The Notion

Injustice in Illinois

By Ari Berman

There's a very important editorial in The Nation this week that I hope everyone will take the time to read. It's about the wrongful conviction of Anthony McKinney, who's been in prison for thirty-one years for a murder he did not commit. I'm posting the relevant portions below.

On the evening of September 15, 1978, a white security guard named Donald Lundahl was murdered in a robbery gone awry in a racially fraught southern suburb of Chicago. Police fingered Anthony McKinney, an 18-year-old African-American with no criminal record, as the killer. The prosecution sought death by lethal injection; the judge sentenced McKinney to life in prison.

McKinney has long maintained his innocence. Based on newly uncovered evidence, there's strong reason to believe that he has spent thirty-one years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

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November 6, 2009

Ft. Hood Drowns Out the Tea Party

By Leslie Savan

Don't bring your pitchforks. This is to be our "last stand" to stop health care reform, it's Alamo time. Don't let your congressmen call it a "rally" or "protest"--make sure they say "press event" or "press conference." The point is to see "the whites of their eyes," because there's nothing a congressman fears more than a "freedom-loving American." Oh, and don't dress "too nicely." We don't want the press to start calling this another "Brooks Brothers riot" like they did when Bush aides stormed Miami hallways to stop the 2000 recount.

You can feel the tension between the urge to bully and the need to seem "normal" in every hectic contradiction sent out over the past couple days by Rep. Michelle Bachmann and the Republican Study Committee to the thousands of Tea Partiers who gathered to protest at the Capitol on Thursday. And you have to sympathize. Truly, it isn't easy to be inoffensively radical, or respectably revolutionary, or even pleasantly insane.

Brought in on buses chartered by the corporate astroturf group Americans For Prosperity, they were the now de rigeur crew of white folks of a certain age, carrying signs emblazoned with Holocaust corpse pits and Obama as the Joker. Most wound up snarled before the metal detectors at the entrances to House and Senate office buildings across the street from the Capitol, trying to get inside to "scare" their congresspeople but instead spilling into the traffic outside. A handful of anti-abortion protesters were arrested at Nancy Pelosi's office in the Canon House Office Building (Pelosi wasn't there; she spent most of her day in the Capitol itself, where access is strictly limited).

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November 6, 2009

Election 2009: What Really Changed?

By Eyal Press

So the tide turned Tuesday on Democrats, liberals, Obama, the left. Republicans are "energized," The New York Times reports today, their elation marred only by the prospect of an inter-party feud that could cost them winnable races in 2010.

So the conventional wisdom asserts. Intelligent conservatives know better. One of them is Andrew Pavelyev, who, over at David Frum's blog, parsed the results of Tuesday's election in a strangely overlooked state: North Carolina.

As everyone knows, Barack Obama narrowly won North Carolina a year ago. As most people agree, Republicans must win it back to defeat him in 2012. So what happened on Tuesday? As Pevelyev observed, Republican Bill Knight won the mayoral race in Greensboro, defeating the incumbent Democrat. "Unfortunately," he went on to note, "Greensboro will now be the only North Carolina city with a population over 100,000 that has a Republican mayor. After an unbroken 22yearstring of Republican mayors, Charlotte yesterday elected a Democrat, Anthony Foxx. The Democrats also won 8 out of 11 seats on the city council."

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November 5, 2009

Marriage in Maine: Losing Forward

By Emily Douglas

Last night, in a voter referendum, Mainers narrowly, nail-bitingly voted to repeal the law extending marriage rights to same-sex couples, with the Bangor Daily News now reporting a margin of 53 to 47 percent.

It wasn't only bad news for LGBT rights on election night--voters in Kalamazoo, Michigan, approved an anti-discrimination ordinance adding sexual orientation and gender identity to existing civil rights law in their city, and Washington state's referendum to approve everything-but-the-M-word protections for same-sex couples is winning, though the race hasn't been called yet.

Still, on a morning after like this, you could be forgiven for thinking that it's the elite institutions in American life--courts and state legislatures (although, are you noticing, the sphere of what's "elite" keeps expanding?)--that are ready to contemplate marriage for gay people, and that Americans themselves (Liz Lemon's insistence that no Americans are any more real than any others notwithstanding) aren't. The State Supreme Court extends marriage rights to same-sex couples in California. Californians use a ballot initiative to take the right away. Maine's state legislature passes marriage equality legislation, and voters take the right away. In some jurisdictions (namely, Maine and California), public policy may be slightly outstripping public opinion. But the New York Times has recently taken a close look at whether public opinion on gay rights issues leads or lags behind public policy in all 50 states, sparked by a paper in the American Political Science Review (via Nan Hunter's indispensable blog). Only in Iowa does partnership recognition (in that state's case, marriage) outstrip public support. (In fact, illustrating the vagaries in polling and voting, in this survey, just over half of Mainers support the right to marry.) But the study does not stop at examining attitudes on marriage. Over 50 percent of residents in almost every state (Oklahoma and Utah being the two exceptions) support health benefits for same-sex partners, and yet only 14 states offer this protection. A few more states have enacted workplace and housing discrimination protections, but again, virtually all states see a majority supporting this protection. In fact, average Americans want gay people to have protections--not necessarily marriage, yet, but we're getting there.

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November 4, 2009

Will a Racial Divide Swallow Obama?

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell

On Sunday I went to the Prudential Center in Newark to hear President Obama make the case for Governor Jon Corzine's reelection here in New Jersey. Already a strong supporter of Governor Corzine I wasn't going to be convinced. And I wasn't particularly excited about standing in a long line, on a chilly afternoon to listen to two men I've heard speak dozens of times. But I was determined to go. One year ago I'd been in Newark to hear candidate Obama make his closing arguments, and I wanted to check out what an Obama rally looks like one year later.

Some elements of the atmosphere were familiar: insanely long lines, intense police presence, surprisingly jovial mood despite the chill. One thing was noticeably and distressingly different: the crowd waiting to see President Obama in Newark on Sunday was much less diverse than the crowd that greeted him in the waning days of the 2008 election. By my estimation the supporters in Newark yesterday were not exclusively, but certainly predominately, African American.

The event mirrors recent trends in the polls. Presidential job approval polls by Gallup have tracked two consistent trends in President Obama's ratings: overall decline and a widening racial gap between black and white Americans.

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November 2, 2009

Berlin, Israel, Mexico: Walls Across the World

By Jon Wiener

It's being called "the most ambitious commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany": "The Wall Project" in Los Angeles -- and its political message will surprise many. Artists commissioned by the organizers have promised works that draw analogies between the Berlin Wall and the wall the Israelis have erected along the border with the West Bank, and the wall the US has erected along the Mexican border.

That's not exactly the sort of thing Ronald Reagan had in mind when he stood in Berlin in 1989 and said "Tear down this wall!"

LA's Berlin Wall anniversary commemoration has been organized by the Wende Museum, a private institution in Culver City, with the support of the City of L.A. It includes "The Wall Across Wilshire," a one-hour event on November 8 at which a replica of the Berlin Wall 60 feet long will be erected blocking Wilshire Blvd. in front of the County Museum of Art at midnight.

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November 2, 2009

Twitter Tweaks Social Media with New Lists Feature

By Ari Melber

Twitter, the over-hyped, under-appreciated social network for sharing chit-chat and links, just launched a tool enabling users to create their own lists on the site. The Journal explains the basics:

The new feature allows Twitter users to organize the people they follow and streamline their feeds. Others can then follow their lists, sparing them the time of hunting for individual Twitterers with shared interests

So what, right?

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October 30, 2009

Reparations?

By Leslie Savan

Even without George W. Bush's debut in Fort Worth as a motivational speaker (see Stephen Colbert swoon over the speech here), this past week has been full of reminders of 43. On Wednesday, President Obama walked out onto the North Lawn of the White House to plant a tree where, one year earlier, Bush had tried to plant a Scarlet Oak. Bush's tree "didn't take," so Obama shoveled a few symbolic spadefuls of dirt over the roots of a Linden tree, asked assembled reporters whether it looked nice, and walked back into the Oval Office.

Sometime after midnight, 44 caught a quick helicopter ride out to the Dover Air Base to stand, wind-whipped and slender, as the bodies of 18 Americans killed in Afghanistan were off-loaded from a C-17 in their flag-draped coffins. It was the first time in eight years of war that a President has greeted our returning dead. Obama flashed a neat, palm-down right-hand salute, which cameras recorded matter-of-factly, as if images of respect for the returning dead were an everyday affair.

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October 29, 2009

Palin's Pet Has Taliban Ties?

By Laura Flanders

One week before Election Day, the special election to fill a vacant House seat in New York's North Country is heating up. It's a three-way split, pitting a Republican, a Democrat, and a Conservative against one another. It's close.

And the conservative on the ticket has the kind of support the Democrat running against him must love.

Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman has already received the backing of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the anti-public-spending Club for Growth. On Monday he was endorsed by another beauty: Dana Rohrabacher, the senior Orange County (CA) Republican who began his career as a speechwriter for President Reagan. Said Rohrabacher "We don't need Tweedle-Dum or Tweedle-Dee, we need Hoffman. He's not afraid to stand up and speak the truth."

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October 29, 2009

Centrist Democrats = Corporate Sellouts

By Ari Berman

Every time I hear about Joe Lieberman's latest apostasy, I think, Oy vey! There he goes again. More Joementum.

Remind me why we still call this guy a Democrat? Sure, Lieberman caucuses with Democrats in the Senate--Joe is nothing if not opportunistic and who wants to be part of a lowly Republican minority?--but I think he forfeited his right to call himself one when he almost became John McCain's VP and campaigned stridently against an Obama presidency. Yet somehow he managed to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Gotta love those Senate Democrats--they always find a way to reward someone for stabbing them in the back. See Baucus, Max.

Following Lieberman's threat to filibuster a public option, every paper played up the story of how the "centrists" are now rebelling. Watch out, the centrists are coming! "Centrists unsure about Reid's public option," the Washington Post reported today. Let's get real. These holdouts are not centrist Democrats; they are corporate Democrats, which should be an oxymoron. They'll do whatever the healthcare industry wants and use their red state constituents as an excuse to do so. Only Lieberman is from Connecticut, one of the bluest states in the country. So what's his excuse?

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October 28, 2009