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By Erik Larson
$13.78
E.J. Dionne
$20.95
$22
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AP
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By The Rev. Madison Shockley — The marriage equality movement has been severely damaged by the argument that those opposed to same-sex marriage would be forced to perform weddings against their will.
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One country’s taking the piss is another’s bigotry. A blackface sketch on an Australian variety show has exposed what the Global Post calls “an ugly side of the Australian character.”
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thefrisky.com
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A new Oklahoma law, effective Nov. 1, will require women seeking abortions to reveal personal information such as marital status, number of children and race—all of which will be posted online. Critics say that the intent is intimidation.
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flickr.com
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Washington, D.C., has the highest rate of AIDS in the country, and millions of federal dollars are spent trying to alleviate it. But a new investigative piece uncovers a corrupt system where books were cooked, corners cut, and $400,000 lost to a nonprofit launched by the leader of a cocaine ring.
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Flickr / Lord Jim
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By Eugene Robinson — Rush Limbaugh, are you ready for some football? Um, I guess not.
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Obama campaign / Boston.com
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Keith Bardwell, a Louisiana justice of the peace, may be in hot water for refusing to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple. “I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way,” Bardwell says, because he thinks it’s cruel to the children produced by such unions.
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White House / Samantha Appleton
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama should make peace with the “angry white men” who see his Nobel Prize as a token of elitism by enacting policies that address their economic grievances.
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AP / Mike Mergen
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By Joe Conason — Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh like to call the president a racist. They should know. The media provocateurs long ago established that they are bigots through and through.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Bill Boyarsky — By monopolizing the airwaves with his calm rationality, President Obama has retaken control of the national health care debate, which was beginning to descend into ideological hysteria.
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By Eugene Robinson — President Obama has to give even his most vocal critics the benefit of the doubt. But I don’t. There’s a particularly nasty edge to some of Obama’s detractors that is difficult to explain in terms other than racism.
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By Adele M. Stan, AlterNet —
How the health care industry, the GOP and one media mogul made common cause with the anti-government fringe.
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By T.L. Caswell — In Washington, a Supreme Court nomination usually sets off a flood of political accusations, and in this case the GOP certainly upheld the grand old tradition of seeing sin where none existed.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Marcia Alesan Dawkins — The struggle over Sonia Sotomayor’s viewpoint and voice has important ramifications for legislative politics and identity politics in our country.
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AP / LM Otero
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By Chris Hedges — The most prominent faces of color, such as President Obama or Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr., mask an insidious new racism that, in essence, tells blacks they have enough, that progress has been made and that it is up to them to take advantage of what society offers them.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The problem with “teachable moments” is that the term sets up one group of people as teachers while another group is consigned to the role of pupils. In a democracy, that’s troublesome.
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By Eugene Robinson — If race were the only issue, there would be much less hyperventilation about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.‘s unpleasant run-in with the criminal justice system. The debate is also about power and entitlement.
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White House / Pete Souza
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The strange saga involving an African-American Harvard professor, a white Cambridge, Mass., police officer and a crash course in racial politics may have reached a (somewhat) happy ending—or at least an interesting one—now that President Obama has invited Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House to try to work it all out together.
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Summit Entertainment
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This week the Truthdig panel talks about the racial politics behind the arrest of high-profile Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who himself said, “I was cast by him [the policeman] in a narrative and he didn’t know how to get out of it.” Also, pop culture critic Sheerly Avni gives a big thumbs up to a new and telling film about the Iraq war, “The Hurt Locker.”
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Summit Entertainment
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This week the Truthdig panel talks about the racial politics behind the arrest of high-profile Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who himself said, “I was cast by him [the policeman] in a narrative and he didn’t know how to get out of it.” Also, pop culture critic Sheerly Avni gives a big thumbs up to a new and telling film about the Iraq war, “The Hurt Locker.”
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pbs.org
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Looks like Harvard professor and race scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. won’t face criminal charges after last Thursday’s unfortunate confrontation with a Cambridge, Mass., police officer, but the incident definitely touched off some reactions well beyond Harvard Square. Meanwhile, Gates has given his account of what happened and has called for an apology from the officer in question.
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By Amy Goodman — As it moves into its second century, the NAACP is, unfortunately, as relevant as ever.
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Flickr / ECohen and White House / Eric Draper
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Yet another report confirms, as The Guardian explains, “that rates of teen pregnancy and STDs are, after more than a decade of decline, once again on the rise.” Thanks to President Bush’s abstinence-only sex education agenda, black, Hispanic and poor women are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies.
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By Eugene Robinson — A century ago, when the NAACP was founded, black America was under siege. Some critics have wondered whether there is still a role for an organization like the NAACP. President Obama says there is.
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By Ellen Goodman — The would-be first Latina justice faces a committee with only two women members in order to get confirmed by a Senate with only 17 women for a seat on a court with only one woman. And yet Sotomayor has to prove that she isn’t biased.
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AP photo / Win McNamee, pool
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By Eugene Robinson — For the Republicans outraged at “wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor, being white and male is seen as a neutral condition, the natural order of things. Any “identity”—black, brown, female, gay, whatever—has to be judged against this supposedly “objective” standard.
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By Marie Cocco — Unless Sotomayor suffers a “complete meltdown,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted, she will be confirmed. The price, though, is barely coded race baiting that has been part of the assault on Sotomayor since her nomination was announced.
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AP photo / Amy Sancetta
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By Chris Hedges — If you have defrauded banks and customers and investment firms of billions of dollars, as AIG or Citibank has, you get taxpayer money. If you are moral scum in America we take care of you. But if you are poor, if you are, say, Tearyan Brown of Trenton, N.J., you are in trouble.
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wordpress.com
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Not only are the Freemasons a bit weird, some are also a bit racist. The admittance of Victor Marshall, a 26-year-old African American, to a chapter in Atlanta last year caused many Georgian Freemasons to seek to revoke the charter of Marshall’s chapter, sparking a legal battle over equality in this new “post-racial” world.
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By Eugene Robinson — The white supremacist who allegedly took a rifle into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and killed a security guard is more than a bitter, demented old man. He is a known figure in the domestic hate industry and a reminder that words have consequences.
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Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — We may thrill to Obama’s rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration.
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A provocative new book, “One State, Two States,” by revisionist Israeli historian Benny Morris breaks a taboo by asking whether anti-Zionism has become the anti-imperialism of fools. Can his polemic act as the ax that helps break up the frozen and brittle nature of a debate over the seemingly intractable war between Palestinians and Jews?
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AP photo / Damian Dovarganes
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By Scott Tucker — The right to rebel is my real subject here, but the misery of the law is not incidental. No good case can be made for rebellion as an unqualified good in itself. But the right to rebel also cannot be limited to the rebel causes that were won long ago and have passed over into our national mythology.
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By David Sirota — Historically, Americans generally held campaign promises sacred. Just ask the first President Bush. But now behavior by President Obama suggests a systemic assault on the campaign promise is under way.
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By Eugene Robinson — President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court is a proud and accomplished Latina. This fact apparently drives some prominent Republicans to a state resembling incoherent, sputtering rage.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Republicans would be foolish to fight the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court because she is the most conservative choice that President Obama could have made.
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By Marie Cocco — President Obama’s nominee said she hopes Americans “will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.” Ordinary people have had a difficult time of it before the current Supreme Court.
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inhofe.senate.gov
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The news that known Latina Sonia Sotomayor may soon join the Supreme Court spurred an apparently alarmed Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) to hold forth in a statement on Tuesday about the need to make sure that Sotomayor will be able to mete out justice from her vaunted post without her pesky extra X chromosome or her non-Oklahoman ethnic roots mucking things up for everyone.
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White House / Lawrence Jackson
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President Obama decided not to break with White House custom this Memorial Day and sent a wreath to honor the fallen Confederate soldiers who wanted nothing to do with the Union. But he also started a new and long-overdue tradition by honoring the hundreds of thousands of black Americans who fought against the South.
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“Cruel and Unusual” by Anne-Marie Cusac reveals a startling reality: Since 1973, America’s imprisonment rate has jumped more than five times and is now the highest in the world. Why?
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AP photo / Mark Avery
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In its zeal to crack down on illegal immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining and deporting American citizens. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Andrew Becker talks about his investigation into this disturbing trend.
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AP photo / Mark Avery
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In its zeal to crack down on illegal immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining and deporting American citizens. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Andrew Becker talks about his investigation into this disturbing trend.
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AP photo / Nam Y. Huh
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By Chris Hedges — Israel and the United States will together boycott the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection. It’s times like this President Obama would do well to heed the sermons of his former pastor.
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By Eugene Robinson — In 10 trips to Cuba, I have met Afro-Cubans who told me with conviction of their opportunities under the Castro regime. But I’ve also heard bitter complaints about deep-seated racism that many black Cubans believe is getting worse.
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AP photo / Tsafrir Abayov
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By Chris Hedges — It was unthinkable, when I was based as a correspondent in Jerusalem two decades ago, that an Israeli politician who openly advocated ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from Israeli-controlled territory, as well as forcing Arabs in Israel to take loyalty oaths or be forcibly relocated to the West Bank, could sit on the Cabinet.
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The great divide between religion that accommodates itself to secular knowledge and biblically literal religion that rejects any such knowledge that contradicts the Bible is the insufficiently explored story at the center of this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian’s most recent and otherwise compelling book.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Marie Cocco — Indefinite and secret detention at the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, was a fundamental breach of justice and morality when the Bush administration did it. It is made worse by the stench of hypocrisy when the Obama administration does it.
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