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One might say that one of the most remarkable events of the Civil War happened a few weeks after it ended — and in Charleston, South Carolina.  This Memorial Day, that event — the first utterly original, deeply moving Memorial Day — was remembered, and I had the good luck and rare privilege to attend that commemoration.

Union prisoners burying ground
Charleston, S.C., 1865. (George Barnard)
Library of Congress

The story, briefly, is that a Union prisoner of war camp was established in 1864 on the “Washington Racecourse,” the horse race track of the city’s high society, to house prisoners moved there from the notorious Andersonville camp. Some 260 Union soldiers died there of exposure and disease in the following months, and were buried in a mass grave.

When Charleston fell, rejoicing black Charlestonians not only staged a parade with a coffin named “Slavery” with the slogan “Fort Sumter Dug Its Grave”, but also organized to properly rebury and honor those Union prisoners. Yale University history professor David Blight, who rediscovered the story some ten years ago, described it this way (in a piece for the Newark Ledger):

Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”

It was the first Memorial Day, and — as Professor Blight put it in remarks on Monday — it amounted to a declaration by black Americans that the Civil War had been about slavery, and that the defeat of the Confederacy amounted to a second American Revolution and a birth of freedom for millions of former slaves.

And then the event was forgotten, at least by white Charleston.  The soldiers were reburied elsewhere, the grounds of the former race course converted to what is now Hampton Park.  Again, Blight:

[A] measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.” In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream dominance.

But this particular story is lost no more.  On Monday, Memorial Day 2010, the city of Charleston took official notice of the first Memorial Day (or “Decoration Day,” in the language of the day) 145 years and one month earlier, with Mayor Riley, David Blight, and College of Charleston history professor Bernard Powers making remarks, and joining Hampton Park horticulturalist and activist Judith Hines in unveiling a plaque commemorating that first Memorial Day.  I’ve included some local TV news coverage of the events and a slideshow of the photos I took.

I happened to be there because I had corresponded with Professor Blight about my review of his 2001 book “Race and Reunion,” and mentioned that I was visiting Charleston soon for an annual rendezvous with my parents there during the Spoleto Music Festival we enjoy attending.  I added that I planned to take my daughter to Hampton Park and tell her about that first Memorial Day that he had described in that book.  Professor Blight (who appreciated my review) wrote back immediately to say that I could join him and the mayor there if I went at 3pm on Memorial Day.

So there I was, now with my wife and daughter and both parents along as well, among a crowd of around a hundred black and white onlookers.  I didn’t take notes on the speeches, but all three were excellent.  From listening to his lectures and reading his books, I know Blight is always an eloquent and engaging speaker on the subjects of histories lost and found, and on the struggle for racial equality and justice, and this Memorial Day was no exception.  I was also impressed by the other two speakers; Dr. Powers made the point how impressive the organization of that first Memorial Day was, and discussed how it fit with the history of black churches in Charleston.  As with Dr. Powers, I wish I could re-read Mayor Riley’s remarks; I knew nothing about him before yesterday either, and came away very impressed at how seriously he took the occasion, and how eloquently he conveyed his appreciation of the day’s events.

For me to visit Fort Sumter one day, reflect on the events of the first Memorial Day the next, and then participate in a kind of resurrection of that day was an experience that is hard to put into words.  I’ve always been convinced that knowing and understanding history (as best as one can) is vitally important.  But I’ve never seen so “close up” how much of a difference it can make to recover history and restore it to good use among good people.  It must have been a supremely satisfying moment for Dr. Blight, and judging by the sustained applause (and many an “mm hmm” and “amen” from the assembled crowd), a vindication and new point of pride for many in both the black and white communities of Charleston as well.

I understand Charlestonians like to say they live where “the Cooper and Ashley rivers meet to form Charleston Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean.”  Now that’s mainly meant to raise a smile.  Yet it now seems to me it may actually undersell that place — once all of it is considered.   Not “merely” an ocean, but history itself seems to form there and return there, time and again, like a needle stitching and restitching the same tapestry - with slavery, with war, with defeat, with liberty, with amnesia, and now with remembrance. It was quite an experience to witness that.

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OTHER ACCOUNTS: Reclaiming history, Derek Legette, Charleston Post and Courier 6/1/10; The first Memorial Day, Brian Hicks, Charleston Post and Courier, 5/24/09.
EDITS, 6/3: Links to Powers, Hines (video interview) added; College of Charleston, not Charleston College.

THE TEXT OF THE MEMORIAL PLAQUE:

At the time of the Civil War, Hampton Park was the site of the Washington Racecourse, which was owned by the South Carolina Jockey Club and was one of the most famous racetracks of the antebellum South. In late 1864, this site became a large open-air prison for thousands of Union troops evacuated from the Andersonville, GA prison in advance of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Before Charleston fell in February 1865, several hundred of the prisoners died and were buried in mass graves. In an effort led by African-American churches in April 1865, the dead were reinterred in orderly graves enclosed by a picket fence. Over the gate was written: Martyrs of the Race Course.

On May 1, 1865, a parade in honor of the prisoners of war who died here took place with ten thousand participants, according to contemporary accounts. Nearly three thousand were school children from the new Freedman’s Bureau Schools. The children led the parade, carrying armloads of flowers and singing patriotic songs. They were followed by women’s organizations, church leaders, Unionists, recently emancipated slaves, and Union troops, including the 54th Massachusetts. The soldiers were later buried in Beaufort and Florence National Cemeteries or in their hometowns. Annual events to honor the dead of both sides of the Civil War eventually became known as Memorial Day. The event in what is now Hampton Park is acknowledged by most historians to be the first Memorial Day in the United States of America.

Via PBS. Crossing my fingers they’ll succeed with their “top kill.” Meanwhile, here’s a look at the catastrophe for Lousiana marshlands, via Al Jazeera:

Remarkable video from CBS, showing BP and Coast Guard personnel turning journalists away from investigating the effects of the Gulf oil spill on marshlands:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

I first saw this video in a story posted by Karl Burkart of Mother Nature News (MNN), who writes:

I never thought I would say this, but for once I actually agree with Rush Limbaugh. The right-wing radio host is attributed with calling the Gulf Oil Spill “Obama’s Katrina.” [...] Despite Obama’s half-hearted attempt at displaying anger over the government’s “cozy relationship” with BP, I believe Obama is aiding and abetting a foreign oil company as it perpetrates an environmental crime on American soil…

While I share Burkart’s simmering anger at both BP and the Obama administration, I hesitate to go as far as Burkart in suggesting that’s a quid pro quo for BP’s campaign contributions.  Granted, it’s not comforting at all to learn the video of the oil gusher had been on display in the White House Situation Room for weeks before its release to the public — and immediate calculations that the spill rate was an order of magnitude greater than government estimates.

But I think a response by the Coast Guard (appended to the end of Burkart’s article by an MNN editor) inadvertently suggests a different analysis, both of the incident itself and of the Obama administration’s responses:

…Neither BP nor the U.S. Coast Guard, who are responding to the spill, have any rules in place that would prohibit media access to impacted areas and we were disappointed to hear of this incident. In fact, media has been actively embedded and allowed to cover response efforts since this response began, with more than 400 embeds aboard boats and aircraft to date. Just today 16 members of the press observed clean-up operations on a vessel out of Venice, La….

(Emphasis added.)  Sadly, it’s not hard these days to imagine BP or Coast Guard personnel construing “embeds” as the only authorized form of journalism — we’ve all seen it before in Iraq and elsewhere.  Indeed, it speaks volumes about journalism today that the CBS crew itself acquiesced in a plainly wrong demand.

In fact, the Obama administration seems to have accepted its own “embedding” — buying the absurd notion, for example, that the underwater video of the oil gusher (one of the principal ways of gauging the extent of the disaster)  is simply “proprietary information” that is BP’s to control. It’s not just as if the United States government has ceded control of its shores, its territory, and its authority to provide for the common good and common defense.  They’ve gone and done it — in the face of the organization responsible for the the greatest environmental disaster in our country’s history .

It seems as if Obama and his administration think there’s a tension between making BP pay for the disaster response, and exercising authority and oversight over that response.  To be sure, there may be legal issues to be solved, but there first needs to be executive will to solve them, and that has seemed lacking.    As McClatchy News’s Marisa Taylor and Renee Schoof put it, BP withholds oil spill facts — and government lets it:

BP’s role as the primary source of information has raised questions about whether the government should intervene to gather such data and to publicize it and whether an adequate cleanup can be accomplished without the details of crude oil spreading across the gulf.

Indeed it has.

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UPDATE, 5/20: More from Renee Schoof and other McClatchy News reporters at the Real News Network video “Spill may be 19 times larger than BP & Gov’t say.”

Looks like those trendlines weren’t lying:

Rep. Joe Sestak, riding a call for “new blood” in Washington, defeated incumbent Arlen Specter in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary Tuesday, ending the career of the longest serving senator in Pennsylvania history.

With 79 percent of precincts reporting, Sestak had received nearly 53 percent and Specter about 47 percent, according to unofficial returns. Specter conceded.
–Sestak ousts Specter in Democratic primary, Fitzgerald, Nunnally, Philadelphia Inquirer

Observed MSNBC:

“The vote also was a defeat for President Barack Obama, who supported Specter when he abandoned the Republican Party last year.”

Well, don’t do that next time, Barry.  Obama has a very bad habit of mixing himself up in primaries on behalf of DINOs (Democrats In Name Only): Specter, Lincoln (forced into a runoff against progressive favorite Bill Halter), Lieberman. If he’s wondering who he has to blame for sharing in Specter’s defeat, he should go find a mirror.

With Specter, even “DINO” is a bit charitable for a guy who sometimes forgot he wasn’t still a Republican, and who said up-front when he switched parties that his opposition to EFCA wouldn’t change.  Some warn, of course, that Sestak is no reliable progressive either; as the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne pointed out a couple of days ago:

While Sestak does enjoy some support from progressive online groups, it’s impossible to cast the race as a left-vs.-center showdown, especially since Sestak supported Obama’s surge in Afghanistan while Specter, trying to curry favor on the Democratic left, opposed it. “We should not engage in the laborious and problematic task of nation-building,” declared the newly dovish Specter.

But how long would Specter’s new found dovishness have lasted in the absence of a challenge?  How long would any position at all ever last with Specter, who did extended Hamlet routines about FISA and the Military Commissions Act before voting for them, and supported the Employee Free Choice Act before turning against it?  The one constant thing about Specter was his desire to stay in office, and Pennsylvanians were right to vote him out of it.  When Specter switched to the Democratic Party last year, I wrote:

But the basic point is that Specter and the Democratic poobahs (apparently Joe Biden and Harry Reid chief among them) who coaxed the senator into switching sides have shoved aside the people who ought to really matter when political parties grow or shrink: the voters — yes, even the Republican “base” voters — who choose the candidates of each party, and then test their strength against each other in the general election.

On Tuesday, the voters struck back.  Democrats everywhere — even Barack Obama, even E.J. Dionne — should reflect on that and then welcome that.  And then they should stop playing games trying to get the odd Republican senator to cross party lines, and start sticking up for the people who voted them into office.  And then they should decide to trust Democratic voters instead of making deals over their heads.  Obama can start by keeping himself out of the Arkansas runoff between Lincoln and Halter.

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UPDATE, 5/18: Added my 2010 ActBlue donation page button; Sestak and Halter are my two choices so far.
UPDATE, 5/20: E.J.Dionne today: “That Specter’s support collapsed so quickly everywhere outside Philadelphia suggested how weak he probably would have been against conservative Republican nominee Pat Toomey. Party leaders who backed Specter can nonetheless be relieved that voters picked the stronger candidate for November.” Which says what about those leaders?
EDIT, 5/21: links added to stories detailing Obama’s support for Specter and Lincoln (2 stories).

Dear Congressman Van Hollen,

I’m reading today that the volume of oil being spilled from the Deepwater Horizon disaster site may be substantially larger than government estimates first indicated.

It’s *imperative* to get the *best possible estimates* of the size of this catastrophe, and it’s imperative that BP not be allowed to obstruct that in any way, shape, or form, and indeed that those, um, ne’er-do-wells be compelled to pay for those best possible estimates. Time is of the essence; please add your voice to those urging the best possible estimates of the flow rate from that well. Woods Hole scientists and equipment should be flown there *today*.

(The URL for the article is http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/us/14oil.html.)

From the article (Size of Oil Spill Underestimated, Scientists Say, Gillis, NYTimes):

…BP has repeatedly said that its highest priority is stopping the leak, not measuring it. “There’s just no way to measure it,” Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president, said in a recent briefing.

Yet for decades, specialists have used a technique that is almost tailor-made for the problem. With undersea gear that resembles the ultrasound machines in medical offices, they measure the flow rate from hot-water vents on the ocean floor. Scientists said that such equipment could be tuned to allow for accurate measurement of oil and gas flowing from the well.

Richard Camilli and Andy Bowen, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who have routinely made such measurements, spoke extensively to BP last week, Mr. Bowen said. They were poised to fly to the gulf to conduct volume measurements.

But they were contacted late in the week and told not to come, at around the time BP decided to lower a large metal container to try to capture the leak. That maneuver failed. They have not been invited again.

A scientist commissioned by NPR has used apparently similar techniques to estimate that the oil well is gushing 70,000 barrels or 2.9 million gallons of oil per day, give or take 20%. (Via Michael Whitney, “Firedoglake.”) That midpoint estimate is nearly 15 times as much as NOAA and Coast Guard estimates issued early on. I’m not saying the government is deliberately low-balling the size of this catastrophe, but they absolutely must keep working on getting a handle on it.

“Just no way to measure it.” Nice trick, when it works: we don’t measure civilian casualties we cause in Iraq, we don’t measure oil volcanoes we cause in the Gulf. This kind of willful ignorance makes it too easy to turn around and do it all again, because “who knows” what the real costs are.

And meanwhile, Congress appears more interested in getting BP off the hook than on it.

To call your own congressperson, call the switchboard at 202-224-3121 or look up the number here.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein gets it. Sort of:

Lloyd C. Blankfein continued to defend Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s reputation on Wednesday in comments to some of the firm’s wealthiest clients.The embattled chairman and chief executive, who last week was grilled by a Senate subcommittee looking into Goldman’s role in the financial crisis, said the firm will always put clients first. He said there is also a silver lining to the civil-fraud charges leveled against the firm by the Securities and Exchange Commission: It allows the firm to re-examine how its business practices.

“Frankly, at this point we have to go with an open mind and determine what we may be doing wrong,” Mr. Blankfein told customers of its private-wealth-management business during a 30-minute conference call. “On a very microscopic level, we’re going to use this as an opportunity for a deep dive on our practices and how we run things.”

He pledged to clients that he wants Goldman to “be the leader in things like ethics, in putting clients first.”

– Blankfein Defends Goldman’s Ethics (Bruno, Philbin; Wall Street Journal, May 5)

Michael Lewis (”The Big Short”) responds with an attaboy, and action items to“create the illusion for American mortals (or as we like to call them, “The Morts”) that our business is in their interest, much less that we share anything in common“:

No. 5: Be careful not to say or do anything now that will constrain our ability, after this crisis has passed, to do whatever we want.

The other day, on your emergency conference call with our customers, you said that you wanted Goldman to be seen as a “leader in things like ethics.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. If in the future we fail to be a leader in ethics we can point to your statement as evidence that we never intended to be a leader in ethics, merely in “things like ethics.”

Lewis vows to compile a list of “things like ethics” for Blankfein to lead in — but Blankfein’s way ahead of him: he’s talking about “things like ethics,” and that all by itself is being a “leader” in “things like ethics”!  And I like finding a silver lining in civil fraud charges against your company — it shows the kind of roll up your sleeves, getting busy with that ethics stuff we’re looking for.  Good luck with “determining what you may be doing wrong”! … That’s right: “getting caught.”

Mainly, of course, Blankfein knows that having the right buddies helps with things like ethics. Remember Obama’s “First of all, I know both these guys”? Again, it’s not actually ethics, just something like ethics — call it maybe “reputation illusion management.”  I just hope Obama hasn’t been learning too much from Blankfein about how to “put his clients first.”  This doesn’t look good, though.

I got an e-mail from a friend yesterday, with the line,

“I don’t see the purpose served by bashing Kagan from the left.”

I think the answer is that it’s not really Kagan who’s being bashed from the left — after all, not many people know very much about her.  It’s the Democratic Party as a whole that’s being bashed from the left, at least that party’s upper, national echelons — very definitely including Obama.  And as it becomes more and more plain that progressives wield no influence on that administration, the ultimate purpose of that is to depose that leadership or  — taking a deep breath — to break away from that party.

By saying — by having to say — over and over and over again, “look at what Obama’s done now,” “look at what our party in Congress has done now,” there’s more and more room to consider that revolt, or that breakup.   In the meantime, people will just quietly boycott it and walk away from it.  Sure, Obama is well spoken and handsome — but do we agree with his choices?  Is this really our party?

FISA Amendment Act.  Abandoning the public option.  Offshore drilling.  Military Commissions Act.  Vast escalation in Afghanistan.  Cave-in on the Iraq surge.  Seamless continuation of the Bush administration’s disrespect for civil liberties and “war on terror” policies.  Torture goes unpunished, while its whistleblowers are persecuted and its critics silenced.  Envisioning indefinite detention.  Paltry, timid jobs programs in the midst of a terrible recession.  Paltry, timid proposed financial regulations.  Threats to Social Security.  Abandoning Dawn Johnsen. Threats of war on Iran, dressed up within nuclear nonproliferation talk.  Shameless fundraising for more Blue Dog Democrats — when the party won’t do anything with the ones it has (or to them when they defect).  The Democrats seem like the Civil War general George McClellan — always wanting more resources, and then either doing nothing with them or doing the wrong thing with them.

The national thing we call the “Democratic Party’ — the DNC, the people on TV on weekends, the mail and web presence — is unloved and often not even liked by much of its “base.”   Yet its members and functionaries often take their role and that base for granted — and then go their own way on issues like those above.  That has created real and deserved hostility.

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You would think that after an environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, the federal agency in charge of reviewing plans for new wells would put everything on hold while it figured out what happened, how to better prevent it, and what to do if another “oil volcano” disaster occurred.

You would be wrong.

From a Friday, May 7 press release from the Center for Biological Diversity:

Even as the BP drilling explosion which killed eleven people continues to gush hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Department of Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) has continued to exempt dangerous new drilling operations from environmental review. Twenty-seven new offshore drilling projects have been approved since April 20, 2010; twenty-six under the same environmental review exemption used to approve the disastrous BP drilling that is fouling the Gulf and its wildlife.  [...]

“Salazar is playing a cynical shell game, making the public think he stopped issuing the faulty approvals that allowed the disastrous BP drilling to occur, when in fact he has given MMS the green light to keep issuing those very same approvals,” said  [CBD executive director Kieran Suckling]. “The only thing Salazar has stopped is the final, technical check off which comes long after the environmental review. His media sleight of hand does nothing to fix the broken system that allowed what may be the greatest environmental catastrophe of our generation to occur.”

“For Secretary Salazar to allow MMS to exempt 26 new oil wells from environmental review in the midst of the ongoing Gulf crisis shows an extraordinary lapse of judgment. It is inconceivable that his attention is apparently on providing BP with new environmentally exempted offshore oil wells instead of shutting down the corrupt process which put billion of dollars into BP’s pocket and millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.”

(Via Mick Arran, “Fact-esque.”) The press release provides side-by-side comparisons of the doomed Deepwater Horizon Mississippi Canyon exploration plan and a Green Canyon plan approved on May 6.  Unbelievably, some MMS functionary actually signed off on that plan with the following: “II.J. Blowout Scenario - Information not required for activities proposed in this Initial Exploration Plan.”

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Race and Reunion, David Blight, 2001
Harvard University Press
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With the end of April came also the end, for this year at least, of “Confederate History Month,” unfortunately resuscitated by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell after a long dormancy under the previous two governors.  Amidst an outcry that apparently surprised the Regent University law graduate, McDonnell hastily reworded his proclamation with a grudging nod to the impropriety of slavery and the possible existence of other points of view on the matter of a rebellion leading to the country’s bloodiest war.

One might reasonably ask why there are no  “Union History Month” or “Victory over Treason and Slavery” celebrations — and that, more or less, is what David Blight did in his book “Race and Reunion,” published in 2001.  Covering the period from the Emancipation Proclamation to the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg — and the release of the notorious film “Birth of a Nation” — it’s a fascinating read.  It’s also  — still, going on ten years later — a useful, jolting reminder of just what was lost as remembering the Civil War became more about rehashing every last engagement, and about getting over it, past it, and around it, than about reflecting why it happened — let alone reflecting on the unfinished business of the human and civil rights of black Americans.

Click above to order this
book or others by Blight.

Reconciliation — on southern terms
Blight’s research led him to soldiers’ remembrances in periodicals of the time such as Century and Harper’s; to the annals and publications of the Southern Historical Society and the Confederate Veteran, and to the schedules and membership rolls of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  But he also paid attention to the writings and speeches of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B DuBois, the short stories of Ambrose Bierce, and the novels of the unjustly forgotten Albert Tourgee (”only fools forget the causes of war”) or Nelson De Forest — as well as the celebration of Klan terror by authors like Thomas Dixon, Jr, or the perhaps more insidious romanticization of the antebellum South by authors like Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris (”Uncle Remus”).

The book tells stories you’ve still almost certainly never heard before: the first Memorial  Day (that is, “Decoration” Day) — held by black Charlestonians to honor and restore the graveyard of Union prisoners of war on the site of the city’s “Race Course,” now Hampton Park; the unveiling of Richmond memorials to Robert E. Lee in 1896, and to Stonewall Jackson in 1875; the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895, when Booker T. Washington gave his “Atlanta Compromise” speech — widely acclaimed at the time, but half wishful thinking, half sadly understandable surrender; the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg, but with blacks in attendance only as blanket distributors and latrine cleaners.*  The Washington Post — apparently already a runaway gusher of idiotic political commentary –  marked that occasion by noting that slavery and secession were “no longer discussed argumentatively,” but were “disposed of for all time“; moreover, slavery was something for which “no particular part of the people was responsible unless, indeed, the burden of responsibility should be shouldered by the North for its introduction” (emphasis added by Blight.)

What had happened by 1913 was a “Lost Cause” regional movement as potent, committed, and persistent as the abolition movement had been.  What’s more, it arguably had a greater reach (at least within the U.S.), in that ex-Confederates could and did safely peddle their redefinition — for that’s what it was — of the causes and legacy of the Civil War throughout the country, for good money and to plentiful applause.

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1. “Predator drones“:

As digby writes, “All presidents should probably make it a rule not to yuk it up over WMD and air attacks. It’s unnecessary.”

2. “Tase him!”

(also via digby)

After all, the kid ran on to a baseball field, which jeopardized… something or other. Anyway, TASE HIM!

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EDIT, 5/6: WMD link added.
UPDATE, 5/10: Credit where credit is due — the Washington Post editorial page weighs in against what happened in Philadelphia (”Police and Tasers“): “…[T]he Philadelphia police commissioner, Charles Ramsey, who reviewed video of the incident, said his officer had acted within department guidelines. That’s the problem. While Tasers have been useful in protecting officers from dangerous and out-of-control suspects, in too many police agencies the policy on using them is so loosely defined that officers can fire the weapons more or less when they feel like it.”