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Peter Nyong’o embraces sister Lupita Nyong’o after she wins the award for best actress in a supporting role for “12 Years a Slave”
Lupita Nyong’o, best supporting actress winner for her role in “12 years a Slave,” hugs the movie’s director Steve McQueen as actress Angelina Jolie and co-star and producer Brad Pitt look on at the 86th Academy Awards
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Five Years Ago This Week – What A Perfect Choice. Love and Best Wishes to @BeauBiden, @VP and @DrBiden pic.twitter.com/z1DHb82AJn
— TheObamaDiary.com (@TheObamaDiary) August 21, 2013
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Medgar Evers July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963 (by Sam Hundley)
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Today:
10:0: The President departs the White House
11:25: Arrives Boston
1:45: Delivers remarks at an event for Ed Markey, Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center, Roxbury Crossing, MA
2:45: Departs Boston
5:40: Arrives Miami
7:05: Delivers remarks at a DNC event (Private Residence)
8:55: Delivers remarks at a DNC event (Private Residence)
9:55: Departs Miami
12:20: Arrives the White House
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AP: Myrlie Evers-Williams acknowledges it would be easy to remain mired in bitterness and anger, 50 years after a sniper’s bullet made her a widow.
Instead, she’s determined to celebrate the legacy of her first husband, Medgar Evers — a civil rights figure often overshadowed by peers such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Events including a black-tie gala are being held this week to remember Evers, the first Mississippi field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was 37 when he was assassinated on June 12, 1963.
“We are cursed as human beings with this element that’s called hatred, prejudice and racism,” said Evers-Williams, now 80. “But it is my belief that, as it was Medgar’s, that there is something good and decent in each and every one of us, and we have to call on that, and we have to find a way to work together.”
More here
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Here at Medgar Evers funeral in Jackson MS 50 years ago this week, MLK, amid fears for his life, is halted by police: twitter.com/BeschlossDC/st…
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) June 12, 2013
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In this June 15, 1963, file photo, mourners march to the Jackson, Miss., funeral home following services for slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
ABC: It has been 50 years since the shocking slaying of Medgar Evers. The civil rights activist and NAACP field secretary fought for equality on many levels, from organizing voter drives and protests against discrimination, to calling for legal investigations into school segregation and the lynching of Emmett Till.
Evers was returning from a meeting when he was gunned down by a white supremacist in the driveway of his Mississippi home. His death, coming just hours after a speech on civil rights by President John F. Kennedy, sparked a national outpouring of mourning and outrage.
More here
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Here after Medgar Evers murder, Jackie Robinson asks JFK to tighten security around MLK to avoid “bloody holocaust”: twitter.com/BeschlossDC/st…
— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) June 12, 2013
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Shorter Libertarians: “They came for Black kids in NYC and Latino Kids in AZ & I stayed silent. They came for my Facebook & I said IMPEACH!”
— Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) June 11, 2013
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All this talk about privacy and yet we have elected officials writing legislation on what women can & can not do w/their bodies. #Maddow
— Stacey (@bruntofitall) June 12, 2013
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Francis Wilkinson (Bloomberg): The immigration crucible begins this week in the Senate, where conservatives opposed to legalizing undocumented immigrants will begin a summer siege.
The legislation will both expose and challenge the core pathology of the Republican Party – that recurring tic by which the least constructive faction on any particular issue calls the ideological tune. (A budget compromise to put the nation’s fiscal policy on track? Nah. Let’s hold the global economy hostage over the debt ceiling instead. Negotiate improvements to Obamacare? No way: Better to cast toy repeal votes by the dozens.)
Immigration is different from other issues in a powerful way.
After five decades of using race as a political wedge to win elections, a process that transferred Dixie from Democratic to Republican control, Republicans can draw upon little goodwill from racial minorities. The party’s undisguised efforts to destroy the first black president will cement black allegiance to the Democratic Party for decades to come…..
More here
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The front pages, five years ago today
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Today:
10:30: The President delivers a statement, The Rose Garden
11:10: The President and Chilean President Sebastián Piñera hold a bilateral meeting; the VP also attends
1:0: Press Briefing by Jay Carney
2:20: The President departs the White House
2:30: Arrives Bethesda, Maryland
2:50: Visits the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
4:35: Departs Bethesda
4:45: Arrives at the White House
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From left: Cornelia Pillard, Patricia Millett and Robert L. Wilkins
NYT: President Obama will nominate a slate of three candidates on Tuesday to fill the remaining vacancies on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a White House official said Monday.
The president will name Cornelia T. L. Pillard, a law professor; Patricia Ann Millett, an appellate lawyer; and Robert L. Wilkins, a federal district judge, to fill out the appeals court, which is often described as the second most powerful court in the country because it decides major cases and often serves as a launching pad for future Supreme Court justices.
By making his choices in a group, the president and his strategists are hoping to put pressure on Senate Republicans to confirm them.
More here
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Steve Benen: …. At the outset, let’s emphasize how uncontroversial this is – there are vacancies on an important federal bench, so the president is sending qualified nominees to the Senate for consideration. Republicans are characterizing this as a scandalous power-grab, while many political reporters are describing this as Obama thumbing his nose at his political rivals. In reality, it’s neither – presidents filling judicial vacancies is basic American governance. It’s Civics 101. That today’s announcement is seen as somehow remarkable is evidence of just how broken the process has become.
…. This is far more consequential than much of the public realizes …. the D.C. Circuit is likely to have considerable influence over the future of the Affordable Care Act, Wall Street reform, immigration reform, and perhaps most importantly, efforts to combat the climate crisis.
This is, in other words, a fight worth having, and the outcome will have a lasting impact for many years to come.
More here
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last 30 days: car sales way up. home prices way up. Dow way up, consumer confidence way up. so yeah, makes sensecable obsesses over IRS
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) June 4, 2013
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Michael Tomasky: Obama’s Economic Triumph
It’s increasingly clear that the president has steered the country back from the brink – and, in the process, exposed (yet again) the central lie of conservative economics…..
More here
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If Romney were president and the Dow were up 20 days in a row, would today be a national holiday or would we all just get Mitt tattoos?
— LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) June 4, 2013
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Greg Sargent: As I’ve been saying here for some time, behind all the GOP noise and hoopla about Beltway scandal-palooza is a stark reality that can’t be obscured. House Republicans are confronting two major challenges – what to do about the debt limit and about immigration reform, both of which will require cooperation from House conservatives that they aren’t prepared to give — and they don’t have an answer to either one.
This is driven home in fresh and vivid detail by today’s big Post story on the deep divisions within the House GOP caucus.
More here
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Steve Benen: We talked yesterday about the new report from the College National Republican Committee, detailing their party’s difficulties in connecting with younger voters. As the College Republicans explained, it’s a “dismal present situation” with focus groups, led by GOP pollsters, finding that voters under 30 consider the party “closed-minded, racist, rigid, [and] old-fashioned”…..
…. In focus groups in January, the report said, young voters were asked to list leaders of the Democratic Party. “They named prominent former or currently elected officials: Pelosi, the Clintons, Obama, Kennedy, Gore. When those same respondents were asked to name Republican leaders, they focused heavily on media personalities and commentators: Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck.”
More here
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This — in 1 powerful photo — is why wingnuts are losing it. The browning of America. Giddy up. (h/t @nerdywonka) #TFY twitter.com/AngryBlackLady…
— Imani ABL (@AngryBlackLady) June 4, 2013
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As long as we’re listing Eric Holder’s accomplishments at DOJ, let’s not forget this one immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2013/06/as-lon…
— Smartypants (@Smartypants32) June 4, 2013
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May 1, 2011 – Pete Souza: “Much has been made of this photograph that shows the President and Vice President and the national security team monitoring in real time the mission against Osama bin Laden.
Some more background on the photograph: The White House Situation Room is actually comprised of several different conference rooms. The majority of the time, the President convenes meetings in the large conference room with assigned seats. But to monitor this mission, the group moved into the much smaller conference room. The President chose to sit next to Brigadier General Marshall B. “Brad” Webb, Assistant Commanding General of Joint Special Operations Command, who was point man for the communications taking place.
Barack Obama on the day after being elected the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, Feb. 7, 1990
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New York Times, February 6, 1990
The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.
The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago’s South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.
”The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ”It’s encouraging.
”But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment.
….. Professors and students at the law school reacted cautiously to Mr. Obama’s selection. ”For better or for worse, people will view it as historically significant,” said Prof. Randall Kennedy, who teaches contracts and race relations law. ”But I hope it won’t overwhelm this individual student’s achievement.”
Full article here
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Harvard, 1990
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LA Times (March, 1990): Barack Obama stares silently at a wall of fading black-and-white photographs in the muggy second-floor offices of the Harvard Law Review. He lingers over one row of solemn faces, his predecessors of 40 years ago. All are men. All are dressed in dark-colored suits and ties. All are white.
It is a sobering moment for Obama, 28, who in February became the first black to be elected president in the 102-year history of the prestigious student-run law journal.
The post, considered the highest honor a student can attain at Harvard Law School, almost always leads to a coveted clerkship with the U.S. Supreme Court after graduation and a lucrative offer from the law firm of one’s choice.
Yet Obama, who has gone deep into debt to meet the $25,000-a-year cost of a Harvard Law School education, has left many in disbelief by asserting that he wants neither.
“One of the luxuries of going to Harvard Law School is it means you can take risks in your life …. You can try to do things to improve society and still land on your feet. That’s what a Harvard education should buy – enough confidence and security to pursue your dreams and give something back.”
After graduation next year, Obama says he probably will spend two years at a corporate law firm, then look for community work. Down the road, he plans to run for public office….. 💡
Full article here
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Feb 6, 1990
Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle Obama hug after his victory rally at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center January 26, 2008 in Columbia, South Carolina. Sen. Obama is the winner of the South Carolina Democratic primary, a critical one for him, followed by Sen. Hillary Clinton with former Sen. John Edwards coming in third.
Miami, October 11 (Scout Tufankjian)
Miami, October 11 (Scout Tufankjian)
Miami, October 11 (Scout Tufankjian)
Miami, October 11 (Scout Tufankjian)
Miami, October 11 (Scout Tufankjian)
Miami, October 11 (Scout Tufankjian)
First Lady Michelle Obama prepares her absentee ballot (Jocelyn Augustino)
Washington DC, October 12 (Scout Tufankjian)
Washington DC, October 12 (Scout Tufankjian)
La Crosse, Wisconsin, October 12 (Christopher Dilts)
La Crosse, Wisconsin, October 12 (Christopher Dilts)
La Crosse, Wisconsin, October 12 (Christopher Dilts)
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Coming up:
2:45 ET: Michelle Obama speaks at a campaign event at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware
5:45 ET: Michelle Obama speaks at a campaign event at Cuyahoga County Community College, Cleveland
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A hoot:
Obama White House.gov WH Tumblr The People’s View Steve Benen
The Obama Diary 
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