremiah 5:21
So here we are with another isolated incident.
That, at least, is how the April 4 police killing of 50-year-old Walter Scott will play in those conservative enclaves where the notion that there is such a thing as systemic racism is regarded as deluded and absurd. Those enclaves will not, of course, be able to claim innocence for now-fired North Charleston, S.C., police officer Michael Slager. As cellphone video captured by a passerby makes brutally clear, Slager repeatedly shot the fleeing, unarmed African-American man in the back after a traffic stop.
They will likewise find it difficult to defend a police report that claims officers administered CPR to the dying man. The video shows them doing no such thing. Finally, they will find it problematic to support Slager’s claim that he shot Scott after the suspect seized his Taser. The video shows Slager picking up a small object and dropping it near Scott’s body, fueling strong suspicion that he planted the Taser.
Well, the people who shouted that looking for justice was being "anti-police" didn't let facts get in their way last time. Or the time before that. Or the time... Anyway, how much is the Slagar FundMe site up to? Can I expect Slagar supporters to accost me at the next baseball game?
Let's go in an see what else folks have to say.
The New York Times notes that, while President Obama's term is winding down, insane GOP spittle laden rants are just getting wound up.
It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.
Republican lawmakers in Washington and around the country have been focused on blocking Mr. Obama’s agenda and denigrating him personally since the day he took office in 2009. But even against that backdrop, and even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president.
It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it.
What are they saying so subtly? He's black.
Gregory Downs says that 150 years after Appomattox, people are still getting it wrong.
On April 9, 1865 — Palm Sunday — Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee negotiated their famous “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of surrender. In the ensuing celebration, a relieved Grant told his men, “The war is over.”
But Grant soon discovered he was wrong. Not only did fighting continue in pockets for weeks, but in other ways the United States extended the war for more than five years after Appomattox. Using its war powers to create freedom and civil rights in the South, the federal government fought against a white Southern insurgency that relied on murder and intimidation to undo the gains of the war.
And yet the “Appomattox myth” persisted, and continues today. By severing the war’s conflict from the Reconstruction that followed, it drains meaning from the Civil War and turns it into a family feud, a fight that ended with regional reconciliation.
It didn't end then. It didn't end with some respectful salute and a "we're all one America now." It didn't end.
Frank Bruni looks at a strange story of good grades and bad outcomes.
Between May 2009 and January 2010, five Palo Alto teenagers ended their lives by stepping in front of trains. And since October of last year, another three Palo Alto teenagers have killed themselves that way, prompting longer hours by more sentries along the tracks. The Palo Alto Weekly refers to the deaths as a “suicide contagion.”
And while mental health professionals are rightly careful not to oversimplify or trivialize the psychic distress behind them by focusing on any one possible factor, the contagion has prompted an emotional debate about the kinds of pressures felt by high school students in epicenters of overachievement.
Pressure to achieve is... pressure, of course. It's stress, and apparently way, way too much. To have a great life, first you have to live.
The New York Times editorial board reminds us that, hey, we never fixed that thing that almost destroyed our civilization.
After the latest round of bank stress tests last month, the Federal Reserve announced that, by and large, the nation’s biggest banks would all be able to withstand another crisis without requiring bailouts.
This month, Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, released data that contradict the Fed’s conclusions.
In the face of Mr. Hoenig’s challenge, the Fed would do well to recall a chapter from its recent history. Before the financial crisis, when Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Fed, was insisting all was well with the banks, one Fed governor, the late Edward Gramlich, warned of mounting risks. He was ignored.
Of course he was. No one contradicts Wall Street's favorite Ayn Rand boy toy. Remember when everyone thought it was so, so cute that Greenspan would appear in front of Congress and babble a stream of nonsense which everyone tried to parse for predictions like sheep guts? Yeah. No one ever seemed to say "what if this guy is just an idiot?"
David Brooks tells you how to be a good person.
About once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. ... You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.
Really, that's about my Brooks limit. Let's just say he spends the rest of the article turning "being a good person" into ridiculous categories with trite labels like "the call within the call." You know... he Brooks it.
Peter Moskos explains why the Walter Scott case is "not another Ferguson.
This one is different.
Walter Scott was killed — shot multiple times in the back — by North Charleston, S.C., police officer Michael Slager last weekend. Scott, already running away, was no threat to the officer when the first shot was fired. He was even less of a threat when Slager paused and fired the eighth and final round. ...
To law enforcement officers observing the North Charleston tragedy, the case is nothing like “another Ferguson” — and that’s where the police perspective and the civilian perspective on these events diverge.
The real difference between Walter Scott and Micheal Brown? When Scott ran away and was shot even though he was no threat to the officer, there was a camera rolling.
Kevin Horrigan says Conservatives don't have a choice.
Those “conservative conversion therapy” programs are a waste of time. It means that businesses that refuse for religious reasons to cater or photograph conservatives’ weddings are out of line.
Except for the last paragraph, this all true. The relatively new hard “science of politics” is real. Hard science — quantifiable experiments that can be replicated and are peer-reviewed, like climate science — has been studying the differences between right-wingers and left-wingers. ...
Bottom line: Conservatives have a “negativity bias,” that is, they react with more alarm to things that are perceived as threatening and disgusting. They find safety in the familiar. ...
The lessons of all of this are clear, if disturbing. If you’re a Republican politician, you can’t go wrong stoking the base’s fears: Of immigrant children carrying Ebola across the border, of jack-booted Obama administration Sharia-pounding thugs coming for their guns, of their taxes going to steak-eating welfare queens on cruise ships. You can sell them on economic ideas that run contrary to their interests by wrapping them in negativity (i.e., the “death tax”).
Go read this, plus the journal article. As FDR said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Only there are a lot of Americans that run on fear.