President Obama looks less than entirely stoked with this stuffed bear he won on the New Jersey boardwalk.
TPM Reader JL takes another view on the Civil War and national reconciliation …
I’m a lifelong Democrat and though I was raised in Mississippi go back two generations and all my people are in Ohio or New York. My uncle worked for RFK and I’ve received awards from state and national organizations recognizing my “progressive” activism.
As I flagged over the weekend, the Mayor Ford/crack cocaine saga has now graduated up to potential connection to an unsolved murder in Toronto. Over the weekend, the Globe and Mail reported that a member of Ford’s senior staff had reached out to the Toronto police after getting a tip from another member of the staff about the location of the video and the suggestion that a young Toronto man had been murdered over the tape. Now we have a few more details. Read More
Two Congressmen propose adding a right to vote into the US constitution.
TPM Reader CH chimes in on memories of the Confederacy …
Although I am a born and bred Southerner, I agree with your general premise. It absolutely boggles my mind that following the War, General Robert E. Lee became president of Washington College in Virginia, later changed to Washington AND LEE University.
But the entire perspective on the War is different down here, even today. I was in college before I realized we had been on the wrong side of the War. It wasn’t until then that I learned that the War had really been about slavery. Growing up, it never crossed my mind that the South had done anything wrong; I certainly didn’t think of the three 100-foot men on the side of Stone Mountain as being anything less than heroes.
I feel a bit of uncertainty about broaching this subject on a day set aside for unity. But I couldn’t help but mention it after reading this opinion piece by Jamie Malanowski from the Times on May 25th. The gist is that there are 10 U.S. military bases named after Confederate generals. At the risk of stating the obvious, these are men who broke their allegiance to the United States, fought against the United States and either directly or indirectly were responsible for killing numerous members of the United States Army (mainly Army, though Marines and Sailors too.)
This is a complicated story, there are a lot of choices and compromises that were made to stitch the American union back together in its inner places, after it had been forced back together by military victory. Read More
Here’s one of the Memorial Day stories that will challenge and perhaps slay your cynicism. A soldier who was killed by a Japanese sniper in the Pacific War had kept a diary focused in no small part on his High School sweetheart who he asked as his “last life request” to get the diary if he was killed. That didn’t happen until 70 years later when she finally saw the diary in a museum. Read.
Up until now every day seems to bring a new revelation of Toronto’s fun-loving politics and drug underworld family, the Fords. Yesterday, after calling the Toronto media a “bunch of maggots”, Mayor Rob Ford denied the very existence of the purported video at the center of the evolving scandal. But today, the Globe and Mail reports the story is moving to a whole new and potentially terrifying level – much more serious but no less bizarre. Read More
A mayor in Japan suggested that U.S. troops would be less likely to commit sex crimes if they visited more local adult biz establishments instead. He has now apologized.
You have no doubt heard the on-going saga of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Though the video has never been publicly shown, three reporters have allegedly seen video of Ford smoking what appears to be crack cocaine with a group of Somali immigrant drug dealers. They appear to be the ones who are shopping the video of Ford smoking said crack. For the last week or more he’s been dodging the press and clearly unwilling and presumably unable to deny the videos existence or authenticity. Yesterday he emerged to give a classic non-denial denial of his apparent drug use.
Looking at this from the outside, setting aside that it’s problematic to have a serving mayor caught on tape doing drugs, I’ve had to ask: how does the sitting Mayor end up carousing with Somali crack dealers and smoking crack? Well, we may have an answer. The Globe and Mail has just published a lengthy, very lengthy look at the Ford family. And basically all Ford’s siblings have substantial past ties to the drug trade. Read More