Monthly Archives: December 2010

Written by E.J. Dionne Jr. for The Washington Post The Civil War is about to loom very large in the popular memory. We would do well to be candid about its causes and not allow the distortions of contemporary politics or long-standing myths to cloud our understanding of why the nation fell apart.

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Author not attributed. From Dictionary.com Still slogging through your kids’ excess Halloween stash? You’ve probably begun to wonder what the names on many of those wrappers mean. Here’s the meaning behind the names of a few popular (and chocolately) confections.

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Written by Cenk Uygur John Boehner can’t stop talking about the “will of the public” these days. Now that the Republicans have won the House, he keeps saying over and over that the Democrats must go along with Republican plans from now on because they have to listen to the… will of the public. Well, here’s what I don’t remember — the Republicans giving a damn about the will of the public after the 2008 elections.

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Written by Faiz Shakir for thinkprogress.org Text of actual letter from aclu.org Text of actual letter follows article-LTS Tennessee’s state counter-terrorism officials at the Tennessee Fusion Center maintain an open-source internet map which identifies “terrorism events and other suspicious activity.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Tennessee found its way briefly onto the map earlier this month, after the civil rights group penned a letter to school superintendents encouraging “schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.” The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports what happened next: The Fusion Center’s Internet map is part of a national map maintained by globalincidentmap.com. Information is provided by agencies across the U.S. It includes various blinking icons. The map’s label originally was titled Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity. Near Nashville, a blinking hexagon-shaped symbol with an exclamation point read “ACLU cautions TN schools about ‘observing one religious holiday.’” The hexagon symbol, when clicked on, originally stated “suspicious activity.” But it later was changed to say “general nonincident terrorism news” after inquiries by reporters.

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Written by David Michael Green So, class, what have we learned from the past week or two of the lame duck Congress and our just plain-old lame president? A few things, actually. Not – since lameness trumps all else – that they’ll necessarily matter, though. One thing – which is actually only new to someone who has spent the last several decades not paying attention to American politics (Barack, are you listening?) – is that there is effectively no bottom to the depths to which Republicans will sink in order to serve their plutocratic masters and strip the country bare. I mean none. Zero. Nada. Zip. They are capable of absolutely anything.

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