"My Tumblr was once a collection of evidence, convincing the world that something very strange actually existed, but now everyone believes..."

"... and everyone has seen, and Thorning-Schmidt has the evidence on her phone. So it was time to do the only sensible thing: It was time to declare victory, to revel in drawing a line from the bottom to the top."

The creator of the blog Selfies at Funerals declares victory and ends the project after Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt gets British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama to pose alongside her in the selfie she made at the Nelson Mandela memorial service.

AND: There's a strange amount of talk about Michelle Obama's look of seeming disapproval (caught not in the selfie but in the photograph of the selfie getting taken). At Salon, Roxane Gay collects and reacts to the reactions to the First Lady's reaction.

More than anything, the response to these latest images of Michelle Obama speaks volumes about the expectations placed on black women in the public eye and how a black women’s default emotional state is perceived as angry. The black woman is ever at the ready to aggressively defend her territory. She is making her disapproval known. She never gets to simply be...

But none of the responses Gay quotes refer to race or talk about Michelle Obama as anything other than one individual reacting to one particular thing on one occasion. But Gay seems so sure that it's those other people who are failing to perceive Michelle Obama as an individual: "On and on the punditry goes, ascribing very specific, historically racialized narratives to what Michelle Obama is thinking and feeling in one candid moment."

Now, it's not just the selfie. At The Daily News, there's a whole string of photos showing Michelle looking grouchy while Obama seems to be enjoying his interactions with the pretty Danish Prime Minister. But still, there is no reference to race. The closest reference to race is at the rather scurrilous website Gawker:

[T]here is a new sexy spy prime minister in town... and she is maybe kind of pretty if you are into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty.” You know who does not seem to be that into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty”? Michelle Obama, that is who! That is some side-eye not seen since the one time John Boehner grabbed her ass at lunch and slurred something about shayna tushies before falling face-first into his organic grassfed triple martini lobster bisque.

I had to go to the "that one time" link to see what that John Boehner incident was and was highly amused to see that Michelle Obama reacted to John Boehner with exactly the look look I described in the previous post as the best response to someone who makes a sexist remark in a social situation.

"9-year-old slams Rahm over Chicago schools."

Drudge has been linking to this item at Salon:

"We are not toys, we are not going down without a fight ... This is racism," boy tells mayor over closures

We're expected to think wow, what a great kid.

I've watched the video, and my reaction is: Adults taught him a speech. He's being used as a political puppet. I've seen far too much of the use of children in politics — click my "using children in politics" tag — and I don't like it. I think it's especially bad to teach a child to yell angrily at another person and to exhibit hostility, and it's bad for us to express enthusiasm about a child who's good at giving the scripted performance. This is not how children should be taught. Ironically, the topic under discussion is education.

I've seen this before, in Wisconsin, with children taught to chant or sing the adults' hostility toward Gov. Scott Walker. I don't like when children are used to sing the praises of a politician either. We all know the absurd children's choirs singing about Barack Obama as if he's a divinity. But teaching children to perform hatred is another matter. Children need to learn about policy and politics over time, so that they understand the substance of the issues and can make their own choices.

It's really awful to see a 9-year-old used as a political mouthpiece and cheered as he yells rudely at an adult authority figure. He's also been taught to believe that he is hated because of his race — "this is racism" — and that the proper reaction is violence — "we are not going down without a fight." What a truly sad appropriation of youth!

"[I]f the bomber ends up being a white anti-government extremist, white privilege will likely mean the attack is portrayed as just an isolated incident..."

"... one that has no bearing on any larger policy debates. Put another way, white privilege will work to not only insulate whites from collective blame, but also to insulate the political debate from any fallout from the attack."

Writes Salon's David Sirota:

It will probably be much different if the bomber ends up being a Muslim and/or a foreigner from the developing world. As we know from our own history, when those kind of individuals break laws in such a high-profile way, America often cites them as both proof that entire demographic groups must be targeted, and that therefore a more systemic response is warranted. At that point, it’s easy to imagine conservatives citing Boston as a reason to block immigration reform defense spending cuts and the Afghan War withdrawal and to further expand surveillance and other encroachments on civil liberties.

This is just about exactly the opposite of what Rush Limbaugh was saying yesterday.