THANKS FOR NOTHING, TEXAS LEGISLATURE

Molly Ivins summarizes the Texas legislative session that has just ended.

Newspaper editorials around the state graded this session an "F." As Bud Kennedy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said, the session opened with low expectations and managed to exceed them with an even lower performance.

NIXON HISTORY REVISIONISM

I've been wondering what Joe Conason was up to. One of my favorite journalists, I've not seen a significant story or think-piece from him in a while.

He's back, with a good read about the Nixon apologists a la the Deep Throat revelation.

WAR NERD

One of the most fascinating interviews I've read in ages. It's the War Nerd.

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT VS. SCIENCE

Wow. Being a Florida native I periodically scroll my home-state newspapers. And every once in a while, I come across a gem. This opinion piece asks why we should permit religious fundamentalists (and I object to that characterization -- the Christian right ignores, or at the very least deemphasizes, the fundamentals of Christ's teachings) to deny the rest of us the benefits of scientific discovery.

What right do fundamentalists have to deny us such medical wonders? It took more than 300 years for the Catholic Church to acknowledge that Copernicus was right, and that Galileo had been unjustly punished. Fortunately, the fundamentalists' crusade against science will be much shorter-lived. We all have too much to gain from science to let the rigid beliefs of a small minority deny us its benefits. In a relatively few years their crusade will surely come to a very timely end. During that time, however, science elsewhere will have moved ahead by its usual leaps and bounds, and the United States will have to scurry to catch up.

I have never understood Christians who fear enlightenment -- to whom science, philosophy, historical analysis, art, etc. are threats to their emotional, or spiritual (as they would have it) well-being. I've been a true believer in Christ since I was nine years old. I distinctly remember when (I was an intelligent child) I went from being a reluctant Sunday School-er to a child who had discovered Truth. Challenged to memorize hundreds of Bible verses in a matter of weeks so that I would win the annual class competition (I hadn't even started when others were winding down), I actually became so fascinated with the Word that I read far before and after the assigned passages to understand the context. I fell in love with Jesus then and there, though it took me many years study afterwards to be able to truthfully say I loved the Father as much. Similarly to how we interact as earthly children of earthly parents, Jesus seemed my ideal older brother, God the stern, not understood, and somewhat feared, parent. It has taken study and wisdom born of experience to relate to God as my true father. I remember when, having embraced that understanding, I exulted in a bumper sticker I spotted that said, "God is DAD. Hallelujah!"

My point is, in a decades-old search for spiritual growth, I have never felt threatened by a single scientific discovery or theory. Nothing I have ever read of science has disproven or contradicted the tenets of my faith. The Bible says, fear is the opposite of faith. So what is the Christian right exposing by their obsessive opposition to science?

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (I Jn 4:18)

PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN VOICES

Christian progressives, we're encouraged to take heart. Our voices are beginning to be heard.

For example, Governor Bob Riley of Alabama proposed a tax increase to help the poor, calling this action his Biblical duty. On CBS News, Gov. Riley said, "we're supposed to love God, love each other, and help take care of our poor." [Ed. note: Riley's bill went down in flames.]

And former US Ambassador to the United Nations John C. Danforth, a former US senator and an Episcopal priest, says he does not fault religious conservatives for political action on high-profile issues like the Terri Schiavo case, but that the Republican Party has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.  He warns that, aside from obvious First Amendment issues, the work of government and political leaders is to hold together as one people in a very diverse nation in which religion can be uniting influence but is more often highly divisive.

BLOOD REPLACES OIL AS IRAQ'S CHIEF EXPORT

RICK PERRY TO SIGN BILL AT CHURCH

Dallas KLIF radio talk show host Greg Knapp was conflicted yesterday regarding Texas Governor Rick Perry's plans to "showcase his opposition to abortion and gay marriage with a bill-signing ceremony at a church this weekend" but not over Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater's article about it.

To his credit, Knapp repeatedly expressed that he didn't "feel right about it," that he thought it was a bad idea for the Governor to be so "in your face" about it with those who oppose the bills, that he rather should be trying to bring us together rather than polarizing us Texans. (The bill requires that minors have the written consent of parents before getting an abortion, and during the ceremony the governor also plans to tout his support of a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to ban gay marriage.)

But Knapp also repeatedly stressed that the Slater article said the event would happen at a "church," and Knapp pointed out that, in fact, the event was scheduled to take place at the church's religious school gym, NOT a church. Knapp should know that the word "church" refers to a group of believers and not to a facility; therefore, the religious school gym is property of the church every much as is the sanctuary, which I believe Knapp was referring to when he used the word "church."

Knapp also went off several times about how this is a ridiculous thing to get hot about since the Democrats (he noted John Kerry several times) have traditionally politicked in black churches and nobody made a big deal about it. He spoke as if politicizing the church is a brand-new initiative for Republicans, and they're being unfairly criticized for it. As a Southern Baptist, I can recall numerous times since the late seventies that Republican politicians appeared as honored (and, the implication was, endorsed) guests in the pulpit at church services I attended. When running for president in '96, Bob Dole himself spoke at the Easter service at Prestonwood Baptist Church, which my family attended, and we were very offended. It was an unpleasant political intrusion into our most sacred service of the year, the celebration of our Lord's resurrection.

Rick Perry just happens to be my husband's fifth cousin. We have no acquaintanceship with him, and wish none. He is a vapid hairhead, a political opportunist who wouldn't know how to lead his way out of a paper bag. But he knows how to follow. He's witnessed the success of Bush/Rove in pandering to the Christian right and by Jove, he's going to co-opt it.

UPDATE: Love that Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

This is the first act in what will be an interesting passion play should U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison announce that she indeed is going to run for governor in 2006. That would make the Republican primary the must-see race in March.

Hutchison's traditional power base is Dallas; Perry has the GOP hearts in Houston. That places oh- so-conservative Tarrant County -- not to mention Johnson, Parker and Denton counties -- center stage for one bodacious political contest.

All of which obscures the sad fact that when Perry puts pen to paper in a Sunday photo op in a church-school gymnasium, people of faith will once again allow a politician to use their religion as a prop.

KORAN MISUSE WATCH: THE CASE OF THE ACCIDENTAL URINATION

I know wingers think we liberals are all America-hating, America-blaming traitorous atheistic slugs, but it's just not true. I love my country in an almost maudlin way, and I take no pleasure in mistakes made in our name. But like a good parent can't just close their eyes when their child misbehaves and pretend it didn't happen, lest the child graduate to worse offenses, I can't put on blinders when my country does wrong. On the contrary, I want to fix it and make it better, truer to its ideals.

So I read this report, in which the Army tries to refute allegations of misuse of the Koran at Gitmo:

The U.S. Southern Command, which supervises the Guantanamo facility, said Friday that in specific incidents prisoners' Korans were kicked, stepped on, and drenched with water. In one incident, the report says a ventilation system carried a soldier's urine into a prisoner's cell, which got on the prisoner and his Koran. The report says that incident was accidental, but the soldier was removed from his post. It says the prisoner was given a new Koran and a new set of clothes.

All of the incidents happened in mid-2003 or earlier, except the accidental urine incident. The investigation also uncovered several other incidents of complaints by prisoners about handling of the Koran, but concluded that the incidents were either minor or could not be confirmed.

Excuse me, accidental urination? How does urine go from a soldier to a ventilation system (aren't they installed in the ceiling?), which then gets into a prisoner's cell? Sounds more likely that the soldier peed into the cell deliberately. I don't WANT to believe an American soldier would do something so disgusting and demeaning so I can "blame America," and in fact I've NEVER blamed America. I've blamed Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I and Bush II. That's not the same thing as blaming America. America is an ideal, a vision of good governance based upon our Constitution. My country is the United States OF America. And when obvious, pitiful lies are put out in our name, I'm embarrassed and/or outraged. Who do they think is going to believe this tale of accidental urination seepage through the ventilation system that was so great it wet the prisoner's Koran and his clothes? And if it was inadvertent, why was the soldier removed from his post?

The irony is, there are plenty gullible true believers who will swallow it. And what should be a hilarious story for Jon Stewart's Daily Show will probably be completely ignored by everyone else.

UPDATE: The NY Times has more detail on the incident:

The splashing of urine was among the cases described as inadvertent. It was said to have occurred when a guard urinated near an air vent and the wind blew his urine through the vent into a detainee's cell.
...
The final report released on Friday said that four of the five incidents took place after January 2003, after written procedures governing the handling of the Koran had been put in place. That contradicted an account provided last Thursday by General Hood, who was asked directly whether all five of the incidents had taken place before January 2003, and replied: "Not all of them. One of them occurred since then."

AMERICANS SUPPORT U.S. ACTION IN DARFUR

Blowing away the Bush excuse for not taking action in Darfur: that there's little public support for it. Not so, says Zogby poll.

"THE SMOKING BULLET IN THE SMOKING GUN"

Bush started the war without us:

The implications of this information for US lawmakers are profound. It was already well known in Washington and international diplomatic circles that the real aim of the US attacks in the no-fly zones was not to protect Shiites and Kurds. But the new disclosures prove that while Congress debated whether to grant Bush the authority to go to war, while Hans Blix had his UN weapons-inspection teams scrutinizing Iraq and while international diplomats scurried to broker an eleventh-hour peace deal, the Bush Administration was already in full combat mode--not just building the dossier of manipulated intelligence, as the Downing Street memo demonstrated, but acting on it by beginning the war itself. And according to the Sunday Times article, the Administration even hoped the attacks would push Saddam into a response that could be used to justify a war the Administration was struggling to sell.

On the eve of the official invasion, on March 8, 2003, Bush said in his national radio address: "We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein does not disarm peacefully, he will be disarmed by force." Bush said this after nearly a year of systematic, aggressive bombings of Iraq, during which Iraq was already being disarmed by force, in preparation for the invasion to come. By the Pentagon's own admission, it carried out seventy-eight individual, offensive airstrikes against Iraq in 2002 alone.
...
But another question looms, particularly for Democrats who voted for the war and now say they were misled: Why weren't these unprovoked and unauthorized attacks investigated when they were happening, when it might have had a real impact on the Administration's drive to war? Perhaps that's why the growing grassroots campaign to use the Downing Street memo to impeach Bush can't get a hearing on Capitol Hill. A real probing of this "smoking gun" would not be uncomfortable only for Republicans. The truth is that Bush, like President Bill Clinton before him, oversaw the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam against a sovereign country with no international or US mandate. That gun is probably too hot for either party to touch.

Let the wingers try to hang this on Bill Clinton. He's out of office, and they did enough to punish him for his sins while he still occupied it. The issue isn't whether or not the Big Dog bombed Iraq before Bush did. The issue is whether or not Bush was already waging war while he was still talking about it as a "last resort." There are hugely different degrees of culpability here. Clinton didn't lie about his bombing or the purposes behind it. Bush has lied and lied and lied to both the American people and Congress. He started the war even before he'd finished coming up with a rationale for it.

WHY BUSH WON'T INTERVENE IN DARFUR

Nat Hentoff.

As Silverstein notes, the head of Sudan's equivalent of the CIA, Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, was Khartoum's liaison with Osama bin Laden when that Al Qaeda flourished in Sudan during the 1990s. More recently, members of Congress have charged General Gosh and some of his colleagues in Khartoum with "directing military attacks against civilians in Darfur."

With their blood on his hands, General Gosh told the L.A. Times, "We have a strong partnership with the CIA. The information we have provided has been very useful to the United States."

General Gosh was not understating how valuable his partnership with the CIA has been, and continues to be, to the United States—so valuable that last October, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service confirmed that while Gosh has indeed been among those playing "key roles" in the genocide in Darfur, the Bush administration is "concerned that going after these individuals could disrupt cooperation on counter-terrorism."

THE HARRY REID-ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW

The Rolling Stone interview with Harry Reid is here. It is disappointingly short. Excerpts:

In his first five months as minority leader, Sen. Harry Reid has come out swinging. The soft-spoken Nevadan has called George Bush a "loser," Clarence Thomas an "embarrassment" and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan a "political hack." He has held the Democrats together to oppose Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. And he stood up to Majority Leader Bill Frist and other radical Republicans who tried to deploy the "nuclear option" to overturn the Senate tradition of judicial filibusters.
...
RS: Is the deal real? Republicans are saying they will still go nuclear if you filibuster.

HR: They're saying that to cover themselves. The nuclear option is history. Listen: The Republicans who signed that agreement, we should put up a statue to them someplace. That was a brave thing they did.

RS: Why couldn't you and Frist agree on a deal yourselves to avert a showdown?

HR: He couldn't do a deal. He's being driven by these right-wing zealots.

RS: What did you learn about Frist during your negotiations?

HR: I like him, but he hasn't been in government very long. He's a doctor, and doctors have a little different outlook on life. Being a senator is about the art of compromise. That's what the filibuster is all about -- it forces compromise. And if anyone feels that compromising is unethical, or immoral, then they should get in some other business -- because that's what we do.

RS: What differences do you see in Bush now that he's in his second term?

HR: This first five months of the second term, he and his folks have become even more pushy than they were in the first four years.

RS: Did you learn anything from dealing with the Mob during your days on the Nevada Gaming Commission that helps you in dealing with the Republicans?

HR: [Laughs] It allows you to put things in perspective when there aren't bombs in your car, when your kids aren't being taken to school with armed guards, when you don't have to carry a gun every place you go. Those were some very frightening times in my life. In the Senate, I'm not worried about physical pain -- just legislative pain.

RS: What kinds of gains will Democrats make in 2006?

HR: Well, history's on our side. Presidents who have been in Bush's situation have lost from one to thirteen senators. We are going to be competitive in races in Pennsylvania, Montana, Ohio, Rhode Island and Missouri.

RS: Why did Kerry lose, and what do Democrats have to learn from that?

HR: Everybody says it was about values, but I don't buy that. Senator Kerry lost because he ignored rural America. Take Nevada as an example. Ninety-one percent of the registered voters are in Reno and Las Vegas. So you would think that someone who carries those two counties by a nice margin would be the winner. Wrong. Kerry carried those counties -- but he got slaughtered in the other nine percent, where the turnout was huge. The rural vote went five-to-one against Kerry, and he lost the state by two percent. Democrats can no longer win elections in big cities. We have to go to places like Elko and Carson City and Ely and let people know who we are. Until we do that, we're going to continue to lose.

RS: You've called Bush a loser.

HR: And a liar.

RS: You apologized for the loser comment.

HR: But never for the liar, have I?

JUST HOW MANY DANGEROUS TERRORISTS ARE IN GITMO?

Some Gitmo detainees maintain that they were sold to the Americans:

Bounties ranged from $3,000 to $25,000, the detainees testified during military tribunals, according to transcripts the U.S. government gave The Associated Press to comply with a Freedom of Information lawsuit.

A former CIA intelligence officer who helped lead the search for Osama bin Laden told AP the accounts sounded legitimate because U.S. allies regularly got money to help catch Taliban and al-Qaida fighters. Gary Schroen said he took a suitcase of $3 million in cash into Afghanistan himself to help supply and win over warlords to fight for U.S. Special Forces.

"It wouldn't surprise me if we paid rewards," said Schroen, who retired after 32 years in the CIA soon after the fall of Kabul in late 2001. He recently published the book "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan."

Schroen said Afghan warlords like Gen. Rashid Dostum were among those who received bundles of notes. "It may be that we were giving rewards to people like Dostum because his guys were capturing a lot of Taliban and al-Qaida," he said.
...
Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for "a briefcase full of money" then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo.

"It's obvious. They knew Americans were looking for Arabs, so they captured Arabs and sold them — just like someone catches a fish and sells it," he said. The detainee said he was seized by "mafia" operatives somewhere in Europe and sold to Americans because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — an Arab in a foreign country.

A detainee who said he was a Saudi businessman claimed, "The Pakistani police sold me for money to the Americans."

"This was part of a roundup of all foreigners and Arabs in that area," of Pakistan near the Afghan border, he said, telling the tribunal he went to Pakistan in November 2001 to help Afghan refugees.
...
In March 2002, the AP reported that Afghan intelligence offered rewards for the capture of al-Qaida fighters — the day after a five-hour meeting with U.S. Special Forces. Intelligence officers refused to say if the two events were linked and if the United States was paying the offered reward of 150 million Afghanis, then equivalent to $4,000 a head.

That day, leaflets and loudspeaker announcements promised "the big prize" to those who turned in al-Qaida fighters.

Said one leaflet: "You can receive millions of dollars. ... This is enough to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life — pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people."

Is ANYBODY at Gitmo guilty, other than a handful? What ARE we doing? Maintaining our own gulag because we dare not admit the vast majority of the prisoners we've got stashed are innocents? Good grief.

DEEP THROAT AND ME

Bob Woodward tells his side of the story.

There's nothing really new here except his account of how the two met and continued their acquaintance before Felt became a source for Woodward's reporting. Woodward, like others, speculates on Felt's motives, but offers no new insights.

IS THERE MORE TO THE CRASH OF THE IRAQI AIR FORCE PLANE?

When I asked last week, "Is Bush setting his sights on Iran?" I was not suggesting that he WAS, just being cautious -- I wouldn't put anything beyond this administration. But Lapin at KOS has some suspicions that that crash of an Iraqi Air Force plane might be a prelude to an invasion. Read it and tremble.

HARRY REID ROCKS

From an upcoming interview in Rolling Stone as reported by Raw Story:

RS: You've called Bush a loser.

HR: And a liar.

RS: You apologized for the loser comment.

HR: But never for the liar, have I?

WHAT TO MAKE OF DEEP THROAT?

I haven't commented on Mark Felt's revelation that he was Bob Woodward's Watergate source Deep Throat. I'm glad Nixon was brought down, and his smarmy, above-the-law, mediocre, mean-spirited little cabal of advisers and sycophants banished from Washington inner circles for a time -- that is, until they could repackage themselves as religious crusaders and radio talk show hosts. They broke the law, they covered it up, they lied to Congress and the American people, and they got found out and punished. That was all good. I wish that today there were courageous reporters who would take on the powers that be when they abuse that power, but most of the modern press seems more titillated by stories with a sexual twist than they are by more important issues like war, intelligence, security, healthcare, the economy, misuse of government power and assets, etc. And I wish that government whistleblowers could actually get a hearing for their allegations instead of getting fired and/or having their reputations destroyed, then seeing their corrupt or incompetent bosses get promoted.

But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Anyway, Eric Alterman says a lot of what I'm thinking and feeling.

UPDATE: Keith Olbermann has some ver-r-r-y interesting insights.

WHAT'S HAPPENING AT GITMO

Time magazine has a Gitmo thumbnail:

In the April 30 letter, lawyer Marc Falkoff, who represents Yemeni inmate Abdulmalik Abdulwahab Al-Rahabi, says statements made by an important witness against his client "appear to have been obtained by use of torture." Falkoff's letter says the witness is the same detainee whom FBI agents at Gitmo, in internal e-mails disclosed earlier this year, called #63 and who they said was intimidated with a dog and showed signs of "extreme psychological trauma" after being subjected to "intense isolation for over three months."
...
One of those inquiries, the findings of which are expected to be issued soon by Air Force Lieut. General Randall Schmidt, was spurred by eyewitness accounts from FBI agents at Gitmo from mid-2002 to mid-2004. According to just-released memos, agents reported seeing captives shackled in a fetal position for 24 hours without food or water and left in their own excrement, another gagged with duct tape that covered much of his head and another who had torn out his hair after being chained all night in a hot room. Former Army Sergeant Erik Saar, who served at Gitmo and wrote Inside the Wire with TIME correspondent Viveca Novak, has described an instance in which a female interrogator smeared fake menstrual blood on a captive's face. It may have been a measure of how detainees are treated that when Army Specialist Sean Baker played the role of an inmate in a 2003 training exercise, he says he was beaten so badly by MPs, who did not know he was one of them, he now has seizures. The Army is investigating the incident, and Baker has filed suit against the government, seeking damages for his injuries.
...
Still, earlier this year the civilian head of intelligence at Guantanamo admitted in newspaper interviews that the majority of detainees were no longer of much intelligence value and were not even being regularly interrogated.

NOW YOU CAN CONGRATULATE US...

Lovely miss Caitlyn Elizabeth was born this afternoon, six pounds seven ounces, twenty inches, mother, father and brother Conner also doing well.

"THE TEN MOST HARMFUL BOOKS"

Oh, this is rich. The right-wing Human Events Online has come up with one of those goofy lists we all enjoy, this one entitled "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Some of the choices may have some validity, but some beg the question, "Harmful to Whom?" It's unclear to me whether or not the judges actually READ any of these books, but go on, pick your faves:

1. The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels)

2. Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler)

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao (Mao Zedong)

4. The Kinsey Report (Alfred Kinsey)
Well, if old Alfred hadn't reported that people were having sex, the rest of us wouldn't have had to join in. It was an especially low blow to suggest that women could enjoy sex, since that meant husbands had no more excuses.

5. Democracy and Education (John Dewey)
In Democracy and Education Dewey emphasizes the associational and communal aspects of democracy, and finds that conscious, directed education is necessary to establish these conditions and form democratic character in children. Growth, experience, and activity are the preferred terms by Dewey to describe the tying of learning to social, communicative activity that allows for the flourishing of democratic community. I suppose Dewey was just too fond of words like "freedom," "social" and "communal" for the wingers.

6. Das Kapital (Karl Marx)

7. The Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan)
Betty Friedan blew the lid off the top of the Big Secret: that women in Post-WWII America were unhappy with their lives, victims of "a false belief system that require(d) them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands and children." Now THAT was a big blow to the little castle-rulers. They'll never forgive her for telling their women what other women were privately confiding to Friedan.

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy (Auguste Comte)
The founder of sociology and advocate of the technocrats, "(t)he dominant motive of Comte’s positivism was not speculative but practical. His purpose was for him, most clear -- the reformation of the social order. 'The object of all my labor,' Comte wrote, 'has been to re-establish in society something spiritual that is capable of counter-balancing the influence of the ignoble materialism in which we are at present submerged.' With this statement in mind, Comte continues the 18th and 19th century preoccupation with human liberation -- whether the Church, tyranny, materialism or government, man must liberate himself." That should be enough to clue you into why Comte landed on the list.

9. Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (John Maynard Keynes)
The Classical tradition assumed that in a recession, wages and prices would decline to restore full employment. Keynes argued that the opposite was true. Falling prices and wages, by depressing people's incomes, would retard a recovery from the economic disease by preventing a revival of spending. Instead government had to focus on the factors determining total spending. He insisted that direct government intervention was necessary to increase total spending. Government would stimulate spending and decrease taxes when private spending was insufficient and threatened a recession. In the same way, it would reduce spending and increase taxes when private spending was too great and threatened inflation. More here.

Honorable Mention:

The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich) Eek! Sounds like birth control!
What Is To Be Done (Lenin)
Authoritarian Personality (Theodor Adorno)
On Liberty (John Stuart Mill) Eek! There's that phrase again -- "the tyranny of the majority!" We LIKE tyranny -- when we're in the majority!
Beyond Freedom and Dignity (B.F. Skinner) Eek! Skinner suggests that the social environment has an impact upon personal freedom and dignity! He was a behavioral psychologist!
Origin of the Species (Charles Darwin) Eek! Anti-creationism!
Coming of Age in Samoa (Margaret Mead) Eek! Sex among the pygmies!
Unsafe at Any Speed (Ralph Nader) Eek! Challenging U.S. automakers with safety standards!
Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir) Eek! More women's lib crap!
Silent Spring (Rachel Carson) Eek! The environment, written by a rational, plausible advocate!
Wretched of the Earth (Frantz Fanon) Eek! Anti-materialism!
Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Freud) Eek! Sex again!
Descent of Man (Darwin) Eek! More monkey business!
The Promise of American Life (Herbert Croly)
Reflections on Violence (Georges Sorel)
Madness and Civilization (Michel Foucault)
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (Sidney and Beatrice Webb)

If some of the choices sound nutty, consider the panel of judges, which included Arnold Beichman of the Hoover Institution (named for good old Herbert); the executive editor of Regnery Publishing (home of the Swift Boat Vets and other wingnut writers); Prof. Brad Birzerr of Hillsdale College (the "family values" college, scene of the notorious incest scandal); the Second Vice Chairman of the American Conservative Union; Prof. Robert George of Princeton, member of the President's Council on Bioethics (that should tell you a lot) and Terri Schiavo expert; Prof. William Anthony Hay of Mississippi State U., fellow at one of the oldest right-wing think tanks, the Foreign Policy Research Institute; the president of the Hudson Institute, another right-wing think tank; Prof. Mark Malvasi of southern Randolph-Macon College; the associate rector of the Witherspoon Fellowships; and Phyllis Schafly, president of Eagle Forum. A real blue-chip panel of objective thinkers, eh?

Hat tip to Demagogue.

CONGRATULATE US...LATER TONIGHT, I HOPE

The absence of blogging over the Memorial Day holiday can be explained very simply: My son and daughter-in-law are having a baby (a granddaughter!!!). This afternoon should see the job done.

There's more than one way of expressing yourself.