I had occasion to link to some of Rodda’s latest work in my July 8 Care2 post:

For much, much more regarding Barton’s crimes against history be sure to check out the extensive works ofTalk to Action blogger (and also at The Huffington Post) Chris Rodda, Senior Researcher for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the author of Liars for Jesus:  The Religious Right’s Alternate Version of American History.  Rodda’s “No, Mr. Beck…” series is instructive for understanding Barton’s tactics; like misrepresenting the work of actual academics in order to suggest that the Constitution was based on the Book of Deuteronomy, or cropping a quote from John Adams in order to claim that the second American President thought “Governments must be administered by the holy ghost.”  (Sigh…)

Barton, clearly, has no shame.  And as you’ll see in the clip from the July 8 Countdown broadcast, he is in serious need of some fashion advice.  (I know… It’s a petty observation. But that  jacket is tragic.)

                          

PFAW has assembled a nice, but alarming post, comparing the then & now of McCarthyism.  Perhaps what’s most frightening about its present manifestation is that there aren’t any Republicans with the stones to stand up to the baseless fear mongering.

From People for the American Way, published December, 2009:

McCarthy’s campaign against supposedly widespread communist infiltration of the U.S. government brought down sitting Senators and intimidated even President Eisenhower (who loathed McCarthy) and his advisors.  McCarthy’s campaign was boosted by conservative think tanks, media figures, and clergy, and abetted for years by the unwillingness of most of his colleagues to stand up against his false charges and clear abuses of power.

[snip]

Today’s McCarthyism has many faces and voices, including the household names of right-wing cable television, a plethora of radio hosts, Religious Right leaders, right-wing organizations and the bogus “grassroots” campaigns they generate – and Members of Congress and other Republican Party officials.  Together they engage in character assassination and challenge the loyalty and patriotism of their targets…

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From Time for Change’s Journal, 6 March 2009 post, @ DemocraticUnderground.com:

“If Bush and Cheney commit war crimes and everyone knows it, but does nothing, are they still crimes?” – Jonathan Turley

Jonathan Turley’s rhetorical question gets to the heart of one of the biggest problems with our country (and many other countries as well): We sanitize our history to the point where we can believe in and present a version to the world that is vastly at odds with reality. While that serves the purpose of making many Americans feel better about their country, and also serves the purpose of maintaining the status quo, it greatly impedes progress towards making ourselves a better country. You can’t learn from your mistakes as long as you don’t recognize them. And they will be repeated over and over again until we learn from them.

While Jonathan Turley and many others are focused right now on the crimes of the Bush administration, as well they should be, we should also recognize that this pattern is nothing new. The powers that be have been sanitizing U.S. history since its inception.

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Originally published @ Suite101.com, by Aaron D. Pendell

The years following World War I were marked by the waning spirit of cooperation that had delicately existed between organized labor and capital during the War. Perhaps it was inevitable that it fell apart as the cooperative situation had been brought into line by the Wilson Administration through, according to historian, M.J. Heale, “… engaging public opinion to the war effort, employing massive propaganda campaigns and secret armies of volunteers to ferret out subversives and slackers.”

Heale describes the Federal Government during WWI as “lacking coercive powers” to deal with a nation that was divided by war. When the cooperative spirit slipped following the War, the citizens that had been receptive to Wilson’s propaganda recognized the voices of labor activists as being associated with subversive elements that had infiltrated the ranks of organized labor…

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Maddow aptly assesses that the ‘Bush Legacy Project’ is on a fools errand.  Thanks, in part, to the “Google Machine” and the “Internets,” it will be extremely difficult for the  administration to polish the turd that was the Bush presidency.

Rachel is such a gem.  If you’ve got about ten minutes to spare, view the below clip.

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Nobel laureate Paul Krugman was around to remind Will of some history — that the economy improved after the New Deal, and that it was FDR’s attempt to balance the budget in 1937 (a move favored now by many conservatives) that then cut into that progress.
WATCH

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From the The New Yorker, 17 November 2008 post by, George Parker:

…Barack Obama’s decisive defeat of John McCain is the most important victory of a Democratic candidate since 1932. It brings to a close another conservative era, one that rose amid the ashes of the New Deal coalition in the late sixties, consolidated its power with the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, and immolated itself during the Presidency of George W. Bush…

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Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States on Tuesday, sweeping away the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive…

Mr. Obama’s election amounted to a national catharsis — a repudiation of a historically unpopular Republican president and his economic and foreign policies, and an embrace of Mr. Obama’s call for a change in the direction and the tone of the country. But it was just as much a strikingly symbolic moment in the evolution of the nation’s fraught racial history, a breakthrough that would have seemed unthinkable just two years ago…

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Obama’s Victory Speech:  Grant Park, Chicago:

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Visit The Jed Report for full text of the speech, and extensive election coverage.

                          

I’ll have to look into it, but I’m quite certain that this is an American – if not worldwide – first.  Stay tuned.

International Space Station - NASA

Note to those considering skipping next week’s presidential election from the fellas’ in orbit:  “If we can do it so can you.”

From rawstory.com – Oct. 31, 2008 post:
…Commander Mike Fincke and Flight Engineer Greg Chamitoff, who are working aboard the International Space Station, are to vote by secure electronic ballot uplinked by Johnson Space Center in Houston, according to NASA.

Their votes will be submitted by secure link back to Earth, and recorded by local voting officials in Texas…

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In my imagination:  One astronaut said to the other, “If Obama loses, I’m not going back down.”

                          

From the suntimes.com, September 22, 2008 post by, Abdon M. Pallasch:

The map hasn’t changed all that much in 148 years. But the political parties have switched places. The northeast part of the country, from Illinois to Maine — along with California and Oregon — likes the tall, skinny lawyer from Illinois.

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Also among the top 10 is JFK’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.  RCP sets the scene:

Heading into the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy was a clear frontrunner for the nomination, but did not have it locked up. Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson was at the very least a threat, not to mention the possibility of a surge of support for the party’s nominee in the last two elections, Adlai Stevenson. Kennedy, of course, went on to secure the nomination and gave his acceptance speech on live television from the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.

Perhaps the best part of the post is the AV goodies embedded within its text, and when the link or clip is unavailable it links to the full text of the ranked speeches. However, sometimes reading the text doesn’t provide the flavor of an event as well a video can.

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The maps show county-by-county data for every major election year in which data are available, and that information shifts over time. One map, for example, highlights counties where the victor won by only a small margin. It reveals how “battleground states” have changed over the years. The maps are displayed as video montages, with each election year shown sequentially. A slow-fade effect—that’s the Hollywood-inspired part—is used between maps, which helps highlight the changes…

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This is Walsh’s third “Consequential Election” article.  The first two both covered Lincoln:  1860 & 1864.

                          

“It remains to be seen if the new law will prod more institutions to reach out to veterans or if it will transform veterans’ enrollment patterns. But history suggests a skeptical view.”

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From Wilson’s July 6, 2003 NYT op-ed:

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Wilson wrote the above only after hearing George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address which spouted the now infamous 16 words:

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Original Post from Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell, 6 July 2008.  Also see FactCheck.org post from 2004.

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