Farai Chideya at The Guardian writes—Our discourse on race is becoming ever more polarised:
Over the past 25 years, I’ve made many forays into what I call the Heart of Whiteness – meeting Klanspeople in a blizzard; interviewing Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio about his desire to start a border war with Mexico; and to a white church that threatened to disinter the body of a dead mixed-race infant.
It was a double-dare I set myself: first, could I actually get the story; and second, could I do so with compassion? [...]
Listening to extremists and people with casual resentments and prejudices was the easy part, though. Because the Heart of Whiteness that has disturbed me most over time is that within the American media, which have stubbornly refused to integrate even as America has become more diverse. While more than a third of Americans are Latino or non-white, they only make up 13% of radio and print journalists. (That figure is better – 22% – among television journalists.)
This has affected how we see the battles over policing in America. When news organisations did not provide adequate coverage that included perspectives of black communities (they’ve also not been great at covering poor white communities), organisers such as the three female founders of Black Lives Matter created their own channels, leveraging the power of social media and mobile technology.
Charles M. Blow at The New York Times writes—A Week From Hell:
Since people have camera phones, we are actually seeing these deaths, live and in living color. Now a terrorist with a racist worldview has taken it upon himself to co-opt a cause and mow down innocent officers.
This is a time when communities, institutions, movements and even nations are tested. Will the people of moral clarity, good character and righteous cause be able to drown out the chorus of voices that seek to use each dead body as a societal wedge?
Will the people who can see clearly that there is no such thing as selective, discriminatory, exclusionary outrage and grieving when lives are taken, be heard above those who see every tragedy as a plus or minus for a cumulative argument?
Lucia Graves at The Guardian writes—In Dallas, yet another shooting that won't move the needle on gun control:
On Wednesday, Americans went to bed thinking about one shooting. On Thursday morning, we woke up to another, watching an innocent victim die on a video taken by his girlfriend. On Thursday night, we fell asleep to the horrors of a third.
Such events used to feel like an aberration. And while the killing of blameless cops reporting for duty at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on Thursday night is a new, heinous twist, the outcome – the gunning down of innocents – has become the status quo.
The trouble is, ending America’s scourge of mass shootings and the deep-seated bias in police killings will require many things that our country is not good at. It will require persistence and cooperation, empathy and bipartisanship. It will require policy reform and, specifically, gun control. It will require us to walk a line between numb detachment and murderous rage.
So far, we haven’t found the line.
Josh Rogin at The Washington Post writes—Obama plans major nuclear policy changes in his final months:
President Obama announced his drive to reduce the role of nuclear weapons and eventually rid the world of them in his first major foreign policy speech, in Prague in 2009. In his first years, he achieved some successes, such as the New START treaty with Russia, the Nuclear Security Summits and the controversial Iran deal. But progress waned in the past year as more pressing crises commanded the White House’s attention. Now, the president is considering using the freedom afforded a departing administration to cross off several remaining items on his nuclear wish list.[...]
“It’s pretty clear the Prague agenda has stalled,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, which supports groups advocating for nuclear nonproliferation. “There isn’t anything that the president does that isn’t criticized by his opponents, so he might as well do what he wants. He’s relishing his last days in office.”
Scott Lemieux at The New Republic writes—Why Did Obama Do So Well at the Supreme Court?
The last time a Democratic president successfully passed an ambitious progressive agenda with a Republican-controlled Supreme Court, the result was a constitutional crisis. The Court of the FDR era struck down several major New Deal statutes, leading to a proposed court-packing plan and the Court’s swing vote abruptly changing his mind about those decisions (this was then followed by a wave of Democratic nominees that quickly solidified the New Deal constitutional order). Unlike FDR, Obama was not able to change the median vote of the Court. While both of the justices he replaced were Republican nominees, John Paul Stevens and David Souter were both stalwart liberal votes by the time they retired. And yet, despite some major defeats, the Roberts Court left Obama’s domestic agenda mostly intact, while delivering the Democratic coalition some major victories it would not have been able to win any other way, most notably on abortion and LGBT rights.
Juan Cole at Informed Comment didn’t find much new in the Chilcot report on the U.K.’s involvement in the invasion and occupation or Iraq. He writes—The Real Problem with the Iraq War: It was Illegal:
Most of it comes as no surprise to me. I chronicled it at the time, and it wasn’t actually hard to find information about shenanigans if you looked hard enough.
The report did not make a determination about whether the war on Iraq was illegal. But that actually in my view is all that matters. There have been noble wars that failed. There have been noble wars that were pyrrhic in character. Those like Tony Blair who continue to defend going to war do so on the grounds of noble war gone wrong.
This was not a noble war.
Calvin F. Exoo at TruthOut writes—The Chilcot Report Fails to Speak Plain Truth: Bush Lied, So Did Blair:
The newly released Chilcot Report on Iraq is British understatement, to a fault. In fact, it is understated so far as to miss the plain truth of the matter. Saying only that extremely questionable intelligence "was not challenged [by the Bush and Blair regimes] and it should have been" is failing to say plainly what the evidence so clearly shows: George W. Bush lied; so did Tony Blair.
To demonstrate that, let's try a simple exercise: let's compare what White House officials said about Iraq in the run-up to war with what they knew at the time -- or at the very least, should have known, because the intelligence was available to them.
Alex Shephard at The New Republic points out that Like Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich is talking out of both sides of his mouth, not exactly a revelation but a good reminder:
Friday morning, Donald Trump released a statement where he said some things about how “more needs to be done” so that black people can feel secure around police and in America. His statement, though notable for not being full of narcissistic crazy talk, was nevertheless a cynical ploy that distorted his opinions about policing and his history of making racially-charged remarks.
Friday afternoon, Newt Gingrich appeared on Facebook Live with Van Jones and took things even further than his possible running mate. “It’s more dangerous to be black in America,” he said. “It’s both more dangerous because of crime, which is the Chicago story. But it’s more dangerous in that you’re substantially more likely to be in a situation where the police don’t respect you where you could easily get killed. I think sometimes for whites it’s difficult to appreciate that.”
That is, aside from the characteristic euphemistic allusion to “black-on-black crime,” surprisingly on point. But it’s surprising because Gingrich has a long, long history with making racially-insensitive remarks and proposing racially-insensitive (at the very least) policies.
Robert Reich writes—The Huckster Populist:
The tectonic plates of American politics are no longer moving along the old fault lines of “left” versus “right” or even Democrat versus Republican.
As we’ve seen this bizarre political year, the biggest force welling up is rage against insider elites in both parties, and against the American establishment as a whole – including the denizens of Wall Street, large corporations, and the mainstream media.
Now, with Bernie Sanders essentially out of the race, Donald Trump wants Americans to believe he’s the remaining anti-establishment candidate.
It’s smart politics but it’s a hoax.
Here’s a taste of what neoconservative Godfather2 William Kristol has to spout in Neither of the Above at the Weekly Standard regarding Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and the potential for an independent right-wing party:
Hundreds of delegates to the Republican convention have organized to seek to force a true and free ballot of the delegates, with the hope of saving the party from Trump. This impressive grass-roots effort is something of a David-versus-Goliath fight.
David may prevail, as he did three millennia ago. But if he does not, there will remain just enough time for an independent nominee to get on the vast majority of state ballots and provide a responsible third choice to the American people. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted over July 2-4 found 30 percent of the American public saying that in the fall they'll mostly be voting for Hillary Clinton and 25 percent saying they'll mostly be voting for Donald Trump. No less than 40 percent said they'll mostly be voting against Clinton or Trump (evenly divided between 20 percent mostly against Clinton and 20 percent mostly against Trump). In other words, there is an anti-Clinton, anti-Trump plurality in the country. An independent candidate could presumably win those votes.
Zoë Carpenter at The Nation writes—The Next Big Fight for the Pro-Choice Movement: Taxpayer-Funded Abortions:
Nearly 40 years ago, when she was a young congressional staffer, Representative Barbara Lee watched as lawmakers cut millions of poor women off from abortion coverage. They did so via a provision barring Medicaid from covering the procedure. Henry Hyde, the Illinois Republican who sponsored the amendment, made little effort to conceal that his was an effort to undercut Roe v Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion just three years earlier; nor did he deny his amendment would disparately impact women in poverty. “If rich women want to enjoy their high-priced vices, that is their responsibility … that is fine, but not at the taxpayers’ expense,” he quipped during one debate. Later he admitted, “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the … Medicaid bill.”
The amendment’s passage shocked Lee. “It was really earth-shattering for me as a young African-American woman, you know—why this guy would even want to interfere with women’s rights and women’s health-care decisions,” she remembers. After Lee was elected to Congress she served on the House Foreign Affairs committee, with Hyde as chairman. She thought often about how she might convince him that his amendment was hurting women. Eventually, Lee says, “I decided there was no way to convince him of that, so I’m going to just have to work to help try at some point to repeal it, when the political climate was right.”
Lee has waited a long time. [...] There have been a few attempts to repeal the ban over the years—Bill Clinton tried, in 1993—but in general even pro-choice politicians have preferred not to talk about Hyde.
That’s changed, and rather quickly. Lee, along with Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Diana DeGette, introduced a bill this time last year that would ensure that anyone with federally funded health insurance has coverage for abortion care; they now have more than 115 co-sponsors. Hillary Clinton criticized Hyde directly on the campaign trail for “making it harder for low-income women to exercise their full rights.” And, for the first time, the Democratic Party platform draft explicitly calls for repealing Hyde, as well as the Helms Amendment, which applies to foreign aid—for “full-fledged taxpayer funding of abortion,” to quote one scandalized anti-abortion writer.