By Ryan Powers

In honor of memorial day, I thought I’d note that the oldest surviving Medal of Honor recipient, John Finn died yesterday at the age of 100.

Finn’s write up reminded me that I also wanted to mention an on-going Medal of Honor dust up. 1st Lt. Alonzo Cushing died at Gettysburg in 1863. Margaret Zerwekh — a 90 year-old woman who lives on land once occupied by Cushing’s family in Wisconsin — led a 20-year-long campaign to get Cushing the Medal of Honor for his actions at Gettysburg. Cushing’s medal was recently approved by the Secretary of the Army and Zerwkh hoped that the medal would be presented to the mayor of Cushing’s birth place, Delafield, WI. But now some “New York interlopers” (!) from New York are trying to steal the show, apparently. All Things Considered had Zerwekh on last weekend, to explain the issue:

RAZ: When you finally heard from the secretary of the army that Lieutenant Cushing will be getting a Medal of Honor, what was your reaction?

ZERWEKH: I jumped up and down, and then I sat down, and I picked up the phone again and I called everybody who had supported the effort. Unfortunately, I called the Fredonia Public Library, which had given me information, that’s Fredonia, New York.

RAZ: Uh-huh. And that’s where he actually moved to as a young boy.

ZERWEKH: That’s where the family moved to. And so what happened when I called the library to tell them, they called the mayor, their mayor. And now the mayor of Fredonia is trying to get this medal.

Jerks. But perhaps better than these communities fighting over the medal, someone should locate Cushing’s descendants and present them with the medal. Some sort of Medal of Honor timesharing agreement just doesn’t really seem appropriate.

By Jamelle Bouie

More good stuff today from TAPPED. Here’s Adam Serwer on the alleged “color-blindness” of Arizona’s recent immigration law:

One of the primary arguments of the “read the law” chorus is that since the law has a provision outlawing racial profiling it won’t unfairly target Latinos. This is basically an extension of colorblind racist philosophy into law — namely the text of the bill outlaws racial profiling, despite the fact that it is clearly aimed at the state’s Latino population. The reason you can pass a law that encourages racial profiling in spirit while prohibiting it in letter is that everyone has a concept in their head of what an “illegal immigrant” looks and sounds like. A police officer wouldn’t have to make a judgment based on race alone; as the civil-rights groups’ lawsuit points out, they could make such decisions based on racialized factors such as “language, accent, clothing, English-word selection” or “failure to communicate in English.”

In an earlier era, this same “colorblind racist philosophy” was used to craft laws targeting African-Americans. Rarely were Jim Crow laws explicitly racist, instead, they relied on “colorblind” mechanisms — like poll taxes and grandfather clauses — to achieve the desired, anti-black outcome. Arizona’s immigration law is obviously not the same as Jim Crow, but it’s animated by the same basic idea of “colorblindness” — if something doesn’t explicitly mention race, then it can’t be racist. And the converse is also true, anything that mentions race is de facto racist, even if it’s designed to ameliorate racial prejudice (see: Chief Justice John Roberts, 2007)

It’s tempting to lay this on conservatives as another example of their inability to understand racism as something broader and more pervasive than simple prejudice. And while that’s true, it’s not simply a conservative problem. Serwer noted in another post, that Americans of all stripes have trouble thinking about race in ways that move beyond hooded white supremacists and angry skinheads. As he put it:

This is part of why the American conversation on race is so counterproductive — it’s almost entirely focused on excluding almost every model of rational behavior from the category of “racism,” rather than examining the very real effects race continues to have on people’s lives. The

Yep, that gets to the nub of it.

By Matthew Yglesias

As you’ve doubtless heard, China is currently undergoing a massive boom in infrastructure projects. And as you can see in the United States, the future development of a metropolitan area tends to be shaped for a long time by infrastructure decisions made in the past. New York City was a big early builder of subways and commuter rail, whereas most of the Sunbelt invested early and often in freeways. These decisions aren’t irreversible, but there’s a lot of lock-in. If you don’t have transit, then the private sector doesn’t build transit-appropriate projects which makes adding transit a hassle.

Different Chinese cities have different approaches in this regard, but Dalian where I am today is currently investing in a substantial Metro system:

Right now it’s a modest two-branch affair, but within the next eight years four more lines should be built and right now you can see the construction all over the city. I obviously don’t have the knowledge of local conditions necessary to make even a sketchy evaluation of these plans, but as a transit fan it’s exciting to see. We met today with the top Communist Party official in the city, and he explained that he saw transit as crucial to avoiding endless traffic jams and that the subway is just one leg of an envisioned stool that also includes Bus Rapid Transit, regular bus, and light rail.

I’ve been interested to see that no Chinese city seems to be interested in implementing congestion pricing. This is really too bad, since currently conditions in China are ideal for it. Car ownership is still only a minority pursuit of the wealthy so raising funds by taxing congestion in traffic-plagued cities (of which there are certainly a few) in order to finance improved mass transit ought to be a no-brainer way of dealing with an economic and ecological problem while also improving the welfare of average Chinese people in a very direct way.