UPDATE: 4.30PM ET SAT – President Obama delivered a remarkable speech – one that some observers said the best of his Presidency – at the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Saturday afternoon. It was, one commentator said, a love letter to America and to the next generation.
One of the leaders of the march, Georgia Congressman John Lewis told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell recently: “We were prepared to die for what we believed in.”
It’s the kind of moment rich with history — a moment to reflect on a searing date in the civil rights struggle, and to do so with the nation’s first African-American president taking center stage at the memorial ceremonies. It’s a time and place to reflect on where we have been and where we have come as a nation. But also to ponder the future for Barack Obama and whether the discussion of race and inequality will become major themes of his post-presidency, which begins in less than two years.
Jane Richard lost her left leg in the blast and had numerous pieces of shrapnel removed. Denise Richard suffered head injuries and lost sight in one eye. Henry Richard suffered cuts, scrapes, and temporary hearing loss. Bill Richard had a piece of metal lodged in his leg and suffered hearing loss after his two eardrums were perforated.
“But I can still hear you, I can still hear music, I can still hear the beautiful voices of my family,” he said.
The trial is expected to last anything up to four months. Full coverage of the proceedings from the Globe is here.
The derailment comes amid increased public concern about the safety of shipping crude by train. Since 2008, derailments of oil trains in the U.S. and Canada have seen 70,000-gallon tank cars break open and ignite on multiple occasions, resulting in huge fires. A train carrying Bakken-formation crude from North Dakota crashed in a Quebec town in 2013, killing 47 people.
What we have now is a rather absurd situation, in which everyone’s trying to figure out how this all worked and what the implications are, but the one person who could answer most of the questions hasn’t yet given an interview about it. But eventually, she’ll have to.
It’s one thing to be pro-business, the environment be damned. But it’s quite another to trade billions of dollars tomorrow for a tiny fraction of that today and still call yourself a fiscal conservative. This is the very definition of penny-wise, pound-foolish. But remember that Christie gets credit for those pennies today, whereas pounds forfeited tomorrow will be the next governor’s problem.
The big takeaway: Journalists at The New York Times were much more likely to retweet journalists at other traditional media organizations, and reporters from BuzzFeed were more likely to retweet journalists from other digital news organizations.
And, talking of sharing stories on Twitter, this one seems to have a pretty specific SEO signature.
Maddow noted that she had reached out to Fox News about the stories, but was given an interesting response: Information on Bill O’Reilly’s “great” ratings. Maddow burst out laughing. “Your ratings are great! I’ve seen your ratings shoot my ratings right in the head,” Maddow said. “Well, I’ve seen pictures of that, I should say.”
With Spring Training in full swing, even if you’re not a sports fan, or a baseball fan, this beautifully-turned ESPN article by Eli Saslow about the Blue Jays’ Daniel Norris, “the most interesting pitcher in baseball” is definitely well worth your time. A flavor:
It unsettled him in those first months to see so many zeros on his bank account balance — “Who am I to deserve that?” he wondered. “What have I really done?” — so he hired financial advisers and asked them to stash the money in conservative investments where Norris wouldn’t have to think about it. His advisers deposit $800 a month into his checking account — or about half as much as he would earn working full time for minimum wage. It’s enough to live in a van, but just barely.
“We went from seeing 15 to 20 people per day to seeing two or three,” [owner Heidi] Rogers said. “I went from feeling like I was at the center of the world to feeling invisible.” The store, on West 54th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, opened in 1937 and provided the city’s musicians scores from the standard— Bach, Beethoven —to the arcane. Ms. Rogers bought it in 1978.
A “searing” Justice Department civil rights report into the police and court system in Ferguson, Missouri found that the city “had engaged in so many constitutional violations that they could be corrected only by abandoning its entire approach to policing, retraining its employees and establishing new oversight,” according to the New York Times.
In Ferguson, if you are black, you live in the shadow of lawlessness and plunder, directed by city officials and enforced by the police. You work, and you pay taxes, and those taxes go to fund a system that stops you, arrests you, and steals from you.
“Michael Brown’s death, though tragic, did not involve prosecutable conduct by Officer Wilson,” Holder said. “These findings may not be consistent with some people’s expectations.”…
“Members of the community may not have been responding to a single isolated confrontation but also to a pervasive, coercive and deep lack of trust,” he said. “Some of those protesters were right.”
After thousands of pages of legal briefs and nearly two years of hearings, a lawyer for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev stood in federal court Wednesday, the first day of the long-awaited Marathon bombing trial, and made a startling simple declaration: “It was him.”
Etsy, founded a decade ago as a niche website where artists could sell their creations, offers everything from crochet chickens to Soviet-era souvenir pens, making revenue through commissions and listing fees charged to sellers. Revenue last year surged 56 percent to $196 million, the filing shows. Still, the company’s losses widened, to $15.2 million for the 12 months through Dec. 31 from $796,000 a year earlier.
It wouldn’t require a vote in Congress or Presidential approval to get a woman on the twenty-dollar bill. The Secretary of the Treasury is responsible for the designs that appear on paper notes, including the portraits. Nor do the people depicted on bills have to meet particularly stringent standards; according to U.S. law, they just have to be dead. Even so, the appearance of U.S. banknotes was hardly modified during the twentieth century; according to historians, this was partly to keep the bills recognizable and partly due to the American public’s resistance to change.
“Statutes are often ambiguous. They contain conflicting provisions, omit words, and use the same words differently. This happens because human beings write the statutes, and often rewrite them under intense pressure as elected officials do deals that require earlier drafts to be modified on the fly. It’s often hard to reconstruct what the relevant members of Congress sought to accomplish. We rely on courts to interpret statutes in an impartial way.
“The Constitution grants the power to tax and spend to Congress alone. Yet the executive branch, under the Obama administration, has brazenly arrogated the power to spend with its IRS rule authorizing the distribution of subsidies through federal exchanges. The original cert petition filed with the Court on behalf of the plaintiffs phrases it as follows: “If the ACA means what it says… the IRS is illegally spending billions of taxpayer dollars every month without congressional authority.”
* POLITICS * A Justice Department civil rights report report into the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department and the city’s municipal court has found “systematic discriminatory practices” against African-Americans. The New York Times says that the report – set for official release on Wednesday – “will most likely force Ferguson officials to either negotiate a settlement with the Justice Department or face being sued by it on charges of violating the Constitution.”
Congress sent a bill to the President funding the Department of Homeland Security without any of the immigration add-ons some Republicans had demanded. The AP reported that “There have been suggestions that [House Speaker John] Boehner would face an insurrection by tea party-backed conservatives if he brought a “clean” DHS bill to the floor. But Boehner’s opponents seemed resigned, and there was little sign of a brewing coup.”
That Hillary email scandal? Not so fast, writes Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast.
A key question would seem to be this: When did the new regulations go into effect? If 2007 or 2008, then Clinton would appear to be in direct violation of them, depending on what precisely they said. If later, it gets a little murkier. Oddly, the Times article doesn’t say. It doesn’t pin the new regs down to a specific date or even year.
But, he says:
Clinton still has some questions to answer, two that I can think of: Why did she not take a state.gov address? And is the Times accurate in writing that “her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act”? If she can’t put forward persuasive answers to these two questions, then there may still be something here.
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* BUSINESS * Wanting to move from New York to Pennsylvania is perfectly understandable. But secession because of FOMO?
People have made two things crystal clear: They care about the future of objective professional journalism and the most desired (or at least tolerable) revenue model for content publishers to preserve it, quite simply, is advertising. For all of this to work, publishers and consumers need to find common ground.
“It remains our position that Mr. Snowden should return to the United States and face the charges filed against him. If he does, he will be accorded full due process and protections.” The U.S. position is that “Snowden is not a whistleblower. He is accused of leaking classified information and there is no question his actions have inflicted serious harms on our national security,”
The President stressed there was a “substantial disagreement” with Netanyahu over their approaches to the issue, while US Secretary of State John Kerry cautioned against undercutting diplomatic efforts by revealing “selective details of ongoing negotiations.”
In his Reuters interview, the President also criticized plans for additional sanctions on Iran if no deal is reached by June 30.
“I’m less concerned, frankly, with Prime Minster Netanyahu’s commentary than I’m with Congress taking actions that might undermine the talks before they’re completed.”
“Partly the opposition’s bad fortunes are due to the fact that it is practically blocked from national TV networks, which provide news and views for 90% of Russians. As the taxi driver that took me to the march casually observed: ‘If you are not on TV, you do not exist.'”
A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, Nick Merrill, defended her use of the personal email account and said she has been complying with the “letter and spirit of the rules.” Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.
More to the point, is what Shanks did inappropriate? It’s not as if the painting was a private commission for the Clintons that Shanks sabotaged: It’s a bequest to the nation and to the National Portrait Gallery. (The portrait was commissioned by the gallery and paid for with private donations.)
The editor of the Herald-Times in Bloomington Indiana got a call from an eight year-old reader about some changes to the comics page. He posted the voicemail. (via Romenesko)
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* BUSINESS *Bloomberg‘s latest calculation of their Misery index – “It’s a simple equation: unemployment rate + change in the consumer price index = misery” – shows the 15 most miserable economies in the world. Venezuela is the runaway winner. Or loser.
“Many fans took to cyberspace to assail online resellers, who didn’t exist when the Grateful Dead played Soldier Field 20 years ago. Traditionally, Deadheads have frowned on reselling tickets for more than face value. On Saturday, they aired less-than-flattering opinions of Ticketmaster and online resellers such as StubHub, as well as ticket scalpers, on the Grateful Dead’s Facebook page.”
[But].. hearing out Netanyahu doesn’t mean taking everything he says at face value or abdicating to Israel this country’s decision about whether it’s possible to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran without making a fateful decision to use military force.
“We have a bilateral agreement between our two countries to work together. It is about having a partner that has very close values and the same goals as we do,” explained Gen Ordorno at the New America Foundation’s “Future of War” conference. “What has changed, though, is the level of capability. In the past we would have a British Army division working alongside an American army division.” The cuts mean that the US military is now working on the basis that in future Britain will contribute only half that amount, if not less.
Nina Pham, the nurse who contracted Ebola while caring for the first person in the US diagnosed with the disease, told the Dallas Morning Newsshe will file a lawsuit on Monday against the hospital’s parent company, alleging that the hospital’s lack of training and proper equipment and violations of her privacy made her “a symbol of corporate neglect — a casualty of a hospital system’s failure to prepare for a known and impending medical crisis.”
“In many ways, what played out over the last two years at the foundation was the story of Chelsea Clinton’s rise. Her power now at the foundation cannot be overstated, according to sources with knowledge of its workings, who say no major decisions occur without her input. Now 35 and with the official title of vice chair at the foundation, Chelsea Clinton is expected to be a key adviser to her mother in the presidential campaign.”
“The potential is huge to let our audience become schedulers,” Lord Hall will say. “This is the start of a real transformation — the ‘my BBC’ revolution.”
“For Minnie, every day was a reason to smile, and he would want us all to remember him that way, smiling at a ballgame,” Minoso’s family said in a statement released by the team. “As he so often said, ‘God Bless you, my friends.’”
(image: Spider Martin – Two Minute Warning) NPR: Photographer Helped Expose Brutality of Selma’s Bloody Sunday 
(image: Selma50)
The Overnight Note 