This article made a lot of sense to me.

Soon after presidents take office, commentators tend to start drawing historical parallels, even with outliers like Barack Obama and Donald Trump. . . .

It is almost as if we cannot make sense of the present White House incumbent without identifying a phantom soul mate from the past. With Joe Biden, this analytical parlor game has gone into overdrive.. . .

There is another way, however, of thinking about the Biden presidency: not as a revival of Roosevelt, but rather as a repudiation of Reagan. Arguably, Biden has become the first Democratic president in 40 years to mount a major counteroffensive against the legacy of the country’s 40th leader. . . .

This 78-year-old is also departing from the model of the modern presidency that Reagan essentially invented, with its emphasis on the theatrical aspects of the job. For him, the presidency is neither performative nor omnipresent.. . .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/22/biden-isnt-fdr-hes-anti-reagan/

Excellent article, as usual, from Digby....

From Rodney King to George Floyd, what progress in policing has been made over the last 30 years in the U.S?

30 years ago last month I was watching the 11 o'clock news in LA and a grainy black and white video came on that shocked me and shocked the conscience of the entire world. It showed a group of policemen, bathed in the harsh glare of their vehicle headlights, viciously tasering and beating a Black man on a deserted street while several others stood by and watched. There had been police beatings on television before, of course. We saw many of them during the civil rights and Vietnam War protests. But this was different. This video showed what the police did when they thought no one was looking, validating their victims' accusations of police brutality, which were routinely dismissed as the complaints of combative criminals who resisted arrest.
. . .
I've been thinking about that time ever since George Floyd was murdered almost a year ago in Minneapolis. Once again we only know what happened that day because the incident was videotaped by a bystander and we were able to see and hear exactly what happened. The police report was just as dishonest as the report in the Rodney King case three decades before and even more inexplicable since the cops in Floyd's case knew their actions had been recorded. They must have believed they were immune from the law they were charged with upholding.
. . .
It shouldn't have taken 30 years to get there but considering it's a centuries-old problem, at least it's a start.

source: https://www.salon.com/2021/04/21/derek-chauvin-verdict-how-the-crack-in-the-blue-wall-of-silence-should-be-exploited/

happy with three guilty verdicts in the Chauvin trial. What would you think if the verdicts were three non-guilty?

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives who draft and share model legislation for distribution among state governments in the United States.

This is an important read for those interested in reproductive choice.

The anti-abortion movement was never going to stop with overturning Roe v. Wade.

For years, Republicans have argued that their goal was to return the issue of abortion to the states. At no point was this believable; since 1984, the Republican Party platform has called for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Having spent decades denouncing abortion as a singular moral evil, the anti-abortion movement will not be content to return to a pre-Roe status quo, where abortion was legal in some places but not others.

So it’s not that surprising that, with the possible end of Roe in sight, some opponents of abortion are thinking about how to ban it nationally. Last week my colleague Ross Douthat wrote about a debate within the anti-abortion movement sparked by a highly abstruse article by the Notre Dame professor John Finnis in the Catholic journal First Things. Finnis argues that fetuses are persons under the 14th Amendment, and that the Supreme Court should thus rule abortion unconstitutional. The political implication, wrote Douthat, is that just jettisoning Roe is “woefully insufficient.”

Finnis’s contention is radical, but apparently resonant. Damon Linker, a former editor at First Things and author of a book about the Catholic right, writes, “That is where the pro-life movement is headed — and the rest of the country better be ready for it.”

The threat isn’t immediate; it’s highly unlikely that this Supreme Court is going to adopt constitutional personhood. The justices are “not interested in reading the Constitution to protect life from the moment of conception,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a legal group. “It would make so many things so incredibly difficult to give a fertilized egg all the rights and protections of a born human being.”

But the embrace, by some, of Finnis’s proposition is the latest sign of the right’s disenchantment with democracy, and its dream of imposing on the American people a regime that a majority of them will never consent to. Even Mississippi, after all, rejected fetal personhood in a 2011 referendum.
. . .
The 14th Amendment strategy, by contrast, is a plan to ignore voters altogether. It’s not surprising that it would gain currency at a moment when the right is going all-in on minority rule.
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source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/opinion/us-abortion-bans.html

Important read for those interested in truth and equity in NCAA basketball.

Never again let someone from the NCAA call women’s basketball or any other sport a “cost.” Connecticut’s Paige Bueckers is not a cost. She is the entire damn point. The real cost, the real burden in this iniquitous, contemptible system is the legion of skimmers and coasters led by the devious do-nothing NCAA president Mark Emmert and his board of governors cronies. There is the dead weight.

How many AT&T cellphone plans do the Connecticut women have to sell on ESPN to subsidize Emmert’s steakhouse dinners? How many bottles of Coca-Cola must the Stanford women peddle for free before their game is treated equitably and promoted decently by the NCAA? The biggest drag on collegiate sports, the real liability, is not women’s basketball. It’s these murkily titled, excessively salaried suits, who try to paint women’s teams as a revenue fail to cover their soft-padded seats.

At the top of NCAA headquarters sit 10 executives whose collective salaries amount to $8 million annually, topped by Emmert’s $2.7 million in compensation. That’s the U-Conn. women’s operating budget for an entire year.

Let me repeat that. The salaries of just 10 NCAA administrators could sustain the most successful program in women’s basketball for a whole season.
. . .
New Washington Post reporting by Ben Strauss and Molly Hensley-Clancy suggests the NCAA has understated the value of the women’s tournament by nearly $100 million. The women are blended into a $500 million ESPN package of 24 championships. The NCAA has said the women’s event is worth just 15 percent of that deal, or about $75 million. But people in the industry, including some who worked on that pact, say the women’s tourney in actuality is worth around a third of it — or $167 million.
. . .

source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/04/02/ncaa-women-basketball-tournament-cost-burden/