There is a price to invoking race too frequently. It goes something like this: allege bias and racial motivations often enough, and the case gets old. Then, when the time comes when there is a genuinely ugly racial moment, and the claim needs to be made, it seems more shopworn than moving.
I have seen this equation play out countless times in Alabama, and I thought of it as the outcry builds over the shooting of an unarmed black child in Florida named Trayvon Martin. The details remain vague but there is at least an outline of what occurred. A neighborhood resident notices a black teenager who seems out of place to him; without reason or provocation, and contrary to the instructions of the police dispatcher he called, the man apparently follows the teenager. At some point, the two encounter each other and the episode ends horrifically. A 17 year old with no history of violence, and nothing in his past to suggest he would resort to violence, is shot dead. The shooter was allowed to leave without being arrested and without even being subjected to an alcohol or drug test.
The shooter had a bloody nose and it suggests that his meeting with Martin turned into an altercation. But the case seems an almost perfect storm of bad, flawed intentions: one man’s suspicions of a kid who looked neither menacing nor suspicious; a police department’s insensitive decision to let the shooter walk away from the scene of a death; the local prosecutor’s failure to see probable cause to convene a grand jury; and a state deadly force law that might have been written for the jungle and not the confines of a community. It is morally clear enough that, yes, the Justice Department ought to be preparing an assault on the law as well as an investigation of the shooting.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Other Trayvon Martin Tragedy
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Fri Apr 6, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET
The Politics of Pigskin
Arkansas head coach Bobby Petrino has been put on paid leave Thursday after a motorcycle accident this past weekend. It was discovered that Petrino who is married with 4 children has been having an affair with an Arkansas employee half his age. [USA Today]
Rather, my deep disappointment is directed toward the most famous Jonathan Miller.
For those of you who are under the age of 50 and have never tried to Google me, THE Jonathan Miller is “is a British theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor,” best known for being a frequent guest in the early 1980s on The Dick Cavett Show.
That Jonathan Miller also recently committed an act of transparent anti-Semitism.
Miller co-signed a letter (along with three dozen other British actors, directors, and writers, including two-time Oscar winner Emma Thompson), asking Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London to withdraw its invitation to an Israeli theater company “so that the festival is not complicit with human rights violations and the illegal colonisation of occupied land.”
A charge of anti-Semitism, of course, is quite severe, especially concerning a fellow Jonathan Miller. And I’m not one to consider every pronouncement against Israeli policy anti-Semitic or even anti-Zionist.
Furthermore, I strongly support a two-state solution in the Middle East that would require Israel to return most of the West Bank lands it captured in its defensive struggle for existential survival during 1967’s Six Day War. I believe that criticism of the occupation, and particularly of many of the Jewish settlements in these territories, can be — in the proper context — a profoundly Zionist statement.
But this is far from the proper context.
Read the rest of… Jonathan Miller: Jonathan Miller’s Anti-Semitic Act
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Thu Apr 5, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
The Politics of Tech
600,000 Mac computers infected with a botnet and counting. 57% of infected Macs are in the US. The virus is designed to steal personal information. [ars technica]
Augmented reality glasses from Google. Badass. [NY Times]
The Pirate Bay teams up with independent artists to promote there music. [Torrent Freak]
For as long as I can remember in politics, Democrats have always taken it on the chin from Republicans about not being pro-business or not being concerned about small business issues.
An event this week in Washington D.C. proved otherwise. I had the opportunity to join a delegation of about 25 business leaders (Republicans, Democrats, and Independents) from my hometown of Kansas City, Mo. This group consisted of CEO’s, small business leaders, entrepreneurs, and elected officials. It had the clientele of a Chamber of Commerce event. The only thing was we were at the White House meeting with senior officials from the administration to share business ideas, work together on solving problems, and identify ways that the federal government could help or get out of the way to make Kansas City, Mo. grow and thrive.
Interactive dialogue between the group and the chief economist for the U.S. Department of Commerce, deputy secretary of education, President Obama’s top advisors, and the assistant secretary for administration at the Department of Health and Human Services all took place in D.C. Shocking right? Not really, but that is what many political pundits and opposition to the president would like you to believe.
The fact that the White House and the administration is reaching out and bringing individuals into the policy making process is positive. Being part of the process and reaching out to the business community, whether large or small, should stand above the political rhetoric filling up our heads these days. All of the relative and salient points made at this meeting will go into a report for President Obama.
Read the rest of… Jason Grill: Democrats and Small Business
By Zack Adams, RP Staff, on Thu Apr 5, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
The Politics of Pigskin
Disgraced former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams allegedly implored his players during a speech to inflict injuries to 49ers players. Stick a fork in him. [Yahoo! Sports]
Joe Flacco thinks he is the best QB in the NFL. Not sure how you say that with a straight face. [ESPN]
The 49ers will not play the Raiders this preseason. Probably for the best. [NBC]
Nike unveiled their new NFL uniform designs this week. [Sports Illustrated]
The all-time QB bust Ryan Leaf was arrested this week. The charges were for both burglary and drugs. [CougCenter]
Upon release Leaf was promptly arrested again. [NFL.com]
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Apr 5, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET
Life advice at 11:30pm on a Monday when no one has asked for it.
Wishing I knew more answers at this point in life but glad I have so many left to try to figure out.
It’s nice to go through life feeling you have the answers to most everything important question and that those answers need not be questioned.
It’s secure and seductive.
And there are parts of life that aren’t complicated and where plain truths are all we need to know—and simply stick to them.
But life, to me, is a mystery and we can only see through a glass, darkly for now. But we should, in my view, look and think and imagine anyway.
If I hold all the same opinions at age 50 that I had at age 25, I can’t help but feel that I haven’t asked enough of myself. And if I hold the same opinions at age 75 I held at 25,
I’m afraid I’ll feel I learned nothing in this life. And maybe even insulted God by not paying closer attention.
Does this mean go buy some self-help books or CDs? If you want. Maybe take a course. Or talk to a friend who you haven’t met yet because they are too different and may challenge your beliefs.
Or do what I’m doing now, watch and listen to The Who’s “The Seeker”. And pretend you are being deep when you are really just relaxing and unwinding. And maybe preparing to imagine something new.
Whatever you choose. I do recommend being a seeker. It’s not as scary as it seems. Each day is as mysterious as it is predictable. You can come up with rambling Facebook posts. And, best of all, the music is awesome! ; )
At the risk of reading tea leaves from two justices, the ever pivotal Anthony Kennedy and the magisterial but cautious John Roberts, the game seems up on the health insurance mandate.
In casual parlance, they seemed to get it—the “it” being that a government with the power to compel a consumer to enter a market is as omnipotent economically as it wants to be. That government is not only theoretically free to pursue a range of things it won’t do, from making Prius purchasing, Iphone carrying, broccoli eaters of all of us—but, as Kennedy especially seemed to intuit, its also capable of doing something more realistic and more substantial, which is collapsing the zone of economic autonomy to almost nothing, in the name of making the economy look the way government thinks it should.
David Brooks, in his latest column in the NY Times, puts the mandate in the familiar context of the Obama Administration’s penchant for centralized bureaucracies, and he is certainly right about that. Given its druthers, and more votes in Congress, the president would have almost certainly followed that trend into a full scale public option that would have arguably refashioned healthcare delivery along the lines of the fraying, cost-exploding model that is Medicare. For good measure, this White House would have done the same with cap-and-trade and the market for carbon emissions, and they have certainly run the same play in the context of the Dodd-Frank reform by carving out an aggressive new regulator for consumer financial products.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Mandate’s Very Bad Day
There is a price to invoking race too frequently. It goes something like this: allege bias and racial motivations often enough, and the case gets old. Then, when the time comes when there is a genuinely ugly racial moment, and the claim needs to be made, it seems more shopworn than moving.
The shooter had a bloody nose and it suggests that his meeting with Martin turned into an altercation. But the case seems an almost perfect storm of bad, flawed intentions: one man’s suspicions of a kid who looked neither menacing nor suspicious; a police department’s insensitive decision to let the shooter walk away from the scene of a death; the local prosecutor’s failure to see probable cause to convene a grand jury; and a state deadly force law that might have been written for the jungle and not the confines of a community. It is morally clear enough that, yes, the Justice Department ought to be preparing an assault on the law as well as an investigation of the shooting. 
