Happy Martin Luther King Day to you. Or, if you come from a different faith tradition, happy Robert E. Lee’s birthday? Because this is a thing the state of Alabama apparently celebrates. I wish this was a joke, but it’s not: Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’ Birthday are right around the corner. As noted in the original this surely proves there is no institutional racism, amirite?
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There was a time when I would have been all over this story when it happened because I was documenting taser use around the country and the world. To me this use of electro-shock to put people into compliance is nothing short of torture and sometimes, summary execution. But I was told by some experts, and criticized by activists, who said that while the dangers of tasers are horrific they are nothing when compared to the horror of police shootings so I backed off my little crusade after the Michael Brown shooting. But it’s still happening, particularly to people with mental health issues which is just heartbreaking. And there are times, like this, when it is deadly force: Videos released this week of a teacher who died after Los Angeles police discharged a Taser on him at least six times on a Venice street raise serious concerns about the officers’ tactics, law enforcement experts who reviewed the tapes said. The LAPD’s actions have sparked alarms from community activists as well as Mayor Karen Bass and are now the subject of an internal investigation.
From the most powerful woman in the US Congress: That’s just beautiful.
The new generation of Villagers take their seats at the table Here’s how the super insider Punchbowl is reporting the news today: Happy Monday morning. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we’re only publishing the AM edition. We’ll be back to the regular schedule tomorrow. President Joe Biden’s split screen on Sunday was stark. Biden spoke at a memorial service for the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The high-profile speech came at the invitation of Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), the senior pastor there. On what would’ve been MLK’s 94th birthday, and from King’s own pulpit, Biden warned that the United States is at an “inflection point,” with the future of democracy in peril. “We’re at what we would call an inflection point. One of those points in world history where what happens … in the next six or eight years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next 30 or 40 years. It happened after World War II.
If this is true, he’s being unusually subtle about it: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis hasn’t even declared whether he’ll run for president in 2024, and Donald Trump has tried to restrain himself from going after his top GOP rival, but the former president’s allies are already mounting an offensive—with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem now leading the charge. Noem may be interested in running for president herself, and therefore would have good reason to go after DeSantis, but she also may be angling for a different role: Trump’s vice president. Earlier this month, Noem’s press secretary, Ian Fury, took a shot at DeSantis seemingly from out of nowhere. Fury sent a follow-up email to the National Reviewfor an article ostensibly about “the transgender lobby’s outsized influence in South Dakota.” Fury went on a tirade—against DeSantis. “Governor Noem was the only Governor in America on national television defending the Dobbs decision,” Fury said, referring to the Supreme Court decision overturning federal abortion protections. “Where was Governor DeSantis?
Departing showrunner Chris Chibnall is heading to LA to join Jodie Whittaker at Gallifrey One! Gallifrey One has always been a convention that celebrates the whole of Doctor Who, right from the 23rd of November 1963 to the present day. And the 33rd edition of the biggest Doctor Who convention in the world, happening in […]
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MLK was not meek and inoffensive MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan delivered a monologue Sunday night on the “the Santa Claus-ification” of Martin Luther King (Princeton University Professor Cornel West’s words). Over a dozen years ago, West warned his audience at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta that King’s image was at risk of being sanitized by history until the truth of the man is distilled away. “We have to resist the ‘Santa Claus-ification’ of Martin Luther King. I don’t want to sanitize Martin Luther King. I don’t want to deodorize Dr. Martin Luther King. I don’t want to disinfect Dr. Martin Luther King, and we’re not gonna domesticate Dr. King,” West said. “The FBI said he was the most dangerous man in America, and the FBI said he was the most notorious liar in America,” West continued. Cuddly and grandfatherly King was not. Quotes that appear on his monument in downtown Washington, D.C. may be among his most famous because they were the least offensive, the least radical, the least threatening to white Americans. They minimize his legacy while celebrating it.
It took the GOP just 20 years Here in North Carolina, this New York Times essay by Margaret Renkl strikes very close to home. Where Republicans are in charge, spite drives policy and rationality takes a holiday. Here or just west in Tennessee, blue cities have targets painted on them: Last year, when Nashville’s Metro Council voted not to support the state’s bid for the city to host the 2024 Republican National Convention, retaliation was widely understood to be inevitable, according to Nashville’s NPR affiliate, WPLN News. Now we know what shape retaliation will take: Last week, on the first day of the new legislative session, Republicans in both the Tennessee House and Senate introduced legislation that would cut our Metro Council in half. (The bills ostensibly apply to all city governments with a legislative body larger than 20 members, but that’s just Nashville.) If passed, the law would overturn not only a 60-year history but also the will of the Nashville people, who voted in 2015 to keep its 40-member council intact.
Up to two million people could be denied a vote unless they apply for ID – with public awareness about the new rules worryingly low, polling for Byline Times has found
Why it’s vital to present a model before we vote Shorter JQ: Albanese should release draft legislation before the Voice referendum if it is to succeed. Not doing so is a recipe for failure based in part on a mistaken analysis of the 1990s Republic referendum, which I shared for a long time. Although polls […]