Since Max did an Indiana band for the Music Club, I thought I'd throw in a plug for the Indianapolis Children's Museum, which my kids and I visited just this morning. It rocks. The dinosaurs crashing out of the building (above) is almost as cool as the new installation which will be completed this summer: a full-sized brachiosaurus mother and child peeking under the roof of the atrium entrance. (artist's rendering)

Open Thread below...

Digby excerpts part of MLK's not very well known speech on Vietnam, you know the war that Bush says Iraq isn't:

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic wa...read on

And then she says:

Change a few words and that could have been said today about Iraq, no? It was incendiary at the time, when post WWII America was actually far more reflexively jingoistic than it is today (if you can believe that.)

CIFA

Freelance writer Michael Graham emails (I shortened it) and explains why Jim Hightower's piece is required reading:

"I have a special interest in this subject matter because, as some of you know, back in the late sixties I was a military "special agent" of the type to which Mr. Hightower refers. I did this work, in plainclothes. Our target was the anti-Vietnam protest movement--For one thing, I learned how these people think and how they operate -- and the spying technology now is 40 years beyond anything we could have dreamed up.

You really should read up on CIFA. It is more insidious even than the NSA eavesdropping. It's the operational side of counterintelligence. (The very term "counterintelligence" now has a sinister meaning; when I got into it, it was about detecting and catching Soviet spies, a perfectly honorable undertaking. Now it has come to mean dirty tricks aimed at political enemies. Watergate was a counterintelligence operation.)"

Hightower:

"Three years ago, the Pentagon set up a new, ultrasecret agency called CIFA, for Counterintelligence Field Activity. Its initial task was to detect terrorist plots against military installations in the United States, but two years ago, a directive from the Pentagon's top ranks ordered CIFA to broaden its scope by creating and maintaining "a domestic law enforcement database." The agency's motto became "Counterintelligence to the Edge."...read on"