Jonathan Chait: “This last weekend, I finally saw 12 Years a Slave. It was the most powerful movie I’ve ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later — it was a morning matinee — I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era.”

Just released for the iPhone: The Day That Launched The Kennedy Half Century.

It’s a companion app for Larry Sabato’s The Kennedy Half Century.

As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches, a new Gallup poll finds that 61% of Americans still believe others besides Lee Harvey Oswald were involved.

The Monkey Cage: “Why are Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories so popular? The distinguishing feature of a successful conspiracy theory is power, and the Kennedy assassination has that in spades. The victim was an American president and the potential villains include actors of immense reach and influence.”

Out next week: A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination by Philip Shenon.

Former Speaker Thomas Foley (D-WA), who spent
30 years in Congress as a kingpin on agriculture, ultimately leading the
chamber as the ‘Speaker from Spokane,’ has died, Roll Call reports.

He was 84.

This is kind of amazing: JFK 50 Year Commemorative Collection.

The most important moments of Kennedy’s 1,000 days as president as compiled by the National Archives.

The Week warns: “Not every political party lasts forever.”

Associated Press: “Once, the young nation had a dramatic excuse: The Treasury was empty, the White House and Capitol were charred ruins, even the troops fighting the War of 1812 weren’t getting paid.”

“A second time, in 1979, was a back-office glitch that ended up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. The Treasury Department blamed it on a crush of paperwork partly caused by lawmakers who — this will sound familiar — bickered too long before raising the nation’s debt limit.”

“These lapses, little noted outside financial circles in their day, are nearly forgotten now.”

The Nation has dug up the 1981 audio of the late Lee Atwater explaining how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves.

Said Atwater: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.'”

Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka told the Dickinson Press that he regrets not running against Barack Obama to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Said Ditka: “Biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Not that I would have won, but I probably would have and he wouldn’t be in the White House.”

The Los Angeles Times looks back at the recall election 10 years ago that swept California Gov. Gray Davis (D) from office.

“A decade on, the effects are still being felt, albeit subtly, and not the way proponents imagined, or the way actor-turned-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the chief beneficiary, so grandly promised.”

“Fundamental changes in the way California elects its leaders — a top-two primary system aimed at pushing candidates to the ideological center and an impartial redrawing of the state’s political boundaries — will almost certainly change how Sacramento operates for years to come. Neither would likely have passed without Schwarzenegger sitting in the governor’s office.”

In the mail: Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics by Michael Barone.

A newly-published book reports that a U.S. hydrogen bomb “nearly detonated on the nation’s east coast, with a single switch averting a blast which would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that flattened Hiroshima,” the AP reports.

The Guardian published the recently-declassified document which details the information.

Bob Woodward’s notes of his discussions with “Deep Throat” during the Watergate crisis are now posted online.

Out this week: Wilson by A. Scott Berg.

“One hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson–the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President.”

The longtime broadcaster David Frost, who won fame for his interview with the former President Richard M. Nixon, has died at age 74, the New York Times reports.

Charlie Cook: “With all of the talk among some Republicans in Congress about impeachment and shutting down the government to stop Obamacare or force entitlement-spending cuts, you’d think that they were living in another reality back in the 1990s. Republicans were pursuing similar missions then, and things didn’t work out so well for the GOP. For those in need of a quick history lesson, all you need to know is that Republicans managed to lose House seats in the midterm elections of 1998. It was the only time since World War II that the party in the White House (Democrats) gained seats in a second-term, midterm election. Talk about seizing defeat from the jaws of victory!”

“We don’t face beatings, lynchings and shootings for our political beliefs anymore. Martin Luther King did not live and die to hear his heirs whine about political gridlock.”

— Bill Clinton, quoted by the Washington Post, on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.