"This is Joan Trumpauer Mulholland's mugshot. She is the woman below whose sitting at the Woolworth counter with canister full of sugar emptied all over her. I got this photo from the website for the book Breach of Peace, which is itself an arresting and stunning artistic feat. It is the work of photojournalist Eric Etheridge who took it upon himself to track down as many of the freedom riders as possible, and pair their mugshots with present photos. I urge you to both check out the blog, and cop the book."
-Ta-Nehisi Coates (here)
(1) In light of Rand Paul's "principled stance" (note the scare quotes) on the Civil Rights Act, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an excellent point:
I've got the movement in my blood, but no way can I imagine being white, nineteen, violating the law, and being sent off to jail. In Mississippi. As I understand Mulholland went on to transfer from Duke to historically black Tugaloo.
We need to be careful about talking up what we "would have done." It's easy to talk that shit now.
I, like, Paul (God, I hope I never write that again) would like to believe that I would have done what I could to oppose the sin of segregation. But it's worth remembering that it's easier to say you'd do x than actually do it.
Intrigued? Go, read.
(2) Doctors are complicit in the torture of detainees at Gitmo. Says the New York Times:
Doctors, psychologists and other professionals assigned to monitor the C.I.A.’s use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques gathered and collected data on the impact of the interrogations on the detainees in order to refine those techniques and ensure that they stayed within the limits established by the Bush administration’s lawyers, the report found. But, by doing so, the medical professionals turned the detainees into research subjects, according to the report, which is scheduled to be published on Monday by Physicians for Human Rights.
The codification, the bureaucratization of torture is one of the most chilling aspects of our government's torture regime. The presence of doctors to "refine" and "ensure" that these techniques (stress positions, waterboarding, forced nudity, etc.) fell within the proper gray area is simply abhorrent--not only in the general moral sense, but in the fact that it represents a dereliction of duty on the part of the doctors involved. That is, one of the burdens of a doctor is help her patients; for someone with this duty, it is morally worse for her to use her talent in order to harm her patients.
(3) Apparently, conservatives can read really, really fast. Ezra Klein writes:
At about 1 p.m. today, the Clinton library released more than 45,000 pages of documents relating to Elena Kagan's service in the Clinton administration. You can read them here. At about 1:45 p.m., I got this news release from the Concerned Women for America:
Thousands of pages of documents were released today about Elena Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. As Concerned Women for America suspected, Kagan is the socially liberal nominee they thought she was.
I'm inclined to take their word for it, as anyone who can read that fast must be really, really smart.
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