Keep Your Religious Insanity to Your Own Damn Self

As much as it seems here in the U.S. that we are surrounded by the Xian freakazoids' demands that everyone follow their silly, illogical rules, at least they're not assaulting people who don't observe blue laws.

No, they're just murdering doctors.

Orthodox Jews are rioting in Jerusalem. The reason: because the city allows a parking lot to remain open on Saturday, which means people are able to drive on their holy day, which they consider sacred. Anne Barker was there to record the event as a journalist, and she switched on her recorder to document it all — when the protesters turned on her.

I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting - on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms.

It was like rain, coming at me from all directions - hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses.

Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face.

Somewhere behind me - I didn't see him - a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.

I wasn't even sure why the mob was angry with me. Was it because I was a journalist? Or a woman? Because I wasn't Jewish in an Orthodox area? Was I not dressed conservatively enough?

In fact, I was later told, it was because using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I'm not Jewish and don't observe the Sabbath.

This is something too many religious people fail to understand — you can practice your religion, other people can practice their religion, but you don't get to tell other people that they must practice your religion. If your crazy superstition says you aren't allowed to push a button on a certain day of the week, then don't. If your old myths claim that your god turns into a cracker when the right ritual is carried out, go ahead and believe that. If your dogma dictates that you should visit a certain magic rock before you die, then go ahead, make your pilgrimage.

But excuse us, everyone who doesn't have these wacky ideas has a perfect right to push the button, disrespect your cracker, or stay home and skip the crowds…and we also have the right to point and laugh at you. And if you are so intolerant, so irrational, and so vicious as to try and impose your foolishness on others, especially in such disgusting ways, then we have an obligation to use civic law and the power of the state to protect those others' liberties.

A Challenge to Africa

Steve Benen notes that President Obama continues to address the rest of the world with straightforward respect leavening blunt challenge.

President Obama challenged practically all of Africa today in a blunt and powerful speech to Ghana's parliament today.

SNIP

The "tough love" aspect of the speech was Obama urging his audience to take responsibility for the continent's future. He conceded the serious consequences of colonialism, "unnatural" borders written by outsiders that have bred division, and unbalanced trade practices.

SNIP

As with Cairo in June, Obama wasn't rebuking the continent or issuing condemnations, he was issuing a challenge and pointing towards the basis for new growth and new relationships.

It was also a reminder that this president, no matter where he is, doesn't talk down to his audiences, or shy away from nuanced or difficult ideas.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Read the full transcript here.

President Obama on Recovery and Jobs of the Future

"I am confident that the United States of America will weather this economic storm. But once we clear away the wreckage, the real question is what we will build in its place. Even as we rescue this economy from a full blown crisis, I have insisted that we must rebuild it better than before."



Full transcript here.

Tent Cities Aren't New: They Never Went Away

In The Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich shows that the growing number and size of tent cities around the country are less a manifestation of the foreclosure crisis and the recession than a newly-visible symptom of our structural economic dysfunction.

Tent City is less a single location than a nomadic but constant phenomenon, a shifting blue-tarped shadow to the glass and steel American metropolis. In good times and bad, Tent City comes and goes, forms and scatters and takes shape again. Despite its momentary dispersal in Sacramento, it is still out there--in Seattle, Portland, Reno, Providence, Fresno, even in the sprawling exurbs of southern California in the small city of Ontario. Tent City existed at the height of the real estate boom too, hidden in plain view, an omen for anyone willing to look.

While recent media accounts portrayed Tent City's incarnations as creatures of the recession--reborn Hoovervilles for the laid off and the foreclosed--shantytowns have been a periodic but permanent feature of American urban life for at least the past two decades. They are what connects us to São Paulo, Lagos and Mumbai, physical manifestations of our growing inequality and societal neglect.

SNIP

The rise of Tent City, though, says John Foley, director of the nonprofit Sacramento Self-Help Housing, had "almost nothing to do with the recession." But the recession has made poverty visible again, and Tent City tells the grueling backstory to the current recession--nearly thirty years of cuts in social services to the poor and mentally ill, the decimation of the industrial economy and the cruel underside of the housing boom. Kraintz, despite his soil-caked clothes and matted hair, summarized that narrative with more precision than most white-shirted economists can manage: "We've seen falling wages and rising rents. The two finally collided."

SNIP

Most of Tent City's residents, though, have been homeless for years. The original causes of their homelessness--an illness or injury, addiction, some life-shattering tragedy--blurred out in the distant past. "But on a structural, societal level," says Burke, the causes of homelessness are far from hazy: "It's the lack of housing that people can afford."

"I used to be a Republican. I voted for Ronald Reagan," a man who identified himself only as Tom M. told me, laughing. But it was Reagan who in his first year as president halved the budget for public housing. Over the course of his first term, more than half a million people were thrown off the disability rolls. "Until then," says Tim Brown, director of Sacramento County's Ending Chronic Homelessness Initiative, "basically there was no homelessness." Since then, neither the disability nor the housing budget has come close to recovering. Clinton-era welfare reforms cut all but the last remaining threads of the Great Society safety net.

SNIP

In April I asked Brenda Hill, who had been there from the start, if she knew where she'd go if Sacramento closed Tent City. She shook her head sadly. "Nope," she said. "Nowhere."

Read the whole thing.

Lucky Kansas City MO

For their representative in Congress is Emanuel Cleaver II*, proud member of the Progressive Caucus and outspoken proponent of a strong public option in the health care reform bill.



From Firedoglake:

Mike Stark was on Capitol Hill for us yesterday and he interviewed about 15 members of Congress, asking them on video if they'd take the Pledge. They were mostly non-committal, seemed really uncomfortable that anyone would be asking this question and really didn't want to be bothered. The one bright spot was Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, who gave -- without question -- the strongest statement that any member of Congress has given about the principles he is committed to on health care:

My name Emanuel Cleaver. I represent the 5th Congressional District of Missouri. I have said from the very beginning and I will say even to the end that I will not support any health care program that does not have a very strong public option. If there is no way to guarantee from the very beginning that every American will have access to adequate insurance coverage, that I will not support it.

The individuals who support this program will do it only if they have bargaining power and accountability to Congress and to the people of this country and particularly for me, Missouri's 5th Congressional District.

Health care should be available to everyone without limitation, and I think that those of us in the Progressive Caucus -- and frankly, I'm the Vice Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus -- and we have not taken an official vote on it, but I can tell you now that this is the direction we are moving in. We are going to support only those plans with the public option that would have some accessibility for every American to have quality health care.

That is just awesome. No equivocation, no back doors, no "I have to see the bill first," no weasel words. At a time when progressives should be standing up and taking charge of the health care debate, Emanuel Cleaver does just that.

We've started an Act Blue page for members of Congress who have taken the pledge. Right now, on the list are Raul Grijalva, Keith Elison, Lynn Woolsey, Jerrold Nadler, Rush Holt, Maxine Waters, Phil Hare and Cleaver. We hope there will soon be many more.

John Yarmuth, Louisville's own Proud Liberal Representative, why aren't you on that list? Just this week you were interviewed "drawing a line in the sand" on the public option. Why haven't you taken the Pledge?

* Our good friend Blue Girl is represented in Congress by Emanuel Cleaver. We are so envious.

The Perfect Repug Candidate

It gets more difficult every day to satirize the repugs, because they passed self-parody way back with Mark Foley. But Thers at Firedoglake throws his back into it, and comes up with a winner.

THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF WINGNUTTIA: Our candidate for president in 2012 will be a baked potato.

TEH LIBERALS: ...?

TPPoW: You heard us! We see the danger facing us in the Obama presidency as so powerful and so imminent that we demand a candidate who wants to devote time and speeches to fighting it in a very public way. That candidate is a baked potato. In fact, this baked potato right over here. ------>

TL: You're nominating a baked potato? What the hell are you talking about?

TPPoW: Ha! We knew that would drive you libtards crazy! Clearly, this potato has earned the eternal enmity of the liberal elite for the affront of who it is: a working-class, pro-life vegetable with decidedly red-state mores. Unlike you out-of-touch coastal elites with your pommes frites, the baked potato is from the real America -- these small towns that we get to visit, these wonderful little pockets of what we call the real America, the hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

TL: Are you on drugs? Who the hell is going to vote for a potato?

It gets even better. Read the whole thing.

Kissinger Will Never Cry

Jonathan Schell has a superb piece in The Nation about the day, 42 years ago, when he confronted Robert McNamara with his own eyewitness account of the U.S. bombing civilian villages in Vietnam.

Schell does not by any means absolve McNamara of responsibility for Vietnam, any more than McNamara sought to absolve himself. But he does make clear why McNamara, of all the many who contributed to that catastrophe, deserves to be singled out:

Certainly, if one puts McNamara's tears in one pan of a scales and the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans in the other, there is no doubt which way the scales would tip.

On the other hand, how many public figures of his importance have ever expressed any regret at all for their mistakes and follies and crimes? As the decades of the twentieth century rolled by, the heaps of corpses towered, ever higher, up to the skies, and now they pile up again in the new century, but how many of those in high office who have made these things happen have ever said, "I made a mistake," or "I was terribly wrong," or shed a tear over their actions? I come up with: one, Robert McNamara. I deduce that such acts of repentance are very hard to perform.

If a statue is ever made to him, as probably there will not be, let it show him weeping. It was the best of him.

Read the whole thing.

40 > 59: Only in the Democratic Senate

Since when is 59 not a majority of 100?

Since Democrats took over the U.S. Senate in 2007, as Steve Benen explains.

But there's another detail that the Post article didn't mention, and which is summarily ignored by the political establishment: we're dealing with a procedural dynamic that has never existed in American history. There's never been a time in U.S. history in which a Senate minority caucus could simply stop the majority from bringing all bills and/or mildly controversial nominees to the floor for a vote.

... the piece makes the current dynamic -- every vote gets a filibuster, and it's up to an easily-divided Democratic caucus to overcome this hurdle -- seem customary and normal, as this is just the way the American government has always operated.

It's not. Without a hint of debate, the rules have changed, and mandatory supermajorities on everything have become routine. Matt Yglesias recently noted, "This is a very new 'tradition' in American governance, it goes against everyone's common understanding of how democratic procedures are supposed to work, and there's very little reason to believe that the results will be beneficial in the long run."

Quickly and quietly, the political establishment came to accept that 60-vote minimums on everything of significance are customary. It's become something everyone simply "knows," despite the fact that this is a fairly radical departure from American norms.

If the nation is comfortable with this dramatic departure from the way the system was designed to function, fine. But let's not pretend this is normal.

No, it's not remotely close to "fine" and it never will be. Even if a majority of the country were in favor of changing the rules of math to make 40 greater than 59, it still would not be "fine," because not even a majority can eliminate majority rule.

The number of votes required to approve anything - bills, amendments, procedures, resolutions, bathroom breaks - in the 100-member U.S. Senate is 51. That's because - if there are any innumerate Democratic Senators reading this - 51 is 50 percent of 100 plus one. That's the definition of a majority.

And the repugs know it. That's why 49 Democratic Senators couldn't stop the repug Senate from wreaking havoc from 2003 to 2007: because repugs know that a majority is 51, and any party with fewer than 51 votes has to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

Yet even after all those years of being ignored and shut out of all decision-making because they had "only" 49 votes, today's 60-member Democratic majority is still letting the repugs - the 40-member repugs - dictate what happens and obstruct everything.

Writing specifically about the ludicrousness of Senate dems seeking repug votes for healthcare reform, Anonymous Liberal addresses this difference in party dynamics.

If you doubt any of this, you really haven't been paying any attention to politics over the last decade. Anyone who claims that the parties are mirror images of each other is a fool or liar. Republicans and Democrats just don't approach politics in the same way.

Conditions will never be more favorable for the Democrats than they are right now. And yet there is a real chance that they will fail to pass their signature policy. And this is because a number of Democrats in the Senate are reluctant to even step up to the plate to end a Republican filibuster--on a key Democratic initiative with widespread popular support and an electoral mandate behind it. I wonder if Republicans realize how lucky they are. I doubt that any majority party in history has ever made it easier for the opposition party to stay relevant.

I used to accuse the Democrats of bringing knives to the repug gun fight. That's not what they're doing anymore. Now, Democrats are bringing guns to the fight - then handing them over to the repugs and baring their own chests for killing shots.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

MTR Thugs

So, it seems the people blasting mountains to smithereens are not just thugs in how they treat irreplaceable mountains, forests and streams, but also thugs in the way they interact with their peaceful neighbors.

What a lovely site (sic): fat, drunken, violent pro-corporate thugs just dying to bring bloodshed to a peaceful 4th of July celebration.

Via Barefoot and Progressive, which points out that these thugs are MTR-lover Dan Mongiardo's supporters.

Letting the Fox Guard the Henhouse is Not Bipartisanship

Is there some kind of virulent bad appointments contagion going around?

Because President Obama is considering doing it again.

Sometimes I'm just rendered speechless, and this is one of those times. Natasha Chart via Sustainable Food at Change.org:

Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.

As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.

Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.

As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.

So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.

This guy is heading up a food safety working group.

I'm just swimming in the changeiness.

Kids, if you care about your food, you know what to do:

Comments: 202-456-1111
Switchboard: 202-456-1414
Or click here.

Monsanto, of course, is the company driving third-world farmers into destitution and starvation by selling them genetically-modified seed that cannot reproduce itself, forcing farmers to buy new seed every year instead of saving seed from each harvest.

The president might ask the organic vegetable gardening First Lady what she thinks of that.

Geithner, Summers, now Collins: Another Horrific Obama Appointment

President Obama caves to the freakazoids and appoints accomodationist Francis Collins to head the NIH.

As I wrote back in May:

More dangerous even than President Obama's eagerness for republican cooperation is his apparent tolerance for believers in invisible sky wizards and other fairy tales.

While it's remotely possible that someone who suffers from superstition could be trusted to run, say, the White House motor pool, you really don't want him in charge of things that require an acceptance of facts.

And you especially don't want him in charge of things like scientific research if he has made a career of publicizing his belief in myths that contradict scientific facts.

Obama is rapidly solidifying a reputation as the Great Compromiser. Bad enough he's already compromised the economic stimulus into ineffectiveness and is likely to compromise health care reform into an HMO bailout. Appointing freakazoid Collins to run the NIH would be killing scientific integrity.

Between science and superstition there can be no common ground, no meeting halfway, no compromise.

PZ Myers gets the last word.

He'll do a fine job…he's a competent administrator. I think we can trust him to manage the institution smoothly.

We can also trust him to drape Jesus over every major announcement, use the office as a platform for promoting religiosity, and otherwise taint the whole business with embarrassingly inane nonsense…just as he did with the human genome press conference. Isn't it about time our government promoted secular values that work over these antique and ineffective superstitions that just make their proponents look goofy?

Dignified Senator Franken Can Still Bring the Funny

Via Talking Points Memo:

Here's a video from yesterday, courtesy of our friends at The Uptake, of Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) speaking to a reception held in his honor at the Hart Senate Office Building after he'd been sworn in.

When speaking of his family, his friends, supporters, and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, Franken was frequently choking back tears -- as he noted, he has a tendency to stop just short of actually crying. And he also got in some nice jokes:

"If I thanked everyone here individually, who helped in this campaign, I would be thanking virtually everybody in this room," Franken said. "There's a couple of you who are kind of -- just here for the ride. (The crowd laughs.) But, 95% of you in this room had a tremendous amount to do with this victory."

$1.325 million: Conway for Senate sets fundraising record

Jonathan Meador at LeoWeekly's Fat Lip blog has the cleverest take:

Jack Conway’s campaign just sent out a blanket email earlier today announcing the $1.325 his apparatus has raised during this first quarter of fundraising season. Sure, the figure is notable for a couple of reasons (it’s apparently the largest amount raised by a candidate in Kentucky history; it triples the amount raised by his Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo, and more than doubles the amount collected by KY secretary of state/Republican cyborg Trey Grayson), but it’s a painfully obvious conclusion to draw when you consider two things.

Namely, the Commonwealth’s liberal blogosphere is virtually united behind the dashing AG, therefore securing his web supremacy for what will probably be a heated and ugly primary, conducted in true Kentucky fashion. (Fancy Farm will certainly host a hot one this year…)

It also doesn’t hurt Conway’s chances that Mongiardo is a baggage-laden ass clown whose participation in an increasingly disliked gubernatorial administration can only render futile any attempt the latter might undertake toward repackaging himself as something other than a baggage-laden ass clown. As PageOne hath noted, even Eastern Kentucky — Mongiardo’s hometurf — knows this: They gave Conway nearly $125,000. And these are people who can smell a carpetbagger from a mile off.

So what does it all mean? Nothing you didn’t already suspect, I guess, except that you’ll be seeing way more of Jack’s purdy mug on your digitally-transitioned TV sets than you will Lil’ Danny’s.

Media Czech has the breakdown:

Conway April-June Fundraising Facts:

• Conway more than tripled Dan Mongiardo's first-quarter filing on March 30. In just 60 days, it appears Conway has more than doubled the cash-on-hand that Mongiardo is expected to have accumulated after six months.

• More than $175,000 in on-line contributions.

• Labor PAC support from the Teamsters and UFCW, reflecting Conway's endorsement from the "Change to Win" labor coalition.

• 82% of contributions were from Kentucky. In a show of national viability for the top targeted seat in the country, Conway held major events in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.

• About 40 percent of contributions ($560,000) came from Conway's electoral and financial base of Jefferson County, which represents more than 20 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary.

• More than $124,000 came from Eastern Kentucky, the home of Dan Mongiardo. With the support of House Speaker Greg Stumbo and a majority of the elected leadership in high turnout counties, Conway is well-positioned to compete and win in Eastern Kentucky.

• Over $125,000 came from Northern Kentucky events, which is the backyard of Senator Jim Bunning and potential candidate Trey Grayson.

Read the whole thing.

Anti-taxers Speeding for the Cliff Edge

Steve M considers the logical conclusion of the GOP's anti-tax extremism and sees history repeating itself.

"Well, we'll just get by the way we did in the Great Depression -- on our own," [Ken] McGarva said, swatting mosquitoes on his porch after another hard day of herding dogies on his 1,000-head ranch. "We'll grow a vegetable garden, we'll use milk cows." If the roads are closed, he said, they always have horses....

This is delusional -- but it's increasingly widespread, and you should think of it as the wingnut version of late-'60s/early-'70s back-to-the-landism (which could also be pretty damn delusional). These folks don't have a coherent plan, but they think they have solid principles: Tax us less spend! Spend less! Oh, but give us everything we need from government. Just cut waste!

The next election cycle is going to be 1972, except in reverse. The out party's presidential candidate is going to have to seem sympathetic to those who wave the freak flag high. That's why Sarah Palin is still very much in the running. And if there's more right-wing violence in the next couple of years, the analogy could be even more precise, and Barack Obama's 2012 numbers could look like Nixon's forty years earlier.

Read the whole thing.

Gatewood for Governor

Oh, Hallelujah, Kentucky's own indefatigable Gatewood Galbraith will challenge Cowardly Waste of Oxygen Steve Beshear's re-election in 2011.

Whole encyclopedias could be written about Gatewood, but here's the short version: he's a pot head gun nut.

You read that right. He is also the most entertaining Kentucky politician since Happy Chandler.

Galbraith said he was running for governor “to combat Kentucky’s electile dysfunction. Nothing has happened in this state for years and it’s the fault of both major political parties. I want to help the electorate change that.”

Galbraith, 62, has maintained that he has no concerns about being a perennial candidate. “Kentucky has perennial problems,” he said.

Read the whole thing.

Gatewood for Governor!

Dr. Dan Channels His Inner Mitch McConnell

It appears the real reason Mitch McConnell doesn't want Jim Bunning to run for re-election is because homophobic DINO, coal industry apologist and no-hoper Senate candidate Lt. Gov. Dan Mongiardo would be a more reliable republican vote.

Page One nails it:

Daniel Mongiardo says he supports universal health care but not socialized medicine. And he rattles on with Republican talking points about cap and trade.

“The Cap and Trade is basically putting a tax on carbon, on CO2, which means anything that produces CO2, coal being number one, is going to be impacted negatively,” says Mongiardo.

Even though Mongiardo endorsed president Obama in the presidential election, he says the Cap and Trade bill is one area they do not agree on. “The tax that’s going to be levied on Kentucky families, Kentucky businesses, and our economy would be devastating. There’s no way that anyone in this whole state could possibly be “for” this Cap and Trade.”

But Mongiardo says he does agree with the President’s views on health care. “I am for universal health care where everyone has some form of insurance of some form of coverage. I am certainly not for socialized medicine.

What does he think government-run health care is? Socialized medicine, single-payer, universal. It’s all the same thing run by the same government for the same people. Does Lt. Dan think Kentuckians are stupid?

You’ll want want to watch WKYT/WYMT’s story. Click here for that.

Dan Mongiardo: Corporate whore, repug shill, shameless liar or hopeless idiot? How about all of the above? And who cares?

Jack Conway for Senate.

The Vietnam Rorschach Test of Robert McNamara

The Vietnam War did not end in 1975. The Vietnam War will not be over until the last Vietnam veteran, the youngest of whom is 52 years old, has died.

However, the death of the man generally considered the "architect" of that war offers an opportunity to consider why people on all sides of that war, people who agree on absolutely nothing else, agree on hating Robert McNamara.

Although I hate, have always hated and always will hate the Vietnam War, McNamara ranks relatively low on my list of Vietnam War villains, which is topped by War Criminals Henry Kissinger, Curtis LeMay, William Westmoreland and Richard Nixon, not to mention Lt. William Calley and the many like him.

Nevertheless, Michael Lind's metaphor holds:

The clue to McNamara's significance is that he was demonized by the left, the right and the center. If there is a Rorschach Prize, he deserved it. Other American public figures have been hated by one side, but usually they have been defended by the other. I can't think of anybody else in American history whom liberals, conservatives and moderates all joined in denouncing.

Why? The vitriol that was directed against McNamara always seemed excessive and even unhinged to me. After all, he wasn't the president. Why not blame Kennedy for deepening the U.S. involvement in Indochina, or Johnson for escalating it, or Nixon for prolonging it? But Kennedy, Johnson and even Nixon have had their partisans, who have sought to minimize the collateral damage done to the reputations of these presidents by their failed Vietnam policies.

SNIP

For whatever reason, McNamara instead of other figures below the presidential level was singled out in the public mind as the iconic symbol of failure in Vietnam. But this still does not explain how people who disagreed on everything else have so often agreed to make McNamara the symbol of all that was wrong in American foreign policy.

The solution to the mystery is simple, if subtle. There have been three influential critiques of the Vietnam War. The critiques are those of the antiwar left, the pro-war right and the realist center. Each critique generated its own image of McNamara to fit its own theory of the Vietnam War.

SNIP

The Vietnam War was a crime to the left, a betrayal to the right, and a mistake to the realists. It followed that Robert McNamara, the ritual scapegoat chosen to stand in for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was a war criminal to the left, a near-traitor to the right, and a fool to the realists. Had another scapegoat like Bundy or Rostow been chosen instead of McNamara to symbolize the failure of Vietnam, that individual would have been denounced with equal fervor as a hubristic fool by the realists, a near-traitor by the conservatives, and a Nazi-like war criminal by the radical left.

SNIP

What will historians in the future say about Robert McNamara and his role in Vietnam? I suspect that in the decades to come, historians will increasingly integrate the Second Indochina War -- and the first, and the third -- into the overall history of the Cold War, rather than treat it as an isolated episode or free-standing morality play. Beyond that, it will all depend on who writes the history. One prediction is safe: What historians of tomorrow think of Robert McNamara will depend on their view of the Vietnam War.

Read the whole thing.

HuffPo Snags Froomkin

I was rooting for Josh Marshall to dump that useless Villager Matt Cooper and replace him with WaPo escapee Dan Froomkin, but Adriana snatched him up first.

Glenn Greenwald explains both the pros and cons of Froomkin going to HuffPo, plus how this move signals the real change in American journalism.

Huffington says that it is Froomkin's views on the media that, for her, is his primary appeal. The key to vibrant, successful journalism, she said, is "getting away from the notion that truth is found by splitting the difference between the two sides, that there is always truth to both sides." Huffington argues that establishment journalism is failing due to "the idea that good journalism is about presenting both sides without a voice -- without any passion." The outlets that continue to adhere to that "obsolete" model "are paying a price." Froomkin -- who has written extensively about how passion-free, "both-sides-are-equally-valid" journalism is the primary affliction of the profession -- echoes that view: "The key challenge is to present an alternative to the 'splitting the difference' culture that has infested traditional media."

While this pairing is, in some ways, a natural one (even the Post Ombudsman suggested that "Web sites like The Huffington Post or Politico would seem a perfect fit"), there are also potential sources of tension. As a practitioner of what he calls "accountability journalism" -- "explaining how Washington works; pulling no punches" -- Froomkin has been a vehement critic of the Obama administration for the last several months, while The Huffington Post frequently trumpeted (some might say "cheerleading") the Obama campaign and even his presidency (though it has become mildly more critical of Obama in recent months; its screaming, red headline today: "White House May Cave on Public Option"). Will Froomkin's harsh criticisms of Obama alienate an Obama-loving HuffPost readership?

And given the central importance of Arianna Huffington's personal relationships with key media figures and those in power, will Froomkin's unrestrained criticisms of many of those same people undermine a key aspect of The Huffington Post's business and promotional strategies? Both Huffington and Froomkin insist that he will have full editorial freedom, though that commitment is often more easily embraced in theory than in practice.

For all the self-serving talk about how political journalism is dying, it is striking how new and online media outlets continue to thrive. Yesterday, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo -- which began as a one-person blog -- announced a major investment from Netscape founder Marc Andreesen that is allowing it to double its reporting staff. And now today, a columnist fired by an old, struggling establishment outlet claiming "business reasons" as a motive is not only almost immediately hired by a new media entity, but was inundated with expressions of interest and even other offers from an electic mix of reporting outlets.

Clearly, journalism itself is not dying. What is dying -- and rightfully so -- is the staid, establishment-serving, passion-free, access-desperate, mindless stenographic model to which establishment journalism rigidly adheres. As The Post's Ombudsman reported from personal experience, Froomkin's firing left "an army of angry followers" and "an outcry from a loyal audience." People are obviously hungry for the type of real journalism Froomkin practices. The Huffington Post immediately capitalized on the Post's short-sighted and myopic decision to fire one of their most (and one of their very few) vibrant, passionate and innovative journalists. In this episode lies many insights about the real reasons establishment journalism is struggling severely.

Read the whole thing.

Xian Fanatics At It Again in Kentucky

Although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled at least twice that posting the Ten Commandments in public spaces is unconstitutional, disallowed and really fucking annoying, the dominionist freakazoids never quit.

The courthouse in Jackson County should have to take down several copies of the Ten Commandments because they are an improper governmental endorsement of religion, a federal lawsuit argues.

The lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky and a county resident, Eugene Phillips Jr., seeks a ruling that nine copies of the biblical laws on the courthouse walls in McKee are unconstitutional. It also seeks an injunction ordering the county to take down the copies.

SNIP

(Jackson County Judge-Executive William O.) Smith said he had not seen a copy of the lawsuit but that most county residents would support keeping the Ten Commandments displayed in the courthouse. He said a judge might order the county to remove the Commandments, but "that doesn't mean it's right."

Thank you, Judge Smith, for reminding us that the courtesy title "Judge" given to county execs in Kentucky doesn't hide the lack of legal - or even basic educational - qualifications for the job.

The lawsuit was filed last week. The lawsuit says that Phillips and other ACLU members in Jackson County must use the courthouse to do business such as paying taxes.

When they do, exposure to the Ten Commandments displays is "direct and unwelcome," because the citizens see the copies as a message of religious endorsement by the county, in violation of the First Amendment, the lawsuit says.

The plaintiffs say that the First Amendment correctly seeks to protect individual freedom by preventing undue government interference in the exercise of religious beliefs, and by barring the government from favoring one religion over another, or religion over non-religion, the lawsuit says.

The ACLU and a handful of courageous citizens like Eugene Phillips are the only things standing between the secular republic the founders risked their lives to establish and the Dominionist nightmare the freakazoids want to impose.

If you haven't joined the ACLU yet, do it today. Or at least send them a check.

Yellow Dog for Chair of Texas Oil and Gas Commission

Because I, Yellow Dog, hate everything to do with the Oil and Gas Industry, and believe the Oil and Gas Industry is the source of all evil in this world and the cause of the Decline of Capitalism, Western Civilization and the American Way, and demand that the Oil and Gas Industry should be outlawed immediately - For The Children - I expect to be immediately appointed head of whatever Texas state agency oversees the oil and gas industry.

No, I'm not insane. I'm just taking advantage of Texas Governor Rick Perry's new habit of appointing as heads of agencies people who are dedicated to destroying everything that agency stands for.

Could it get any worse? Could someone who despises public education soon be heading up the board tasked with managing the Texas public school system? Well, the buzz suggesting that Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, may be the next chair of the Texas State Board of Education is growing louder, writes Hearst Capitol bureau reporter Gary Scharrer for the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News.

Look, we were under no illusions when the Texas Senate wisely rejected the confirmation of Don McLeroy as board chair in May. We knew Gov. Rick Perry would likely choose another member of the board’s far-right faction as chair (even though there are other far more responsible conservative Republicans on the board). After all, the far-right faction represents his electoral base, which he will need in his re-election battle next year.

But surely even the governor realizes that choosing an extremist like Dunbar would be almost inconceivably reckless and irresponsible. Dunbar has clearly expressed her loathing for public education in her book One Nation Under God, calling public schools a “tool of perversion,” “unconstitutional” and “tryannical.” She has also personally rejected the public school system, home-schooling her children. In fact, she wrote in her book that sending our children to public schools is “throwing them into the enemy’s flames even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.”

Just before the November election, Dunbar also authored a vicious Internet rant in which she called Barack Obama a terrorist sympathizer who wants to seize total power by declaring martial law. In another Internet screed, she charged that Obama is promoting Marxism by calling for “shared sacrifice and social responsibility.” (Not surprisingly, both essays have been removed from the Web sites that published them.)

By appointing Dunbar, Gov. Perry would be sending a clear message that he shares Dunbar’s extremism and her contempt for public education. He would be putting his political fortunes ahead of the education of nearly 5 million Texas schoolchildren. In short, such an appointment would be a shocking betrayal of all those children and their families.

Perry's predecessor Smirky pioneered this technique, of course, but Perry has taken it to a new level. Capitol Annex sees it as Perry's desperation to get the super-freakazoid vote in his primary battle for re-election next year.

Down with Tyranny sees it as Perry's desperation to claim the "crazier than a shithouse rat" crown from Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin.

Ignore them, Governor Perry. Just think about this: I absolutely guarantee you that I hate the Oil and Gas Industry WAY more than Cynthia Dunbar hates public education.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....