Civil Rights

SCOTUS Ruling on Race and College Admissions: We’ve already Seen this Movie in Michigan and it Doesn’t End Well

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Conservatives in the United States have a stealth function of supporting white supremacy, even if they deny it. Maybe some do not even realize that is what they are doing. People focus on process and not outcomes when thinking of fairness, but what they think of as fair processes don’t […]

Civil Rights

Rep. Tlaib, reproductive rights Advocates call for U.S. Supreme Court Reform amid Ethics Scandals

Michigan Advance

By: Ken Coleman – ( Michigan Advance ) – During a Wednesday news conference in Detroit, U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) joined reproductive rights advocates and called for major reforms to the judiciary amid growing concern about ethics issues involving the U.S. Supreme Court. Tlaib called for reforming the high court through law […]

Bill of Rights

Why Tennessee’s Law limiting Drag Performances likely violates the First Amendment

The Conversation

By Mark Satta, Wayne State University | – (The Conversation) – On March 2, 2023, Tennessee became the first state to enact a law restricting drag performances. This law is part of a larger push by Republican lawmakers in numerous states to restrict or eliminate events like drag shows and drag story hours. These legislative […]

African-Americans

J. Edgar Hoover was the QAnon of his Era, and Martin Luther King Jr. was the Victim of his Dirty Tricks

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Ours is an age beset by conspiracy theories, with the fascist QAnon cult at the center of much public lunacy. These completely implausible ideas, apparently taken seriously by millions of people, have been enabled by the internet, by social media, and by the rise of a new, militant billionaire class […]

Bill of Rights

The State of Disgrace in Washington

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Well before the House select committee’s January 6th investigation began, trust in the classic American system of checks and balances as reliable protection against executive (or, more recently, Supreme Court) abuses of power had already fallen into a state of disgrace. A domestically shackled Biden presidency, a Congress unable to act, […]

Civil Rights

The Empire’s New Clothes: The Veneer of Accountability Is Wearing Thin in Twenty-First-Century America

Karen J. Greenberg

( Tomdispatch.com ) – If you watched TV in the 1960s and 1970s as I did, you would undoubtedly have come away with the idea that this country’s courts, law enforcement agencies, and the laws they aimed to honor added up to a system in which justice was always served. In those years, for instance, […]

Arab Americans

Islamophobia and the Capitol Insurrection: How the FBI Ignored White Radicals While Spying 24/7 on Muslim Americans

Juan Cole

This is my new column at Tomdispatch.com . After you give it a read, do visit the link for the original to see Tom Engelhardt’s incisive introduction. ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing […]

Authoritarianism

Have Sinema and Manchin Tolled the death Knell of Free and Fair Elections for a Decade?

H. Scott Prosterman

Oakland, CA (Special to Informed Comment) – In this Brave New World of evolving lexicons, “gerrymandering,” a dirty word to begin with; has become a euphemism for “vote-rigging.” Lessons learned in high school Civics classes about the electoral and re-districting processes are now quaintly outdated, as Republican-dominated state houses do all they can to ensure […]

African-Americans

Why MLK would have Launched Nonviolent Disobedience to pass the Freedom to Vote Act

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Everything that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., struggled for is at risk in today’s America, where one of the two major parties has succumbed to the deadly disease of Trumpism, which is built on white grievance. As the Republican Party has become more and more inflected by white nationalism, […]