Ok when?

Bobby Jindal doesn't think "the time is right" to talk about taking down the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina statehouse. 

Also speaking up for the Confederate flag: Gov. Bobby Jindal, who was asked about it by ABC News. Jindal indicated he thought flying the Confederate flag was a states' rights issue:

Look, the states decide that — and, again, just like with the gun issue, let's have that debate at the right time. I mean, right now we should all be in mourning. I think flags should be at half-mast, you know, across our states, across our country. Now's a time for mourning. 

Not sure when Bobby thinks the time might be right seeing as how they've been talking about it for decades already.

“It’s like getting political Ebola,” said David Woodard, a longtime Republican political consultant and professor of political science at Clemson University, of the Confederate flag issue. “Any time you touch it you’re going to make more enemies than friends.”

Woodard recalled the hard-fought battle in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the NAACP announced a boycott on tourism to the Palmetto State in protest of the flag and the issue became part of the national conversation during the Republican presidential primary between John McCain and George W. Bush.

Then-Gov. David Beasley lost reelection in 1998, in part because of his campaign to take down the Confederate flag, Woodard said.

“It was just a very, very tense situation, and you weren’t going to come up with a solution that was going to make everybody happy,” Woodard said.

Tens of thousands of people marched on the Capitol to protest the flag, and several thousand others from the Sons of Confederate Veterans stood on the statehouse steps — in uniform, Woodard said.

State Rep. Rick Quinn, who was the majority leader of the state House of Representatives at the time, said the fierce debate made for strange bedfellows: In an effort to stall a compromise, members of the black caucus who wanted to exorcise the flag from the Capitol grounds joined forces with lawmakers who refused to vote to have it removed from atop its dome.

After months of debate and a final marathon session, Republican leaders wrought the compromise that hard-liners on both sides had feared: The flags hanging on the dome and in each of the legislative chambers would be moved to the state museum, and a new one would be erected on a 30-foot flagpole at the Confederate war memorial outside the statehouse.

But any other changes to the monument — or any other in the state — would require the two-thirds vote, and South Carolina does not have a robust voter referendum system, so a ballot initiative could not overturn the law.

Fifteen years ago they decided the time wasn't right to do away the flag. Just needed some time for "the healing" to happen.  Did the healing happen?

Bizarro World is real life

Occasional reminder that FOX News is, by a wide stretch, the most watched and relied upon source for the vast majority of Americans. So instead of laughing at the crazy upside down way they present events like Wednesday's shooting in Charleston, maybe start to take seriously the fact that.. for most people.. that's what's really going on out there. Maybe that isn't a comforting thought, but it's what we need to deal with.

Tonight on The Nightly Show (a much less viewed news program on Comedy Central) Larry Wilmore made an offhanded comment about how young the Charleston shooter was.  "People keep saying racism is just gonna go away when all the old racists die off..." or something like that.  But, aside from the fact that demographics is not destiny in politics, it's a good idea to notice that "the kids today" are just as racist as they ever were.

So Wilmore's observation shouldn't be some big shock. But it comes as one to a lot of so-called liberals who, most of the time, prefer to wallow in their own smugness than to take realistic stock of what's happening around them. Pay attention to what the wingnuts actually believe. Take them seriously. Because as comforting as it is for many of you to feel superior, there are a lot more of them than there are of you.

Stop assuming everything will be okay because of the "arc of history bends toward justice." It doesn't.  At least not on its own. Just sitting around waiting for it to is a kind of magical thinking almost as bad as the belief that "the free market" or "big data" will solve all of our problems.  In fact, one could best describe the political center at the moment as the intersection of futurism, capitalism, and a passive optimism that social problems work themselves out on their own.

These are dangerous times. The times are always dangerous, really. But we seem to be getting better and better at fooling ourselves into applying exactly the wrong remedy or ignoring the danger altogether.  It's almost been a year since Ferguson. The white backlash has only begun to gain momentum. The time to start noticing is now because 2016 could be a much uglier election year than we've seen in quite a while.