Perspective Monday

After peaceful weekend demonstrations across the country, Time columnist Toure wrote of President Obama's "Bravery" in his Trayvon Martin statements on Friday:

" It was a treacherous speech politically because for one part of the divide the answer to black pain is: get over it, as Representative Andy Harris recently said. Racism is in the past, white privilege is a myth, profiling is a ghost: Doesn’t Obama’s election prove we’re beyond all that? The President knows better. He asked, in his 19-minute address, that black pain be acknowledged, that internalized bias be taken seriously, that history be understood as not done with us yet."

A poll came out showing a black/white racial divide in opinion over the Zimmerman case.  Don't know how much this tells us.  But it is significant I think that there is the same black/white divide over Stand Your Ground laws and gun control.

Also on Monday, the White House released its selection of photos from the month of June, including several from the Obamas visit to Africa, including the one above, taken at the House of Slaves Museum in Senegal.

Also announced: President Obama will begin a series of appearances highlighting his agenda for the economy with a major economic address on Wednesday, at my old stomping grounds of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.  It was the site of a speech he made in 2005 as a Senator that I've noted here before.

Commenting on the "other side of the aisle/planet" in much the same terms as I have here recently, though perhaps even more sharply and certainly more consequently, owing to his rep, his cred, his Twitter followers or whatever, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine wrote in a column titled Anarchists of the House/The Republican Congress is testing a new frontier of radicalism—governmental sabotage, which he began by narrating Eric Cantor's "smarmy, ultrapartisan" attempt to pass a bill defunding crucial parts of Obamacare.  It failed because even more ultraconservative Rs shouted that it didn't go far enough--it wasn't yet another bill to eliminate Obamacare.  Chait:

 Spectacles like this have turned into a regular feature of life in the Republican House. The party leadership draws up a bill that’s far too right-wing to ever become law, but it fails in the House because it isn’t right-wing enough. Sometimes, as with the attempts to repeal Obamacare, the failures don’t matter much, but in other instances the inability to pass legislation poses horrifying dangers. The chaos and dysfunction have set in so deeply that Washington now lurches from crisis to crisis, and once-dull, keep-the-lights-on rituals of government procedure are transformed into white-knuckle dramas that threaten national or even global catastrophe.

"The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism," he continues. "The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists. And the worst is not behind us."

The rest of this piece is a succinct history of what the congressional Rs have done in the Obama years, right through their recent farm bill debacle.  But "the worst" that's potentially ahead is another battle over raising the debt ceiling, with Rs making even more outrageous--and entirely impossible-- demands than last time, threatening to shut down the government as well as topple the global economy.   "The reign of the Republican House has not yet inflicted any deep or permanent disaster on the country, but it looks like it is just a matter of time."   I guess that depends on your definition of disaster-- the sequester seems deep, and the refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis may be the essence of permanent-- but the debt ceiling could well be an immediate and indisputable catastrophe.  All the more likely because it's absurdly unnecessary.

Update Tuesday: A more optimistic view of the prospects for a fall debt ceiling crisis, as Senate Rs turn more towards the moderates: "The group of Senate Republicans working constructively on appropriations overlaps broadly with the Republicans who’ve backed immigration reform, helped confirm several presidential nominees, and have been working behind the scenes on a budget deal that, if enacted, would replace sequestration and end debt limit brinksmanship, perhaps permanently. They represent the significant minority of Senate Republicans who are opposed to sequestration and fed to the teeth with their party’s dysfunction."