Green eggs and PC, a bad breakfast sandwich

 No idea how many books Dr. Suess published; thought that I had read them all at least everyone the public library owned.  And now someone says these books had racist imagery and supposedly that wasn't noticed except what it was subliminally doing to my young brain, and it's why TPP is such a bigot today.  Well, it took long enough for someone to notice, which means If I ran the Zoo wasn't exactly little black sambo.  Hard to take some people seriously, but would you could you read them if you understood the culture into which these books were published,  and clearly they were works of fiction.  Sounds like a teachable moment was discarded along with some out rageously funny ( to a kid learning to read) illustrations and ideas.  The one remembered best was the 500 hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.  

What have we learned from the recent spate of incidents of police violence on black victims?

What have we learned from recent spate of incidents of police violence on black victims?  Tom Tomorrow has the answers, at least from one perspective. All of this seems to be symptoms of a much more serious, troubling, and deep-seated problem in our culture, in our country. Did all of our city police departments use training films taken in Selma during the 1960s? And even in a "nice" Midwestern college town minorities are subject to unjustified profiling and harassment at a rate well above that of others. A sharp-dressing, minority colleague who happened to drive a somewhat flashy car told me how often he got stopped by traffic police, 4-5 times a year, and a non-sharp dressing botanist who happens to drive a non-flashy car in the same has never been stopped ever. So it must be the car. Right.

Be thankful for cartoonists and comedians, and the truth they speak

Once again Tom Tomorrow gets it just about right, especially if you watch Phlox News.  TPP finds this all very depressing. Something really ugly is going on. 

Do SCOTUS justices have defective memories?

50 years is a long time, but not so long that TPP has forgotten the 1960s, his high school and college years.  In those days TPP was very involved in social justice and civil rights, a typical activist and supporter of civil liberties.  The lessons of those years certainly helped bolster my "liberal" (in the classic sense) attitudes and political leanings.  True many of the outward manifestations of racism have disappeared.  As a child brought up in upstate NY, when visiting his southern kin (up north we had relatives), he got very confused about the notion of "colored" water provided by an obvious choice of drinking fountains, and he wanted the colored water of course.  Now there's only one fountain, but you can bet certain people will not use it as a result. The voting rights act may be based upon out-dated data, and quite reasonably SCOTUS could have ruled that the data should be updated, say based on the past decade, but no.  The conservative justices' ruling seemed to suggest that racism is gone, that no attempts were being made to disenfranchise minority voters, or change voting districts or rules to limit minority representation.  Don't the SCOTUS justices remember the 1960s?  Did the SCOTUS justices check the record to see how many recent voting rights litigations there have been?  The list was easy to find.  Here's a recent one, and fairly typical.
United States v. Town of Lake Park, FL (S.D. Fla. 2009)
On October 26, 2009, the Court entered a consent judgment and decree replacing the current at-large method of election with a limited voting plan providing for the election of four Commissioners with concurrent terms. On March 31, 2009, the Department filed a complaint against the Town of Lake Park in Palm Beach County, FL for violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The complaint alleges that the Town's at-large system of electing its Commissioners denies black voters an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Although black voting age citizens compose 38% of Lake Park's total citizen voting age population, no black candidate ever has been elected to office since the Town's founding in 1923.
That's only 86 years!  How could this be a problem?  Is this part of the out-of-date data that invalidated the VRA?  This was the whole point of Voting Rights Act wasn't it?  Voting units from towns to states were routinely and regularly violating people's rights particularly racial minorities, and they still do.  Well, those who forget the past are doomed to let these mistakes repeat, and the big mistake of the conservative justices is to forget that the primary constitutional freedom they are to protect is equal treatment under the law.  But as Justice Scalia has so amply demonstrated in his descent of the DOMA ruling; you can put a black robe on a bigot, but you still got a bigot.   

Oldies but goodies

Margaret and Helen are a couple of bloggers that make the Phactor feel downright young, which he most decidedly isn't. You have to feel good about two 80+ year old women commenting on current events, and offering a bit of perspective.

With respect to the "angry" mobs demanding to have their country back, "I fear that the America they want back is the one where black men don’t become President." Oh, the Phactor thinks the girls have hit the nail right on the head.

HT to the F1.