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On the question of race in America

Tom Ferguson Saw the Disheartening Future of American Politics 25 Years Ago. Nathan Tankus found this archival video (you are going to get a gas out of the production values…and be patient with the set up, it takes a few minutes for the video to get going).

Tom Ferguson Saw the Disheartening Future of American Politics 25 Years Ago

As strange as it may seem, analyzing politics in terms of money was a radical idea in political science 25 years ago. But if you simply followed the money, it was actually remarkably easy to see the direction in which American politics were destined to go. Notice, for instance, that he points out how dependent Democratic party funding was on investment bankers and real estate….in 1988…and what that meant for party strategy. (An interesting bit is also how the role Japan played is not that different than the one now played by China, except back in the 1980s there was public concern about Japan, and now there is pretty much zip re China).

Taxes...

Debating healthcare. Lawrence v Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional. In 2003, the United States Supreme Court decided the case of Lawrence v.

Lawrence v Texas: How Laws Against Sodomy Became Unconstitutional

Texas, ruling, by a six-to-three margin, that anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Even those of us who followed the case had a rather gauzy notion of what had triggered the litigation. On the night of September 17, 1998, someone made a phone call to the police, warning that a black man was “going crazy with a gun” in an apartment just outside Houston. A clutch of sheriff’s deputies stormed the apartment, and found no gun, but they arrested John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner for having sex in Lawrence’s bedroom. And, in an unlikely series of legal twists, the arrests of Lawrence and Garner became a vehicle for challenging old anti-sodomy laws that were used solely to shame and stigmatize gay couples.

Morals: Our great moral decline. The Difference Between Private and Public Morality. Republicans have morality upside down.

The Difference Between Private and Public Morality

Santorum, Gingrich, and even Romney are barnstorming across the land condemning gay marriage, abortion, out-of-wedlock births, access to contraception, and the wall separating church and state. But America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us. There is moral rot in America but it’s not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. Political scientist James Q.

Policing & Prisons in America

Inequality in America. Democracy? A slippery slope... Voter registration, Mississippi, 1960. One of the most important and hard-fought dimensions of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s was the issue of voting rights.

Voter registration, Mississippi, 1960

The Jim Crow South had made democratic participation almost impossible for black citizens throughout the first half of the century in spite of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, ratified in 1868 and 1870. Intimidation and discriminatory voter registration requirements made it all but impossible for African Americans to exercise the right to vote.

US politics - curators

To sort... Under construction... A Story More Important than Debt Limit Kabuki. I take it the American news cycle is dominated by the artificial debate over raising the debt limit.

A Story More Important than Debt Limit Kabuki

It is a silly season story. The budget was being balanced by Clinton in the late 1990s, and the Republicans were the ones who created long-term structural deficits by slashing taxes on the wealthiest Americans (even Bush argued with Cheney over the second cut), by an unfunded prescription drug give-away to get votes from the medicare crowd, and by two unfunded wars, one of them illegal in international law. The reason that the Republicans deliberately destroyed the balanced budget and created unprecedented government debt was precisely in hopes that at some point they could use the debt as an excuse to destroy social security, medicare, and myriads of educational and health programs. They represent rich people, and the rich don’t want to be having to bear their fair share of the national burden. Ayaan Hirsi Ali's War. For a couple of centuries now, we have had to make due with Samuel Johnson’s famous phrase: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's War

Thanks to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, we can now revise this phrase for the twenty-first century. Tthe last last refuge of a scoundrel, it appears, lies in taking up the battle against something called “Christophobia.” Hirsi Ali coins this term as part of her alarmist and deeply hateful cover story for Newsweek. Is this how Newsweek hopes to get raised from the dead? Comment: The Attack on “All-American Muslim” Dearborn, Michigan, is the city in America with the highest proportion of Muslims.

Comment: The Attack on “All-American Muslim”

That is not a new development. Immigrants from the Middle East began arriving in the area generations ago, when jobs building cars were still a lure—which should give a sense of the community’s vintage.

The obama administration