That should not be casually disregarded, that a party has essentially adopted the rhetoric of the opponents of its founding members. The Republican Party has so twisted its own rhetoric, so sold its soul to the race-baiting of old Southern Democratic Party politics, that it's essentially met itself going the other way.

Which makes it all the more ironic that Glenn Beck is trying to mooch off of, even hijack Martin Luther King's legacy, with a stated desire to take back the civil rights movement.

Here was a man who stood for using the government to address economic inequality, who vociferously opposed the Vietnam War, who pushed a vision of non-violent protest, of not responding to hate with hatred, and here you have this conspiratorial nut who race-baits, who inspires people to bother literally and figuratively get up in arms about the government, who calls any attempt to try and repair our economy through government spending socialism, and he thinks that he's entitled to a piece of Martin Luther King's legacy.

That's just twisted. And, in its own way, deeply pathetic.

Let me put this plainly: Glenn Beck could not achieve this kind of noteriety for this event on his own. He has to pretend that he's some kind of intellectual successor to those people in the Civil Rights movement, who endured beatings, jailings, death threats, and bigotry of the worst kind. He has to compare himself and his followers to people who sometimes even died for their beliefs, died for standing up to the system.

Glenn Beck, gently put, is a pretentious bastard for what he's doing. He doesn't deserve and has not earned the right to the kind of acclaim he's aiming for.

If he truly had that kind of presence, that kind of charisma, that kind of significance on the national stage, he could pick any other day of the year, and do just as well.

Instead, this man, who regularly accuses others of just wanting to mooch off the system is himself simply borrowing prestige from somebody who truly earned it. And his followers? You know, when Martin Luther King Jr. Stood before Lincoln's Memorial that day, he was standing in the shadow of the man who liberated his people from slavery, and his party had not yet betrayed that legacy in the name of capturing the South from the Democratic Party that had endangered its hold on it with the Civil Rights Act.

Beck's supporters are thick with the kind of historical revisionism that allows them to make George Washington, the man who put down this country's first tax revolt with an Army, a hero to small-government tax revolters of the modern day. It's thick with the sort of people who try and turn Thomas Jefferson, the man who removed all trace of miracles from his version of the bible, into a supporter of this nation as Christian in its founding.

Many Republicans know Reagan cut taxes considerably. How many know what rates taxes were under him? How many know that he also raised taxes three times? Many Republicans know that Income taxes are a liberal idea. Perhaps they should look in their own party's history, see where Lincoln instituted the first income taxes, where Republicans pushed the amendment that made the income tax unquestionably constitutional.

Maybe they should look and see how many of the most important regulatory agencies were founded by Republicans? Maybe they should look over the history of this country, the things that people in the past went through in the absence of regulations on certain things. Maybe they should realize that many regulators come about because the real world presents a need for them, and when government doesn't act, the problem doesn't necessarily solve itself.

The Republicans have been trying to rewrite history not only to support their agenda, but also to reinforce the agenda of some within the party to push it further down the road of hardline politics that many Republicans of the past would have found unrecognizeable.

I venture this: when somebody revises history for the sake of supporting their modern day efforts, they make a toxic asset, of uncertain worth and trustworthiness, of their sense of histories lessons. When politics is the lens through which history is seen, and deliberately so, we end up blind to the concerns and the ideas that actually got us where we are today.

Glenn Beck talks of restoring honor, but I don't think he knows the first thing about doing that for real. I think he's using the idea of restoring honor as a glittering generality, even as he and his fellow travellers feed people the worst kind of BS. To him, it's about restoring some ideal government, even as the consequences of previous attempts at restoration remain in place. Bush, too, talked about restoring honor and integrity to government, before he went on to operate one of the most corrupt and despised Presidencies of modern time.

People can talk about things, and talk themselves into believing things, they can claim the legacy of great men, and claim to be following in their footsteps, but at the end of the day, their talk is cheap, and their ideas must be judged not by more talk, but by the consequences of their actions.

It was not a liberal who busted the bank on the government these past few years, and finally broke a trillion dollars in deficit spending. That was a Republican. All their talk about what should happen, and what would happen meant nothing in the end, when the money and the numbers came in.

Talk and rhetoric does not create good policy. If it did, the Bush Administration would have been the golden years. When Glenn Beck talks of restoring honor, we have to do ourselves the favor of recalling who it was, really, who blackened this country's name, and brought this country's government to the depths of fecklessness and incompetence. We have to remember, when we so facilely reference somebody's Katrina, who had the original event on their watch. We have to remember whose policies turned surplus into deficit, whose tax cuts not only failed to pay for themselves, but indebted this country to the tune of billions of dollars.

The bitterest of ironies of Glenn Beck talking about restoring honor, is the number of lies he has to tell in order to bolster the reputation of his party, in order to get people to forget all the pain and suffering they've caused this country.

Restore your Honor, Glenn Beck: retire, and recant of your lies and innuendo. Quit using your lies to lead this country around by the nose.

Many brilliant ideas are in the Recovery Act. Time Magazine presents a tremendous list. You must read the whole thing to get to understand the genius of this legislation. Here is an excerpt:

For starters, the Recovery Act is the most ambitious energy legislation in history, converting the Energy Department into the world's largest venture-capital fund. It's pouring $90 billion into clean energy, including unprecedented investments in a smart grid; energy efficiency; electric cars; renewable power from the sun, wind and earth; cleaner coal; advanced biofuels; and factories to manufacture green stuff in the U.S. The act will also triple the number of smart electric meters in our homes, quadruple the number of hybrids in the federal auto fleet and finance far-out energy research through a new government incubator modeled after the Pentagon agency that fathered the Internet. (See TIME's special report "After One Year, A Stimulus Report Card.")

..............The stimulus is also stocked with nonenergy game changers, like a tenfold increase in funding to expand access to broadband and an effort to sequence more than 2,300 complete human genomes — when only 34 were sequenced with all previous aid. There's $8 billion for a high-speed passenger rail network, the boldest federal transportation initiative since the interstate highways. There's $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to promote accountability in public schools, perhaps the most significant federal education initiative ever — it's already prompted 35 states and the District of Columbia to adopt reforms to qualify for the cash. There's $20 billion to move health records into the digital age, which should reduce redundant tests, dangerous drug interactions and errors caused by doctors with chicken-scratch handwriting. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius calls that initiative the foundation for Obama's health care reform and "maybe the single biggest component in improving quality and lowering costs."

Candidate Obama promised change and here is the change.

True, we are still in a grave depression. However, it takes time to extricate ourselves from a cataclysmic depression that has been brought about by decades of deregulation.

President Obama has achieved more in less than 2 years than had been achieved by most presidents during their time in office. Among the Big achievements are universal health care, financial reform and an economy-changing Stimulus. This is what is meant by Obama-instigated change.

Alan Simpson believes that Social Security is "like a milk cow with 310 million tits," according to an email he sent to the executive director of National Older Women's League Tuesday morning. Simpson co-chairs the deficit commission, which is considering various proposals to cut Social Security benefits.

The purpose of the deficit commission is to reduce the deficit. Simpson and other Republicans on the commission want to cut spending for ordinary people. So all we hear from them is cutting Social Security, Medicare and other popular programs. Nary a word do we hear about anything that would hurt the rich and the super-rich.

Millionaires and billionaires, on the whole, pay less a percentage of their income in taxes than do people in the middle class. This is due of course to the many exemptions and deductions they may use to reduce their taxes - in some cases, to nothing. Will Simpson consider this legal cheating in his recommendations?

If he had any courage - just dreaming - Simpson would recommend that the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires be removed in order to cut our deficit by $36 billion per year from now on.

Let's cut this nonsense about Social Security privatization. If Bush had been successful in his privatization efforts, the deep depression we are in would have been deeper. Things are bad enough without Republicans trying to make things worse.

The commission should recognize that the depression has hit the poor much worse than it has hit the rich. As a matter of fact there is no depression for the rich, among which there is a 3% unemployment rate. The rich, not the poor or middle class, should be made to contribute most toward reduction of the deficit.

Those three succeeded. Hell they even succeeded after the collapse of the Hedge Fund Long-Term Capital Management, which should have been the wake up call.

People want to stubbornly believe in the Free Market, see the failures as anomalies, exceptions to the rules.

What I will suggest here is that dark-market failures like those two are inevitable, given the systems we're talking about. While it's not a good idea to micromanage markets, markets, to function smoothly, to preserve and sustain value and productivity, must have at least a glancing relationship with the facts.

One of the most shocking passages in the documentary is where people recount Alan Greenspan telling Ms. Born that even fraud should not be regulated, that we should simply allow the market to figure it out. While for some this idea might have a particular charm, there's an inherent logical problem with this, and if you know basic market economics, it should be obvious.

The problem with letting the market take care of fraud is that the market relies on good information for nearly everything that makes operations in the market predictable and correctable. Fraud has to be discovered in order to resolve it, and if nothing obligates people to tell folks things about what they're doing, it's not going to get discovered real fast, if at all.

Back in April, I started, but never finished a blog post on what happened in the recent economic downturn with Goldman Sachs.

This hit the news pretty big in April , when the debate on financial reform was starting, the so called "****ty deal beingthe Timberwolf financial instrument that got Goldman Sachs in such hot water with the SEC. When Levin called it "one ****ty deal", he was quoting the Goldman Sachs sales force.

Folks say the market can take care of itself because eventually people refine their knowledge their products, their services and everything so they can do business more efficiently. That's the theory. But as I said in the beginning of my unpublished entry:

The cheapest thing to sell people is an empty promise. It costs you nothing but a little time and a little jaw-jaw to convince people to invest, and then you walk away with the money and then they with nothing.

In a market where fraud is not illegal, where the only consequences are market consequences, what gets refined, made more efficient, are the means and processes of deception.

Folks get better at conning you and other investors, playing high-stakes financial games with cards up their sleeves. The markets on Wall Street became parasitic, operating for their own benefit, rather than the benefit of the customer.

I know that the minute people do their research, they'll find the Democrats deeply dirty in this as the Republicans are. That, I'm afraid, is the cost for me, as a Democrat, in bringing this to you. But really, in my philosophy, what's important here is the question of what the worst kind of uncertainty in this market is. That's not a partisan question. That's a practical one.

As I pointed out, the derivatives meltdown could have very well happened under a Democratic Party President's watch as it actually did under a Republican's. Here, in this entry I will not ask you to favor or disfavor one party or another except to the extent they are willing or unwilling to fix this problem.

The Democrats have done some good in this areas, which I am proud to say. Republicans, though have come back and are saying we need to deregulate or freeze regulation because of all the uncertainty that's causing.

Meanwhile, though, the big financial firms are still running this big, massive, and ultimately dangerous dark market. Democrats have done something to get these activities, these derivatives, out in the open, but if the Republicans get their way, we'd go right back in the dark.

I would state right here that this dark market is more of a danger, more of a source of uncertainty. In fact, it's the source of the uncertainty that plagues our market now. When we talk of toxic assets, we're largely talkind about assets from this market.

If you're wanting to have to take emergency measures for the next few decades, or else watch the economy go down in flames, if you're wanting the banks to be forever tottering on the bring of disaster, go ahead and push the government to allow these transactions to go on in the dark, because that will be the consequence. Sure, we won't disturb the nice neat world of our friends in the financial sector, but they'll keep on doing this, because essentially such markets have long been the market's version of crack or heroin, addictive stimulants and opiates that allow all kinds of economic activity to go on without having to make or do real things- speculation gone wild, uninhibited by more natural flows of supply and demand.

Without these unregulated derivatives, Wall Street would have felt the pain of those bad mortgages years ago, not just recently. They would have been more careful lenders, and more careful customers in the secondary markets. Our banks would be more stable, America financial life more calm. Sure the folks on Wall Street would have a little tic in their eye, as they imagine what they could do if they were allowed to, but we'd sleep easier.

What the Republicans are suggesting is just setting the stage for the next disaster, just like what Clinton officials and then Bush officials did over the last twenty years set the stage for. Everybody bought into this vision that the system could survive anything, even self-deception on a grand scale. Economies, though, cannot thrive or prosper for too long merely on castles-in-the-air speculation. They must eventually deal with the real world limitations of scarcity and supply and demand. They have to deal with a world where the unexpected, especialy the bad and unexpected can happen.

What the economic libertarians would have us do, as we deal with this economy, is turn a blind eye to a significant, if not overriding part of our economy being susceptible to self-delusion on a massive scale. They would have us keep our hands off of their black box, and simply hope that a market can somehow correct imbalances it doesn't know exists, set prices right when their brokers won't even be straight with them on their product's real value, and prevent economic stampedes when many in that dark market are actually seeking to spook the herds in order to make themselves money. We even have Goldman Sachs using proprietary technology to basically front-run trades electronically.

Or, put another, and I think fundamentally chilling way, they would like us to help them dim the lights on the economy overall, believing that more economic activity would take place in the shadow of our ignorance, not thinking whether more necessarily always means better.

If the recovery ends up slower because we choose to let in the sunshine to disinfect the markets, so be it. At least when we grow, it will not simply be wishful thinking, a figment of our economic imagination. If we are to recover, let's not recover by once again addicting ourselves to secrecy, deception and theft as a way of doing business.

Enough said. Enough done. Let's go home. My thanks to all the troops who have risked their lives and given their lives in this fight.

"Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the holocaust museum in Washington," Gingrich insisted, speaking of the museum where just a year ago a guard was killed by a white supremacist trying to enter the building with a gun. Gingrich then went on to claim that "we would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor."

Outrageous! But unfortunately he is not alone. Beck, Palin, Limbaugh and the rest of the far-right chorus joined in. To my dismay, Senator Harry Reid and other Democrats succumbed as well. A bipartisan display of intolerance! These leaders are supposed to call for tolerance and understanding among people of different faiths. Instead they unleashed a blow to America's primary principle of freedom of religion.

President Obama decided to speak out, and said:

As a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are. The writ of the Founders must endure.

The reaction was simple. All the naysayers said, Of course, we believe in the freedom of religion, but building a mosque would be "insensitive" to those who have lost loved ones in the 9/11 attack. First, I'd like to know how far away the Park51 structure should be so that it would not be "insensitive" - 3 blocks, 5 miles, outside New York City, outside U.S.? Second, do you believe there would be as much "insensitivity" if a church or synagogue were built 2 blocks from Ground Zero?

President Obama was asked again the next day about Park51. This is what he said:

I was not commenting, and I will not comment, on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have, that dates back to our founding. That's what our country is about.

Several pundits consider this to be backtracking. It's nothing of the sort. The president is saying that Muslims have the same right as anyone else to build a community center. When he says he will not comment "on the wisdom" he is saying that he, as a member of government, should not tell anyone what to do with reference to religion since we must have complete separation between church and state.

President Obama is clear and exactly right. And what he says should be bipartisan because President George W. Bush said the same thing:

In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character - on integrity, and tolerance toward others, and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before - ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Let's close the debate. Let's not use a mosque as a mask for intolerance. Let's allow - no, not allow, but encourage - Imam Rauf to build his community center. Let's show the world that America still believes in freedom of religion.

Will it break our leg or pick our pocket? No. The harm people imagine is imposition of Sharia Law, or something like that. But doesn't the First Amendment speak against that? Yes, indeed, it does. If you buy the argument that the establishment clause forbids government intervening for or against a religion, then there is absolutely no danger of that happening.

Do Muslims have magical hypnotic powers? Are liberals just going to suddenly all convert to radical islam, despite the fact that much of what Liberals and Democrats believe is in utter opposition to what the Radical Islamists claim to support?

We really need to be more levelheaded about things like this. I live not much more than a mile from a Buddhist temple. Didn't used to be there, and the majority of the people in my rather conservative neck of the woods probably wouldn't have decided to build it there, but then, the majority of people, by law, couldn't tell them that they couldn't build such a temple, no more than they could tell the Catholics not to build the several Catholic Churches that exist within a few miles of my home.

Does their existence mean that some people living close by might become Catholics? Well yes, they just might. But if they do, they do so by choice, the choice that all Americans have under the First Amendment. The Catholics are not broadcasting magic Catholic Brainwashing Waves.

I'd say the fear and loathing on display is about territoriality and insecurity, rather than truly about any real threat. The impulse, while understandable in some, should not be mistaken for something rational, or based on fact. We should also not mistake any success in the efforts to prevent this for a true victory in the fight against terrorism.

Terrorists want us to reject moderate, average Muslims, so they in turn can reject us, and turn to them. The more Muslims who instead reject the radicals and the terrorists who claim to be the pure representations of Islam, the better. Do we serve that end by driving them out, by even going so far as to reject building any more mosques in America, ever, as one prominent Conservative suggested? No.

The terrorists want us to react in fear and in panic, to go nuts trying to assume a God-like level of control over the world, so they can say to everybody, "Look, they're crazy thugs, look at all the things they do when somebody rips the scab off their civilized appearance."

America needs to live up to its ideals when its difficult and unpopular, or otherwise we aren't as committed as we would like to claim to what we claim makes us great as a nation. If freedom of religion only applies to groups not currently unpopular, if freedom of speech only applies to those who are voicing popular opinions, if the civil liberties easily get laid aside when somebody attacks us, then what's the point of all those rights? What's the point of boasting about our freedom when it's revocation is subject to the latest crisis?

In essence, these people are saying that in times of stress and strain, America should turn to the expedient habits of hypocrisy, instead of showing our integrity by living up to our founding principles.

The folks who have purchased and leased the properties necessary for this development have bought the right to do, within the law, what is their right to do with their property.

I think some of the doubts people have as to the wisdom of this project are legitimate, but what I think, or what anybody else thinks in this country, should be irrelevant. It should be none of our business what they do. If it doesn't break our leg or pick our pocket, they should be free to worship as they please, and build as they please to that end.

There's a reason that science has been such a smashing success. It's about putting our ideas about the world to the test, by actually looking at the world to determine their truth value. Cut out the emotional BS, cut out the handwaving around the unprovable, you're dealing with what can be proven or disproven in terms of evidence.

But you, know it could have just all been a wild idea. Some folks like to imagine that science is all done by eccentrics locked away in basements, who come up with brilliant ideas, and then have to fight heroically against a disbelieving majority.

In reality, Einstein was not a loner, nor a crank. Bits and pieces of his theory were already in place before he wrapped them all together. He read broadly in his field, and was influenced by others.

Einstein's triumph in his theory of Special Relativity was tossing out the notion of a luminiferous aether (a mysterious substance that allowed lightwaves to move through otherwise empty space) and the notion of a state of absolute rest.

The relativity Einstein talks about was relativity between inertial frames of reference. What is an inertial frame of reference? Well, if you're walking inside a room, and somebody throws a baseball past you, we can count four frames of reference at least:

1) You, walking.
2) The Baseball, flying past you.
3) The Pitcher, throwing the ball.
4) The Room.

Now, at low speeds, even the speed of the fastest fastball, Newton's laws of physics hold. But if objects were moving at speeds approaching that of light there would be consequences, according to Einstein's theory.

Let's take you, for instance. If you were were walking around at the speed of light, Your surroundings would seem to squash as you looked to the sides. As you saw the baseball fly by, it would get squashed even more. This is what's called Lorenzian contraction. Theoretically, if you moved an eighteen foot ladder at high enough speed, it could fit within an ten foot garage. (However briefly!) Your measurement of length would change.

You, too, would seem squashed to an observer able to catch sight of you. Where you might measure yourself as having a certain breadth, your observer would disagree. What relativity would tell us is that we're each right, from our frame of reference. It's not merely an illusion, but an effect of the speed of light, which is our yardstick for all measurements, due to its constancy.

In Einstein's physics, Space and time are connected, so unsurprisingly, time dilates when space contracts. A second for you, walking near the speed of light, takes longer to elapse from the Pitcher's perspective, than it does from yours. Same thing for the baseball.

If that baseball had a twin back in the Pitcher's pocket, the baseball, after improbably returning to the Pitcher's very well-padded glove, would find it's formerly identical counterpart scuffed and worn from years of use. The closer an object's speed to lightspeed, the more intense this dilation's effect.

The speed of light also enforces, at least in one aspect, a limit on the speed of communicating information. So, if that first baseball were to suddenly turn into a pot of flowers, You would see the miracle first, while at the same time, the Pitcher would register this improbable event later, still seeing a baseball and not a petunia. Because of the limits of the speed of light on the effects of the event spreading, our observations will differ greatly in terms of how we see the space and time of the event.

But there's more that limits on the speed of light will do.

Let's get out of the house, and onto a train. The Pitcher has a baseball, and he's lent you the other baseball. He throws from the platform, you throw from the train, which is accelerated to three quarters the speed of light. You and him have good arms, so you can both throw at the same speed. Traditionally, that speed is going to add or take away depending on its relative velocity.

It's important here to register the difference between a speed and a velocity in physics. A speed is just a scalar, a value that you can move up and down. 25 mph or 250 mph.

Velocities are vectors. That means they have both a magnitude and a direction. A change in either quality is a change in velocity. If you take a curve at a constant 25 mph, it's a change in velocity.

A change in velocity is an acceleration.

Objects with mass cannot accelerate to the speed of light, much less past it. Instead of going 1.5 times the speed of light, your baseball will accelerate at an appreciably greater fraction of lightspeed, but still just a fraction.

What's more, the baseball is going to get heavier and heavier, more massive as it accelerates closer to the speed of light, and less and less energy goes into actually making the baseball move faster. As a massive object approaches lightspeed, the accumulation of mass at the expense of acceleration tends towads infinity. Even more intriguing, the relationship of energy to mass is a function of lightspeed square.

Now, having heard all this, many of you might be confused or skeptical. How do we know that Einstein's theory is valid?

The short answer is that we've seen these consequences play out in reality. We've seen particles flatten and gain mass as they are accelerated around facilities like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and the Tevatron accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. We've seen the increases in masses. We've seen muons from particle collisions in the upper atmosphere travel far further down than their known decay rates would allow them to reach, if time dilation weren't true.

Hell, if you're driving around in a car with GPS, your navigation system is working off the principle that two differently accelerated objects will experience a difference in their time frames. The Satellite and the receiver both have onboard clocks, and the difference of time's flow higher up in Earth's gravity well and back on Earth can be used to figure out distance, and triangulate your position.

When you drive a car with a GPS device, Einstein's the navigator!

You could do worse.

Point is, Einstein's theories were both verifiable and verified. Folks worked out the consequences and figured out ways to test the theory through the implications of its truth or non-truth.

Einstein's theory is not invalid because some morons out there think it means they can just act any way they please because its all about different points of view. In fact, on an analogical level, it faiils, because Einstein's theory relies in part on the proposition that some laws, particularly the speed of light in a vacuum, are inviolable.

General Relativity takes things one step further, and states gravity to be an effect of massive objects distorting the fabric of spacetime. Essentially, as a globe might make the shortest path between two lines a curve along a great circle, rather than Euclid's straight line, the curvature of space time that a massive objection brings makes the effective shortest path, given the speed of the object, a certain curve.

This deflection, even if it doesn't change the speed, changes the direction, and as I explained earlier, velocity is both direction and speed, so a change in direction alone would lead us to call this an acceleration.

This deflection, by the way, doesn't depend on an object having mass. Even light, whose photons have no rest-mass, gets deflected. This, by the way, is part of how we know General Relativity, as a theory, is at least somewhat on the right track, as we have seen and measured the light distorted and deflected by massive objects.

Science is about relationships, and relationships within the real world are what we test to test the validity and soundness of different theories. You cannot write up a theory so that it cannot be held accountable to measurements of the natural world, and expect to have it called a scientific theory, because what makes science what it is, is the ability to take the scientists speculation and use evidence to test for the presence, or the absence of a particular result that should come from nature or the lab if something's true.

Science is imperfect, and often distorted by others trying to push an agenda or a point of view, but it's better than the alternative.

The alternative is people trying to run a mechanized, high-tech society by the seat of their pants, not respecting that when it comes to a difference of opinion between you and nature, you never win the argument. In fields such as aviation, where the quality of metals and the physics of jet propulsion are crucial to the passenger's fate, the failure to take real world conditions into account, like volcanoes chucking up ash or winter storms laying down ice, can end up having fatal consequences. Heck, one plane's fate was sealed by the fact that it had square windows.

Unfortunately, some folks, some interest groups count on the rarity of some kinds of failures, or the long onset to still make money doing what they do. If we want to really talk about relativism, we can talk about the ethics of disputing scientifically sound evidence that we're experiencing some of the warmest temperatures on record that we have for thousands of years. In fact, the last ten years, almost year for year, are the hottest years every recorded for global temperature averages, contrary to what James Inhofe said. Local and incidental weather variations aside, the planet is provably getting warmer. This isn't merely some ambiguous human factors question where the answer is, "what's your preference." This is a thermodynamic system where the complexity of the effects of the newly added heat, rather than the build up of additional heat is at question.

Carbon Dioxide is one of those well understood chemicals that scientists can make some reasonable guesses about. We know for a fact, that it scatters infra-red at certain frequencies. We know for a fact that despite it's trace levels (measured in hundreds of parts per million) that it has a disproportionate effect on the ability of the atmosphere to retain heat. Heck, this was known about even at the beginning of the last century.

What the folks of that time (who already were guessing that all our carbon emissions were going to raise temperatures) did not know, or couldn't anticipate, was that both computational models and observation of temperature records were going to show that it wasn't going to be some nice, gradual warm up over the next thousand years, but that instead, the system would stress and stress and strain until it snapped, and that it could do this quickly.

Some folks remain behind the time on the science, or worse, rely on intuition, rather than any disciplined system that relied on verifiable facts. It's not a question of whether people can be right, without the help of scientific discipline, but rather, whether they know when they're wrong, whether the facts and the conditions of the real world can persuade their thinking, or whether they're just operating off their own imagination.

I know the power of the human imagination. People can dream up just about anything, make it seem as real as the world before you. But I know the limits and the potential pitfalls of it, too. Nature plays out, blindly, becoming more complex and more intricate without any need to fit its depth of complexity and wealth of information within the limits of human attention and comprehension. When human beings try to mess around without at least getting a basic understanding of the situation, nature doesn't have to bother outthinking them. Nature simply exists as it is, and overwhelms intuitive human understanding. Things like science are recent innovations of minds that were meant simply to help us survive in the world as it is. We didn't have to know so much, we didn't have any clue that we understood so little.

Those who smugly say that humans couldn't possibly derange the natural order on climate are ignorant of what small stimuli have set off changes over the course of natural history. A few degrees difference was all that it took to take the grasslands the Natufian culture knew, and make it into the Sahara. If anything illustrates the suddenness and caprice of climate, it's The Cave of Swimmers. The paintings of these caves show what the deep dry desert now makes an utter absurdity. The rocks show a culture that only lush rainfall could produce.

The world works by its own rules. We can either be humble enough to respect those rules and try and understand them on a real world basis, or we can arrogantly assume that our feelings, our limited imaginations, our relativistic assumptions about what matters dictate the course of nature, rather than nature's own implacably played out rules.

But bin Laden is a rogue terrorist and murderer to real Muslims. There is no and will not be any "clash of civilizations" for the simple reason that Islam is considered by its adherents to be an extension of Judaism and Christianity. Muslims believe in one God, as do Jews and Christians. Muslims venerate all the prophets venerated by Jews and Christians; they add Muhammad and insist he is the last prophet.

The essence of all three religions is the same: the golden rule:

1. Jews - When asked to explain Judaism while standing on one foot, Rabbi Hillel said "Don't do unto others what you would not want them to do unto you."

2. Christians - The first commandment of Jusus was to love God, and his second was "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

3. Muslims - Muhammad said "None of you can be a believer unless he loves for his brother what he loves for himself."

Let's not judge all Muslims by the violence performed by some Muslims, just as we should not judge all Christians or Jews by the violence performed by some Christians or Jews. The best way we can fight terrorism is to welcome Muslims and work together with them to build a harmonious society. Fareed Zakaria, who returned a prize from the ADL because he feels so strongly about this, says about the Imam of the proposed mosque:

Zakaria says that the man behind the proposed Ground Zero Islamic community center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, "has spent years trying to offer a liberal interpretation of Islam" and "argues that America is actually what an ideal Islamic society woud look like because it is peaceful, tolerant and pluralistic.

"His vision for Islam, in other words, is Osama Bin Laden's nightmare," Zakaria says.

9/11 tested America in a big way. We were attacked and we fought back. But by now, it should dawn on us that our approach is wrong. We're not getting anywhere. Worse, we're hurting ourselves. We fell into bin Laden's trap of endless war with Muslims. We're transgressing against our own principles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

We must have the mosque built and we must make it an integral part of the Ground Zero awakening. We must use it as a form of reconciliation among all religions. Let's celebrate the mosque as a fine expression of American freedom.

However, as Google got bigger and bigger, it began to think about maintaining its bigness and further growing its bigness and its power. The communication companies were eager to get rid of net neutrality. If Google could make a deal for special treatment, Google would become a lot more powerful. More than that, potential competitors would have a tough time providing Google with competition. So, Google, the former champion of net neutrality, made a deal with Verizon, which spells the death knell for net neutrality:

On Monday, Google is expected to announce a deal with Verizon that would end net neutrality and allow telecom companies to slow down particular websites and charge fees similar to cable for access to certain sites on mobile devices. (There is increasingly little difference between mobile and stationary devices.) Verizon, under the agreement being negotiated, could crush blogs, companies or political candidates by slowing down their sites.

"The deal marks the beginning of the end of the Internet as you know it," responded Josh Silver, president of Free Press, an advocate of net neutrality.

This is unfortunate. The Internet is different from all other media ever invented before because it enables ordinary people - you and me - to talk to each other, to work with each other, to play with each other, to influence each other, to get more involved in literature, politics, culture, different peoples, different countries, different religions. The Internet is an instrument for building democracy, inventing better living conditions, and for making the world more liveable and more peaceful.

The Internet is a boon to the little guy. Net neutrality is the means for keeping it so. Here's the way Senator Al Franken puts it:

If we don't protect net neutrality now, how long do you think it will take before Comcast/NBC/Universal, or Verizon/CBS/Viacom, or AT&T/ABC/DirectTV, or BP/Halliburton/Wal-Mart/Fox/Domino's Pizza starts favoring its content over everyone else's? How long do you think it will take before the Fox News website loads five times faster than Daily Kos? If the Internet -- the tool that allowed this community to come together and become a potent political force -- is under the control of corporate elites, then the netroots can't exist. The progressive movement can't exist. Democracy as we know it can't exist.

We've been googled! You can't depend upon the word of a huge corporation. Google's motto is "Don't do evil." This is evil.

We've been googled! Google is claiming it is still for net neutrality. Don't believe it. These corporate monsters distort the meaning of words in order to screw us.

We've been googled! However, this is only a deal between 2 corporations. It's up to the FCC to bless it. It may very well do this, unless you and I complain.

As a liberal, I am an advocate for the use of Government's power for populist purposes, for the good of the average person. But as a liberal, I am also wary of Government's power, and believe that the government can impinge upon rights when given the power it's given without certain checks and balances.

I believe giving a little bit too much help, and too much protection to the rights of Americans is better, if we are to err, than erring on the side of making government a servant of the elite, and a more able intruder into innocent American's lives. As the strength of the government's ability to influence people's lives increases, so must increase the obligations of that government to its people, and the means people have to defend their rights.

I am glad to be born an American, glad to know that I don't need to pass some test, espouse loyalty to a King, recite a creed of some church, or do some other cockamamie thing to proclaim myself a citizen.

And you know what? You, reading this, should be glad, too. If you are an American citizen, you are so for reasons no politician can warp or twist. You are American for a simple reason: when you came out of your mother's womb, you came to the right place. If you believe in God, you can say you are an American simply because God chose you to be, and no other reason. If you don't? Well you're just lucky, and that's that.

It's little stunts like this that make me concerned about the Republicans, really. To satisfy their few most rabid folllowers, the GOP seems willing to take up all the old hobby horses of a politics that lead us to Civil War. From secession itself, to nullification, it seems like Republicans are reviving the ghosts of the strife that tore this country apart.

Worse yet, they're betraying one of their party's shining moments, when they helped end slavery and set us on the path to ending second-class citizenship.

If the Party of Lincoln would sell out the Legacy of Lincoln to appeal to the lowest common denominator of their party, then they are well and truly lost.

If, however, Republicans can recognize, like Alan Keyes did, that birthright citizenship protects America's freedom, that it serves as an essential check against Government's power, then they too can speak out to protect one of this nation's most precious rights against a government's encroachment.

They can also (wink wink) take away a potential bludgeon that Democrats might use against their party. Believe me, it's not hard to argue for the right to be an American from birth. It's a blessing that all born Americans share. The question is simple: would you have liked some Bureaucrat or some judge deciding whether you had the privileges and rights Americans enjoy?

Pundits say it has always been this way. No, it has not always been this way. Sure, during election season the parties would throw calamitous dirt at each other. But after winners were chosen, the mud-slinging would diminish. There was a certain amount of respect each side had for the other side.

But in the last decade or so, Republicans have become emotional and irrational. Since Obama's election, Republicans have become hysterical. Just listen to the ridiculous stuff spouted by Limbaugh's lieutenants: Palin, Beck and Bachmann.

Why are Republicans hysterically angry? Why do people, in general, get angry? Because things do not work out the way they expected. Or because they don't know what to do in a crisis. Or because they realize that what they believed all their life is not true; this is sometimes called congnitive dissonance.

It seems to me that Republicans are faced with cognitive dissonance. Ever since Reagan, they believed in 2 immutable "laws":

1. Deregulation will produce a booming economy
2. Tax cuts will increase government revenue

Although they may not admit it, those Republicans who have a brain can see that neither of these two "laws" is true. It should be obvious to them by now that adhering to these two "laws" was a big cause, perhaps the most important cause, of the current terrible depression.

When Democrats like me denounce deregulation and tax cuts for the rich, Republicans have no rational retort. Their emotions run wild and crazy. They go ballistic criticizing Democrats.

To my angry Republican friends I say, Calm down and start using your head. It may help you build a more rational Republican program.

House GOP leaders: 9/11 first responders aid bill 'a massive new entitlement program' I dunno. I'm still trying to figure out how this makes things better for the GOP.

The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2009, sponsored by New York City Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D), provides medical monitoring to those exposed to toxins at Ground Zero, bolsters treatment at specialized centers for those afflicted by toxins on 9/11 and reopens a compensation fund to provide economic loss to New Yorkers.

And it’s all paid for by closing a tax loophole on foreign companies with U.S. subsidiaries, Democrats say.

There should be a big neon sign on top of that one saying "Please for the love of God vote for this if you have a brain.", but apparently, it was left in the shop. I mean, jeez louise man.

Number Two: The unpopularity of Healthcare Reform is declining. By that, I mean, Fifty percent approve, and Thirty-five percent disapprove.

Republicans hoping that it would be an anchor around the Democrat's leg may end up sorely disappointed.

Number Three: Republicans are failing math.

Appearing on Fox News, Thune and host Greta Van Susteren discussed the bill's call for the creation of a Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction, tasked with reducing the deficit 10 percent year over year.

"It would be required to find 10% in savings -- 10% of the deficit in savings every budget cycle," Thune said.

"So in 10 years we wouldn't have a deficit?" van Sustern asked.

"Theoretically, yes," Thune replied. "10% Is a floor. Obviously -- you can go beyond that."

This is what's known in think tank (and Twitter) circles as a #mathfail.

According to Thune's plan, "the new Joint Committee must introduce legislation that eliminates or reduces spending on wasteful government programs and achieves a savings of at least 10 percent of the previous year's budget deficit." Because the deficit would decrease yearly, the actual returns on 10 percent annual savings would diminish over time, such that it would take decades to reduce the deficit to one percent of its current level. Forty-three years to be exact. For those who remember Zeno's paradox, it would actually be impossible to ever completely eliminate the deficit under the Thune plan.

Well, maybe he intended to say that his plan would cut ten percent a year from current levels. Okay, that granted, is there still a problem?

Yes. It's called extending the Bush Tax Cuts.

Nunes is right about one thing: Tax cuts do increase the debt, but he’s dead wrong in claiming that they reduce the deficit. In fact, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out, the Bush tax cuts will cause $3.4 trillion in deficits between 2009 and 2019 while the “debt-service costs caused by the Bush-era tax cuts, amount[] to more than $200 billion through 2008 and another $1.7 trillion over the 2009-2019 period — over $330 billion in 2019 alone.”

Number Four: Those wonderful, wonderful, wonderful quotes! :-)

Here's a nice selection:

Rand Paul, in Details Magazine:

Something about Harlan has lodged itself in my brain the way a shard of barbecue gets stuck in one's teeth, and I've asked Paul for help. "I don't know," he says in an elusive accent that's not quite southern and not quite not-southern. The town of Hazard is nearby, he notes: "It's famous for, like, The Dukes of Hazzard."

No, it's famous for something else. The Dukes of Hazzard was actually set in Georgia.

"It sounds funny, but you need to be paying more for your health care,"

Nope, not really.

Paul believes mountaintop removal just needs a little rebranding. "I think they should name it something better," he says. "The top ends up flatter, but we're not talking about Mount Everest. We're talking about these little knobby hills that are everywhere out here. And I've seen the reclaimed lands. One of them is 800 acres, with a sports complex on it, elk roaming, covered in grass." Most people, he continues, "would say the land is of enhanced value, because now you can build on it."

If you know what Mountaintop Removal Mining is about, you know just how jawdropping that statement is. It's a practice opposed by the majority of West Virginians. It not only causes more environmental damage, but it's used by the Corporations to get out of the labor intensive requirements of traditional coal seam mining.

Oh, and then there's that other stuff Rand Paul said about the Civil Rights act.

Sharron Angle seems to be competing to make an even bigger ass out of herself, handing a likely Election day life preserver to Harry Reid, who many had declared DOA.

On the oil and mining industries:

I was just saying we are over regulating some of our industries and of course the oil and petroleum industry is one of those we’ve been over regulating and that has what has been dependent on foreign oil.

On "Second Amendment Remedies"

Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who's in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical...

Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.

Angle: Well it's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.

Sort of reminds me of this little comment the King of England made about some priest. Hopefully somebody hasn't considered Second Amendment solutions to political disputes in Washington. That kind of helped make things difficult in the Sixties and Seventies.

This one isn't quite a quote, but it does win the award for best effort to protect our precious bodily fluids.

She pulled a Barton, and then thought better of it!

Angle also seemed to agree with a caller who flatly described the fund as extortion, and added: "Government shouldn't be doing that to a private company." For good measure, she said Dems are exploiting the crisis to push energy reform and are following "Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals."

Angle made the claims on the Alan Stock show late yesterday. A caller said that Obama had "basically extorted $20 billion from a private company," and asked Angle what she thought of "the $20 billion slush fund."

"Government shouldn't be doing that to a private company," Angle replied. "And I think you named it clearly: It's a slush fund."

(We'll get to Barton a little later.)

Then there's this little prize about turning life's lemons into lemonade.

I think that two wrongs don't make a right. And I have been in the situation of counseling young girls, not 13 but 15, who have had very at risk, difficult pregnancies. And my counsel was to look for some alternatives, which they did. And they found that they had made what was really a lemon situation into lemonade.

I don't generally support abortion, but I really do think that in such cases, it should be the choice of the woman who just got assaulted by the father of the child. This isn't a piece of fruit, it's the violation of a woman by the father.

Back to Joe Barton. The oil is spilled on Louisiana shores, fishermen and folks who depend on tourists are out of work, and Barton thinks that the tragedy of the first order is that BP is persuaded to pay for the damages they've done in a way that ensures that they won't try to weasel out of it?

And these aren't mainstream folks. John Boehner compares the target of the Financial reforms to an ant, and the reforms to a nuclear weapon. Yeah. Well, when the ant eats a significant portion of the economy and doesn't even pay when the check comes around, I think a little nuking is in order.

How do Republicans get the idea they can say these things?

Well, when the only folks you listen to all day are lobbyists buttering you up for their sectors, Fellow Republicans speaking your language, and a news network and conservative media praising you for saying things like this, you might get the idea that everybody's cheering you on. Unfortunately for Republicans, the fan club aren't the only folks Republicans need to appeal to in order to get elected.

Number Five: The hits just keep coming!

The article linked discusses the possible political repercussions of a new oil spill, this time in the area of Lake Michigan. Add that to a new one down in Louisiana.

Republicans have something they didn't have in 1994: a terrible legacy of catastrophic policy screw-ups. People might forget, but how much does it take for them to remember, once again?

Small screw-ups fade from memory. Big screw-ups stick around. Republicans, in an effort to avoid having to concede problems to Democratic Party competition, decided to let a lot of problems get worse. Whether that was a fiscal crisis, a market heading for instability thanks to the housing market, a war that was spiraling out of control, the Republicans essentially put themselves in a position of trying to muscle back the media and public opinion blowback from a series of incredible, difficult to believe screw-ups, rather than taking steps to deal with the realities of those problems.

Of those two options, that is, trying to muscle back disdain from people who think you're screwing up, and solving the problem, I would tell you that solving the problem is the better option. With the first option, you're choosing the option that offers the easiest, least difficult decisions to make. It's always going to be easy to talk than do something real, and if you can convince people to accept your talk, your problem's solved.

But for all that easiness, that option represents the hardest way to get anything positive actually done for your country, much less your party. Talk only works when it motivates action, and the talk most people use to jawbone themselves out of trouble often motivates inaction instead. Then when the problem spirals out of control, you find yourself with something really difficult to talk your way out of.

If, however, you manage the problem in the real world, and deal with things responsibly, it's a lot easier to talk your way out of problems, because people cut problem solvers slack easier than they cut loafers slack.

Republicans can talk all they want to, in order to defend their inaction, but when it comes right down to it, people will still see the results of that inaction. A Republican Party that continues to seek excuses to do nothing, or to help their old friends is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Talk was nice in the 90's, when people didn't have wars or economic problems to deal with. Now people want more from their government. If the Republicans can't or won't deliver, that will serve as a ceiling to the fulfillment of their ambitions.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled that the portions of the law that most angered its opponents -- including the checking of immigration status during stops for unrelated offenses -- would not be allowed to be enforced. The Associated Press reported that the sections would be put on hold until the courts resolve the issues. White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters on Air Force one that the Department of Justice would be reacting to the ruling. [...] Bolton rules, "There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens under the new [law]. ... By enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose a 'distinct, unusual and extraordinary' burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose."

Okay, now that this ruling has come down, we can expect to move on from the constitutional merits of the law to accusations from the right of judicial activism and ad hominem attacks on the judge.

I've been making the exact same points for months now, though, even as many on the Right basically said that Obama would walk away with egg on his face. Fact of the matter is, the Constitution gives the Federal Government the power to regulate naturalization explicitly, as an enumerated power. I've also been pointing out the far too low threshold of suspicion that the law enables. Lo and behold, that's one of the issue the judge brings up. The matter of investigating matters unrelated to the reason for a traffic stop is another issue I brought up. Sure enough, thats one of the issues addressed in the ruling.

While I'm at it, I think I should tell you about a rather curious detail about Gov. Jan Brewer's support of this bill.

In short, two of Brewer's two top advisers once worked for a company called Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

Paul Senseman, Brewer’s deputy chief of staff, is a former lobbyist for CCA. His wife continues to lobby for the company. Meanwhile Chuck Coughlin, who leads her re-election campaign, chaired her transition into the governorship, and is one of the governor’s policy advisors, is president of HighGround Public Affairs Consultants, which lobbies for CCA.

This is important because CCA currently “holds the federal contract to house detainees in Arizona.” CBS 5 notes that the company currently bills $11 million a month to the state of Arizona and that, if SB-1070 is successfully implemented, its profits would be significantly padded as it would take responsibility for imprisoning immigrants arrested by Arizona police.

The company maintains that it “unequivocally, did not at any time lobby — nor did we have any outside consultants lobby — anyone in Arizona on the immigration law,” but direct lobbying would not be necessary with allies like Senseman and Coughlin working directly for Brewer.

Food for thought.

Clearly, we we are in a different time. Republicans have struck a blow for corporate secrecy, for people to pump millions of dollars into ads they don't have to take responsibility for. But they certainly haven't struck a blow for Democracy.

If it were any other group, and 90% or more of the experts in that group told you something was very likely, would you take that possibility seriously? For some reason, everybody else must be wrong. Mention that many of the groups that promote doubt are funded by oil companies, and the light goes off.

BP itself is a company with a serious credibility problem. If they said it was sunny out, many people would grab their umbrellas.

Will that company, though, just lie down and accept their lack of crediblity? No. They will try to do end runs around it, using front groups to avoid getting their message shot down before it's even off the runway.

I think people deserve to know, when a corporation is involved, who they're getting their message from, who might benefit from an action. It is the voters to whom our politicians are officially accountable, it's time they acted like it.
57 Democrats agreed. This shouldn't even be a toss-up, Given what polls say about putting limits on Corporate spending in politics.

Republicans boast that they are serving the majority by opposing what Democrats are pushing. But majorities in states and in congressional districts put Democrats in control. It all gets confused if you actually follow numbers on issues and votes. The Republicans stark pronouncements that Democrats have fallen out of step with American majorities is belied by all the different issues where they themselves departed from majorities.

The Republicans have a conflict of interest with getting anything done or done right. If Democrats fail to reform government, even with profound majorities, Republicans usually don't have to field the question they should, which is whether they're the reason a bill never comes to a vote. If Democrats succeed in reforming government, in improving conditions, well then a lot of lip-flapping about government can't do anything right looks to the American people to be what it is: excuses for incompetence and callous disregard for the needs of Americans.

If your plan in November is to simply punish a majority when it doesn't get something done, be my guest. If your plan is to punish people who get in the way of thing getting better, then there are some Republicans who deserve your attention.

Here, in this case, Democrats were not aiming to pass an unpopular measure. Nor were they short on the numbers needed to pass the bill. Yet because the Republicans cannot abide the Democrats exercising their popular mandate, their constitutionally gained popular mandate, they have thrown an monkey wrench in the works.

Majorities should not be denied the right to do the job they were elected to do by a minority that abuses the rules of the Senate to gain back the power voters deliberately took from them. The Republicans had their chances to convince people they were right. They lost. Now, apparently, their philosophy is that the rest of the country should lose until they win again. How selfless of them.