At times, this felt like a debate between a stoner and an alcoholic.  Like in the first debate, it was frustrating to see Obama let McCain largely drive the debate and keep Obama on the defensive.  But more so than in the first debate, I think if Obama seemed somewhat too subdued or even sedate, McCain came off as cranky, irritable, and nasty to the point of seeming unpresidential.  McCain did himself no favors by cutting Obama off to bring up Bill Ayers an extra time, or with the endless sarcastic asides.  And I think you look small when you whine on and on about how a civil rights hero was too mean in criticizing the nastiness of your campaign.

As a super-decided voter, it was aggravating to see McCain attack on the first Gulf War without Obama firing back about the current one, and more so to see Obama sounding defensive, reassuring tones about his tax plan without hammering McCain on why now of all times he would want to outdo George Bush in sending more money to the richest among us.  That said, it's not that Barack Obama doesn't know how to go on the attack.  It's just that he's winning, and his strategy in this debate - like the prior two but even more so - was to show himself a steady hand steering the ship of state.  It's hard to find someone not currently receiving checks from the McCain campaign to argue the Obama strategy isn't working.

After watching tonight’s debate, I have all kinds of good news for my friend John McCain (no, not that one - the other one): First, the Treasury Secretary just got the authority you want to give him to renegotiate mortgages - it was included in a bill signed last week you may have heard about - though that was after you un-suspended your campaign.

Second, if you’re all about your collaboration with Ted Kennedy and Joe Lieberman, the bills we used to call McCain-Kennedy and McCain-Lieberman are still out there waiting to be passed, and I’m sure it wouldn’t hurt those bills if you went back to supporting them again (though judging by the bailout bill, who knows).

Third, if you’re really against cutting taxes for rich people, there’s a man running for president right now who wants to cut taxes for the middle class instead - and it looks like he’s going to win!

Can’t say anything tonight changed that. Neither of these guys is a particularly good debater, and despite the hype, neither man took very good advantage of the town hall format tonight. But Obama was crisper and sharper tonight than either of them had been in the last debate, and he came off more comfortable and compelling and denied McCain another opportunity to change the race.

Who won? I’d say scoring the debates on points, McCain came out somewhat ahead. But neither guy really distinguished himself, which is a victory for Obama: going into the debate more people wanted to vote for Obama, foreign policy is supposed to be John McCain’s best chance to get people to vote for him instead, and many of those people just needed Obama to hold his own and show himself a credible commander-in-chief, which he certainly did.

Neither man seemed really comfortable in his own skin, and each smothered some attack lines and one-liners by delivering them in a half-apologetic sounding way. But McCain, as we knew before, is a somewhat better debater. He sounded crisper, and he drove his lines of attack more directly and consistently. Obama went too far out of his way to emphasize where he agrees with McCain, and he didn’t draw on some of the more powerful lines of attack he’s leveraged against McCain in other fora (now that Iraq’s Prime Minister and George Bush have both come out for timetables, John McCain is standing all alone on this issue).

Mostly, Obama seemed eager to correct the record on particular points but once the debate moved from the economy to foreign policy, he offered a lot of good arguments against John McCain but not a unified theory of why he’d be a scary president.

Like George Bush in 2000 responding to Gore’s attack on his actual opposition to the actually-existing Patients’ Bill of Rights Legislation by spewing bipartisan happy-talk, John McCain did a good job of parrying criticism of his actual record with empty words about how he loves the veterans so much and they already know he’ll take care of them (even if he votes against improving the GI Bill) and “no one from Arizona is against solar power” (even though he keeps voting against solar power - maybe because he’s not from Arizona, he just moved there to run for Congress). If the media keeps letting them get away with that stuff, why wouldn’t they keep doing it?

As for the format, the much-hyped interactive format, to Jim Lehrer’s great consternation, mostly just made it clear that neither senator wanted to interact too much with the other. They didn’t respond to too many of each other’s attacks either.

Haven’t waded into the talking heads’ spin yet, but this seemed to me like a debate unlikely to distract attention for too long from the $700 billion bail-out that seems to be coming down the pike or the Bush-McCain record that got us into the mess. Not to worry: John McCain will cut down on our $18 billion in earmarks! (Does that include aid to Israel)

Dahlia Lithwick notes the mendacity of choice language on abortion from anti-choice politicians like McCain and Palin:

...Sarah Palin used this puzzling locution: "We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby." Pundits were quick to point out that Bristol's "decision" must have been at least somewhat constrained by her mom's position--as articulated in November 2006--that she would oppose an abortion for her daughters, even if they had been raped...So what exactly, one wonders, was young Bristol permitted to decide?

These rhetorical somersaults are, as Lithwick notes, the same ones John McCain employed in talking about a hypothetical Meghan McCain pregnancy eight years ago.  There's no mystery here: Americans like choice more than they like abortion.

Republicans know this, so they dress up their hard-line anti-choice positions as though they were just about choosing against abortion, while never conceding that there should be a choice at all (in my college days the student anti-choice group was called Choose Life At Yale; they published an ad comparing voting for John Kerry  - who also advocates choosing life but is pro-choice - to voting for Jefferson Davis).  And the media too often plays along, as when the New York Times profiled women in an abortion clinic making painful choices that weighed medical, religious, economic, and social factors; the Times held up these women, who were doing exactly what the pro-choice movement defends women's right to do, as representing a middle ground in the abortion debate.

I'd add that watching Palin's gymnastics on choice is probably the most interesting part of the 2006 gubernatorial debate re-aired on C-SPAN over the weekend.  For someone who wants the government to criminalize a woman's choices about her future, Sarah Palin's rhetoric is awfully "personal."  She answers the first question on choice - about whether as a public official she would attend a public event to publicly support legislation banning abortion - by saying that she's pro-life and "I don't try to hide it and I'm not ashamed of it."  When asked whether a rape victim should be able to choose abortion, she objects that it wouldn't "be up to me as an individual" whether that woman was forced to carry the fetus for nine months - leaving unsaid that if she had her way, it wouldn't be up to the woman as an individual either.  But Palin makes clear that she'd force the rape victim to carry the fetus by specifying only the life of the mother as acceptable grounds for abortion.  Then she answers the follow-up question by saying rape is "a very private matter also, but personally, I would choose life."  The hypocrisy here is glaring: if Sarah Palin indeed wants that woman's choice to be private, she should oppose government outlawing it.  But she doesn't.

So it should come as no surprise a minute later when she addresses euthanasia with the same rhetorical sleight of hand: "This is a very personal and private and sensitive issue and I do respect others' opinions on it, but personally I do believe that no, government should not be sanctioning or assisting taking life."

Whatever Fred Thompson's been doing since he finished pretending to run against John McCain for President, it's sure kept him busy.  Otherwise he surely would have read in the newspaper that John McCain doesn't like too much talk about his POW service.  And you'd think Fred would have been more careful than to say that being a POW doesn't qualify you to be President - must have missed it when Wesley Clark got savaged by Republicans and the media for saying the same thing.

I guess if Fred managed to miss all that, we shouldn't be surprised that he hasn't yet gotten around to reading the Obama speech Fred claims was "designed to appeal to
American critics abroad" in Berlin ("...just as American bases built in the last century still help to defend the security of this continent, so does our country still sacrifice greatly for freedom around the globe").

Seems Fred's sure been busy.  Guess it really wasn't fair for anyone to call him lazy after all.

Recently I got the chance to pick up and read Walter Benn Michaels' 2006 book The Trouble With Diversity.  Might as well spoil the suspense and start by saying Benn Michaels didn't convince me when he argues (like Michaels Lind and Tomasky) that left-wing "identity politics" around race and gender stand in the way of a serious left-wing class politics.  The book reminded me at various points of Catherine MacKinnon's argument (in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State) that feminists and Marxists view each other with suspicion because each party could undo one kind of oppression while leaving the other oppression intact.  It's often not clear to whom Benn Michaels, an English professor, is addressing his argument.  He offers criticisms (often clever, always articulate) of some academic arguments about identity, but he doesn't engage with many pivotal ones - like the literature on intersectional (rather than additive) approaches to identity, considering how identities mediate each other - how being identified as a poor Black woman has different social and economics meanings than just being poor plus being Black plus being a woman.  He calls Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States "certainly the most influential academic text on the social construction of race," but cites only two sentences from it.

If the argument is directed at political practitioners, we're left wondering how he actually pictures the left gaining power and effectiveness by throwing race and gender overboard.  In a telling line criticizing the focus on sexism at Wal-Mart as a distraction from exploitation there, Benn Michaels asserts that "Laws against discrimination by gender are what you go for when you've given up on - or turned against - the idea of a strong labor movement."  Tell that to all the folks in the labor movement and labor-allied groups who've worked to support the Dukes lawsuit and the fight against Wal-Mart's sexism as part of a broad-based critique of a company that helpfully illustrates the connections between conservatism's threat to gender equality, economic justice, environmental sustainability, and other values progressives and most Americans hold dear.  Benn Michaels' approach, which denies that rich people can be victims of oppression or that poor people can be oppressed by more than only poverty, would render the left unable to fully understand, let alone seriously engage, with what Betty Dukes and millions of women like her are facing (see also Whitewashing Race).  As badly as Benn Michaels may wish for a revived labor movement, in advocating a disregard for identity politics he's echoing the disconnection from progressive social movements which contributed the labor movement's decline in the first place.  Those blinders regarding oppressions besides class mirror the blindness to class of too many in, , the pro-choice movement - blindness of which Benn Michaels would be rightly critical.

That said, we needn't accept Benn Michael's arguments about the irrelevance of race- and sex-based politics to appreciate the book's critical insight: that the plutocrats triumph when poverty is understood as an identity to be respected rather than as a problem to be eliminated.  Conservatives, as he argues, have masterfully reframed our class problem as being about the elitists who look down on poor people rather than about the robber barons, de-regulators, and union-busters who make them poor.  Examples abound in conservative literature (Tom Wolfe comes in for some enjoyable criticism in the book), but Benn Michaels is right that seemingly liberal takes on class often suffer from the same problem.  And he's right that conservatives draw on the language we use to talk about race to pull this off.

I was reminded of People Like Us, a very engaging PBS documentary about class in America that explores a series of interesting situations - working-class folks fight with ex-hippies about what kind of supermarket to bring into their neighborhood; tensions within African-American communities about whether Jack and Jill clubs aimed at well-off Black kids are elitist; a daughter's embarrassment about her "trailer park" mom - but all from the perspective of how different classes can get along, not how we can reduce or eliminate class differences.  The least sympathetic characters in the movie are a bunch of snotty high school kids at a mixed-income public school talking in awful terms about why they wouldn't talk to the poor kids they go to school with ("What would we talk to them about?").  It's a good movie.  But you could walk away with the sense that our class problems would be solved if the rich kids would befriend the poor kids.  Which, as Benn Michaels would argue, would be much less expensive or destabilizing for the powers that be than making those kids' families less poor.  As Benn Michaels writes (in one of many paragraphs that makes you wish more political books were written by English professors) about an episode of Wife Swap:

At no time, apparently, did it occur to the makers of the show, the people in it or the people reviewing it, that what the show really demonstrates is how much better it is to be rich than to be poor.  Or perhaps one should say not that the show ignores this point but that it is devoted to denying it, and that it succeeds so completely (this is its brilliance) that we find ourselves believing that run-down shacks in the woods are just as nice as Park Avenue apartments, especially if your husband remembers to thank you for chopping the wood when you get home from driving the bus.  The idea the show likes is the one Tom Wolfe and company like: that the problem with being poor is not having less money than rich people but having rich people "look down" on you.  And the rich husband is bad because he does indeed look down on the poor people, whereas the rich wife (the one who has never done a day's work in her life and who begins the show by celebrating her "me time," shopping, working out, etc.) turns out to be good because she comes to appreciate the poor and even to realize that she can learn from them.  The fault here is not in being rich but in thinking that you have better taste - more generally, in thinking that...you are are a better person.

Hillary Clinton got some deserved criticism for her lecture about how "it took a President" to pass the Civil Rights Act (didn't Obama prove he values the role of the President when he started running to be the next one?).  But Robert Caro's op-ed reminds us she could have said something worse:

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

This isn't poetic - it's just offensive.  Did LBJ tie African-Americans' shoes before they left the house to vote?  It should go without saying that African-Americans have been a "true part of American political life" since before the birth of the United States.  Among other things, they led a movement which seized the franchise by shifting public opinion and transforming the political landscape.  That movement made the difference between the days when LBJ was strategizing against Civil Rights legislation to the days when Jesse Helms must claim to support it.

Caro seems smug towards Civil Rights activists who didn't trust Johnson's support until they got it.  No doubt which bills Johnson supported, and when he came around to support them, is indeed, as Caro says, some combination of "ambition and compassion."  It's short-sighted for historians to lionize Johnson's choices while disparaging the people whose vision, tactics, and courage made it possible for him to wed the two.  Of course it makes a huge difference who the President is.  But the Great Man Theory that tells us Lincoln freed the slaves and then Johnson gave their descendants the vote is a theory that should be in the dustbin of history by now.

Let's remember that as we consider the progress Barack Obama's nomination represents as well as the struggles ahead should there be an Obama presidency.

To choose a favorite talking head buzz phrase, I think Barack Obama did what he had to do Thursday night.  And he did it quite well.

First, closing a convention that erred too far on the side of nice (that means you, Mark Warner), Barack Obama came out swinging against John McCain, and I think he managed to do it in a way that's hard to characterize as "nasty" or "shrill" or "too angry," unless you're one of the people who characterizes Democrats that way for a living.  He crossed that threshold John Kerry or Al Gore never quite did, where you take on political opponents with a toughness that suggests you could take on enemies as President.  And he maintained his sense of humor while doing it.

Second, Obama also addressed the imaginary lack of specificity in his policy proposals (the only thing more imaginary may be the desire among voters to hear specifics of policy proposals) by laying out a series of them (including improvements to the bankruptcy law that his running mate helped worsen).  He had to do it; it's good that he did.  But it's an especially silly expectation coming from a press corps that lets John McCain continue praising himself for having championed policies he currently opposes.  It's a good sign that the speech gets compared to a State of the Union address (or is that too presumptuous!).

Third, Obama talked about his own story, not in the linear way he has in the past and others have at this convention, but by explicitly comparing experiences in his life to experiences of Americans he's met.  Of course it's sad that he has a higher bar to clear here than would a White candidate.  That said, he did a compelling job connecting Americans' stories and his own and explaining how they inform where he'll take the country.

And the uplift was there too.

As for the disappointment, of course some of the self-consciously non-that-kind-of-Democrat stuff (are we reinventing government again?) is bothersome.

And in a speech that was more aggressive than we've come to expect from Democratic nominees, there was some needless defensiveness.  If you're going to talk about the importance of fatherhood, why say it's something we "admit"?  Aren't you undercuttng yourself?  Why say "Don't tell me Democrats won't defend America," as though you concede that that's the perception - and why respond to the criticism you brought up by naming presidents from forty years ago?  Obama seems unable to help himself from rehearsing potential counterarguments in a way that doesn't really help him - as in "Some people will say that this is just a cover for the same liberal etc..."  And I think Obama made himself seem a little smaller when he followed talking about the struggles his family has overcome by protesting that he's not a celebrity.  Finally, while he effectively seized the high ground on patriotism, it seems overly restrictive for Obama to say he won't suggest that McCain takes his policy positions with any eye to political expediency - I hope he doesn't really mean that part, which would seem to leave John Kerry's "Senator McCain v. Candidate McCain" line of attack off limits.

Why isn't John McCain on the stump telling Americans to have more babies?

Kate Sheppard notes the passage of Russia's "Day of Conception:"

Today falls exactly nine months before Russia Day, and as one of Putin's policies to encourage more breeding in his country, he's offered SUVs, refrigerators, and monetary rewards to anyone who gives birth on June 12. So the mayor of Ulyanovsk, a region in central Russia, has given workers there the afternoon off to make with the baby making. Everyone who gives birth is a winner in the "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia's Independence Day" contest, but the grand prize winner -- judged on qualities like "respectability" and "commendable parenting" -- gets to take home a UAZ-Patriot, a Russian-made SUV.

This seems like a good opportunity to ask why the kinds of natalist appeals and policy justifications that are so widespread in Europe are all but non-existent in the United States. Sure, American politicians seem to be expected to have gobs of kids to demonstrate their family values. But why is it much more common for politicians in Europe to push policies explicitly designed to make people have more kids?

Discouraging though it may be, I think the best answer is race. Politicians in Sweden or in Russia or in France get further with calls for the nation to have more babies for the sake of national greatness or national survival because that nation and those babies are imagined to look more the same.

Marty Gillens caused a stir with his research suggesting that Americans have negative attitudes towards welfare and its beneficiaries because of their negative views towards the racial groups imagined to benefit (Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, Bruce Sacerdote, Simo Virtanen, and Leonie Huddy further explore this). Americans are less inclined to support government spending on social programs, these scholars argue, because they're less likely to imagine those programs benefiting people who look like them. Conversely, Swedes are more content with a robust welfare state because their immigration restrictions keep those benefits away from people of other races.

(In 1990, the top country sending immigrants to Sweden was Norway. In 2000, it was Iraq. And the increase in Sweden's foreign-born populations in the 90's roughly equaled the increase from the 70's and 80's combined. There's cause for concern that as immigration to Sweden increases, benefits will decrease or access for immigrants will decrease - a process Swedish conservatives already began in the 1990s.)

I don't think you can really explain the lack of natalist rhetoric in the US without similar logic, and particularly confronting animus towards a group Americans can't deny welfare benefits simply by cutting off immigrants: African-Americans. What Ange-Marie Hancock calls "the politics of disgust" heaps shame on imagined "welfare queens" for working too little and birthing too much. In the controversy over the '96 welfare bill, fertility came up plenty, but the imagined problem was too many babies, not too few. Churches and others made what you might consider natalist arguments against the bill, but they didn't get much traction - unlike the GOP Congressman who held up a "Don't feed the alligators" sign.

So when David Brooks wrote a paean to natalism in America, he left those hated Black women out. Instead, in a column a month after the '04 election, he cited Steve Sailer (who even John Podhoretz recognizes as a racist) celebrating that "George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates." Brooks' column celebrates these fertile white parents for demonstrating good red-state values:

Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling...The people who are having big families are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism.

Can you imagine a prominent right-wing pundit or politician saying such things about a low-income Black family that chose to have more kids?

Now some will say that American conservatives are less natalist than their European counterparts because they're more anti-government. Which is a fair point, but I think it's difficult to explain the presence of "Christian Democrat" parties in Europe without considering race. Or you could argue that the natalist push in Europe is based in part in fear of immigration. Which circles back on the same argument: racial fears and prejudices map more easily along lines of citizenship in countries that have historically had fewer non-white citizens. Just as the comparative historical ethnic diversity of the United States plays a role in explaining why our political system has held down benefits for everyone rather than only restricting them to citizens (though we've done that too), it seems like the strongest explanation for why we don't hear lots of appeals for America to have more babies.

Is there a better explanation?

I think several generations of Yale activists have had the chance to gather in protest or at least reflect on the outrageousness of the university's top decision-making body gathering beneath a portrait of the university's namesake with a slave. Looks like the next generation will have to come up with a new rite of passage.

Yale is finally taking the goddamn thing down. But god forbid you should think that Yale's leaders feel regret about leaving it hanging there the past few decades:

Since the portrait is confusing without the explanation [that Elihu Yale did not own slaves], I have decided it would be prudent to exchange that portrait of Elihu to another one in the University’s collection,” Lorimer said.

The quote, from Yale's VP and Secretary, leaves you with the sense that Yale is taking down the portrait, which involves adjusting the moldings around the mantelpiece around the painting (the classic explanation of yesteryear for why the thing had to stay up), because it's easier than putting up a plaque explaining that the man was not a slave owner. But it's a portrait designed to honor Elihu Yale by painting a chained Black man at his feet. It honors him with the imagery of White supremacy - an ideology of which the colonial Governor and the university named for him have been no small beneficiaries.

It's a painting that belongs in a museum. It has no place hanging over Yale's president as he meets with the Yale Corporation to try to chart a course for the university. It never did. (That's the difference between engaging and exulting the problematic)

To suggest that the racist graphic is being taken down to avert misunderstanding is to make abundantly clear that you don't get it.

Doing his best to sweet-talk electorally-ascendent liberals into hitching their wagon to the libertarian rickshaw, Brink Lindsey offers a list of shared victories in which liberals and libertarians can revel together:

an honest survey of the past half-century shows a much better match between libertarian means and progressive ends. Most obviously, many of the great libertarian breakthroughs of the era--the fall of Jim Crow, the end of censorship, the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of divorce laws, the increased protection of the rights of the accused, the reopening of immigration--were championed by the political left.

If these are victories for libertarians, then this is a better argument for why libertarians should support liberals and leftists - the people who actually won each of these victories - than for why the left should turn libertarian. But it's worth asking whether these markers of social progress even qualify as "libertarian breakthroughs" or "libertarian ends."

The Jim Crow regime was undone in part by the elimination of the poll tax, a nasty law which restricts access to a government function to those able to pay for it and rewards those with more money to spend on their politics with more voice in them. What about undoing those laws qualifies as libertarian? The Jim Crow regime was undone in part by anti-discrimination laws that empower government to use regulation to limit the freedom of employers to employ a workforce that looks like themselves. Inflicting government intervention on market transactions is not exactly the libertarian m.o. Neither is government-mandated busing to integrate a public school system that if libertarians had their way wouldn't exist in the first place.

Many libertarians no doubt break with Barry Goldwater and support the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965. But their support for good progressive law doesn't demonstrate a fundamental affinity between liberalism and libertarianism. It simply demonstrates that even its devotees sometimes reject the maxim that "the government is best which governs least" when faced with the liberty-denying consequences of the "free market" whose "relentless dynamism" Lindsey urges liberals to recognize.

Libertarians may support freedom of the press from censorship, but they're more likely to fret over how to sell off our publically-owned airwaves than how to ensure airtime for grassroots candidates. They may support a woman's right to choose, but I wouldn't count on their assistance in ensuring that women have the economic means to choose abortion or childbirth, or the educational resources to make informed choices. They may support the rights of the accused to a trial, but they're not the first to line up to be taxed to pay for decent lawyers to represent them (then there are the ones who would like to replace the crimminal justice system with a system of private torts). They may support allowing more immigrants into this country, but if you expect them to face down employers who exploit the fear of deportation to suppress the right to organize, you've got another think coming.

And though the Cato Institute won't be joining Rick Santorum's crusade against no-fault divorce any time soon, there's no need for an earnest Ayn Rand devotee to support a right to divorce at all. After all, isn't marriage a binding contract that the parties should know better than to get into lightly? Aside from the reality that it presides over marriage in the first place, why should government have any more right to stop consenting adults from entering contracts for lifelong marriage than it does to bar contracts for human organ sales or pennies-an-hour employment?

In the wake of Dennis Prager's furious condemnation of Congressman-Elect Keith Ellison's plan to be sworn in on his own holy text - a story Prager described this week as more important to the future of this nation than what we do next in Iraq - the Council on American-Islamic Relations is calling for his removal from the United States Holocaust Memorial Council. As M.J. Rosenberg notes, President Bush appointed Prager three months ago to the Council, which oversees the Holocaust Museum.

That appointment demonstrates that George W. Bush has not fully learned the lessons of the Holocaust.

That language bristles no doubt, because there's an unfortunate tendency to see big, dramatic historical events on whose moral character there's a broad consensus - the Civil Rights Movement, the Abolition movement, the Holocaust - as somehow beyond the bounds of politics. But these are all political events. They are seismic moments not because they transcend politics but because they both expose and transform fundamental conflicts between different social visions held by different people and advanced through the exercise of power.

The Holocaust was a genocidal murderous enactment of an ideology of racial, religious, and sexual hierarchy and bigotry. It was an act of murder writ large in the name of Aryan heterosexual non-disabled Protestants being more human, having more worth, and possessing more rights than others. There are still those in this country who hold some or all those prejudices. There are some who will say so openly.

History does not interpret itself. But it demands meaning-making by responsible citizens. That is not and never has been a process divorced without influence from or impact on our politics.

The Holocaust Museum's "primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral and spiritual questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy."

No one espousing the view that the "acceptance" of Judaism "as equal" to other religions "signifies the decline of Western civilization" would have a shot at a spot overseeing the Holocaust Museum. But someone who believes such about homosexuals was appointed to the Board three months ago by the President. That's because the full humanity of Jews is considered a settled question in mainstream American political discourse, and therefore inappropriate to "politicize," while the full humanity of gays is up for debate, and therefore it's inappropriate to judge those bravely taking the "politically incorrect" stance.

Jacob Weisberg in this month's Men's Vogue:

But even as the Democratic political discussion grows and engulfs him, Obama is engaged in another more personal and historical conversation - with Wright and Ellison, with his parents, and with those two tragic and prophetic figures, Lincoln and King. Obama, of course, would never be so immodest as to compare himself to either of these men. But being clear-eyed, he must see what others do: that among American politicians, he alone has the potential to one day be mentioned in the same breath.

Barack Obama in last year's Time magazine:

So when I, a black man with a funny name, born in Hawaii of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, announced my candidacy for the U.S. Senate, it was hard to imagine a less likely scenario than that I would win--except, perhaps, for the one that allowed a child born in the backwoods of Kentucky with less than a year of formal education to end up as Illinois' greatest citizen and our nation's greatest President. In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat--in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles.

Anyone out there concerned about the amount of influence Glenn "Heh" Reynolds holds over what people read out on the internets should be more worried about the links that folks don't click on but instead assume, understandably, to say something roughly approximating what Professor Reynolds says they do.

Take the new website Save the ACLU, organized by influential members and former members who've had a series of increasingly nasty and public disputes with the current leadership over how well the organization is living up to its own values. The major flashpoints have been the extent of compliance expected of board members with the leadership's public relations approach, and the extent of compliance demonstrated by the leadership with conditions imposed by public and private organizations offering funding.

As the website describes,

Over the past three years, these breaches of principle include the ACLU’s approval of grant agreements that restrict speech and associational rights; efforts by management to impose gag rules on staff and to subject staff to email surveillance; a proposal to bar ACLU board members from publicly criticizing the ACLU; and informal campaigns to purge the ACLU of its internal critics.

You'd have a hard time guessing that those were the sorts of grievances in play if you just read the link on Instapundit, which reads:

A SAVE THE ACLU CAMPAIGN from supporters who feel the organization has become excessively politicized.

Now the generous read here I suppose would be that "politicized" refers to "office politics" - that the ACLU is being accused of being too political in the sense of being too concerned with reputations and status and salaries and the like. But that's hardly the intuitive read of that sentence. If you didn't know better, you'd think that even the ACLU's supporters have come to echo the contention of Reynolds and others that when the ACLU was backing free speech three decades ago it was being heroic, but when it backs privacy rights today it's being "political" out of hatred for Bush.

The gripe of the critics, arguably, is that the ACLU isn't being political enough - that is, that the politics of its mission haven't sufficiently infused its methods of implementation.

On Good Morning America, they just hosted a consultant advising employees worrying about downsizing to work lots of overtime, make sure not to take any sick days, and subordinate family concerns to whatever their boss wants them to do.

Then in response to a question from the host about the stock market, she responded that high unemployment "sounds like a bad thing," but isn't so bad: it's good for the stock market because it means the Fed won't raise interest rates.

What she didn't say is that high unemployment makes the stock market go up because the prospect of economic insecurity coerces workers into doing all the things that she's on air advising them to do.

Intel head Andy Grove alluded to this strategy of management through fear in his book Only the Paranoid Survive, writing "Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion." He encourages managers to foster “fear of being wrong and fear of losing” in employees as “powerful motivators.”

Indeed, fear of losing freedom from want will powerfully motivate people to work through illness and past their hours on the clock.