2011 MLK Day Roundup (with video)

UPDATE II: I am eternally grateful to the family of one my childhood friends who took me along with them to a "Prayer Vigil" featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. @ the Lincoln Memorial in 1956, in the early days of the movement to remedy the injustices in our nation. It was a consciousness raising experience. We drove to DC from New York in the family's station wagon, with us kids sprawled out on blankets in back. The young man of the family, who was my classmate, is now a prominent law professor who has written and advocated forcefully on civil rights and affirmative action.

UPDATE: Money quote (literally) from the Feingold interview:

What happened in my race was frustrating. What happened in 2010 was frustrating. But it is going to be worse in 2012 unless we do something—much worse. That's why money in politics is such a fundamental issue. In terms of the incredibly corrosive effect that unlimited spending by corporations has, we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg.... I think the process is being destroyed by this. Some of my future activities will involve challenging that directly.

H/t to AMERICAblog: from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last speech, video (03:14).

"Russ Feingold Speaks Out" (John Nichols-The Nation).

"Lawmakers: Close look needed at mental health issues" (Political Ticker).

"Fox News Reports No Link Between Matches, Gasoline and Fire" (The Borowitz Report).

Howie P.S.: Details on Seattle's traditional "MLK Day March & Celebration" @ Garfield High School are here.

Frank Rich: "No One Listened to Gabrielle Giffords" (with video)

Frank Rich, with video (04:55):

For the sake of this discussion, let’s stipulate that Loughner was a "lone nutjob" who had never listened to Glenn Beck or been a card-carrying member of either the Tea or Communist parties. Let’s also face another tragedy: The only two civic reforms that might have actually stopped him — tighter gun control and an effective mental health safety net — won’t materialize even now.
(SNIP)
Did Loughner see Palin’s own most notorious contribution to the rancorous tone — her March 2010 Web graphic targeting Congressional districts? We have no idea — nor does it matter. But Giffords did. Her reaction to it — captured in an interview she did back then with Chuck Todd of MSNBC — was the most recycled, if least understood, video of last week.
(SNIP)
Last week a conservative presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty, timidly said it wouldn’t be his “style” to use Palin’s target map, but was savaged so viciously by his own camp that he immediately retreated. A senior Republican senator told Politico that he saw the Tucson bloodbath as a “cautionary tale” for his party, yet refused to be named.

What are they and their peers so afraid of? No doubt that someone might reload — the same fears that prompted Gabrielle Giffords to speak up, calmly but firmly, last March. Unless and until they can match her courage and speak out too, it’s hard to see what will change. MORE...

Greg Sargent: Obama "finally got conservatives to listen to what he had to say - about them."

Greg Sargent:

Obama's statement that rhetoric didn't cause the massacre is best understood as a set-up to the larger point that followed: that the bloodshed confers a moral obligation upon all of us to improve the tone and integrity of our discourse. If Obama had delivered this latter message without the set-up, conservatives would have had an opening to reject it as political.

Before the speech, it was widely assumed that Obama would not engage the topic of civility in our political discourse. Many on the right had been in a defensive crouch - in some ways understandably so - leaving them inclined to interpret even general calls for toning down rhetoric as thinly disguised blame for the murders. Obama, the thinking went, would not risk broaching the subject.

But Obama took on the topic in a big way. By leading with an explicit statement that the tone of our discourse was not to blame for the killings, he made it impossible for conservatives to maintain their defensive posture, compelling them to respond positively to his larger message.

And that message - that we all tone it down - was mainly, though not exclusively, directed at the right. In a context where prominent conservatives have accused Obama of not loving America, of being a socialist and a Muslim sympathizer, it's clear whom Obama was addressing when he insisted that we improve the discourse for the sake of our country.

Whether the more strident voices on the right act on this message is another matter, but at least Obama got conservatives to listen to it and to implicitly endorse it as something to aspire to as we move forward. MORE...

Taibbi: "The Giffords Tragedy: Is the Media Partly at Fault?"

Matt Taibbi:

In politics, you don't need to treat everyone with decency and humanity, just 51% of the crowd. Actually, given that half or less than half of all people don't vote, the percentage of people who require basic decency and indulgence is probably even lower than that, maybe 20-25% of the population. There's plenty of power and money to be won by skillfully stimulating public anger against some or all of the rest, and there are few rewards for restraint.

In the media, the situation is even worse. You can make vast fortunes riling up mobs. And because it's a fiercely competitive market, there's an obvious and immediate benefit to using superheated rhetoric -- it's more entertaining, gains more attention, and definitely gets more viewers and listeners and, er, readers.

And not only is there no incentive for restraint, there's actually a huge disincentive for restraint, because for many of us in the punditry world, our livelihoods depend upon cultivating audiences who come to expect a certain emotional payoff for tuning in. MORE...

Booman on the Tucson Massacre

Booman:

If half of what the Republicans say about the president and the Democrats were true, we should rise up and kill them all as a minimum down payment on proving our love of country. So, I don't give a crap whether the guy in Arizona was motivated listening to Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle. The problem is so much bigger than one incident, even if that incident had a lot of casualties. Glenn Beck alone has inspired three thwarted assassination attempts, including the planned attack on the ACLU and Tides Foundation offices in San Francisco. That's just one shock-jock with a television program. MORE...

"Can "paranoid" political culture trigger violence in the unhinged?"

Click to enlarge this David Horsey cartoon, "Guns don't kill people... but they help."

Greg Sargent:

I'm going to second Steve Benen's claim that this column by Harold Meyerson is an important addition to the debate over the shooting:

The primary problem with the political discourse of the right in today's America isn't that it incites violence per se. It's that it implants and reinforces paranoid fears about the government and conservatism's domestic adversaries.

Much of the culture and thinking of the American right -- the mainstream as well as the fringe -- has descended into paranoid suppositions about the government, the Democrats and the president. This is not to say that the left wing doesn't have a paranoid fringe, too. But by every available measure, it's the right where conspiracy theories have exploded.

A fabricated specter of impending governmental totalitarianism haunts the right's dreams.

Again, this is why mental illness professionals say that even if we have already concluded that Jared Loughner is a nut, we should still be asking whether the overheated political climate -- and violent, incendiary or paranoid rhetoric in particular -- might have played some kind of role in pushing him over the edge. MORE...

Howie P.S.: In spite of his healing words, "Gun-control advocates disappointed with White House silence."

ED Schultz on "Tragedy in Tucson" (video)

MSNBC-ED Show, video (09:50).