Obama: "The Affordable Care Act is here to stay."

The Supreme Court has again ruled in favor of Obamacare.  Thank goodness.  I am pleased that the right-wing lunatics have again failed in their attempts to pull this country backwards and to rob Americans of health insurance and medical care.

The New American Patriotism

The Confederate-Flag Backlash and the New American Patriotism

By Jonathan Chait Follow @jonathanchait

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President Barack Obama in Selma, Alabama, March 7, 2015. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Gun massacres have grown into a depressingly familiar public ritual of shock, tragedy, and then, ultimately, a return to normality undisturbed by a policy response. The Charleston massacre has produced something different and unexpected: not momentum for gun control, but a widespread reevaluation of publicly sanctioned displays of the Confederate flag. The reconsideration of the Stars and Bars runs wide and deep, ranging from Walmart (a retailer shedding its identification with red America) to the governor of Alabama. The movement against Confederate symbolism encompasses a mix of business logic — an association with backward thinking prevents states for competing for economic talent — to apparently heartfelt realizations, like this moving statement from South Carolina Representative Mick Mulvaney. (“I blame myself for not listening closely enough to people who see the flag differently than I do. It is a poor reflection on me that it took the violent death of my former desk mate in the SC Senate, and eight others of the best the Charleston community had to offer, to open my eyes to that.”)
Some quarters of the right have greeted the sudden retreat with indignation and fear. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol decried liberals for  “expunging every trace of respect, recognition or acknowledgment of Americans who fought for the Confederacy,” a spectacle he called “our own mini-French Revolution, expunging history in a frenzy of self-righteousness.” Rush Limbaugh predicts, “The next flag that will come under assault, and it will not be long, is the American flag.”

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It might seem bizarre to equate patriotism with treason, and to conclude that turning against the symbols of an army that went to war against the United States must lead to turning against the symbols of the United States itself. There is, however, a certain logic to this fear — a twisted logic, to be sure, but twisted by decades of propaganda.
The story of the Civil War is that the United States won the war but lost the occupation. Union soldiers occupied the South and attempted to rebuild a colorblind democracy, an effort called Reconstruction. The Confederate forces eventually reconstituted themselves as an non-uniformed guerilla army that could melt invisibly into the civilian population and launch strikes to defeat the occupying army and terrorize its allies — freed blacks and sympathetic white Republicans. Eventually, the white North gave up and allowed white Southerners to disenfranchise African-Americans and reimpose white supremacy while stopping short of full enslavement. The reconciliation between whites of the North and South formed the basis for the country’s self-conception. The veneration of treason did, in its strange way, support a patriotic idea — an idea of a country after a brief and tragic misunderstanding.
The winners write the history books, and — having defeated the postwar occupation — the newly victorious South set about falsifying the history of the period. It defined Reconstruction as the “misrule” by “carpetbaggers.” The entire country emphasized reconciliation between whites of the North and South, presenting the conflict as regrettable and perhaps unnecessary. The leaders of the Confederacy have been memorialized as heroes, their names adorning roads and schools throughout the South. The thousands of victims of white domestic terrorism, by contrast, have gone almost completely unacknowledged.
One small example stands for the larger phenomenon. In Colfax, Louisiana, white terrorists massacred dozens of freed African-Americans, deposed their democratically elected town government, and reimposed a whites-only government. The site of the massacre is currently memorialized by this sign:

Photo: Billy Hathorn/Wikimedia Commons

In 2003, an Atlantic correspondent traveled to Colfax and was so unfamiliar with the actual events of 1873 he sought to piece together the history from locals and bare forensic evidence. More recent histories have uncovered the macabre events, which reflect the methods employed across the South.
Those conservatives alarmed at the current backlash against the Confederate flag are probably correct that it will not stop at the flag itself. What’s wrong is their interpretation of what this means. South Carolina State Senator Lee Bright, the state co-chair for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, has called the flag backlash a “Stalinist purge,” telling Politico, “They want to take down the Confederate monuments; I’ve gotten emails from people who want to rename streets. … Anytime you want to basically remove the symbols of history from a state, that’s something that just is very bad.” The closest approximation of a Stalinist purge — the brazen rewriting of history to suit modern political ends — took place decades ago. The current movement is, if anything, a de-Stalinization.
The trembling conservatives are also not irrational in their fear that the backlash against the Confederate flag could metastasize into a backlash against America. Neo-confederate revisionism is a form of patriotism. And many atrocities have indeed been committed under the colors of the American flag. As Limbaugh says, “Can you just hear it now? I can hear it now. ‘The United States flag has flown over slavery and symbolized racism, discrimination, bigotry, homophobia for hundreds of years; the Confederate flag flew only four years, and we're getting rid of the Confederate flag.’”
That may be an apt description of the analysis on some parts of the left, the parts that treat oppression as intrinsic to America. But it runs distinctly contrary to the analysis proposed by President Obama, who is the main spokesman for American liberalism today.
Obama has proposed a different kind of patriotic story. He has refined versions of that story throughout his career, perhaps most famously at his star-making 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote speech. As Greg Jaffe recently reported, Obama considers his March speech in Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge its most articulate and fully developed version. In that speech, Obama called the march “a contest to determine the true meaning of America,” and declared that “the idea of a just America and a fair America, an inclusive America, and a generous America — that idea ultimately triumphed.”
The message of Obama’s Selma address was not complacency. Rather, he placed the struggle to expand freedom and opportunity to all at the center of American history. Unlike the post–Civil War revisionism, which writes the Confederates into the narrative of American greatness, Obama writes them out, or casts them as obstacles inevitably defeated (the civil-rights movement having won a century later what the occupying Union army had lost). Obama instead placed the African-American struggle for equality as the center of the struggle for social justice, and the struggle for social justice at the center of what America means:

That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience.  That’s why it’s not a museum or a static monument to behold from a distance.  It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents:  “We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.”  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

This is a form of patriotism, but a very different kind than that with which many Americans have been reared.

Vestavia Hills Rebel Mascot a Vestige of Racism, a Smear on the City

As if we need another reason to dislike Vestavia...

BY John Archibald
23 June 2015
al.com

Vestavia Hills resident and mom Rhonda Steele Nabors cheers for her town's sports teams.

She'll scream Go Red!

She'll holler Go Vestavia!

But she can't bring herself to yell Go Rebels, to stand and cheer for a school mascot that, as she puts it, "marginalizes 7-to-10 percent of the students."

Long before Charleston, Nabors wanted her children to consider the messages they send to others. She was uncomfortable with the Rebel because she wants those children to understand how their own actions affect the way others feel.

This week, in the reflection of that South Carolina horror, Nabors went on a Vestavia Hills Facebook group and questioned – far more politely than I would -- whether the time of the Rebel mascot has passed.

"In light of the race-based Charleston murders, now seems like a good time to have another discussion on this topic," she wrote.

And it began. Dozens of comments rolled in and the discussion she sought began. Reasonably and agreeably and pleasantly and ... not.

Many of the commenters agreed. It is time, at the very least, to talk. Others believe  the Rebel is a respected part of history, that getting rid of it is like banning pirate mascots because, well, pirates robbed people and raped women. But it was a start.

"I can't not push this issue after nine people were gunned down in Charleston because of their race," she said. "It's just not right."

And it's not.

The truth is that Vestavia Hills' Rebel has nothing to do with Civil War history, and everything to do with Civil Rights history.

Alabama's fight against integration took most of the 1960s, as stands in the schoolhouse door gave way to lawsuits. By the end of the decade, schools around Alabama began to open the doors to all people. And the flight began.

In 1970 – as a direct result of that desegregation – Vestavia Hills created its own system. It had the gall to name its mascot the Rebels.

Vestavia didn't just pick it's mascot out of a hat – like a Thundering Herd or a Blue Devil. It picked a Confederate Flag-waving Civil War Rebel because it saw itself as rebellious.

We dare defend our way of life.

We dare defend our way of white.

Of course Vestavia Hills was not alone.

"Rebels" is the eighth most common nickname in Alabama schools -- just ahead of "Patriots." It is used in public schools such as Thorsby High and at private schools like Bessemer Academy, which also formed in 1970 in response to fear of ... the Black Menace.

It was a common mascot at the so-called "Segregation Academies," where more than 50,000 white students swarmed – or seceded to -- between 1965 and the early '70s.

The Rebels.

Of course it is no longer 1970. And Vestavia Hills is not the Vestavia  of 1970. And that is precisely what Nabors is trying to say.

Vestavia Hills is one of the best academic systems around, with great teachers and facilities and scores and sports and support. Vestavia Hills does so many things right. It makes no sense that it would besmirch all that with an offensive mascot.

It's like slapping a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of penicillin, like tattooing a middle finger on Sandra Bullock's nose.

Vestavia Hills is better than that. It knows better than that.

It was 15 years ago when system leaders decided it was a bad idea for students to wave their Confederate flags at away games. Because:

a) They didn't want their students constantly getting punched in the face. Or...

b) They realized it was an embarrassment.

Either way they recognized it was wrong. They just lacked courage to do anything real about it.
Today, however, is another day. Another chance.

Nabors was right. It is time – even in the face of protest and tradition and die-hard Rebellion – to start and finish this conversation without excuse.

This mascot, this brand that stands for the city of Vestavia Hills, was founded in fear and defiance of equal rights.

It is time Vestavia Hills yelled another cheer: "We are better than that."

Hillary vs. Bernie

In a perfect world I'd love to see a real progressive like Bernie Sanders become President backed by a Democratic congress.  This is not going to happen.  If Sanders upsets Hillary for the nomination, I think he'll be easier to beat than Clinton.  My thing is simply to see a Democrat elected.  Hillary has a better chance in the general election.  The Republicans will paint Sanders as a left-wing fanatic.  I think we need Clinton to win the nomination even though I love the things that Bernie stands for.

Nixon

So I'm reading a new biography of Richard Milhous Nixon, the hated Nixon of all good liberals.  Yet I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Nixon.  We'll see what I have to say after finishing the book.

A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths

BY Max Fisher
The Atlantic
23 July 2012

I've heard it said that, if you take a walk around Waikiki, it's only a matter of time until someone hands you a flyer of scantily clad women clutching handguns, overlaid with English and maybe Japanese text advertising one of the many local shooting ranges. The city's largest, the Royal Hawaiian Shooting Club, advertises instructors fluent in Japanese, which is also the default language of its website. For years, this peculiar Hawaiian industry has explicitly targeted Japanese tourists, drawing them away from beaches and resorts into shopping malls, to do things that are forbidden in their own country.

Waikiki's Japanese-filled ranges are the sort of quirk you might find in any major tourist town, but they're also an intersection of two societies with wildly different approaches to guns and their role in society. Friday's horrific shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater has been a reminder that America's gun control laws are the loosest in the developed world and its rate of gun-related homicide is the highest. Of the world's 23 "rich" countries, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is almost 20 times that of the other 22. With almost one privately owned firearm per person, America's ownership rate is the highest in the world; tribal-conflict-torn Yemen is ranked second, with a rate about half of America's.

But what about the country at the other end of the spectrum? What is the role of guns in Japan, the developed world's least firearm-filled nation and perhaps its strictest controller? In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally.

Almost no one in Japan owns a gun. Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country's infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgo guns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.

Japanese tourists who fire off a few rounds at the Royal Hawaiian Shooting Club would be breaking three separate laws back in Japan -- one for holding a handgun, one for possessing unlicensed bullets, and another violation for firing them -- the first of which alone is punishable by one to ten years in jail. Handguns are forbidden absolutely. Small-caliber rifles have been illegal to buy, sell, or transfer since 1971. Anyone who owned a rifle before then is allowed to keep it, but their heirs are required to turn it over to the police once the owner dies.

The only guns that Japanese citizens can legally buy and use are shotguns and air rifles, and it's not easy to do. The process is detailed in David Kopel's landmark study on Japanese gun control, published in the 1993 Asia Pacific Law Review, still cited as current. (Kopel, no left-wing loony, is a member of the National Rifle Association and once wrote in National Review that looser gun control laws could have stopped Adolf Hitler.)

To get a gun in Japan, first, you have to attend an all-day class and pass a written test, which are held only once per month. You also must take and pass a shooting range class. Then, head over to a hospital for a mental test and drug test (Japan is unusual in that potential gun owners must affirmatively prove their mental fitness), which you'll file with the police. Finally, pass a rigorous background check for any criminal record or association with criminal or extremist groups, and you will be the proud new owner of your shotgun or air rifle. Just don't forget to provide police with documentation on the specific location of the gun in your home, as well as the ammo, both of which must be locked and stored separately. And remember to have the police inspect the gun once per year and to re-take the class and exam every three years.

Even the most basic framework of Japan's approach to gun ownership is almost the polar opposite of America's. U.S. gun law begins with the second amendment's affirmation of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" and narrows it down from there. Japanese law, however, starts with the 1958 act stating that "No person shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords," later adding a few exceptions. In other words, American law is designed to enshrine access to guns, while Japan starts with the premise of forbidding it. The history of that is complicated, but it's worth noting that U.S. gun law has its roots in resistance to British gun restrictions, whereas some academic literature links the Japanese law to the national campaign to forcibly disarm the samurai, which may partially explain why the 1958 mentions firearms and swords side-by-side.

Of course, Japan and the U.S. are separated by a number of cultural and historical difference much wider than their gun policies. Kopel explains that, for whatever reason, Japanese tend to be more tolerant of the broad search and seizure police powers necessary to enforce the ban. "Japanese, both criminals and ordinary citizens, are much more willing than their American counterparts to consent to searches and to answer questions from the police," he writes. But even the police did not carry firearms themselves until, in 1946, the American occupation authority ordered them to. Now, Japanese police receive more hours of training than their American counterparts, are forbidden from carrying off-duty, and invest hours in studying martial arts in part because they "are expected to use [firearms] in only the rarest of circumstances," according to Kopel.

The Japanese and American ways of thinking about crime, privacy, and police powers are so different -- and Japan is such a generally peaceful country -- that it's functionally impossible to fully isolate and compare the two gun control regiments. It's not much easier to balance the costs and benefits of Japan's unusual approach, which helps keep its murder rate at the second-lowest in the world, though at the cost of restrictions that Kopel calls a "police state," a worrying suggestion that it hands the government too much power over its citizens. After all, the U.S. constitution's second amendment is intended in part to maintain "the security of a free State" by ensuring that the government doesn't have a monopoly on force. Though it's worth considering another police state here: Tunisia, which had the lowest firearm ownership rate in the world (one gun per thousand citizens, compared to America's 890) when its people toppled a brutal, 24-year dictatorship and sparked the Arab Spring.

Republicans Fear a Black America

Sunday, Jun 21, 2015 04:59 AM CST

GOP’s fear of a black America: The long, racist history which explains Dylann Roof and stains the so-called “party of Lincoln”

Dylann Roof's assault was the latest salvo in the racial struggle we have fought since 1865: Who owns America?

Heather Cox Richardson

Abraham Lincoln, Rand Paul, Lee Atwater (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon)

Dylann Roof’s murder of nine people worshipping at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was not about mental illness; it was not about religious freedom; it was not an “accident;” it does not defy explanation. His attack on nine African Americans in a church was a political attack designed to keep the government in the hands of white men. His bullets were a salvo in the fundamental struggle that we have fought bitterly since 1865: Who owns America?
When the 21-year-old white man killed six women and three men, including pastor and South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney, he reportedly said: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Roof’s words seem bizarre—not just because black Americans make up less than 15 percent of the population but also because he murdered six women—but they made more sense when they first entered the American vernacular. His statement hails straight from the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War, when white Southern men had to come to grips with the fact that they would no longer control the country.
Men like Roof are staring at that same reality today.
Before the Civil War, white Southern Democrats controlled American politics. They used the government to prop up the system of racial slavery that brought money, social status, and political power to wealthy white men. But when Southern leaders tried to spread their system across the nation, northern Republicans, who were largely men-on-the-make, organized to stand against them. Republicans insisted that in America, every man should be able to rise, and should have a say in the government to make sure wealthy men could not manipulate the laws to their own advantage. Once in power, Republicans used the government to give all poor men land, education, and, in 1865, freedom.
In the wake of the Civil War, white Southern Democrats initially refused to face the reality that they would have to share any sort of economic, political, or social power with their former slaves. President Andrew Johnson, himself a Democrat, took over from the slain President Lincoln during Congress’s long summer recess. He pardoned all but about 1,500 white Southerners, and demanded little from white legislatures in the South seeking readmission to the Union except that they ratify the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. State legislators ratified the amendment, but then promptly set about recreating antebellum conditions of racial servitude with what were known as “Black Codes.” In most states, black people could not own guns, had to sign year-long work contracts, and could be arrested on charges of “vagrancy,” fined, and then bound to anyone who paid their fine. Nowhere could a black person testify in court against a white person, which meant that no black southerner could claim the protection of the law against theft, rape, or murder.

With the return of their states to the Union and with the Black Codes in place, Southern Democrats were poised to retake control of the national government and return it to its prewar defense of property.
But when Congress reconvened in December 1865, Northern congressmen refused to return the same African Americans who had fought for the Union to quasi-slavery under the very men who had spent four years trying to destroy the nation. As a condition for readmission to the Union, Congress put forward the Fourteenth Amendment to give black men legal rights. Southern whites promptly retorted that they would rather remain under military rule than submit to black equality. So northern congressmen passed the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867, which called for new Southern state constitutional conventions to rewrite state constitutions providing for black civic rights. Crucially, the Military Reconstruction Act permitted African American men to vote.
As Republicans began to organize black voters, white Southern Democrats recoiled at the idea of sharing political rights with black men. Democrats railed that lazy black people would destroy the country. They would vote for handouts so they could stop working.
White Southern Democrats tried to keep African Americans from political power by simply refusing to enroll voters. So Congress put the army in charge of voter registration. When both white and black Republicans registered to vote and elected moderate constitutional conventions, white Democrats organized the Ku Klux Klan as a political force to stop the change in government. Before the 1868 elections, members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered at least a thousand African Americans and their white allies. Things were particularly bad in South Carolina, where Klan members killed African American clergyman and state legislator B. F. Randolph at a train depot in broad daylight.
When the votes of black southerners helped to put Republican Ulysses S. Grant in the White House, white southern Democrats howled that black voters were taking over the country. Even though black men were a small minority of the nation’s voting population, they were in control of the government because they could swing an election.
Klan terrorism against black voters increased until Republicans in Congress recognized that it was perverting democracy. In 1871, they passed a law making political intimidation a federal offense, a distinction that enabled Grant to shut down the Ku Klux Klan by imposing martial law in nine South Carolina counties and by having federal courts, rather than local courts, try the 1000 men federal officers rounded up (only 36 were convicted). For the next twenty years, white southerners controlled black political voices by finding ways either to work with black voters or to intimidate them into silence. It was imperative to purge black voters from the system, they insisted, for black Americans only wanted social welfare legislation that would enable them to live without working. Those programs would bleed tax dollars from hardworking white men. Black voters were thus “corrupting” the American government and destroying America itself.

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In 1889, a new Republican administration threatened to revive the federal defense of black voting. A new generation of white Democrats combined with increasing numbers of middle-class women working outside the home to turn this political fear into the specter of the rape of white women by black men. Opponents of black political rights explained that in exchange for their votes, political leaders would give government jobs to black men. This would give them the power of patronage, for in the nineteenth century, local positions depended on the goodwill of local politicians. While men gained political favor by promising their votes, women had no votes to trade for a job. So when black men became, for example, school principals, they could force innocent white girls to have sex with them in exchange for jobs as teachers. This social construction of a political fear very quickly turned to the idea that black political power meant widespread rape.
When American judges proved reluctant to convict all black prisoners accused of rape, white mobs dismissed the government as either corrupt or ineffectual and took over the job themselves. By the early twentieth century, white citizens had made the lynching of black men a civic duty.  While the Ku Klux Klan had operated in secret, the vigilantes of the early twentieth century took photographs of themselves with victims. For these citizen-terrorists, only by purging the government of black voices could the nation be made safe.
When Roof said: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go,” and then made himself judge and jury, he was echoing both a fear and a crazed solution that grew out of the Civil War, when white Southern men had to face the reality that they were going to have to share control the government. That fact inspired terror—and terrorism—among white men in the late nineteenth century. It did so in the 1960s, when, once again, white Americans tried to silence black political voices with terrorism.
Today, Fox News, talk radio hosts, and Movement Conservative politicians have stoked in their followers that same fear of losing control of the government with constant references to freeloading black voters and the “47 percent… who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” As in the past, the fear of sharing political power with African American voters who, according to right-wing media, are lazy criminals, has led to horrific violence. After a hundred and fifty years, this pattern should come as no surprise.