National

Kudos to former President George H.W. Bush, pictured above with the 2 year old son of one of his security detail. Bush, and his entire security detail, shaved their heads in support of the child, who is going through chemotherapy treatment for leukemia. This is a kind and classy move. Meanwhile, from Jonathan Chait: "The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses--partisanship, obstruction, gridlock--don't come close to describing this situation. The hard right's extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists."

Aside from the President's 2008 campaign speech on race, needed after his controversial pastor Rev. Wright's remarks came to light, President Obama has mostly strayed away from discussing race and racism in office. Part of that reluctance is due to the fact that since a lot of the opposition to him and his policies was due to his race, and he did not want to turn his administration into a black v. white debate. (And if you think some of the opposition to the President during his first term was not racially-based, then ask yourself why the Tea Party did not exist during President Bush's term, since the very same spending, debt and deficits occurred on a much larger scale during Bush's term, and ask yourself why did they need to make racial jokes, and ask yourself why they call him a nigg*r, and ask yourself why they call him a Muslim Socialist instead of just a socialist. If you deny that racism is at least part of the reason some people oppose the President, then you are a stone cold idiot who should be prevented from operating heavy machinery). Anyway, the President is uniquely qualified and right to speak about racism that African Americans experience, because he is the first President to have experienced it. And he should speak. Because we all need to think about this central question: if Trayvon Martin was white, would George Zimmerman ever call 911? Would he ever had got out of the car?

President Obama: Governor Markell:

I have expect to see these tea party anti-immigration reform protestors to straight out their arms and raise them into the air!