The KKK has reserved the South Carolina Capitol grounds for 2 hours to protest the removal of the confederate flag. So much for heritage, huh?

The chapter’s grand titan, James Spears, told Politico that the group will protest “the Confederate flag being took down for all the wrong reasons.”

“It’s part of white people’s culture,” Spears said.

Yeah, that’s why it’s coming down – it’s part of white people’s culture celebrating when they owned black people. You can’t get away with flaunting your “culture” in people’s faces anymore.

Buh bye and thanks for playing.

First Univision drops the Miss Universe Pageant (I thought they’d cancelled that years ago). And now, finally, NBC gets around to saying “Vaya Con Hairpiece” to Trump over his hilarious, but totally not joking around comments about Mexicans.

Apparently he had already said he wasn’t doing “Celebrity Apprentice” anymore, yeah like he wasn’t going right back to giving D-Lost celebs temp jobs as soon as his campaign is over.

I don’t think he thought all this through.

Gerrymandering is one of the terrible twins that is killing our democracy, along with it’s brother in Satan money in politics. Smart people who care have been trying to overturn Citizen’s United, and even quieter are those who have been trying to end the politically motivated gerrymandering that causes the party that gets fewer votes over all to have a stranglehold on Congress and dominate Congressional delegations even when their voters are the minority.

The Court said 5-4 (natch) that remediating this big steaming crap on democracy is okay by upholding Arizona’s Independent Redistricting Commission.

The majority argued that if the people of a state elect, through referendum, to create an independent redistricting commission, that is self-government and completely constitutional.

The minority argued “argle-bargle, jiggery-pokery, pie!”

Are those that would not only say thing that they know are false, like every anti-gay marriage activist who says that pastors will be forced to do things against their beliefs, but even worse are the people who equate their actions against people’s rights to the actions of our heroes who were for people’s rights. We all know that the Nazis were the real Jews. Or something like that.

And then we have the people who preach one thing and do another. Looking at you Bristol Palin, the world’s worst spokesman for abstinence.

And let’s not give her a pass just because we always knew that she and her mother are just opportunists out for a buck. No, Bristol, like that Duggar chap, sought the limelight, danced with the stars, and made the speeches for prodigious money. These are terrible, terrible people.

This is a lady who just earlier this month went on a tear about Miley Cyrus, saying, “Thanks for giving us the best example of what ‘tolerance’ looks like in Hollywood: it looks a lot like contempt,” and groused of Caitlyn Jenner that “Being gay/transgender makes you a hero,” adding tellingly, “We have way too many hypocrites.” All of this, while she all but certainly must already have known she was pregnant.

Arguably last week’s correct decisions were still handed down based on politics. Of course the ACA case should never have been heard at all, but all’s well that ends well, at least in that case. And did we really expect them to hand the Republicans a massive smack in the face for the 2016 elections? Scalia, Alito and Thomas may be fanatical ideologues but Roberts is as calculating as they come and Kennedy just blows with the wind on social issues.

But never imagine that this Court will stay reasonable for too long, especially when corporations come calling for relief.

They struck down the EPAs rules on curbing toxic emissions 5-4.

We can keep making progress socially, but the country has gone far, far right in protecting moneyed interests and the 1% – with the help of this incredibly corporatist Court.

A piece of racist literature from the ’90s… 1990’s, not 1890’s.

It’s well worth talking about, given recent events, how certain factions from the South have indeed lobbied, largely successfully, to cover up, obfuscate and twist the history of the Civil War and their “peculiar institution” (a phrase that was used in the South, as well as the North) in order to continue to fight for ideas that should have been buried along with Jefferson Davis.

Tony Horwitz’s piece in TPM is well worth a read and I’d add a few historical tidbits.

Good to see that many news outlets have given the context that the confederate battle flag we’re talking about was not flown over statehouses regularly until it was brought out of attics (and Klan meetings) by Southerners in the 1950’s and 60’s in direct response to the civil rights movement and school desegregation. It didn’t fly over Southern capitals during the war or in the 90+ years since the war, until white Southerners felt a challenge to their de facto apartheid regime and pushed back by being less covert about their white supremacist tendencies.

Some of those who invoke the “heritage, not hate” mantra are disingenuous. On the day of the shooting, I was in rural east Texas, touring a small town with a businessman who displayed the rebel flag on his truck. After telling me “it’s heritage, not hate,” he proceeded to refer to a black neighborhood as “Niggertown” and rant against the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

Scratch a heritage lover and reveal either a racist or someone completely snowed by Southern propaganda. Horwitz cites polls that show Americans in general have a basic misunderstanding of the reasons for the Civil War.

But a deeper problem remains, and not just among those who cherish the Confederacy. Nationwide, Americans still cling to a deeply sanitized and Southern-fried understanding of the Civil War. More often than not, when I talk to people about the conflict, I hear that it was about abstract principles like “state sovereignty” and “the Southern way of life.” Surveys confirm this. In 2011, at the start of the war’s sesquicentennial, the Pew Research Center asked more than 1500 Americans their view as to “the main cause of the Civil War.” Only 38 percent said the main cause was slavery, compared to 48 percent who answered states’ rights.

In my experience this misunderstanding of history is partly to blame on the urge to dismiss the simple (but sometimes correct) answers in a Gladwellian effort to find the hidden, more complex and sophisticated answers (“Freakonomics”). The only problem is that the rhetorical diminution of slavery as the prime factor in the secession of 13 Southern states is factually incorrect and an absurd acceptance of Southern propaganda created to deny the real history and to indemnify Southerners for their role in the Civil War and the massive injustice they fought to perpetuate.

The sick truth is that Southern slaveholders and their representatives in the U.S. government (with their Northern enablers) pushed from 1776 till 1861 to expand their free labor system, protect it from any encroachment on it or even hint of threat to it (gag rules on Congressional speeches and the delivery of abolitionist mailings) and also to glean any advantage they could get from their slave populations (economic or political).

Beginning with the Continental Congress promising colonial slaveholders that it would not be ironic at all to fight for freedom for the new nation but continue to keep and import slaves, continuing with the 3/5 compromise in order to incentivize the Carolinas and Georgia to ratify the Constitution, “compromises” in 1820 (over Missouri), 1832 (John C. Calhoun’s nullification crisis) and 1850 (the great compromise that solved nothing and solidified regional factions) were forced by Southern states with almost feudal economies, whose political power in Congress was artificially propped up by the counting of their chattel slaves as if they were 3/5 of a full voting citizen (seriously, imagine Iowa with each cow counted as 3/5 a citizen and you see how demented that gift to the South was), in order to prevent disunion even earlier than it eventually happened.

It is worth noting that state conventions to discuss secession began in the late 1840s and kept meeting despite every compromise designed to hold the union together through 1861. The inevitability of the Civil War was set just about right from the beginning of the nation by (1) the Founding Father’s (Jefferson and Madison especially) mistaken belief that slavery would expire by its own weight eventually, and (2) their willingness to compromise with the slave power in order to appease them while waiting for slavery to end in the South as it ended in the North. No act of appeasement was enough to slake the thirst of the slave powers for expansion of their property rights. Absolutely every question in government from 1800 through Fort Sumter was seen through the prism of how the United States of America could be both an exceptional experiment in egalitarian democracy dedicated to liberty and the self-evident truth that all men are created equal and also completely dedicated to the enslavement and subjugation of an entire race of people.

With the Civil Rights struggle, scholars of the Civil War era gave new emphasis to race and slavery, and this trend has continued ever since. The evidence is overwhelming that Southern states seceded and fought to maintain slavery. Don’t believe me; believe the words of secessionists and Confederate leaders. Among the most often cited is Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens who in 1861 declared the Founders “fundamentally wrong” in judging all humans equal. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—the subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

For 70 years from inception of the nation till the Civil War, the South did not really except the core concept of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, they just cynically gained whatever they could from the Union, while essentially going their own way. Southern rhetoric defended slavery both as right, moral, appropriate and the best possible existence for black people as they used the property rights protections granted in the founding documents and propounded by the courts as an ironclad legal defense for their actions. Then after losing the war they took up a propaganda effort to say that the war was the fault of the North victimizing them, that slavery wasn’t all that important (or bad) and that racism had nothing to do with any of it (and was in fact even worse in the hypocritical North).

This disingenuousness continues today and has been spread by the Southerner’s grasp on the political power of the Republican Party – the party that arose in the 1850’s in response to the nation’s untenable position on slavery and was ironically captured in the mid-20th century (the “Southern Strategy”) to be the defender of the heritage of segregation.

The heritage Southerners defend is really just the cynical manipulation of our political systems to maintain their hold on power in a separatist tribal society that shits on the ideas of equality and democracy.

Anybody else wonder if the flag of hate and treason that has been such an essential mainstay of Southern pride and heritage since the early 60s (1960s albeit) is coming down without much fight so that we’ll stop talking about guns and racists?  Are they just throwing us a bone to distract everyone’s attention away from the real killers?

The manufactured outrage industrial complex high-fived as soon as the word got out and retreated with purpose to their mighty keyboards of justice to compose their acid criticisms of the black man in the White House for using the word in the context of a conversation about progress on racial relations.

It’s like a trap set to see who is serious and who is not. Anybody who would mention this in a critical way is clearly as unserious as it gets. We know them by the fruit of their bullshit.

“The Key Thing Conservatives Don’t Get About Obama’s Use of the N**** Word”

Ta-Nehesi Coates on the Confederate Flag. It’s the flag of treason and white supremacy, not heritage. All that needs to be said.

Sounds crazier than it really is when you see it. Steven Souza bunted for a hit on a rainy sloppy field. Two throwing errors later he scored. Don’t think I’ve seen that before in a MLB game, but who knows.