"This Moment Is Bigger Than The Democrats Or The Republicans"

I like Al Franken well enough. He's not my favorite senator but he certainly has a great voting record-- ProgressivePunch rates him a strong, solid "A" and his lifetime crucial vote score is 95.69, pretty much identical to Bernie Sanders', Jeff Merkley's, Dick Durbin's... right between Kirsten Gillibrand's and Tammy Baldwin's. Last time I saw him, I was leaving Cafe Gratitude and he was just entering. I introduced him to Randy Bryce and he stood and gave Randy a lot of generous advice... and then sent him a check (which Bryce has since donated to a Milwaukee shelter for women veterans).

If you don't live in Michigan-- or even if you do-- you had probably never heard of Dana Nessel, a candidate for her state's Attorney General. When her ad started getting played, I doubt anyone was happier than Patrick Miles a former US Attorney for the Western District (not to mention Republicans state House Speaker Tom Leonard and state Senator Tonya Schuitmaker, all candidates for the same job Nessel is campaigning for. I don't know anything about her other than her anti-penis shtik.



She'll lose, either the primary or the general. Men are furious, even if they're not running to the mic whining about it. I only know about how pissed off liberal men are. I imagine conservative men are even angrier. A gender war only benefits the GOP and forcing Franken to resign was the overreach of the year. At least this will mark the end of Gillibrand's presidential hopes, Gillibrand-- the former Blue Dog and NRA champion who became the xenophobic poster girl for keeping immigrants from getting drivers licenses-- before she suddenly was reborn a Wall Street fake progressive.

Today I was out with a woman friend hiking. She was furious Franken was being forced to resign. We met half a dozen neighbors-- men and women-- and every single one of them was as angry as she was. Jeff, an old friend (decades) who I know to be a reflexive progressive and who is the father of two uber-liberated daughters, sent me this note this morning: "I never write to politicians... ever, but I just sent this to Schumer and a modified version to Gillibrand, Feinstein and Harris." He always takes the lead from his even more left-wing wife and I was eager to see what he had to say to Schumer.

As a lifelong Democrat, I am disgusted by your support for Al Franken's resignation. Like thousands of others, I will be resigning from the Democratic Party, and resigning from making donations to the party. Franken was a supremely qualified senator and his transgressions minor compared to Roy Moore or the President, or I’m sure many senators and congressmen as will be revealed in the coming days. The fact that the Democratic Party would waste time and effort attacking one of their own, instead of Roy Moore or the President astounds me. Under your leadership the Democratic Party has shot itself in the brain.

You should be embarrassed to be leading the Senate.

I see where he-- and most people in know in the real world-- are coming from; but another friend, Eugene Puryear, an author, journalist and one of the country's most enlightened political leaders, had very different perspective, one that progressives angered about Franken should read carefully and take into account:

Just historically here, there was always a push for the Civil Rights movement to moderate itself, or subject itself purely to the political demands of the Democratic Party at the moment. The argument was that if they did not it would cause a white backlash that could kill the momentum on civil rights legislative priorities. In fact the 1966 election WAS a backlash election, and DID kill the open housing bill. Who here wants to argue the MFDP should've taken those two seats and shut up though?

Further, that same bill ended up passing after the uprisings after King's assassination in 1968. That same liberatory upsurge produced the initial positive moves, the backlash, and then more positive moves. Politics can't be governed purely by what this or that piece of electoral math in the moment dictates. That is how you can end up with huge election shifts, that result in, well, less than huge political shifts in the direction of the country. Racism isn't gone, but for sure, it is now considered terrible to be a racist, where the actual racists do not even want to be called racist.

This moment is bigger than the Democrats or the Republicans, it is bigger than partisan politics. We are seeing truly mass steps towards an extremely necessary, critical, indispensable cultural change in this country. We need to fan the flames. The time to fight to take on (and hopefully crush) the patriarchy is now, women are fighting and leading, we need to join them not lament that some pissed off dudes are gonna vote next year.

So what do you walk away with? Gillibrand may be an idiot but Eugene is correct-- "This moment is bigger than the Democrats or the Republicans." Pass it along.

A day-late happy birthday to the Bill of Rights (and what happened to the two "lost" amendments?)

As the Inside the Apple "Postcard Thursday" post notes, the original Federal Hall was torn down in 1812, eventually replaced by the building we know as Federal Hall National Memorial, seen below. [Click to enlarge.]

by Ken

Since it looks as if, whatever "change" is in store for us in our bold new political future, it's not going to include overmuch worrying about rights, except insofar as they apply to (a) rich folks and (b) the crackpot Right (who of course have become skilled at turning rights like that of free speech to advance their own in the interest of suppressing actual free speech), as the new movers-and-shakers feel a need to placate them for continued support. So, even a day late, I thought we should take a look at the latest "Postcard Thursday" post from Michelle and James Nevius, the Inside the Apple team, authors of Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, a wonderful guide-and-history book I've written about a number of times, and Footprints in New York: Tracing the Lives of Four Centuries of New Yorkers, a series of moments in the city's history viewed around their key actors.

Though it's hard not to think that we ought to be lighting a candle to the memory of the Bill of Rights, we can instead stick one on a cupcake, as a representative of the full 225, to celebrate one of our crucial founding documents.

Postcard Thursday: Happy 225th Birthday to the Bill of Rights

New York was only the capital of the United States for a brief time, but many important things happened during the city's tenure as the seat of government. Perhaps none is more central to our daily lives than the passage of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

The Bill of Rights [warning: PDF], primarily written by future president James Madison, was designed to address what were seen as deficiencies in the Constitution, especially among anti-Federalists, who thought the original document ceded too much power to the federal government and didn't do enough to protect individual rights.

The House of Representatives, meeting in Federal Hall on Wall Street (pictured above), actually voted in favor of 17 amendments. Once the laws reached the Senate, they were combined and rewritten into 12 amendments, which then passed to the states for ratification. On December 15, 1791 -- 225 years ago today -- Virginia became the final state to agree to ten of those twelve amendments, putting the Bill of Rights into effect.

What became of the other two amendments passed along to the states?

One, which proposed a system for ensuring that the House of Representatives was never too small -- and that bolstered the power of less populous states -- couldn't garner the votes for passage.

The other amendment, regarding congressional pay raises -- first ratified by Maryland in 1789 -- was finally approved in 1992 and became the 27th Amendment, 201 years after the rest of the Bill of Rights became the law of the land.

[Click to enlarge.]

Meanwhile, by the time the Bill of Rights had been ratified, Federal Hall was no long the seat of government. A deal between Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton at Jefferson's home on Maiden Lane moved the capital to Philadelphia in 1790 and, ultimately, to Washington DC. The Federal Hall pictured at the top was torn down in 1812 and today's Federal Hall National Memorial (originally the US Custom House, shown here under a blanket of snow during the blizzard of 1888) went up in 1842.

#

Trump Will Have Vast Powers As President. Thanks, Democrats.

by Gaius Publius

I don't want to let this go by without a mention. There have not been many voices in the mainstream Democratic ecosystem that have taken Obama and his Democratic administration for taking Bush II's war on civil liberties and putting it on steroids.

It's been left to those of us at the margins of the conversation, i.e., not on MSNBC or in the Washington Post, to notice, for example, that via the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), the executive branch can order indefinite detention of U.S. citizens. Or that Obama's drone kill program normalizes executive execution. As Jonathan Turley wrote in 2012:

On Monday, March 5, Northwestern University School of Law was the location of an extraordinary scene for a free nation. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder presented President Barack Obama's claim that he has the authority to kill any U.S. citizen he considers a threat.

How does this not mean that President Obama asserts the White House right to order you killed?

Seems silly to say it that way, doesn't it? I mean, Obama's one of the good guys (i.e., a Democrat), and he'd never use that power frivolously, right? (Actually, of course he would, but not against anyone you would care about — meaning, ethnically European — except in jest.)

Now all that power that our vengeance-seeking, retributional nation thought was "safe" in Obama's hands will be handed to Donald Trump.

Civil Liberties in the Age of Trump

Suddenly, on the cusp of the Age of Trump, the Washington Post sees a problem (emphasis added):

Glenn Greenwald: Trump will have vast powers. He can thank Democrats for them.

Liberals liked executive authority as long as Obama wielded it. Now they've set a precedent.

Liberals are understandably panicked about what Donald Trump can carry out. “We have a president-elect with authoritarian tendencies assuming a presidency that has never been more powerful,” Franklin Foer wrote this past week in Slate. Trump will command not only a massive nuclear arsenal and the most robust military in history, but also the ability to wage numerous wars in secret and without congressional authorization; a ubiquitous system of electronic surveillance that can reach most forms of human communication and activity; and countless methods for shielding himself from judicial accountability, congressional oversight and the rule of law — exactly what the Constitution was created to prevent. Trump assumes the presidency “at the peak of its imperial powers,” as Foer put it.

Not to mention the extra-judicial detention and murder mentioned above. The cause of the problem, of course, is Barack Obama. The news is that the Post is now willing to notice this:

[B]eginning in his first month in office and continuing through today, Obama not only continued many of the most extreme executive-power policies he once condemned, but in many cases strengthened and extended them. His administration detained terrorism suspects without due process, proposed new frameworks to keep them locked up without trial, targeted thousands of individuals (including a U.S. citizen) for execution by drone, invoked secrecy doctrines to shield torture and eavesdropping programs from judicial review, and covertly expanded the nation’s mass electronic surveillance.

The other cause of the problem, of course, is that partisan Democrats and other Obama supporters found all of this completely acceptable. (I don't mention Republican enablers here, since they will almost always find authoritarian rule acceptable.)

Blinded by the belief that Obama was too benevolent and benign to abuse his office, and drowning in partisan loyalties at the expense of political principles, Democrats consecrated this framework with their acquiescence and, often, their explicit approval. This is the unrestrained set of powers Trump will inherit. The president-elect frightens them, so they are now alarmed. But if they want to know whom to blame, they should look in the mirror.

Something to keep in mind as you cringe considering the Trump possibilities, or when you fall back into Obama nostalgia.

Constitutionalizing State Violence

Just as one likely cause of Clinton's electoral loss was Obama's mad push to pass TPP before leaving office, one certain cause of all of Trump's abuse of executive power regarding indefinite detention, death-by-drone, and mass-surveillance of citizens (with the resulting blackmail opportunities this clearly offers) ... is that Barack Obama normalized what Bush II did, gave it the color of law, and a bipartisan blessing.

What both parties agree can be done, can be done by either party. It's the other way our Constitution gets amended. Or, as Greenwald puts it:

By putting a prettier liberal face on these policies, and transforming them from a symbol of GOP radicalism into one of bipartisan security consensus, the president entrenched them as permanent fixtures of the American presidency. As [Bush DoJ official Jack] Goldsmith put it, Obama’s actions were “designed to fortify the bulk of the Bush program for the long-run.”

Yes, he did say "designed to fortify" the Bush program "for the long run." In other words, Obama's actions were deliberate, to secure for the executive branch by law what Bush had secured by taking. 

Trump will have vast powers as president, powers that we will not be able to curtail. Thank you, Mr. Obama, and thank you, complicit Democrats. I hope we don't forget you, as the vice grip tightens, that your hand was on it too.

GP
 

The End Of The GOP?

The Wall Street Journal headline indicated more bad news for Campaign Trumpanzee: Trump Running Mate Mike Pence Tries to Get Republicans on Board. It's midway through August and the parties should be united and reaching out to independents. Democrats, including the vast majority of Bernie supporters, are overwhelmingly united behind Hillary, even if reluctantly. Trump is still hemorrhaging traditional Republican voters and there is a daily drumbeat of ominous news reports about GOP leaders who have been pushed to the breaking point and just can't endorse him-- or even vote for him. Pence was supposed to be the antidote. That hasn't worked. Mike Steele, a former aide to Paul Ryan, told the Journal that "Mending fences isn’t usually part of a vice-presidential nominee’s job. But we’ve never before seen a nominee like Donald Trump, who has alienated huge swaths of the party."

A week after Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump threatened last month to put money into a super PAC to end the political careers of former rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich, Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, called each of them to try to make peace.

While Mr. Trump has exacerbated intraparty tensions, Mr. Pence is taking on a conciliatory role, trying in phone calls and private meetings to persuade GOP stalwarts, one by one, to rally behind the party’s presidential ticket.

The task has taken him from the private office of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to a Phoenix airport meeting with embattled Arizona Sen. John McCain. He has tried to charm hostile talk-radio hosts, whose ranks he once belonged to, and even low-ranking state party officials.

According to a report from Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, early this summer Trumpanzee campaign's own internal polling showed that too many voters described him in two words: "unqualified" and "racist." And there began a series of "interventions" from friends, allies and family to try to get him to behave better. Although Mr. Trumpanzee goes along with their entreaties to shut them up, in the end each intervention has failed. Utterly.

Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching. He has ignored their pleas and counsel as his poll numbers have dropped, boasting to friends about the size of his crowds and maintaining that he can read surveys better than the professionals.

In private, Mr. Trump’s mood is often sullen and erratic, his associates say. He veers from barking at members of his staff to grumbling about how he was better off following his own instincts during the primaries and suggesting he should not have heeded their calls for change.

He broods about his souring relationship with the news media, calling Mr. Manafort several times a day to talk about specific stories. Occasionally, Mr. Trump blows off steam in bursts of boyish exuberance: At the end of a fund-raiser on Long Island last week, he playfully buzzed the crowd twice with his helicopter.

But in interviews with more than 20 Republicans who are close to Mr. Trump or in communication with his campaign, many of whom insisted on anonymity to avoid clashing with him, they described their nominee as exhausted, frustrated and still bewildered by fine points of the political process and why his incendiary approach seems to be sputtering.

...Trump’s advisers believe he is nearly out of time to right his campaign. On Tuesday, hours before his explosive comment about “Second Amendment people” taking action if Mrs. Clinton is elected, his brain trust reassembled again at Trump Tower in a reprise of their stern meeting in June.

They again urged Mr. Trump to adjust his tone and comportment. The top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, gave an unvarnished assessment, warning that Mr. Trump’s numbers would only move in one direction, absent a major change.

Mr. Trump, people briefed on the meeting said, digested the advice and responded receptively.

It was time, he agreed, to get on track.

Oops! Pence has succeeded in signing up crackpot Iowa racist and xenophobe Steve King... but no one else. He's been rebuffed by far more influential Republicans like Ted Cruz, Jeff Flake, John McCain, John Kasich and Jeb Bush. Pence also seems to be trying to reassure the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that Trump isn't really opposed to traditional globalist Republican trade policies and he's only playing it up to win over the rubes.

AP reporter Steve Peoples wrote yesterday that "frustration abounds" among Republicans and that the party could be near the breaking point in terms of Mr. Trumpnazee. "As he skips from one gaffe to the next, GOP leaders in Washington and in the most competitive states have begun openly contemplating turning their backs on their party's presidential nominee to prevent what they fear will be wide-scale Republican losses on Election Day... Republicans who have devoted their professional lives to electing GOP candidates say they believe the White House already may be lost. They're exasperated by Trump's divisive politics and his insistence on running a general election campaign that mirrors his approach to the primaries. 'Based on his campaign record, there's no chance he's going to win,' said Sara Fagen, the political director for former President George W. Bush. 'He's losing groups of people he can't get back.'"

Trump did show some modest improvement as a candidate in the past week. He has stopped criticizing a Muslim family of a fallen U.S. soldier. Gone are the fights with some of his party's most respected members of Congress.

But also in the past seven days, Trump has questioned the advice of senior aides, threatened to stop raising money for the party, dismissed the usefulness of get-out-the-vote efforts and defended his decision not to run any television ads even as his opponents fill the airwaves with spots backing Clinton in several contested states.

It all largely overshadowed the content of 44 previously-unreleased email exchanges Clinton had while at the State Department. They became public on Tuesday and showed her interacting with lobbyists, political and Clinton Foundation donors and business interests while serving as secretary of state.

"He can't simply continue to preach to the choir and think he's going to put together a coalition that will win the White House," said Ryan Williams, a party strategist and former aide to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney. "He's essentially guaranteeing that he will lose by refusing to clean up his mistakes and stop committing future ones."

The mistakes do keep coming.

Trump this past week stuck by a patently false claim that President Barack Obama founded the Islamic State group. The candidate made an off-handed remark about Clinton that was widely condemned by critics as an invitation to violence. He even acknowledged that losing might not be so bad.

"I'll just keep doing the same thing I'm doing right now," he told CNBC on Thursday. "And at the end it's either going to work or I'm going to you know, I'm going to have a very, very nice, long vacation."

All of it, to some Republicans, should lead the party to give up on its nominee.

More than 100 GOP officials, including at least six former members of Congress and more than 20 former staffers at the Republican National Committee, have signed a letter asking the party chairman, Reince Priebus, to stop helping Trump's campaign.

They call the New York real estate mogul a threat to the party and to the nation. They want the RNC to take resources now helping Trump and shift them to vulnerable GOP candidates for House and Senate.

The letter follows a steady stream of recent defections from Republican elected officials and longtime strategists who vow never to support Trump. They want party leaders to acknowledge that backing his White House bid is a waste of time and money.

"They're going to do it sooner or later. They might as well do it sooner to have more impact," said former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, one of the Republicans to sign the letter to Priebus.

...There is no evidence that a formal plan to break with Trump exists at either the state party or RNC level, but Priebus has informally discussed the possibility with party leaders in battleground states in recent days, three of the officials said.

Should that occur, it's not likely to happen until after Labor Day, as the party is still relying on Trump to help raise money to fund its expansive political operation. But the amount of money needed decreases as each day passes, giving the RNC greater financial freedom to potentially change course as the election nears.

For now, Priebus is vocally supportive of Trump. The party chairman joined the nominee on Friday, part of a larger effort to ensure an experienced political hand is almost always at the candidate's side when he travels. Others keeping Trump company this past week include former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

"We've always found it's wise to have people traveling with him, because it's an opportunity to have him engaged and not just sitting there," Manafort said.

Why not give him a book to read or, if he refuses, a bunch bananas? Republican Party operative Avik Roy thinks it's too late anyway-- not just for the Trumpanzee campaign, but for the Republican Party itself. "I don’t think the Republican Party and the conservative movement are capable of reforming themselves in an incremental and gradual way,” he told Vox reporter Zack Beauchamp last month in Cleveland. "There’s going to be a disruption," which he fears will leave Democrats dominating national politics for a long time. "[H]e also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans. 'Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country... Goldwater’s nomination in 1964 was a historical disaster for the conservative movement,' Roy tells me, 'because for the ensuing decades, it identified Democrats as the party of civil rights and Republicans as the party opposed to civil rights.'... This had a double effect, Roy says. First, it forced black voters out of the GOP. Second, it invited in white racists who had previously been Democrats. Even though many Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the post-Goldwater party became the party of aggrieved whites."

Patti Davis' father was Ronald Reagan

Republican intellectuals have long denied this, fabricating a revisionist history in which Republicans were and always have been the party of civil rights. In 2012, National Review ran a lengthy cover story arguing that the standard history recounted by Roy was “popular but indefensible.”

This revisionism, according to Roy, points to a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism-- philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

Conservative intellectuals, for the most part, are horrified by racism. When they talk about believing in individual rights and equality, they really mean it. Because the Republican Party is the vehicle through which their ideas can be implemented, they need to believe that the party isn’t racist.

So they deny the party’s racist history, that its post-1964 success was a direct result of attracting whites disillusioned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. And they deny that to this day, Republican voters are driven more by white resentment than by a principled commitment to the free market and individual liberty.

“It’s the power of wishful thinking. None of us want to accept that opposition to civil rights is the legacy that we’ve inherited,” Roy says.

He expands on this idea: “It’s a common observation on the left, but it’s an observation that a lot of us on the right genuinely believed wasn’t true-- which is that conservatism has become, and has been for some time, much more about white identity politics than it has been about conservative political philosophy. I think today, even now, a lot of conservatives have not come to terms with that problem.”

This, Roy believes, is where the conservative intellectual class went astray. By refusing to admit the truth about their own party, they were powerless to stop the forces that led to Donald Trump’s rise. They told themselves, over and over again, that Goldwater’s victory was a triumph.

But in reality, it created the conditions under which Trump could thrive. Trump’s politics of aggrieved white nationalism-- labeling black people criminals, Latinos rapists, and Muslims terrorists-- succeeded because the party’s voting base was made up of the people who once opposed civil rights.

“[Trump] tapped into something that was latent in the Republican Party and conservative movement-- but a lot of people in the conservative movement didn’t notice,” Roy concludes, glumly.

...[S]oul-searching led Roy to an uncomfortable conclusion: The Republican Party, and the conservative movement that propped it up, is doomed.

Both are too wedded to the politics of white nationalism to change how they act, but that just isn’t a winning formula in a nation that’s increasingly black and brown. Either the Republican Party will eat itself or a new party will rise and overtake its voting share.

“Either the disruption will come from the Republican Party representing cranky old white people and a new right-of-center party emerging in its place, or a third party will emerge, à la the Republicans emerging from the Whigs in the [1850s],” Roy says.

The work of conservative intellectuals today, he argues, is to devise a new conservatism-- a political vision that adheres to limited government principles but genuinely appeals to a more diverse America.

“I think it’s incredibly important to take stock,” he says, “and build a new conservative movement that is genuinely about individual liberty.”

I don’t know how this would work. I don’t think Roy knows either.

For the entire history of modern conservatism, its ideals have been wedded to and marred by white supremacism. That’s Roy’s own diagnosis, and I think it’s correct. As a result, we have literally no experience in America of a politically viable conservative movement unmoored from white supremacy.

I’ve read dozens of conservative intellectuals writing compellingly about non-racist conservative ideals. Writers like Andrew Sullivan, Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and too many others to count have put forward visions of a conservative party quite different from the one we have.

But not one of these writers, smart as they are, has been able to explain what actual political constituency could bring about this pure conservatism in practice. The fact is that limited government conservatism is not especially appealing to nonwhite Americans, whereas liberalism and social democracy are. The only ones for whom conservatism is a natural fit are Roy’s “cranky old white people”-- and they’re dying off.

Maybe Roy and company will be able to solve this problem. I hope they do. America needs a viable, intellectually serious right-of-center party.

Because we now know what the alternative looks like. It’s Donald Trump.

Another Brick In The Wall

British rock stars were never part of Hillary's crumbling firewall-- not like Georgia state Sen. Vincent Fort, the #2 Democrat in the Georgia Senate, who flipped his endorsement this morning from Hillary to Bernie-- but, nonetheless, another brick in the wall is now out of reach for her campaign which is being viewed world over as less and less believeable and less and less inevitable. Pink Floyd's Roger Waters was early in seeing the danger of the neocon monster that is so much a part of Hillary Clinton. Back in October he endorsed Bernie and said he was worried that Hillary "might become the first woman president to drop a fucking nuclear bomb on somebody."

The other day I was interviewed by someone writing a book about the early days of psychedelic rock and she knew more about me than I could remember myself. "Do you remember," she asked almost reverentially, "when you played See Emily Play on WUSB for the first time, the first airplay Pink Floyd ever got in America?" Oy. I don't remember much about my Stony Brook dj days. I was always up on the roof of the station getting high between long tracks like Revelation from Da Capo. But I do remember that I played Arnold Layne before I played "See Emily Play." So someone was misremembering something here. I liked "See Emily Play" way better and played it more often.

Waters can't vote in a U.S. election but he told Rolling Stone why he's hoping Bernie wins. "He's the only person in the race that I see with any credibility. He seems to speak the truth, far as one can tell at this point. He seems prepared to stand up against big money and the banks and stand up for the predicaments of minorities, the middle class and the working class in this country."

He says that Hillary Clinton is a "far better alternative than any of the Republican candidates by a long, long way," but he still has severe reservations about her. "Hillary worries me," he says. "I have an awful worry that she might become the first woman president to drop a fucking nuclear bomb on somebody. There is something scarily hawkish about her, and she has that politician look down of, 'You are never going to get a word of truth out of me.'"



Many Democrats say that if Sanders is nominated, it will hand the election to the Republicans because the Vermont senator is so radical. "It is true that people become marginalized if their politics appear too far to the left," he says. "That is why I admire Sanders. When he speaks the truth, he sounds very left-wing, but that is because we have been fed this right-wing bullshit by the whole of the mainstream media since the Second World War. And it has gotten worse and worse and worse, and the outlets for dissenting voices have become fewer and fewer. So he is bound to sound out of step, because he is! And that is what is so good about him."

Back to Georgia for a moment, where Senator Fort explained his switch to Bernie by saying, "After months of looking at Bernie’s record and studying his positions on healthcare, Wall Street, predatory lending and the minimum wage, I came to the conclusion that Bernie’s position on the issues that affect my constituents in Georgia the most conform most closely to my positions... He’s going to do well here. As people have a chance to listen to him, to have a chance to understand that he’s speaking to the issues that are the most critica. As people study and listen to him, I think there’s going to be movement toward his campaign." Fort is now the most high-profile Bernie backer in Georgia, joining state Rep. LaDawn Jones and Clarkston Mayor Ted Terry-- and putting him at odds with a very uninspiring party establishment.

Hillary and her surrogates have, predictably, floated the ugly Clintonian smear that Bernie is lying when he says he was involved in the Civil Rights movement. It's well-documented-- and though she doesn't bring it up when talking on the campaign trail, she admits it when cornered-- that she was a Goldwater Girl and subsequently the president of the Young Republicans at Wellesley College at the time. Bernie was at the University of Chicago, president of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Perhaps she's changed; she seems to on about everything-- but he hasn't. He's been a stalwart fighter for progressive values while she was a right-wing activist and a corporate shill, sitting on the Board of Walmart. Here's a video of him being arrested in 1963 at a school segregation protest in Englewood:

Hillary's Attacks On Bernie Very Much Mirror Her Equally Ugly Attacks On President Obama

One of Hillary's many bad moments during Thursday's debate was her psychotic attack on Bernie for being mean to president Obama. In the past we talked about how Hillary savaged Obama during the 2008 campaign claiming he wasn't as anti-NRA as she was, even though her own gun record is purely opportunistic and changed whenever she needed to appear on one side or the other-- the entire story of her life from the time she was a Goldwater Girl and the President of the Young Republican Club at Wellesley College right until the present day. Her attempt to turn Obama supporters-- especially African American voters in South Carolina-- against Bernie based on him being anti-Obama was especially hilarious in light of how vicious and negative she was during the 2008 campaign. Funny how she still hasn't learned that that's exactly why she lost the respect of Democratic voters and why they chose Obama over her. A little trip down memory lane, courtesy of Donald Trump's least favorite newspaper in the world:

Hillary Clinton's assault on Barack Obama shifted from outrage to heavy sarcasm Sunday, with the former First Lady mocking her rival as much as chewing him out for his tactics.

Framing Obama as both a deceiver and a dream weaver, Clinton said "none of the problems we face will be easily solved."

Then oozing derision, Clinton cracked, "Now, I could stand up here and say, 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified. The sky will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.'"

Her remarks drew chuckles from a supportive audience gathered at Rhode Island College.

"Maybe I've just lived a little long, but I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be," she said. "You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear."

Clinton's mockery of Obama came a day after she railed, "Shame on you, Barack Obama," decrying what she termed deceptive mailings in Ohio about her stances on universal health care and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Later, in Boston, Clinton signaled she would continue her more aggressive approach against Obama. "I just have this sense that finally my opponent is getting maybe a little bit of scrutiny," she said.

The New York senator has a narrow lead over Obama in the Buckeye State and is trying to regain ground after 11 consecutive primary defeats.

Campaigning in Cleveland, Obama pushed back on the NAFTA issue, using quotes from Clinton's book to demonstrate her past support for the pact. NAFTA has been blamed for an exodus of jobs in pivotal states like Ohio, where Democrats vote March 4.

"Ten years after NAFTA passed, Sen. Clinton said it was good for America. ... Well, I don't think NAFTA has been good for America-- and I never have," Obama said during a campaign stop at a wallboard factory. "The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for President."

Clinton has said on the campaign trail that the trade agreement-- which was passed during her husband's administration-- is problematic.

Obama said Sunday that while he has issues with NAFTA, an attempt to repeal it "would probably result in more job losses than job gains in the United States."

A Clinton spokesman retorted that Obama has spoken positively of NAFTA in the past: "Sen. Obama's insistence on repeating attacks that have been demonstrated to be false by independent entities proves once and for all that his speeches about the new politics are just words."

That's inconvenient

Her campaign then was-- and her campaign now is-- worthy of who she is, a former president of the Wellesley Young Republicans. One of her surrogates, a man I have always admired, John Lewis, attacked Bernie, who, like many people his age-- he wasn't an elected official or anything like that-- supported the Civil Rights Movement, on her behalf last week. "I never saw him. I never met him. I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved with the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery and directed (the) voter education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met President (Bill) Clinton." As Harry Belafonte pointed out on the Chris Hayes show Friday, John Lewis "never saw most of the people who were engaged." Watch the video:



Lewis must have misremembered when he now claims to have met Bill and Hillary, because in the past he's written that he never even heard of Bill Clinton until the 1970s and didn't meet him until 1991.

Showdown-- Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America By Wil Haygood

August 30, 1967 was a very important day in the history of our country. It was the day a reluctant Senate finally confirmed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. 69 senators voted YES, 11 voted NO, and, crucially, 20 didn't vote. We'll come back to those 20 in a moment. Marshall served on the Court for 24 years, from October, 1976 until October, 1991. He was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice-- and he was no Clarence Thomas (who, hideously, was appointed to his seat by George W. Bush). Marshall was an accomplished attorney for the NAACP with an astounding success rate of arguing cases in front of the Court, including Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 landmark case that discarded "separate but equal" and outlawed segregation in public schools. John Kennedy appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals (NY) and then Lyndon Johnson appointed him Solicitor General before appointing him to Tom Clark's Supreme Court seat when he resigned (when his son Ramsey Clark was appointed Attorney General).

So why bring this up now? Not because it's October. Last month Wil Haygood's epic book on the life of Marshall, Showdown-- Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, was published. In his review in the NY Times, David Margolick begins with a showdown between Marshall and 4 racist senators from the Judiciary Committee who were determined to block him from being confirmed to the Supreme Court-- John McClellan (D-AR), Sam Ervin (D-NC), Strom Thurmond (R-SC) and James Eastland (D-MS), the committee chair and the father of Miss Confederacy, 1966. Margolick laments how Marshall's story has been largely forgotten by history, "relegated to the shadow of Martin Luther King Jr.," but is excited that the Haygood book is going to change that. President Johnson:

“Thurgood, I’m nominating you because you’re a lot like me: Bigger than life, and we come from the same kind of people,” he told him. Because there had been no Supreme Court vacancies handy, Johnson, the consummate wheeler-­dealer, fashioned one, naming Ramsey Clark attorney general in order to induce his father, Justice Tom C. Clark, to quit. Johnson could then slide Marshall, solicitor general at the time, into Clark’s slot.

Before that, Marshall had been a federal appeals court judge in New York, begrudgingly named six years earlier by President Kennedy after Marshall had spurned his offer of a seat on the federal trial bench. (“My boiling point is too low for the trial court,” Marshall had explained. “I’d blow my stack and then get reversed.”) That initial offer had come from Robert Kennedy. “You don’t seem to understand,” he warned Marshall. “It’s this or nothing.”  “I do understand,” Marshall lectured him. “You don’t know what it means, but all I’ve had in my life is nothing. It’s not new to me, so goodbye.”

For much of that life, Marshall had been the founder and principal litigator of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fighting, against great odds and at enormous personal risk, to dismantle Jim Crow in Southern schools, courtrooms, lunch counters and voting booths — that is, when he wasn’t struggling frantically to spare individual indigent blacks from the electric chair or the rope. “Folks would come for miles, some of them on muleback or horseback, to see ‘the nigger lawyer’ who stood up in white men’s courtrooms,” an N.A.A.C.P. official would later recall. Not all of Marshall’s beneficiaries, though, were black: By helping to invalidate ­Texas’ whites-only primaries, thereby adding thousands of black voters to the rolls, he helped make Lyndon Johnson a senator.

“He is one of the most distinguished lawyers in the land,” Senator Jacob Javits of New York said in introducing Marshall to the Judiciary Committee. Javits’s words were echoed 24 years later when the first President Bush introduced Marshall’s replacement, Clarence Thomas. But in Marshall’s case, they were true.

In what was really Marshall’s first victory over the segregationist senators, they did not dare challenge his civil rights work. Instead, seeking to exploit concerns about crime — riots in Detroit and elsewhere were taking place during the hearings — they asked him about (and, in effect, blamed him and people like him for) recent Supreme Court decisions expanding the rights of criminal defendants. At one point Senator Ervin, not yet the avuncular figure of the Watergate hearings, complained that the Fifth Amendment was never meant to invalidate “voluntary confessions.”

“Well, Senator, the word ‘voluntary’ gets me in trouble,” Marshall replied. “I tried a case in Oklahoma where the man ‘voluntarily’ confessed after he was beaten up for six days.” The hearings, startlingly unscripted compared with today’s antiseptic proceedings, furnished one of the first debates on originalism-- the idea that the Constitution was frozen in time rather than, as Marshall argued, a “living document”-- and which, in this instance, was the refuge of bigots. They also featured Senator Thurmond trying to trip Marshall up on historical trivia that no one but a specialist, and certainly not Thurmond himself, could possibly have known.

“Are you prejudiced against white people in the South?” Senator Eastland asked Marshall. It was not, as Haygood writes, the “penultimate” question, but it was the ultimate one, and Marshall handled it with aplomb. Shortly thereafter, he was overwhelmingly confirmed, and far more easily than Haygood leads us to expect he would be. Miraculously (though Haygood fails to point it out) only one Republican, Thurmond, voted against him. For all his fears, Lyndon Johnson was famously persuasive (and were Marshall to falter, he even had another black candidate, William Coleman, waiting in the wings). He could also count noses.

An interview with Haygood on KPCC's AirTalk is what drew my attention to the book and to the 20 senators who didn't vote and how that happened. Before Marshall's nomination, no Supreme Court nominee's Judiciary Committee hearing had lasted more than 4 hours. Marshall's was a full 5 days, stretched out for almost 2 weeks. Haygood on how Johnson managed to force the confirmation through the Senate despite the intent of the Southern racists to block it:

Johnson... was a master. These were senators that he had known from his years in the Senate. After Marshall made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee [the nomination] of course headed to the full Senate. His paperwork sat in limbo for 5 weeks and that was also unheard of at the time. It made a lot of people very upset, but Lyndon Johnson started working the telephones and he convinced 20 Southern segregationists to not vote on the day of the vote for Thurgood Marshall. He twisted arms; he let them know what he would do to them. He would hurt them in their home districts, maybe by making speeches against them or not giving them some pork barrel project. He was being a master politician. And on the day of the vote, 20 Southern segregationist senators opted not to vote against Marshall.

The racists' plan for a filibuster fell apart. Only 1 Republican-- Strom Thurmond-- and 10 Dixiecrats-- Robert Byrd (WV), James Eastland (MS), Allen Ellender (LA), Sam Ervin (NC), Lister Hill (AL), Spessard Holland (FL), Fritz Hollings (SC), Russell B. Long (LA), John Sparkman (AL), and Herman Talmadge (GA) voted NO. But among the 20 senators who stayed away that day less than half were actually Southern segregationists: Harry Byrd, Jr. (D-VA), Paul Fannin (R-AZ, not technically a Southern segregationist but a Southwestern segregationist), Fred Harris (D-OK), B. Everett Jordan (D-NC), John McClellan (D-AR), Richard Russell (D-GA), George Smathers (D-FL), and John Stennis (D-MS). Others who stayed away included non-Southerns and non-racists like Democrats Joseph Montoya (NM), George McGovern (SD), Gaylord Nelson (WI), Vance Hartke (D-IN), Ed Muskie (ME), Ernest Gruening (AK) and Mike Mansfield (MT). Haygood got that wrong.

RIP Julian Bond, A Personal Hero

Saturday night, Julian Bond, one of my personal heroes, passed away. I didn't realize he was 75; I always assumed he was my age, maybe a year or two older. I first met him in 1966, and I'm going to tell you about that in a minute. In more recent years we've both been on the board of People for the American Way, where he has continued to inspire me. He's inspired a lot of people. In fact, this morning Eric Holder tweeted "Julian Bond-- activist, icon. A great man who made the gains of the next generation possible and the nation better. We owe him much."

From his days as the co-founder and communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s to his chairmanship of the NAACP in the 21st century, Julian was a visionary and tireless champion for civil and human rights. He served as the SPLC's president from our founding in 1971 to 1979, and later as a member of its board of directors.

With Julian's passing, the country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice. He advocated not just for African Americans, but for every group, indeed every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he recognized the common humanity in us all.

When I was a sophomore at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, I became chairman of the Student Activities Board. In that position, over the years, I brought groundbreaking, mostly then-unknown artists to play at the campus, musicians on the cutting edge of pop culture: Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, The Dead, Otis Redding, the Airplane, Big Brother, Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Muddy Waters, Country Joe, Ravi Shankar, Pink Floyd, The Byrds... But there was also a speakers series I felt I could use to help expose students to a more overtly cutting edge. I was happy to invite Timothy Leary to speak at the campus. And then there was Julian Bond.

Julian Bond was one of 8 African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in the wake of passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Come January 1966, however, the Georgia House voted 184-12 not to seat him because he publicly opposed the war against Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was depriving him of his freedom of speech and that they must seat him. They did, and I booked him to give a lecture at Stony Brook. Mrs. Couey, my lovely, batty old faculty adviser told me I couldn't present such an unbalanced program at a tax-funded university. I asked her if she wanted me to book the head of the KKK to balance it. "Now, Howie, you're so funny. You do the right thing." So I booked Senator Strom Thurmond as a speaker for the same evening. Balance!

A week before the event-- stoned out of my mind, as I was for my entire four years at Stony Brook-- I called Thurmond's office and explained that we're a struggling state university and the budget is tight and that I couldn't pay him the $5,000 I had offered and could he do it for $2,500? They said OK. I then called Julian and explained there was a change in plans and we would have to give him $7,500 instead of the agreed-upon $5,000. I felt I needed to do more.

The day of the event I picked Julian up at the airport in a fancy rented car and took him to the most exclusive restaurant in Suffolk County, the 3 Village Inn. We had an amazing dinner, and when we were leaving, we were approached in the parking lot by two waiters who said that although almost all the waiters were African Americans, this was the first time they had ever seen an African American eat there. They both had tears in their eyes.

Earlier I had asked my Hospitality Committee chairman to walk over to the Long Island Railroad Station and meet Thurmond. I gave him $10 and asked him to take the senator to a beer-and-pizza joint down the road from the campus for dinner. I knew Stephen would be very polite and charming to him-- it's in his nature. He was the most flamboyantly gay person I knew at the time.

Julian spoke, and the audience gave him a standing ovation. Then Senator Thurmond took the stage, and the entire audience-- as one and with no prompting-- got up and walked out of the gym. Mrs. Couey and Stephen, forever the most courteous and proper guy I had ever run across, stayed to hear Thurmond. No one ever told me what he talked about.

Julian served in the Georgia state legislature for two decades. Soon after he spoke at Stony Brook he was fighting on the floor of the Democratic convention in Chicago as the head of an alternative delegation trying to unseat the racists in the official delegation headed by Governor Lester Maddox, best known for having barred black students who wanted to eat at his segregated restaurant next to Georgia Tech with an ax handle-- and then for claiming LBJ and the communists put him out of business. The wave of the future. (The video at that link can't be embedded but I urge you to watch it.)

Sunday, President Obama issued this statement about Julian's passing: 

Julian Bond was a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend. Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life-– from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP. Michelle and I have benefited from his example, his counsel, and his friendship-– and we offer our prayers and sympathies to his wife, Pamela, and his children. Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that?

A few years before I met Julian, he wrote this poem (1960):

I too, hear America singing
But from where I stand
I can only hear Little Richard
And Fats Domino.
But sometimes
I hear Ray Charles
Drowning in his own tears
or Bird
Relaxing at Camarillo
Or Horace Silver doodling,
Then I don't mind standing
a little longer.

Selma Songs And More Music for MLK Today

by Denise Sullivan

You can thank Stevie Wonder for the move toward making today a federal holiday, and it all started with the song “Happy Birthday," from his album, Hotter Than July.



The idea to honor the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. with his own national observance was first mooted by Rep. John Conyers in 1968, but the collection of millions of citizen signatures from city to city was Wonder's doing (along with that of his tour mate, Gil Scott-Heron). Taking to the road for 41 days at the end of 1980 to promote his album and the idea of a national day in honor of King, Wonder originally had Bob Marley in mind to accompany him on the road but the singer had taken ill for the final time. In his place, Gil Scott-Heron filled the bill with his own repertoire of politically-charged, poetic songs, and a personal connection which he writes about it in great detail in his brilliant memoir, The Last Holiday. In a horrible twist of fate, at the concert's Oakland tour stop, the musicians, including their local guest Carlos Santana, learned John Lennon, had been fatally shot and Wonder had the unfortunate job of delivering the news to the the crowd that another man of peace had died by violence.

North Carolina's Jesse Helms was first to oppose the day; John McCain voted against it. Three years later, Congress passed the law signed by President Ronald Reagan declaring the day for MLK but it would take years, more activist effort, more songs, and more applied pressure for the idea to catch on and the day to become a reality (most notoriously, New Hampshire was last to party, finally observing in 1999).



While we are the subject of white male disregard for black lives, last week's slight of Selma by the largely white Academy Awards nominating committee was yet another demonstration of how hopelessly out of touch most arts and cultural organizations and institutions (Grammy, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) are with the realities of the people they are supposedly serving. In addition to being a gorgeously rendered and directed film by Ava DuVernay, beautifully acted by the entire cast of ensemble players and in particular David Oyelowo as Dr. King, the film's release couldn't be timelier given the ongoing nationwide protests against police violence in the present, in addition to the continued endangerment of the very voting rights that people died to have written into law by President Johnson in 1965.





Mercifully, the film was recognized in the category of Best Picture, which it is, and for its theme, Glory by John Legend and Common. Its score by jazz pianist Jason Moran is light-touched and in tune with the times. But the actual pieces of music of the Civil Rights Era were the film's musical highlights for me. Incidental appearances of songs by the Soul Stirrers, Staple Singers and the Impressions' anthem, "Keep on Pushing," swelled in all the right places, not too much to be obtrusive and usually just enough.



But if you want to hear the most moving piece of music of all, wait until the final credits roll: A medley of "This Little Light of Mine/Which Side Are You On?/Freedom Now Chant and Come By Here (Kumbaya)" sung by civil rights workers at the mass for one of their own, Jimmie Lee Jackson, is a revelation. Jackson's police shooting is what sparked the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the first place. The track is taken from a full album on Smithsonian Folkways titled Freedom Songs: Selma, Alabama. Some of the other traditional gospel pieces on the recording like "Steal Away" and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen," are led by the Rev. Hosea Williams (played in Selma by the always fabulous actor/activist, Wendall Pierce). But the marching songs are most vital: they are mobile, spirited, and ultimately free. These songs were built to travel the distance from slavery and incarceration to freedom, and that's why you can still hear them being sung today. In fact, right now, across the country there are King Day calls to action by young people organized to end police violence. And 50 years later, the song and the question remain the same: Which Side Are You On?

Denise Sullivan is the author of Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop.


UPDATE: A Little Politics

Reagan opposed the bill to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday but he signed it when it passed the House with a veto-proof margin, 338-90 on August 2, 1983. Not many of the opponents are still in Congress, but these are the last 4 survivors:

• Richard Shelby (D-AL)- switched parties and is now a Republican
• John McCain (R-AZ)
• Hal Rogers (R-KY)
• Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)

In the Senate, the 7 racists who voted for Jesse Helm's amendment to prohibit the holiday are all dead or were long ago forced out of government.


UPDATE From Melody Siegler

Denise's wonderful post (above) reminded me of a YouTube that I found a while back, and one that I think is a profound statement of the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.

A Celebration Of John Lewis, Civil Rights Leader Extraordinare

-by Melody Siegler,
constituent

Who is John Lewis?  Easy answer: he’s my congressman- the GA-05 district.  DWT readers may find my experience shocking (or not)-- but a lot people I know one way or the other from around the country don’t actually know the name of their congressman. And, if I say (rather proudly) “mine is John Lewis” that simply doesn’t register. For those of you who might wish to inform clueless friends, here’s a very very brief rundown:

John Robert Lewis:  Born in rural Alabama in 1940, town of Troy.  At age 18, March 1958, meets MLK Jr. Lewis had written to King in Montgomery Alabama, asking for his help. King sent him a round trip Greyhound bus ticket from Troy to Mongomery, so that they could meet. Attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, where he learned about nonviolent protest and helped to organize sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. In 1960, Lewis became one of the 13 original Freedom Riders. In 1963 he was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was one its founding members. Lewis was one of the organizers of the historic 1963 March on Washington. At age 23, Lewis was youngest of the 10 speakers.

  Fast forward to 1965, Selma, and Bloody Sunday, as summarized here:

In 1965, at the height of the modern civil rights movement, activists organized a march for voting rights, from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital. On March 7, some 600 people assembled at a downtown church, knelt briefly in prayer, and began walking silently, two-by-two through the city streets.  With Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leading the demonstration, and John Lewis, Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), at his side, the marchers were stopped as they were leaving Selma, at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, by some 150 Alabama state troopers, sheriff ’s deputies, and possemen, who ordered the demonstrators to disperse. One minute and five seconds after a two-minute warning was announced, the troops advanced, wielding clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. John Lewis, who suffered a skull fracture, was one of fifty-eight people treated for injuries at the local hospital. The day is remembered in history as “Bloody Sunday.”

“Two Minute Warning,” photograph by Spider Martin, March 7, 1965

(John Lewis stands next to Hosea Williams at the front)

With Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leading the demonstration, and John Lewis, Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), at his side, the marchers were stopped as they were leaving Selma, at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, by some 150 Alabama state troopers, sheriff ’s deputies, and possemen, who ordered the demonstrators to disperse.

One minute and five seconds after a two-minute warning was announced, the troops advanced, wielding clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. John Lewis, who suffered a skull fracture, was one of fifty-eight people treated for injuries at the local hospital. The day is remembered in history as “Bloody Sunday.”

John Lewis (in the foreground) being beaten by state troopers, March 7, 1965

Note that he is wearing the same coat as in photo above.

But, above are just stills. These two youtube give a more visually graphic account:

Part of the narrative for the first YouTube:  MLK Jr. on events leading up to Bloody Sunday:  “He (Jimmy Lee Jackson) was murdered (shot at point blank range) by the irresponsibility of every politician from Governors on down who have fed his constituents a stale bread of hatred the spoiled meat of racism.”

A hellish scene of police brutality and chaos.



This second YouTube shows more graphically the hellish scene.  Througout the following you can identify John Lewis in his raincoat, wearing his backpack, and next to him Hosea Williams, wearing a dark overcoat.



Fast forward even more: 1968, Lewis continues his work to enfranchise minorities. 1970, he becames director of the Voter Education Project  and during his tenure, the VEP helped to register millions of minority voters. In 1981, Lewis wins a seat on the Atlanta City Council. In 1986, he is elected to the House of Representatives, and is such as of this day. He is the only serving member of the “Big Six” of the Civil Rights Movement. This is his website:

For those of you who know the “legend” of John Lewis, but don’t yet have a sense of this man, an interview on The Colbert Report in 2012 will give some clues.  Okay, so this is a spoiler, but pay attention to how he gracefully conveys his story, gracefully plays the “straight man” for Colbert, and how he manages to flummox Colbert at the end.

What got me started on this post?  Howie has talked about the movie Selma, as the second part of a post about Marches.

I haven’t yet seen the movie, but I wondered if John Lewis had commented on it. He has.

Variety  (The Show Biz daily) posted an interview with John Lewis-- this is part of the text.  

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who helped lead the 1965 voting rights march in Selma, Ala. said, that …(the movie) Selma is “long overdue.”  Lewis continues:  “The movie is good timing with what is going on in Ferguson, and I was so pleased to see in the movie there was a mention of Ferguson… It was said to another generation, and maybe future generations, that through the peaceful non-violent action you can bring about change.”

In the movie, Lewis and Williams lead the marchers across the bridge, only to be stopped as they see a flank of state troopers, holding billy clubs and other weapons, blocking their way on the other side of the Alabama River. Williams asks Lewis, “Can you swim?”

Lewis says that is what actually happened at that moment.

“Even today I don’t know how to swim … But as we cross the bridge on Bloody Sunday, I think Hosea thought there was a possibility we could be going overboard, or something could happen that we could jump in the water. But I preferred taking my chances by just walking straight ahead, and that is what I did.”

Of watching the movie’s re-creation of the Bloody Sunday march, Lewis says, “It was not just hard to go back there [and watch it on screen], but [it was hard] seeing, reliving what happened to the women and children, and hearing people crying out for help. I thought the movie did a good job in capturing the essence of what happened and how it happened… It was long overdue. It was time for it to be on the bigscreen.”

The accuracy of the movie was so exact, Lewis says, that he wants to tell the actor who played him, Stephan James, that “I want my backpack, I want my trenchcoat.” That’s because Lewis is preparing to go to Selma in March for the 50th anniversary commemoration.

Thank you, John Lewis. I am proud to have you as my congressional representative.

Elephant in the room, 2015