I’m traveling today. My brother is being buried at Arlington tomorrow, so I’m in the DC area. My motel room has a great view of the Pentagon, which is a very boring building to look at. So talk about whatever.
I see that David Axelrod wrote in his new book that President Obama was in support of same-sex marriage all along, and just said he wasn’t back in 2008 so he wouldn’t scare off voters. Righties are incensed. The President lied! Booman says, “The President Lied, People Got Married.”
Did you know there is a global warming scandal? A novelist with no known scientific background named James Delingpole writes for Breitbart that he knows for a fact that organizations like NASA and NOAA are falsifying the data people are going by to make claims of global climate change. This claim has been picked up by The Telegraph, no less, which I’ve noticed publishing science denialism propaganda in the past. And the whole right blogosphere is eating this up and crowing about the “scandal,” utterly oblivious to the flagrant hinkyness of their source.
Reading on, we learn that the scandal was “broken” by a retired accountant named Paul Homewood who has made something of a name for himself by writing inane science-denialist articles for pseudo-science websites.
In brief, wingnuts, wake us up when you’ve got scientific, peer-reviewed data. Otherwise, just keep playing in traffic. Thanks much.
Stuff worth pondering in an article by Nick Hanauer, “Stock Buybacks Are Killing the American Economy.”
As economic power has shifted from workers to owners over the past 40 years, corporate profit’s take of the U.S. economy has doubled—from an average of 6 percent of GDP during America’s post-war economic heyday to more than 12 percent today. Yet despite this extra $1 trillion a year in corporate profits, job growth remains anemic, wages are flat, and our nation can no longer seem to afford even its most basic needs. A $3.6 trillion budget shortfall has left many roads, bridges, dams, and other public infrastructure in disrepair. Federal spending on economically crucial research and development has plummeted 40%, from 1.25 percent of GDP in 1977 to only 0.75 percent today. Adjusted for inflation, public university tuition—once mostly covered by the states—has more than doubled over the past 30 years, burying recent graduates under $1.2 trillion in student debt. Many public schools and our police and fire departments are dangerously underfunded.
Where did all this money go?
The answer is as simple as it is surprising: Much of it went to stock buybacks—more than $6.9 trillion of them since 2004, according to data compiled by Mustafa Erdem Sakinç of The Academic-Industry Research Network. Over the past decade, the companies that make up the S&P 500 have spent an astounding 54 percent of profits on stock buybacks. Last year alone, U.S. corporations spent about $700 billion, or roughly 4 percent of GDP, to prop up their share prices by repurchasing their own stock.
The more I learn about stuff going on, the more I think we should give up trying to live in the 1 percent’s world and just go build ourselves cottages on the prairie somewhere. We takers, we undeserving poor, should be the ones who “go Galt.”
In the past, this money flowed through the broader economy in the form of higher wages or increased investments in plants and equipment. But today, these buybacks drain trillions of dollars of windfall profits out of the real economy and into a paper-asset bubble, inflating share prices while producing nothing of tangible value.
As with many other things, the rules that used to discourage this practice were changed during the Reagan Administration, and the finance guys get more and more brazen about it all the time.
But … but … but … Free Markets (Blessed Be They)! Most of the commenters seem to think Hanauer is some airhead socialist who doesn’t understand how real he-men run an economy.
Some People can’t handle the truth. President Obama referenced the Crusades at yesterday’s prayer breakfast, and from the reaction you’d think he’d just pissed on Jesus.
“Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Mr. Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
These are what we call bare-assed facts. Yes, terrible things were done in the name of Christ during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Yes, lots of antebellum ministers delivered sermons supporting slavery, quoting the Bible as they did so. These are well-documented facts that ought to be taught in high school level history, and certainly anyone who has a bachelor’s degree in just about anything should have had enough History 101 to have been exposed to these facts.
But I guess not.
“The president’s comments this morning at the prayer breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” said Jim Gilmore, the former Republican governor of Virginia. “He has offended every believing Christian in the United States.”
Rush Limbaugh devoted a segment of his show to what he said were the president’s insults to the “whole gamut of Christians” and Twitter’s right wing piled on. Guests on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show spent 15 minutes airing objections to the president’s comments.
Another article quotes Gov. Gilmore this way —
“He has offended every believing Christian in the United States,” said Mr. Gilmore, a Republican. “This goes further to the point that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we share.”
Of this, Ed Kilgore writes,
While some of Obama’s critics may claim the Inquisition and the Crusades just weren’t all that bad (though an auto-da-fe in a capital case for, say, the refusal to eat pork, was probably about as “barbaric” as a beheading), I think Gilmore articulates the main objection: we’re in a “religious war” and the president needs to show solidarity with “our” religion. Others, of course, reject the idea of separation of church and state that Obama spoke of yesterday, typically by drawing on David Barton’s spurious histories of the Founders’ intentions.
In other words, it’s possible that knowledge of Christianity’s less glorious episodes does reside in a little-used nook in Gilmore’s head, but it’s disloyal to the Team to talk about that stuff! (See also “Mass Rage Event.”)
Ed Kilgore goes on to make some excellent points about the President’s understanding of Christianity being more traditional and, well, religious than those of his critics, but for now I want to skip to another point, which is the rightie obsession with labels. I’ve written about this in the past (see, for example, “Why Are Righties So Obsessed With Labels?” ). Many righties, such as South Carolina Senator Miss Lindsey Graham, are demanding that the President say the words “we are in a religious war against radical Islamists.”
Even assuming we can define “radical Islamist” narrowly enough so that it doesn’t include anyone who’s ever visited a mosque or worn a headscarf, what do you mean by “religious war”? America is not supposed to do “religious wars,” I don’t think. A “religious war” by definition is “a war primarily caused or justified by differences in religion,” according to Wikipedia, and I honestly don’t think “differences in religion” are the real problem. The problem is “whackjob radicals murdering people and destabilizing the Middle East,” as I understand it. The radicals may have co-opted some twisted version of Islam to justify what they’re doing, but it’s what they’re doing, not our “differences in religion,” that is the problem.
John Amato quotes Uber-Catholic Bill Donohue as saying “We have a problem with Islam. Not just with Islamists, but a problem with Islam.” But who is “we”? I don’t have a problem with Islam. As John Amato says,
For some reason the right has focused on Obama for not constantly bashing the Muslim religion, as Bill Donohue does in this interview, but then they demand that Muslim countries join us in fighting groups like ISIS. Do they not understand the fallacy of their reasoning?
Peter Beinart (yeah, I know, it’s Peter Beinart) writes,
If there’s one thing top Republicans know, it’s that America can’t defeat terrorism unless we call it by its real name. “We are in a religious war with radical Islamists,” Lindsey Graham recently told Fox News. “When I hear the President of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me.” Rudy Giuliani agrees: “If we can’t use the words radical Islamic terrorism, we can’t get rid of them. So does Ted Cruz. At the Iowa Freedom Summit in January he declared that, You cannot fight and win a war on radical Islamic terrorism if you’re unwilling to utter the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.'”
There are several problems here. Even if one believed that calling the enemy radical Islam were a good idea, it would hardly explain how to defeat it. …In reality, denouncing radical Islam offers little guidance for America’s actual policy dilemmas.
Back to Ed Kilgore:
As Beinart suggests, the real purpose of these demands seems to be a sort of defiance of “political correctness” — a test of the president’s willingness to offer unnecessary and counter-productive offense for the sheer hell of it. Some conservatives, of course, wish to wage war on Islam in its entirety, which would require a degree of unilateralism and bottomless resources that might daunt even Dick Cheney. Others are simply intoxicated with the alleged power of “moral clarity” involved in insulting people. Any way you look at it, though, it’s an irresponsible obsession.
So they don’t really have a plan, but just think America will be naturally empowered if its head of state says the right magic words. Of course, some of this is the usual faux outrage intended to damage the President politically, even if it means messing up U.S. foreign policy. But the faux outrage wouldn’t score points if it didn’t tap into something deep and nasty and real.
Every now and then one runs into something that gets to the heart of things, and I ran into such a thing this morning. This is from an article on karma (emphasis added) —
We read the early Buddhist attacks on the caste system, and aside from their anti-racist implications, they often strike us as quaint. What we fail to realize is that they strike right at the heart of our myths about our own past: our obsession with defining who we are in terms of where we come from — our race, ethnic heritage, gender, socio-economic background, sexual preference — our modern tribes. We put inordinate amounts of energy into creating and maintaining the mythology of our tribe so that we can take vicarious pride in our tribe’s good name.
That’s at least 80 percent of most right-wing politics these days — the mythology of their tribe. It’s all about taking vicarious pride in being Christian, or American, or white, or whatever. And the other 20 percent is protecting the assets of the 1 percent.
Paul Waldman asks if it’s too soon to declare the current Congress a failure.
In fairness, with a Democratic president there really isn’t much that a Republican Congress can achieve unless it’s willing to compromise, which this Congress isn’t. But after six years of waiting for the moment they’d take complete control, you’d think they’d have some kind of plan. If they do, it’s hard to discern how it’s supposed to work. Every conflict they have with the president only seems to make them look worse, and they seem to be lurching from day to day with no idea how to do anything but fall on their faces.
Ironically, the Republicans had a lot more power when they were in the minority than they do now. With a Democratic Congress, the administration set out an ambitious legislative agenda, which Republicans were able to obstruct and subvert as long as they stayed unified, which they did very well. But once they took control, the administration all but gave up on legislating (apart from unavoidable tasks like passing budgets to keep the government open), which leaves Republicans with no fights to wage apart from the meaningless ones they manage to concoct on their own. And they can’t even figure out how to win those. Winning Congress has put Republicans in a position where they have little choice other than to make things worse.
The box they’ve put themselves in is that they can’t actually do anything. Even if they were capable of doing something, they can’t allow themselves to do it. The few things they might be able to do, like approve the XL pipeline, will be vetoed, and anything that wouldn’t be vetoed would probably get them in hot water with the base. Waldman continues,
They could come to an agreement with President Obama on infrastructure spending, which everyone used to agree is absolutely necessary. They could make tough but realistic demands on the budget, and pass something that Obama will be willing to sign but still manages to move government’s priorities in the direction they’d like — even if tea partiers call it a betrayal, because tea partiers will call any compromise a betrayal. If the Supreme Court rules in their favor in King v. Burwell and takes insurance subsidies from millions of people, they could be ready with a plan to help them immediately, instead of just celebrating the fact that they successfully made so many Americans’ lives worse.
All that could happen. But based on their first month with control of Congress, does anyone think it will?
The health care issue more than any other reveals how hamstrung they are. They’ve been promising their own version of health care reform since the bleeping Clinton Administration. Where is it? The one halfway workable idea they came up with ended up becoming Obamacare, which they have sworn to destroy.
Recently the GOP announced it was creating a task force, headed by Paul Ryan, to come up with an alternative plan in case the SCOTUS screws with the subsidies. CNBC reported,
The GOP has been criticized for their continued opposition to President Barack Obama’s signature health law without offering a serious alternative to the program, which is credited with significantly reducing the number of uninsured Americans last year.
But the pending Supreme Court case, due to be argued in March, has spurred what could turn out to be serious action by Republicans.
But … but … but … for years they’ve been saying they do have an alternative plan. Lots of them, actually. Here on this very blog I have written about them. For example, I wrote about a plan back in 2009 that, remarkably, is a lot like their other plans. These plans largely are designed to provide talking points so they can fake having a plan. They survive scrutiny about as long as a Popsicle in July.
They’re in the same box regarding presidential politics. They may not allow themselves to address real issues or propose workable solutions, because it will piss off the base. Michael Tomasky wrote,
I finally sat myself down and watched that Scott Walker speech from last week that everyone is raving about. If this was the standout speech, I sure made the right decision in not subjecting myself to the rest of them. It was little more than a series of red-meat appetizers and entrees: Wisconsin defunded Planned Parenthood, said no to Obamacare, passed some kind of law against “frivolous†lawsuits, and moved to crack down on voter “fraudâ€â€â€”all of that besides, of course, his big move, busting the public-employee unions. There wasn’t a single concrete idea about addressing any of the major problems the country faces.
There’s lots of noise that Walker is the front runner this week.
He’s gained because those items— kicking Planned Parenthood, denying your own citizens subsidized health-care coverage, pretending that voter fraud is a thing—are what pass for ideas in today’s GOP. Walker is even more vacuous on foreign policy, as Martha Raddatz revealed yesterday, twisting him around like a pretzel with a couple of mildly tough questions on Syria. The Democratic Party has its problems, but at least Democrats are talking about middle-class wage stagnation, which is the country’s core economic quandary. Rick Santorum is, in fairness, but a) his solutions are the same ones conservatives have been advertising for years (lower taxes, less regulation, more two-parent families) and b) he’s not going anywhere in the polls so far, undoubtedly precisely because he’s trying to drop the homosexuality-is-bestiality shtick and talk about actual economic problems.
This vacuity works for them sometimes, especially when they can blame screwups on Democrats and OH LOOK MUSLIMS SHAIRA LAW MOSQUES BOOGA BOOGA. So, one can argue, they don’t need to accomplish anything; they just have to persuade enough voters that Democrats will take away their guns / give them cooties / hate Jesus. So we’ll see.
Public health is in the news lately, as Republicans — who shamefully exploited ebola fear last year — suddenly find themselves playing defense on measles. Most of them are saying encouraging things about vaccines but won’t say the “m” word, mandate. Although Rand Paul recently said on television that many children develop “profound mental disorders” after vaccination. And it wasn’t long before several spokespersons for wingnuttery were blaming the measles outbreaks on illegal aliens. And it also has to be said that if you go back a few years you can find some anti-vax pandering coming from Democrats who knew better.
And then there’s the guy who says regulations requiring restaurant employees to wash their hands after using the restroom is an example of government overreach. Which leads us into why things are mandated.
I remember reading an article awhile back about how businesses that rely heavily on tourism welcome government regulation, because if tourists have bad experiences at a particular destination, and go home and tell their friends about it, it potentially hurts all the businesses at that destination, not just the offending ones.
Not that anyone is following restaurant staff into restrooms to monitor their hand washing, but it’s somewhat reassuring to know employees are being reminded.
Well, maybe somewhere there’s somebody who wants white men to hate themselves, but it isn’t me, and it isn’t anybody I know, even though most people I know are liberal to a fault.
I bring this up because of an article I stumbled into, written by a guy who says he’d be a natural-born social justice warrior except that he’s a white man, and those other SJWs out there hate him and say mean things about white mandom. He says,
The problem is that I no longer wish to be a subject of the social justice ideology. I like Plato, I like Shakespeare, and I am interested in John Milton. I think reason and logic are still valid. I don’t think my ancestors were purely evil patriarchs, and if they were, I still love the ideas and culture they left me. In the humanities and academy at large, I find that the very things I love and cherish as part of my tradition and culture are under attack.
Accepting that I am subject and can never be a true ally, I find that I am moved to align more closely with the movement that would not have me tear my culture to the ground and burn it in the name of justice. So I ask you, please make room for me in the conservative tent; If not your tent, then your voting bloc. I am one of many nameless who has fallen to the “law of merited impossibility.â€
Not being aware of any movement to suppress Shakespeare, never mind reason and logic, I kept reading for an example of what this guy is talking about. The one example provided  was a complaint by a couple of UC-Berkeley students that their humanities courses amount entirely to studying the thinking of dead white guys and leave out the perspectives of women and nonwhites. And, of course, the problem here is that for many centuries of western civilization only white guys were paid attention to, so theirs are the only “thoughts” left us in the western civ curricula. It’s a variation of the Saving Private Ryan problem — people complained about the film because all the soldiers in the Normandy Beach scene were white. But they were — at the real event, I mean. The U.S. military was racially segregated at the time, and I see no purpose being served in pretending that it wasn’t. It’s good to be reminded of these things, actually.
On the other hand, there’s a real problem in some academic studies in which perspectives other than those of dead white European guys are still being frozen out. For centuries, women were locked out of contributing to both eastern and western civ, but that doesn’t mean current, well-documented gender bias in academia can be ignored. And the philosophy departments of American universities continue to shortchange Asian philosophies. I have read that even major universities with highly regarded philosophy departments have no faculty who specialize in Chinese philosophy, for example. American students who want to focus their graduate studies on Chinese philosophy often are told to go to Hong King or Singapore. When one Asian-American student wrote a widely circulated article complaining about this, a prominent U of Chicago professor wrote, “And should we really add East Asian philosophers to the curriculum to satisfy the consumer demands of Asian students rather than because these philosophers are interesting and important in their own right?”
And, of course, it’s panels of white guys whose education is limited to the standard Dead White Guy curricula determining what is “interesting and important.” The student who complained about the lack of Asian philosophy had written, “Philosophy, it is often claimed, deals with universal truths and timeless questions. It follows, allegedly, that these matters by their very nature do not include the unique and idiosyncratic perspectives of women, minorities, or ‘people of culture.’†It’s the default norm syndrome, in other words. The experiences and perspectives that vary from the universal default norm (white maleness) are aberrations and not worthy of consideration.
But let’s go back to the guy who imagines Plato is being pulled off library shelves to make room for Simone de Beauvoir. It’s been obvious to me for a long time that the way Americans are educated, from Kindergarten on, has a European bias that makes no real sense any more. It’s possibly not as blatant as when I was in school, where “world history” was a trajectory going from Egypt to Greece to western Europe to North America, and anything else was just ignored. It is argued that this is where “our” culture comes from, so American students should know about it. And that’s fine, but I thought the purpose of education is to teach us what we need to know to understand and appreciate the world, and leaving out perspectives other than European is not accomplishing that.
Awhile back, when the Eurocentric nature of American higher education was first challenged, guys like Harold Bloom mounted a spirited defense of The Way We Have Always Taught Stuff by defending the western canon. But I looked and looked and couldn’t find anyone arguing that we shouldn’t study any of that western canon stuff any more. The argument was that there’s other stuff of huge value that western academia ignores because it doesn’t come from the Eurocentric tradition, and we should be looking at that, too. But the old keepers of the White Male Western Civ Flame react to these suggestions as existential threats. If we take Zhuangzi seriously, somehow Plato is diminished. If white men  aren’t allowed to dominate higher education, somehow reason and logic will be lost, a perspective that is neither logical nor reasonable.
And the allegedly Wise Men who keep the flame are too blinkered to see this. It’s like the whiny white guy extolling the virtues of “his” culture, as if somehow Europe was a continent inhabited only by men. As if a whole lot of what is unique and wonderful about American culture  didn’t emerge from African American culture. Obviously this guy is has emotionally invested a whole lot of his self-worth into his race and gender, so challenges to his racial-gender dominance sound to him as if he’s being asked to hate himself.
Of the whiny person who complains that he won’t be a liberal if that requires hating himself, I put him in the same boat as white racists who snarl that liberals want them to feel guilty. Guilt is of no importance to me. Guilt does not so much as butter toast. All I want is for guys like him to see that the default norm syndrome exists, and is holding all of us back, including white guys. It’s possible he would find Zhuangzi’s perspectives enriching, if he ever learned what they are. It’s possible that if he stops clinging to race and gender as if that’s what makes him special, he might actually like himself more.
Related: Jonathan Chait recently stepped in a pile of doo-doo by complaining about “political correctness.” He said PC is an attempt to stifle free speech. Actually, I’ve come to see whining about PC as an attempt to stifle free speech. Lindsay Beyerstein responds.
There are measles epidemics breaking out around the country, and plenty of people are plenty mad at anti-vaxxers who have weakened our herd immunity and allowed this to happen by not getting their kids immunized. Apparently upscale crunchy suburban parenting requires abstention from vaccines, or else one is a bad parent allowing toxins into children’s bodies. These are college educated people who have persuaded themselves that the risks of the vaccines are greater than the risks from the diseases. I understanding not feeling warm and fuzzy toward the pharmaceutical industry, but this is ridiculous.
I ran into a guy the other day raving about vaccines being a violation of personal sovereignty. To which I thought, how did we get to be such a nation of whiny hothouse orchids that vaccinations are a violation of personal sovereignty? I can understand the small number of people with genuine religious objections, but most anti-vaxxers are objecting on pseudo-science grounds. The long-discredited link between vaccines and autism is still believed, and the link is still being promoted on a lot of websites. Plus there are new scientifically unsupported theories about how the number of vaccines kids are getting is overloading their immune systems, or something.
If vaccines were a brand new thing this fear might be more understandable, but if you’re alive today you probably were vaccinated as a child. Not counting the original, primitive smallpox vaccine of the 1790s — which really was risky — people have been getting vaccinated for all kinds of diseases since the late 19th century. The U.S. issued regulations of recommended vaccine schedules for children and adults in the 1940s. It must have been a state program, but in the 1950s in my public elementary school, the school nurse from time to time lined up everyone in class in alphabetical order and give us our shots right there in school. Nobody was excused. Â When I enrolled my kids in public school in the 1980s I had to send their immunization record to the school.
However, after all these years, a substantial number of people have decided that immunizations are (choose as many as apply) a government plot, a scam by the pharmaceutical industry, a threat to our health that for some reason nobody but some celebrities on teevee take seriously, or a harbinger of the One World Order, This is just weird.
Health fads aren’t new at all, but fads about diets have gotten so prevalent they’ve spawned a new term — orthorexia. Suddenly gluten is bad. Suddenly people have to de-tox. Like we didn’t have livers for that. Not that I’m exactly a role model of sensible eating, but I do run into people who are absolutely obsessed with only eating certain foods from a few trusted, and out of the way, sources. It’s like anything sold in a chain grocery store might cause sudden death.
My working theory for at least some of this craziness is that food and health fads have taken the place of religion for some people as a means for protecting themselves and their loved ones for the scary things out there. Prayer has been replaced by colon cleanses.
The measles outbreaks also reminds us that the things we do, or don’t do, really do affect other people in myriad ways. We can go around pretending that our personal choices are just our business, but it’s not always that simple.
So Mittens announced today that he wouldn’t be running for President. I’m actually sorry; I was so looking forward to seeing Mr. Privilege retool himself as a champion of the downtrodden. It would have been fun.
The  “I will not run” statement reveals a lot about the man. He has decided to magnanimously step aside and give “other leaders in the Party the opportunity to become our next nominee,” even though he believes he had it in the bag:
Let me give you some of my thinking. First, I am convinced that with the help of the people on this call, we could win the nomination. Our finance calls made it clear that we would have enough funding to be more than competitive. With few exceptions, our field political leadership is ready and enthusiastic about a new race. And the reaction of Republican voters across the country was both surprising and heartening. I know that early poll numbers move up and down a great deal during a campaign, but we would have no doubt started in a strong position. One poll out just today shows me gaining support and leading the next closest contender by nearly two to one. I also am leading in all of the four early states. So I am convinced that we could win the nomination, but fully realize it would have been difficult test and a hard fight.
I also believe with the message of making the world safer, providing opportunity to every American regardless of the neighborhood they live in, and working to break the grip of poverty, I would have the best chance of beating the eventual Democrat nominee, but that is before the other contenders have had the opportunity to take their message to the voters.
In brief, I am the superior candidate, the one America wants and needs, the one who would most likely whip whatever the Democrats nominate, but I am stepping aside to let lesser men take a shot at it, because that’s the kind of guy I am.
Mark Halperin apparently had insider information, and his assessment doesn’t make Mittens look any better. Mittens thought  he ought to run, because by golly he would make a great President, and he felt downright obligated as a patriot to jump in there and take the White House and make America a better place. It was his duty. And he could win it this time, too; he just had to persuade a few more of the little folks that he really cares about them , too, in an abstract sort of way.
On the negative side, winning the nomination would be hard, because all those other GOP candidates will say unkind things about him, and in the meantime Hillary Clinton is going to take the Dem nomination in a cakewalk and will enter the general election unscathed. Not that he couldn’t beat her, of course, but it would be hard. He’d have to fight for it. And even though he is far and away the best man and the front runner for the GOP nomination, and he felt obligated to serve his country as head of it, because nobody but him understands how to do anything.  he might lose. So he quit.
Seriously; that’s what Halperin says of Mittens’s decision, in a lot more words. What a pathetic weenie.
Compare/contrast Crazy Bill Serman’s  “I will not accept if nominated, and will not serve if elected,” which were his actual words, not the “If nominated I will not run ….” thing. His troops called him Crazy Bill, but in fact Sherman was a man who had been through hell and seen and done hard things, and he was a man with few illusions. Pretty much the opposite of Mittens.
But if Mittens truly is out … and it wouldn’t surprise me if his faux noblesse oblige called him back into the Clown Car in a few months — we may luck out and get Lindsey Graham , who is exploring the possibility of running on his sterling record of — get this, children — foreign policy.
I know. Kind of takes your breath away, huh?
Simon Maloy reviews part of Sen. Graham’s record as a foreign policy genius at Salon. For some of the senator’s more recent geniius, see Maloy’s  America’s most terrified senator: Lindsey Graham’s never-ending doomsday visions from last September.
I’m up against my usual end-of-month deadline wall. But in the light of this week’s flash mob trashing of the First Lady for not wearing a scarf in Saudi Arabia, here’s a trip down memory lane — what happened in 2007 when Nancy Pelosi DID wear a scarf to visit a mosque in a Muslim country.