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Today would have been John F. Kennedy’s 90th birthday.

June 11, 1963:

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?

Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Must-see TV, from the PBS NewsHour: what is the War in Iraq costing us?

(The full report is about three minutes longer than this clip, and includes discussion of countervailing costs — the cost of maintaining continuing sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime, for example — and can be viewed here.)

Bill Moyers, after showing clips of old conversations with World War II veterans:

Every Memorial Day I think about what those men did and what we owe them.

They didn’t go through hell for a political system that functions on bribery, or for offshore tax havens that pass the cost of national defense from the conglomerates that profit from war to the ordinary people whose children fight it, or for an economic system that treats working men and women as disposable cogs to be tossed aside at a predator’s whim, or for an America where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Yes, our soldiers did fight and sacrifice for freedom, but as wiser men than I have said through the ages, when liberty is separated from justice, neither liberty nor justice is safe, and those who sacrifice for both are mocked.

On April 30, 2004, the late-night ABC News show Nightline aired a tribute to the fallen, showing photos of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq while Ted Koppel read their names. (Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the local ABC affiliate, banned the broadcast on stations they owned.) Nightline repeated the tribute, with more names, on Memorial Day 2005.

Nightline is a half-hour program. If they had repeated the tribute this year, with no interruptions, they would have had only about half a second for each fallen soldier. We are currently at 3,455 dead — and counting.