TV News LIES

When President Joe Biden landed here Sunday, he met a city frozen in time.

Brick buildings, aging and largely untouched since the days its inhabitants helped ignite the country’s civil rights movement nearly six decades ago, line the streets. Empty storefronts dot both sides of the main drag — Broad Street — where the famed Edmund Pettus Bridge is located. Typically, the city is quiet. But on the first weekend of every March, the streets come alive.

On Sunday, hours before Biden stepped foot on the bridge, white vendor tents covered almost every corner, many selling T-shirts emblazoned with the face of the late Rep. John Lewis or a $13 plate of fried fish. Grassroots organizers held programs on reparations and voting rights.

Biden arrived to recognize “Bloody Sunday.” The 600-person demonstration in Selma on March 7, 1965, ended with state troopers beating protesters, and it ultimately led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year. Biden’s visit was part of both a somber commemoration and a joyful celebration. A reminder of Black excellence and strength — and of the terrors of the Jim Crow era. For decades, nearly every president has visited Selma during this weekend.

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The Supreme Court’s ultraconservative majority has succeeded in making the court hostile territory for death row inmates. It has perfected the art of turning a blind eye to shocking injustices in capital cases or obscuring them in a dense fog of legalisms.

So it was both surprising and revealing when on Feb. 22 the court, by a 5-4 vote, granted relief to John Montenegro Cruz, an inmate on Arizona’s death row. This decision is a welcome reminder that even those who commit heinous crimes are entitled to the protections afforded by our nation’s commitment to due process and the rule of law.

Cruz’s crime was indeed heinous.

Thousands of conservatives, including prominent Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls, flocked to a suburban Washington, D.C., convention center this week to discuss children’s genitals.

On March 7, 1965, Sheyann Webb, a 9-year-old Black girl from Selma, Ala., sat in her bedroom, chest heaving, face streaked with tears, her throat still burning from tear gas.

Her parents were perched on her child-size bed having just calmed her screams. They watched as she wrote furiously, capturing the lyrics from a song, “Oh, Freedom,” she’d heard over and over during the past few months — ultimately gutted as they read to the end. She’d written about her own funeral arrangements.

That morning, Webb had been the youngest participant in the civil rights march that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” a 600-person demonstration in Selma that ended with law enforcement beating the protesters. She had dressed in capri pants, thrown her hair in a quick plait and put on her white and black oxfords — her “marching shoes.” Having snuck out of the house, she left a short note to her parents on the washing machine. She was apologetic for disobeying them. But ultimately, she wrote, “I am marching for our freedom.”

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Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged to "stand shoulder to shoulder" with war crimes prosecutors in Ukraine and said U.S. investigators had already "zeroed in" on what they say are specific crimes allegedly committed by Russian forces in an unannounced visit to a country at war.

Garland met with Ukranian President Vloydomyr Zelinsky and signed an agreement to promote information sharing about Russian atrocities that have targeted maternity hospitals, schools, and other civilian dwellings since the start of the unprovoked conflict one year ago.

"The perpetrators of those crimes will not get away with it," Garland said in remarks to a room filled with European justice ministers, presidents and other dignitaries.

The attorney general said the United States has a long memory when it comes to war crimes, pointing to a years-long effort to identify and deport Nazi war criminals who fled to America. Ultimately about 130 such cases advanced, many a generation or more after World War II ended.

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