Visual source: Newseum
AP:
Colin Powell told graduates of South Carolina's premier historically black university that they were graduating during a tumultuous time that saw a royal wedding, a pope's beatification and a U.S. military assault that killed Osama bin Laden, "the worst person on earth."
But the former secretary of state and Joint Chiefs chairman told South Carolina State University's 400 graduates on Friday that he particularly enjoyed another recent event: "That was when President Obama took out his birth certificate and blew away Donald Trump and all the birthers!"
LA Times:
GOP finding it hard to make progress
Republicans struggle to appease the right and appeal to the center, resulting in fits and starts in the party's agenda. Their retreat on Medicare is a prime example.
Well, even a DC pundit could have predicted that.
Leonard Pitts, Jr:
WASHINGTON -- Fifty years later.
This morning, if all goes according to plan, a group of college students will board a bus here, bound for New Orleans. The young people in the group represent diverse heritages — a Mexican-American guy born in Yucatan, a white girl from Santa Monica, a black girl studying journalism in Tallahassee. The fact of them traveling together will be unremarkable.
Fifty years ago.
A group of college students boarded two buses here, bound for New Orleans. They were joined by members of the African-American press, and officials of the Congress of Racial Equality, including its national director, James Farmer, who had organized the journey. Six of the riders were white, 12, black. The fact of their traveling together would prove incendiary.
Politico:
The mystery of South Carolina is not whether some conservative Christians are suspicious of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a fact easy to establish in polls and casual conversation. It’s whether there are enough of them to matter, and whether they are voters who might have been in Romney’s or Huntsman’s camp otherwise. Recent political campaigns have seen endless attention devoted to questions of prejudice that did not stop Barack Obama being elected president – nor did it stop a woman who had recently converted from the Sikh faith from being elected governor of South Carolina last year.
“This year will be very much like my election,” Gov. Nikki Haley told POLITICO. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re male or female or black or what your religion is.”
The vibes in SC are so bad
Lindsay Graham felt obligated to yell at candidates for not coming.
“You better come next time,” he said. “Because you can’t win unless you come to South Carolina.”
Yeah? What if they don't? SC has to vote for someone.
Rishi Manchanda:
Florida college students, military personnel, low-income and minority voters and anyone who might change addresses between elections are all raising their voices in opposition to state House Bill 1355 and Senate Bill 2086. And for good reason. These Floridians will have the hardest time exercising their right to vote if these bills become law, according to experts.
Today, add one more group to the growing list of concerned citizens: doctors.
Science magazine:
A large, thorough hunt for a mouse retrovirus known as XMRV in people who have chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)—including in patients who tested positive for the virus in other labs—has come up empty-handed, further deflating the hope that a cause for this baffling disease has been found. "I'd urge people to move on rather than to keep their hopes hanging on the link between XMRV and CFS," says Ila Singh, a virologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who led the new study.