Following on Dean Baker's point, the upsurge of anger at casually bestowed bonuses for top bankers--the same who so drastically botched financial matters with consequences apparent for all to see--is evidently the American way of backing into a normally buried question, namely, is there a public interest in regulating salaries?

If you believe that "the market," in the guise of a self-perpetuating "executive compensation" establishment, is entitled to do whatever the market likes, and damn the consequences, then the AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac bonuses are the ordinary, unexceptionable price of doing business.

If you believe, on the other hand, that the discrepancy between top salaries and medium salaries is outlandish, then the logical policy is to raise top tax brackets. Whether any particular bonuses are warranted is a question that can be disputed by reasonable people. Whether the public good has a claim to the proceeds would seem to be indisputable.

Apparently we have to give them more than $200 million in bonuses to give them enough incentive to lose taxpayers billions of dollars. The NYT says that 213 employees are slated for bonuses of more than $100k each and the top paid ones will pocket over $1 million.

That seems like a lot of money. After all, can't we pay a high school kid the minimum wage to throw away taxpayer dollars. Just to be clear, I'm not referring to the money that was lost on their prior loans, I'm referring to the money that they are losing on the loans that Fannie and Freddie are buying every day.

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The news that Larry Summers was paid more than $5 Million by the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the year before he joined the Obama Administration is not that surprising. What is good news is that he will be barred from any involvement in the decisions over how hedge funds will be regulated. According to the White House,

"Of course, since joining the White House, he has complied with the strictest ethics rules ever required of appointees and will not work on specific matters to which D. E. Shaw is a party for two years."

While Treasury Secretary for Bill Clinton, Summers fought to keep hedge funds from being regulated. Now that must change and they should be as transparent as mutual funds in their disclosures. The notion that Summers will be locked out of the room as these regulations are formulated is a relief.

I had planned to write a post this week about American exceptionalism and European social democracy, but I confess, I got side tracked reading about Michelle Obama's fashions on display this week and reading less about the debates between the American and European models. This is not a bad thing.

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Maybe the neocons will consider this when they argue for an Israeli attack on Iran.

Are they ready to risk their families to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon? Are there actually people so crazy that they say "well, if Haifa is under some hypothetical danger, I'm willing to give up my kids here."

Yes, I suppose there are, just nobody I know or want to know.

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I very much doubt Stokely Carmichael would have been a candidate for post-King general civil rights leadership. In 1967-68, he was at high revolutionary tide, at least rhetorically--take a look at his Oakland speech of fall 1967, full of blustery threats about "offing" not only "the pig" but black bourgeois types who didn't get with the program. I don't know what his tactical maneuvers were like in Washington in early '68 but my guess is that he was reeling between Third World revolutionary bombast and practical politics at this point. Of course we don't know what he would have evolved into had he not left the country, but when he did become a pan-Africanist, that was no surprise, given the way other SNCC militants had been going after Watts. The surprise (to me, for sure, who knew Stokely starting in high school) was that this intelligent man at some point in the '70s started ranting against "Zionism" as if it were responsible for all the horrors of neocolonialism. That kind of junk doesn't come out of the blue. When defeat masquerades as blustery victory, you have taken leave of reality. So soon it came to pass that he would answer the phone, "Ready for the revolution").

As for the great Bayard Rustin, he was already anathema to the New Left before Ocean Hill-Brownsville, as a coalitionist. (His old comrade Staughton Lynd denounced him in 1965, publicly, for proposing "coalition with the Marines.")

Only King had the nonviolent credentials to hold at least some white liberals and most radicals once the pseudo-revolutionary tide went out and a lot of people started returning to their senses.

I have a few thoughts in response to Todd and Rick's insightful posts.

The counterfactual scenario Todd lays out is certainly possible. At the same time, I'll return to my earlier comment--namely, that King's ideas about American society and inequality were changing rapidly at the end of his life, and that as he turned against the war and became increasingly critical of American capitalism, he was losing the support of many American liberals, both black and white. In his April 4, 1967 Riverside Church address, King said,

We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

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Let me join in on Clay Risen's haunting question, "What was the impact of King's death for the civil rights movement?" As Peniel Joseph notes, King was unpopular in many quarters by 1968. It is possible that had he lived, King's influence over the direction of the civil rights movement - his emphasis on integration, nonviolence, nondiscrimination in any direction, an alliance with organized labor, and placing economic inequality at the center of a broader human rights agenda - would have diminished over time and been eclipsed by the Black Power movement. More hopeful is Todd Gitlin's suggestion that King and his allies might have helped the left "survive the Southern Strategy."

We do know what subsequently happened to King's intellectual soulmate, Bayard Rustin. Rustin, who first introduced King to nonviolence and organized the 1963 March on Washington, was in the months and years after King's assassination essentially written out of the civil rights movement.

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Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, will be meeting with President Obama this weekend. Given his previous statements about President Obama, it should be an interesting meeting for them both.

The following piece on Klaus is excerpted from my book, My Brother's Keeper (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003):

The hostile reception new communitarianism encountered from some of the Czech leaders mirrored concerns initially raised by leaders and intellectuals in other former communist countries when they were first exposed to our message. It also reflected the particular position of its prime minister, Václav Klaus. Klaus has been credited with the quick transition of the Czech Republic from a communist to a capitalist economy. He defines himself accurately as an extreme Milton Friedmanite and has taken great personal umbrage to my book The Moral Dimension, which challenges libertarian assumptions of Friedmanite economics. When Klaus ran into me during the World Economic Forum in Davos in 1997, he grabbed my lapel, waved his index finger in my face, and announced in a booming voice, "You are crippling my republic! You are undermining what we are trying to do! You do not understand that egoism and the profit motive are the best part of human nature. You work for those who want to return my country to communism!"

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I'm late to this party, but will jump in as best I can with a response to Clay's question: "What was the impact of King's death for the civil rights movement?"

For those of us who understand the crucial role of movements, it's something of an embarrassment to acknowledge how central individuals can be. It's especially irritating to have to do so when a celebrity-soaked culture is obsessed from the get-go, and stupidly so, with personifications, treating the civil rights movement, say, as if it were the personal project of Martin Luther King. But the truth is that individuals are not just themselves--their biographies, their bundles of talent and character--but also, in a way, the energy-collecting and -distributing nodes of the force-fields they strike up with their partisans (and enemies). This is how history works. Sidney Hook made the point long ago, in a smart book called The Hero in History.

In this light, individuals really can be indispensable. King was. I certainly agree with Clay and others who note that King had worn out a lot of his welcomes before April 4, 1968. Still, if you want to know how important he remained even at low ebb, look, as Clay does in his book, at what happened in this country on April 5 et seq. How many of us remember exactly where we were and what we were doing when he heard the awful news of what had happened in Memphis? Who can forget?

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Go over to my Israel Policy Forum home to see what I mean by that fanciful headline.

No, Netanyahu did not say that in so many words. But his meaning (in an interview with Jeff Goldberg) is pretty clear. He is not going to help President Obama resolve the Iran nuclear issue through diplomacy (nor will President Peres, Defense Minister Barak or Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman).

Bibi believes that Iran will happily sacrifice millions to destroy Israel and, armed with that rather uninformed view, he knows that the only way to save Israel is to strike first.

Imagine waking up to that news which, in my opinion, would inexorably lead to the very horror Netanyahu claims to most fear. As for America, any attack by Israel would be viewed by the Muslim world as an attack by US (and we have 130,000 kids next door).

Anyway, check out my piece and follow the links to both Goldberg and Klein. While you are there, check out the new IPF website, which is the pro-Israel community's best (by far) website on the Middle East and is updated around the clock.

It is still commonplace for scholars and pundits to talk about the period after King's assassination as the "post civil rights era," a period when "the marching stopped." For many, especially whites, the post-1968 story was one of optimism. "The movement" (almost always in the singular) reached its goals with the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. The need for organized activism waned because we had overcome. Any remaining racial inequality was residual. Because the barriers to opportunity had been lifted, it was now up to African Americans to clean house, to address the problems that were the result of dysfunctional family structures or crime or a too generous welfare state. For others, especially those who searched for another King, the post-1968 period was a tragic denouement to the movement, a fragmented struggle in search of leadership. Many tell the post-King story in the form of a declension narrative: namely integrationism gave way to identity politics and civil rights to black power.

Both views are incomplete. Activists in the North, whom I write about extensively in my new book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North, turned their attention to improving life in the inner city, most notably through community economic development, a effort that led to unlikely alliances between advocates of black self-determination and community control with liberals, corporate leaders, major foundations, and especially the federal government--which was in the first stages of a long shift away from large-scale urban spending to devolution.

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Karl Rove says that is what the President told Rep. Peter De Fazio after the Oregon Democrat voted against the stimulus package.

Heavens to Lyndon Johnson, this made my day. I always assumed that Obama could be a tough m'fer when crossed (he won, didn't he?) but I wasn't sure.

Now, unless Peter D says it never happened, I'm going to believe the President said it and celebrate.

I wouldn't bother scorekeeping with Republicans. I expect the likes of Boehner and Cantor to do their worst, which, in the end, will secure our majority. No, I'd focus on the Democrats who think they can piss on a Democratic President's leg in the belief that he'll just think it's raining. They need to support the Obama program or start paying a price (you know, the way LBJ only built dams in the home states of friendly senators).

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The opponents of health care reform in the 90's had "Harry and Louise", the middle class couple afraid that they wouldn't be able to choose their own doctor. But the front man for this year's opposition is Rick Scott, the disgraced CEO of Columbia/HCA.

Once lauded for building Columbia/HCA into the largest health care company in the world, Mr. Scott was ousted by his own board of directors in 1997 amid the nation's biggest health care fraud scandal. The company's guilty plea and payment of $1.7 billion to settle charges including the overbilling of state and federal health programs was taken as a repudiation of Mr. Scott's relentless bottom-line approach.

Scott's solution to cutting health care costs was simple--slash and burn.

The frugality carried over the Columbia/HCA's hospitals. "Gloves rip easily," complained hospital workers in Florida. In California, some nurses protested "filthy conditions" and being "stretched to the limit as the hospital slashed the ratio of nurses to patients"

"I sometimes had to watch 72 patients heart monitors at a time," one nurse reported. "I was told, either do it, or there's the door." In Indianapolis nurses complained to state authorities that babies in the neonatal unit were left unattended for as long as three hours.

Rep. Michael Burgess (R.-Texas), one of the Republican health care opposition leaders likes what Rick Scott has to say. But mostly he likes that Scott is going to spend $5 million of his own considerable fortune running scare ads ("Imagine waking up one day and all your medical decisions are made by a central, national board," he warns in a radio spot) on TV and radio.

With Obama's new job approval ratings at 66%, you've got to wonder if the Republicans could have possibly chosen a worse spokesman for their side of the health care debate.

I guess Tom Delay was too busy.

The aftermath of MLK's assassination, in most conventional accounts of the Civil Rights Movement signaled its deathknell as a national movement. In this interpretation, King's call for multi-racial democracy was replaced by the angry polemics of gun-toting Black Power era militants who practiced politics without portfolio and successfully inspired an electoral realignment in the form of white backlash.

But such a perspective diminishes the complexity of both King and the Civil Rights-Black Power Movements. Michael Honey's definitive account of King's Poor People's Campaign, Going Down Jericho Road, poignantly illustrates the depth of criticism levied against King by liberals, conservatives, and some radicals during his final days. Put more bluntly, King was not considered a popular civil rights leader in many quarters by 1968.

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When it comes to regulating the financial sector, Europe's leadership is on the right track. We clearly need to rein in the masters of the universe so that they don't have the opportunity to do even more damage. It would be great if Sarkozy could convince Obama of the need to rein in hedge funds, private equity funds, and the other non-bank institutions that still play by Wild West rules in the United States. It would be even better if everyone agreed on a modest financial transactions tax (like the 0.25 percent stock transfer tax in the U.K.) so that we can all profit from the speculation that does take place. Such a tax could produce more than $100 billion in annual revenue in the United States.

However, when it comes to stimulus, the Europeans seem to be missing the boat. Their economies will be mired in slow growth unless their governments are prepared to spend more money. This is just simple arithmetic.

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Barack Obama and G-20 leaders will probably emerge from the sessions that start today with (1) commitments on international financial regulatory reform, (2) non-binding commitments to various (mostly modest) stimulus strategies within their own economies, (3) a commitment to significantly enhance the resources of the International Monetary Fund and (4) a joint commitment to "resist protectionism" in their countries.

But the major benchmark of whether this G-20 Summit matters or not will be the degree to which the surplus countries of China, Japan and Germany commit to a plan to rewire their economies to derive more of their growth from domestic consumption as opposed to export led growth.

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I never post twice a day -- and I apologize for crowding my fellow bloggers -- but e-mail and online responses to "A Quiet Read," below -- about Gershom Gorenberg's "The Missing Mahatma: Searching for Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank" -- show that few know what "coercive non-violence" is. I'd better try to explain.

From the national-security-state right to the "armed struggle" left, people scoff that coercive non-violence is pious pacifism and passivity and that those touting it are either credulous dupes or Machiavellian oppressors. But coercive non-violence requires as much concerted, collective energy as warfare, and more courage than that of the scoffers on both sides, whom history often turns into pious apologists for mass murder.

Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World explains that practitioners of coercive non-violence are committed and disciplined to expel not just the oppressor but the oppressive methods they themselves have internalized. They stop obeying established power and generate new power by doing new things together peacefully that the oppressor disapproves. That needn't mean that they attack or, if attacked, turn violent, although at times, they may: Scoffers seem unaware that Gandhi and King weren't pacifists, and they don't understand what that means. It's urgent that we find out.

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Being in this conversation is like being a kid in a candy store. As I said at the outset, Rick, Tom, Todd, and Peniel are all writers I look up to and draw from. Now I get to ask them questions! So here's one, building off the current conversation: What was the impact of King's death for the civil rights movement?

It's a question I touch on but don't grapple with sufficiently in my book. But I see two possibilities. On the one hand, his death, and the riots that followed, spurred a new era of community activism; while black local activism was certainly nothing new in 1968, the loss of the national community's de facto leader let (to use a perhaps inapt analogy) a thousand flowers bloom. I don't want to imply that King was in any way preventing them from action; rather, it seems like his death convinced many at the local level to take up his mantle, even though the results were not necessarily extensions of King's philosophy per se. Likewise, the evisceration of so many communities by riots caused helped catalyze "self-help" organizing nationwide.

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Today's Washington Post gave a favorable review to Caryl Churchill's "Seven Jewish Children," which addresses the Holocaust and the Gaza war.

Earlier this week Jeff Goldberg of the Atlantic duked it out with Ari Roth, who heads Theater J, the magnificent Jewish community theater in Washington, which put the play on this week. Goldberg thinks the show is viciously anti-semitic. Roth is ambivalent on that point but believes it should be seen.

In New York, Washington, London, and everywhere else the show has been produced, huge battles erupt. I missed the Washington show but I found it online and am sharing it here.

Decide for yourselves. It is definitely worth watching. Also, read this.

PART 1

PART 2

The new Israeli government is the largest in Israel's history and the largest of its kind in the world, according to Israeli media reports. Another enviable number--54% of the Israeli public already hold it in negative esteem and this is on the day of its swearing in, today.

That's the good news. The bad news is that even due to its internal contradictions, it is unlikely to collapse quickly because this is a government about self-preservation, and not much else. The only pressure it will feel--and it will feel it for certain--will be from the U.S. and from Europe.

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Without disagreeing with Tom or Rick directly, I'll start off where both of them left off: King's life was cut short, and at a moment when he was just beginning a new segment in his lifelong struggle against injustice. It's no slap at his grand intellect to suggest that he was still working through a lot of the policy implications his principles evoked.

He very clearly believed that the nation owed African Americans something for their suffering. He said so throughout his life, but perhaps nowhere more forcefully than his March 31, 1968 sermon at the National Cathedral, the last Sunday address of his life. It is worth quoting at length:

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Even with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu almost declaring war on Iran, the most valuable assessment of threats in the Middle East is "The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank," Gershom Gorenberg's rich, deep reckoning with how to get Israelis and Palestinians out of their death dance.

If you've followed me on "How (and How Not) to Assess Israel's Moral Self-Destruction," you know how coercive non-violence is becoming the most effective way to win power justly. Some Israelis and Palestinians have noticed this, even if most of their leaders and self-proclaimed spokesmen haven't.

Reading Gorenberg, I was suspicious at first of the fact that this Israeli author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 and contributor to The American Prospect and the dovish Israeli Ha'aretz, had just published his "The Missing Mahatma" in, of all places, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard. Was this some West Bank pacification gambit? But an hour ago Gorenberg told me how the piece wound up where it did.

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With our myriad banking problems, rapidly rising unemployment, looming political battles over the budget and much more on the pressing domestic agenda, is the G20 summit in London (dinner Wednesday and meeting Thursday) really worth all the time and effort that the President and his team have devoted to it? And, granted that President Obama has to attend this heads of government meeting for protocol reasons, is there much that this summit can realistically achieve - i.e., are there actions that will be taken as a result of the summit that would not otherwise have happened and that can really make a difference to the parlous state of our economy?

These are all reasonable questions. And the answer is simple: in terms of the obvious major issues of the day, this summit is unlikely to achieve much.

But every global economic recovery has to start somewhere and it probably has to begin small. And there are some slight glimmers of hope because (a) President Obama is taking a global leadership role, (b) he is doing this in a creative way that might seem surprising, but which should reduce the chance of a further global meltdown.

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Tim Geithner is not a tool of Wall Street. He is an agent of finanzkapital.

Jack Murtha to his constituents: if lovin you is wrong I don't wanna be right.

Everybody is discovering what tools be the Senate Democrats.

My NCAA final four bracket was the Minneapolis Trotskys coached by Farrell Dobbs, the Toledo Autolites w/coach A.J. Muste, the Seattle General Strikers, and the U.S. Bonus Army Academy. The Denver Wobblies coached by Bill Haywood were declared losers by default for not observing the rules of the game, after Joe Hill threw in a three-pointer from the third row seats.

Obama guarantees your GM car's drivetrain for five years, and it's a step down the road to fascism!

The U.S. advisers in Afghanistan are so not like the advisers in Vietnam, and Pakistan is totally not like Cambodia.

TPM Café needs more posts on Israeli politics.

The Washington Post is consolidating all of its sections into a Sudoku puzzle.

The new global currency will be dropped from black helicopters.

On Friday, I wrote that I thought that incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu may have moderated over the years.

Not for the first time, I was wrong. Big time.

Check out this interview Netanyahu gave the Atlantic's Jeff Goldberg today. Netanyahu says flatout that either the Obama administration deals with Iran's nuclear development or Israel will have no choice but to act unilaterally (i.e, with bombs).

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Tom Sugrue is right to note in his post, "Remembering and Misremembering King," that Martin Luther King Jr. supported "compensatory treatment" for this nation's history of discrimination against blacks, but the record is very clear that King wanted the compensatory remedy to be color-blind and to include poor whites.

In chapter 8 of Why We Can't Wait, King began with the sensible observation that passage of Civil Rights legislation would not wipe the slate clean of the historical legacy of discrimination. King says "compensatory or preferential treatment" is justified, making an analogy to a foot race. "For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner." King goes on to say, "America must seek its own ways of atoning for the injustices she has inflicted upon her Negro citizens."

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A one day summit of the 20 nations that make up 80% of the world's economy is really nothing more than a posturing exercise for roosters like Sarkozy of France and Hu Jintao of China to show their home market that they matter. Last week the Chinese suggested that the dollar be replaced with a new "world reserve currency". Good luck with that.

The dollar is the world's reserve currency because it is the largest and most liquid government bond market. Our T-bill market alone is (ex-Japan) bigger by a factor of two-to-one than the next five government debt markets. China may not like owning so much US paper, but the market for US treasuries is three times the size of the Euro zone debt market.

Despite all the doomsayers on these pages, I am of the opinion that the worst of the economic crisis in the U.S. has passed. That is not to say that unemployment won't continue to worsen for the next six months, but the notion that we are headed into a second great depression is way oversold. If you want to see what a depression looks like, check out these charts from yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

So President Obama's task for the next few days will be that of the Zen Master. Let Merkel, Sarkozy and Hu posture for their domestic audiences, do some serious listening and avoid the temptation to instruct them how to fix their own domestic economies.

Clay Risen's book on the King riots of 1968 has much to commend it, including his clear-eyed portrait of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in his last, difficult years. As Clay writes, "the public, the media, and the political establishment increasingly saw him in a negative light..." When King turned his attention northward, he faced bitter opposition from whites who professed their racial innocence and resented his intrusion into their communities. Black power advocates denounced him (quite wrongly) as a conservative and a sell-out. To top it off, King became an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War, earning the enmity of Lyndon Johnson and hawkish liberals. By the spring of 1968, King was at his nadir of popularity, in part because of the media's belated discovery that he was not at all "moderate." King was ultimately far more radical than the plaster saint, the saccharine "dreamer," who dominates our images of him today.

King was particularly unpopular among working-class and middle-class whites, both South and North, who were by 1966 already abandoning the Democratic Party and who never cared much for racial equality. Indeed, as Clay notes (drawing from book, The Origins of the Urban Crisis), the New Deal coalition was fragile well before the 1960s because of the charged issue of civil rights and racial equality. Even modest efforts to desegregate housing and schools in the North met with fierce white resistance. That's a reality that King discovered when he joined the open housing movement in Chicago in 1966.

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Nobody has earned the the right to say "I told you so" as honestly as Paul Krugman. Like many others, I have not hidden my gratitude. Yet I wonder about two of his claims against Geithner's plan that seem to me both crucial and not sufficiently answered, at least not in Krugman's writings and public appearances I have seen. If we are going to put major banks into receivership--in effect, nationalize them--the answer to both had better be "no." (I have some working hypotheses, but l am prepared to be enlightened.)

1. The first has to do with the meaning of insolvency, or its flip, the recoverable value of mortgage-backed securities on banks' balance sheets. Krugman (supported by terrific bloggers on this site) insists that Geithner is not acknowledging the size of the housing bubble, that is, the very low actual values of these assets, as compared with the values they were booked at. But these values, much like the price of oil, depend almost entirely on the pace of recovery. What, if anything, can be said about that?

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The new consensus among the experts who missed the housing bubble (EMHB) is that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's plan to subsidize the purchase of junk mortgages and their derivatives will help alleviate the stress on the banking system. That's good news.

These geniuses have devised a plan that for $1 trillion (approximately equal to 300 million kid-years of SCHIP, the State Child Health Insurance Program) can alleviate the stress on the banking system. Note that no one claims that $1 trillion spent on the Geithner plan will actually clean up the banking system - that would be asking too much. The EMHB only assure us that this $1 trillion (more than enough to have energy conserving retrofits for every building in the country) will make things better. Isn't that enough?

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First off, congratulations to Clay Risen for a terrific book which brilliantly captures one of the most important single weeks of the Twentieth Century. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968 and the rioting that followed in city after city helped shape the fate of American liberalism for a generation, and Clay's book helps us understand that period much better.

I'm struck by Clay's use of the phrase "the King riots," because, as Clay himself points out, rioting was the ultimate repudiation of King's nonviolent approach to civil rights. The riots were on one level perfectly understandable expressions of justifiable rage and despair. But, as Clay notes, they played right into the hands of conservative Republicans, like Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, who capitalized on white fear of black militancy. Nonviolence, in King's view, was not a weak or timid strategy; it was the only pragmatic route to victory in America, where black violence would surely yield white backlash.

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First off, I want to thank Rick, Tom, Peniel, and Todd for joining me in this discussion. Throughout the course of writing my book I looked to all four of them as inspirations, and I am lucky enough to have worked with each of them as managing editor at Democracy (well, Tom will be in our next issue). So it is a distinct honor to be joined by them this week.

The bulk of A Nation on Fire is a detailed account of the week following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968. There are a lot of moving parts to the story-the first days of the manhunt for James Earl Ray, the reaction among the civil rights movement-but I decided to focus on two elements. First, I wanted to give a chronology of the riots that broke out in more than 100 cities nationwide and led to 39 deaths and over $650 million in damage (in 2009 dollars), and second, I wanted to tell the story of what was going on inside the White House, as President Lyndon Johnson, who had just withdrawn from the 1968 campaign, dealt with the latest in a long list of national crises to beset his presidency. I found the force of these twinned narratives compelling, particularly as elements of a story that has too often been overlooked in accounts of the 1960s.

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Clay Risen joins us this week to blog on his book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, an account of the riots that raged across the country in April 1968. The narrative delves into each individual riot and explores the broader impact of violence on the American public. Risen also details the efforts of President Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael to curb the simmering rage.

From Risen's first post:

Why the King riots were so important in American history: Namely, they were a signal moment for so many white Americans that postwar liberalism had failed to ensure domestic order, even as it had pushed further on racial integration than many whites-in and outside the South-were comfortable with.

Risen is currently the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Previously, he was assistant editor at The New Republic and has written for The American Prospect, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Slate, and the Atlantic.

Joining the conversation are Richard Kahlenberg, a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation; Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; Peniel Joseph, Professor of African-American Studies at Brandeis University; and Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology at Columbia University and regular TPMCafe contributor.

Communications academics use the word "mediated" a lot-- "connected indirectly through another person or thing". The "thing" of course is a screen--TV, Computer, mobile phone--and a new survey says the average American stares at the damn things 8.5 hours a day. All of which delights advertisers.

The researchers found that the number of minutes with media is almost identical for every age group. Mr. Wakshlag called the amount of time "amazingly consistent across the age groups." Except, that is, for 45-to-54-year-olds, who spend on average an extra hour in front of screens each day, the study found.

I don't know about you, but I like to sleep 8 hours a night, swim for an hour a day and my commute to USC is 45 minutes each way. That leaves about 4 hours of human (unmediated) interaction a day.

I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Isaac Luria of J Street just sent out an early link to Seymour Hersh's piece in the New Yorker this coming week about Obama's plans for the Middle East.

It is worth reading.

One thing that strikes me, and it's been striking me a lot lately, is that Dick Cheney is about as evil a personality to ever participate in American public life. Utterly unpatriotic, completely disloyal to the President he "served," a liar and a thug, he now is specializing in publicly predicting (hoping for?) a terrorist attack on our shores which he can happily blame on the Democrats.

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