There is a common complaint among conservatives that African Americans should just “get over” slavery. In fact, I think that they have gotten over it. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has noted, systemic oppression of African Americans is much more recent than that, and it continues to this instant. What I think is that southern whites need to get over the Civil War. And the rest of us need to get over pandering to their hurt feelings over having lost their treasonous rebellion. I’ve discussed the issue a number of times. For example, No More Confederate General Bases! And, Southern Pride Rotting Our Republic.

With the fiftieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we have yet another example of this problem. Edmund Pettus was not on the right side of history. He was a Confederate general in the Civil War — and very much in favor of slavery and the Confederate cause. And like almost all of those guys, after gleefully committing treason against his country, he was welcomed back by that very same country. He went back to the life he had before the war. And eventually made it into the United States Senate (when it was still a corrupt appointed gig). God bless the US, because if you are rich and white, it doesn’t matter what you do — they will treat you like a hero.

But the other notable thing about Pettus is that in 1877, he became Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. And this was no secret. In fact, when the bridge was named after him in 1940, this was probably a selling point. It is part of that whole sick southern inferiority complex that claims that only things Confederate constitute the true soul of the south. And for 75 years, the name of a bigot and a traitor has been displayed proudly on that bridge. Perhaps it is time to change the name.

This morning, Jenée Desmond-Harris at Vox reported on a group of students who are trying to do just that, Inside the Fight to Strip a KKK Leader’s Name From Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is about a Change.org petition, Remove Selma’s KKK Memorialization: Rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The message is clear, “It’s time for the state of Alabama, the city of Selma, and the National Park Service to remove a KKK leader’s name from the historic bridge.” Of course, this isn’t the first time such a request has been made and nothing has changed yet.

I think this really ought to be an issue for whites — but I say that as a white person. I know that power concedes nothing without a demand. But is there no shame among us? Must we be beaten over the head about every obvious offense? The name on that bridge should make every white person cringe. And trust me, I know what many people will say, “You want to hide our history!” But that’s not it at all. I am fine with our history — it is what it is. But I have a major problem with celebrating men of history like Edmund Pettus.

Indeed, Tony W Harris of the Alabama Department of Transportation made exactly the same “history” argument. And a white resident of Selma said, “I think it’s going to be more divisive than unifying.” But I think it is really just a matter of people accepting the fact of past wrongs. Bloody Sunday will always be associated with the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And changing the name of the bridge would be a nice continuation of that — an acknowledgement that treasonous KKK leaders are not people we honor.

Have you seen the great jobs report this month? The economy added 295,000 jobs. The unemployment rate went from 5.5% to 5.3%. Wow! Happy days are here again! There is literally a chicken in every pot. Unfortunately, most Americans lost their pots when the bank foreclosed on their houses. All right, maybe not. It isn’t a bad jobs report. It’s a mixed bag. That 295,000 number is impressive, but it is still less than the number of people who gave up looking for a job last month. And it is still true that we need a lot more months of job growth like this to get back to our pre-crash levels of employment.

Job reports these days are very much a double edge sword. We want to see good numbers — more job growth. But the better the numbers, the more it brings out all the austerity fools who claim that the Federal Reserve must raise interest rates because inflation is going to increase. This is said based entirely on theory. There is no indication that inflation is actually increasing. As I’ve noted many time before, the reasoning here is that it is better to deprive workers of jobs than to allow the rich to face even the threat of inflation.

So the lower the unemployment rate gets, the louder the screams from the finance types will be that the Fed must raise interest rates. But here’s the thing: the Federal Reserve has a 2% inflation target. I think this is too low. It is basically just something that Alan Greenspan pulled out of the air. And now it has become some kind of iron law of economics — which should tell you a lot about just how scientific economics is. But the target is 2%. The problem is that more and more it isn’t even a target — it is an upper bound. In a really good blog post yesterday morning, Paul Krugman cautioned the Fed:

He is making the case that inflation that is too low represents a much more serious threat to the economy than inflation that is too high. But it is pathetic that he has to remind these people of this. If the Fed’s target is 2%, then it should be above 2% about half the time. But that hasn’t been the case since 2009. And the power elite love this. It’s just a reflection of the fact that working people are doing really poorly. But the rich don’t care about that. Their piles of money are worth a lot and they want it to stay that way. Deflation would be even better for them.

This is the problem with an oligarchy. Our leaders are not, in general, doing what is best for the economy. Or at least, not what a reasonable person thinks is best for the economy. They’ve defined what is best for the economy as what is best for the rich. And so every month we have this fight about the jobs report. If it’s good, the rich tell us the Fed must do something because they will get very slightly less rich. And if it’s bad, well, it’s bad. Of course, even when it is bad there are some who argue for raising interest rates. Who cares if American workers have jobs? Have you seen the price of yachts recently?!

Dahlia Lithwick wrote a great overview of Wednesday’s King v Burwell hearing, High Drama for Obamacare at the High Court. She’s a very playful writer and it is well worth reading the whole thing. It is pretty much all that I know about the hearing. And I have to say, I don’t know why so many observers — including Lithwick herself — seem so reticent or even gloomy.

Chief Justice Roberts said almost nothing. That could be ominous, I suppose. But I think it just means that Roberts knows this is a highly contentious case and maybe in this case it is a good idea to keep a low profile. The bad reading, of course, is that if he were planning to find for the government, why not clearly signal it so that people wouldn’t be left in doubt for the next few months. But I don’t think that would be his thinking if he were concerned about his and the court’s reputation.

It certainly seems to be the case that Kennedy is siding with the government. He seemed to be following two different tracks that lead to a good outcome. The main one is the argument that if the law reads the way the plaintiffs want, that means that the federal government had excessive leverage over the states. Basically, it was saying, “Sign up for full Obamacare or we are going to destroy your state.” It’s an interesting argument, because the last time the Supreme Court waded into these waters, it decided that the states had the right to opt out of the Medicaid expansion. So Kennedy seems to be saying that since the Court decided that way, it has a kind of obligation to not cause the states any more harm.

The whole thing is an outrage, though. What the “liberals” on the court were saying made perfect sense. You really have to tie yourself in knots to find this challenge compelling. Check out this exchange the Lithwick recorded:

Michael Carvin is the plaintiff’s attorney. I suppose he had to answer that way, but it is ridiculous. I’d hate to be a lawyer that spends his whole life making stupid arguments all for the benefit of those who already have more money than God.

What Scalia and Alito had to say didn’t bother me all that much. Alone, I wouldn’t think it meant that they were necessarily going to vote against the government. But there was no real discussion of what was supposed to be the big issue: whether four words out of an enormous law could trump all the rest. Instead, it was more stuff like you might hear on a slightly elevated right wing talk radio station. And I think what it means is that in any clearly partisan case like this one, the evil trinity on the Supreme Court will always side with the conservatives. If Roe v Wade came before them, they wouldn’t look at the law; they would just know that they were going to overturn it because that’s the side they are one.

It’s all embarrassing. I just hope the rest of the world isn’t watching. But it is a perfect microcosm of American politics. The “left” is made up almost entirely of moderates — people slightly to the right of Richard Nixon. The “right” is just crazy. And the “center” is just a couple of justices we all hope will occasionally be reasonable. I think we are safe on this case. But we are looking at decades of bad times here in the United States.

Glenn Greenwald wrote a really informative article over at The Intercept on Wednesday, The “Snowden is Ready to Come Home!” Story: a Case Study in Typical Media Deceit. This is in reference to all the recent stories about how Snowden wants to come back to the United States and how he has lawyers working on the matter. As Greenwald documented in some detail, there is no story. It isn’t that Snowden doesn’t want to return and that he doesn’t have lawyers working on this. Rather, it is simply that Snowden has always wanted to return home and has had lawyers working on a deal pretty much from the start.

The problem that Snowden faces is that he’s been charged under the Espionage Act. This is the 1917 law that the Obama administration has used twice as many times as all other presidents before him. And I don’t think that they have ever used it appropriately. It is for this kind of crap and the general war on whistleblowers that Reporters Without Borders dropped the United States 13 places to 46th on its index of press freedom. Remember, there are not even 200 countries in the world. So this puts the United States outside the top 20% countries. How “exceptional” is that?

According to Greenwald:

From the beginning, Snowden has claimed that he would come back to the United States if he were given a fair trial. It’s sad that in my country, this is a request that has to be made. Of course, there are plenty of poor “nobodies” who are only too aware that a fair trial is just not something that our judicial system provides. But when it comes to stuff like the Espionage Act and government secrets generally, the government doesn’t even pretend to be just. Basically, if Snowden came back, his “fair” trial would consist of a jury passing judgment on him without his having presented any real evidence. Such a trial would be no better than the Soviet show trials of the 1930s.

Given that Greenwald documented many times when major media outlets had published stories and headlines about Snowden wanting to come back home, how is it that this recent brouhaha started? It is very simple. Snowden’s Russian lawyer just wrote a book. He held a press conference as part of the promotion for it. During the press conference, he was asked about Snowden and he said, “He has a desire to go back, and we are doing everything possible to make that happen.” It wasn’t meant to be news because it wasn’t:

The implication here is that Snowden must now regret what he did. Life is horrible in Russia and he wants to come home. Greenwald noted that Snowden is not at all unhappy in Russia where he has quite a good life where he’s able to work on the issues he’s always cared about. There is, of course, still this Cold War residual in America that Russia must be a terrible place to live. This is part of a larger American narrative that it would be terrible to live anywhere but America. This is generally most especially believed by people who live in awful places like Dallas.

So the story, such as it was, allowed the US media to create a false narrative where Snowden had turned against Russia and toward the the 46th best place for press freedom — also called the “land of the free.” (Fun fact: higher on press freedom is Romania.) Of course, this is all ridiculous anyway. As everyone should know, Snowden is only in Russia because the United States has done everything in its power to stop him from leaving. The Bolivian president’s plane was forced to land and searched because the American government thought that Snowden might be on board.

If Snowden ever makes a deal to come back to the United States, it will certainly not be under this administration. It isn’t that future administrations will be better about this stuff. History shows that they just get worse. But Snowden will always be an embarrassment to the Obama administration. So a Republican especially might have a reason to make an acceptable deal — something like they gave to David Petraeus. But it doesn’t sound like Snowden is in any rush. As it is, the United States seems to get worse every year. “Land of the free” is more and more a cruel joke.