When I wrote that the Texas schoolbook rewrites were important becuase they could happen in other states, I didn't really expect to see the early adopters be the United Kingdom. Yet, the Guardian reports:

Niall Ferguson, the British historian most closely associated with a rightwing, Eurocentric vision of western ascendancy, is to work with the Conservatives to overhaul history in schools.

Speaking at the Guardian Hay festival, the Harvard-based academic, whose historiography is often considered to be an apology for imperialism, laid out his ideas for a vision of the school history curriculum in which, he said, children should be taught that the "big story" of the last 500 years "is the rise of western domination of the world".

In Ferguson's 2004 book "Empire: the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons" he wrote this:

Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned...To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way ticket seems baffling. Yet without millions of such tickets -- some purchased voluntarily, some not -- there could have been no British empire. For the indispensable foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white." (p. 44-45)

What a remarkable statement. No mention of the reasons for the mass diaspora; at least, not in this introductory paragraph. Just this: It turned whole continents white. The implications of that conclusion are mind-boggling.

This is the man who will be forming the curriculum for British schoolchildren, and here are his plans:

Along with a Channel 4 television series, he plans to produce materials for use in schools: "a four-year history syllabus on the west and the world".

The big question the course would attempt to answer, he said, was how in AD 1500 "the small warring kingdoms of Europe, which looked so feeble compared with the Ming or Ottoman empires, got to be so powerful". He said the syllabus was "bound to be Eurocentric" because the world was Eurocentric.

Answering criticisms from the audience that the project sounded uninterested in the fates of the oppressed, Ferguson lashed out against "the militant tendency" in the audience and said: "Can we get away from this rightwing-historian, apologist-for-empire crap?"

Oh, silly us, caring about the oppressed and those continents that weren't turned white, that aren't white, that aren't Eurocentric. Pity those who don't bow down to the great White Legend in deference.

Wanna bet Rupert Murdoch has a stake in it?

ProPublica: Gulf disaster puts the spotlight on a regulator with a mixed record

The Talking Dog: We're seeing comparisons of the Obama Administration's reaction to the Gulf Coast mega-spill to the Bush Administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina. Maybe there's a point in that, but I'm hard-pressed to see what it is.

Consortiumnews: How Rev. Moon's snakes infested US. Now, the unabashedly right wing Washington Times is for sale

PERRspectives: Republican Party Animals

We are respectable negroes: When smart people say stupid things

Some Guy's Blog: Documentary Film of the Day: Note By Note - The Making of Steinway L1037...

With all the hyperventilating hot air being spewed by the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson and Ted Nugent, et. al., it might appear the tea-bagging right wing is gaining momentum. The incendiary rhetoric being encouraged and even generated by Republican politicians egging on fanatical teabaggers to translate this into real violence can’t be simply written off as trivial; such behavior deserves as much exposure to the light of media as is possible to shine on such moral cockroaches -- mostly to show how very little support it actually does have with the vast majority of the American people.

Most children tend to grow out of the Terrible Two stage where ‘No!’ is their favourite reaction to everything. But however loudly Boehner screams ‘No, you can’t! at the top of his lungs, the softer tones of hope are becoming stronger every day, on both the right and the left, in spite of the Becks and the Boehners and the tea-baggers. It is comments left in on James Poniewozik’s post with a clip of a new viral video based on Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" from the 2008 primaries that give me hope the grown-ups are finally coming back.

‘I am yet another 50 year old small business owner for whom the tea party is a scary group,’ says Donnafre. ‘We can't sit back and assume it is okay to be a silent majority.’

‘Approaching my 70th year,’ says kbsamurai, a self-professed fiscal conservative and a social liberal, ‘Mr Boehner is [the] voice of fear trying to shout down the voices of hope. I did expect to see the left praise this video. I did not expect to see avowed Republicans speak the same language.’

And: ‘I'm 65, white, male, regular at church,’ says mcr57. ‘Yes We Can!’

There it is. That one little word. Yes. With such immense power in three little letters. Yes, we did. Yes, we will again. Yes. We Can.

So you can shout ‘No!’ as loud as you like, Mr. Boehner, not many are listening to you anymore. And just as the three – count them, three – teabaggers who showed up outside of Congressman Steve Driehaus’s home Sunday afternoon were scolded by a neighbour, ‘My family lives on the street, don’t do this to his kids,’ consider this video your well-earned trip to the naughty chair.

I forgot to post about this last week. You may remember Neal Horsley when he famously admitted his love of farm animals with Alan Colmes a few years ago.

"Is it true?" Colmes asked.

"Hey, Alan, if you want to accuse me of having sex when I was a fool, I did everything that crossed my mind that looked like I..."

AC: "You had sex with animals?"

NH: "Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule."

AC: "I'm not so sure that that is so."

He is now running for governor in Georgia as a Republican and says that he'd kill his own son for liberty. I'm not kidding you.

A longshot Georgia candidate for governor who’s already admitted having sex with a mule before finding God says he’s ready to sacrifice his own son in an effort to get his state to secede from the union.

Neal Horsley made national headlines when he posted the names, phone numbers and addresses of abortion doctors online. His “Nuremberg Files” website also crossed off the names of doctors as they were killed.

Now he’s ready to make new news. In an interview by Dylan Otto Krider published late Wednesday, he indicated he’d kill his own son to dissolve the United States (in an effort to overturn Roe v. Wade). Asked if he was ready to sacrifice his own son in a national insurrection, Horsley recounts a fight with his son where he almost killed him. “I was one foot from killing my own son, or hurting him really, really bad,” Horsley told Krider. “If he would have attacked me again, I would have stuck him. Or cut him or sliced him or done something to stop him. That’s the point, you hypothetical has literally already been worked out with me, and that’s what makes me different from the other candidates for Governor.

I don't think this is the type of candidate that Republicans intend to now fill their new "Big Tent" party with.

James Fallows: Palin shares some toxic traits with our current leadership: Ignorance, lack of curiosity, 'decisiveness,' and of course, dishonesty. It's really epic. Is it possible to support a candidate who campaigns on the notion that expertise is simply irrelevant? Hell yeah! Facts are overrated.

The Anonymous Liberal: John McCain has become a pathological Pinocchio, spouting a torrent of lies.

The Brad Blog: Legendary rightwing vote-suppressor honored by Republicans in D.C.

The Big Picture: Hank Paulson's God Complex just got bigger. The Director of Government Bailouts, and head of the Socialism Department at Treasury has informed Congress to back off his turf.

Bob Geiger: The Saturday Cartoons

Facing South: Is the South the "Other America?"

Adventures in Democracy: The PBS show NOW's site goes beyond election headlines and candidate spin to focus on issues that truly matter to many of us and our democracy.

Lawyers, Guns and Money: Harry & Louise revisited

Ragebot: And these are the "homeland security, support the troops" guys?

Wampum: McCain's sell-out complete...

Vagabond Scholar: Rightwing cartoon watch

Balkinization: AG Mukasey is as bad as Gonzo

The Arabist: Speaking of torture...

Secrecy News: The head of the 9/11 Commission was in frequent contact with Karl Rove and other Bushistas during the 20 month "investigation."

TPMmuckraker: Everything gets more complicated in the Bush Administration's hall of mirrors; it's all pots and kettles.

Making Light: Republicans in trouble...

HOLY CRAP: The Interfaith Alliance media roundup...The Sodfather, guru of doo doo..When authoritarians cry 'censorship'...888? awe-fully close to 666, isn't it?...Do we really care what the Pope says anymore?..."Kissing the Leper"...On the symbolism of Christian Nationalism...Is Huck the rightwing savior?...Jesus was a Liberal

It may be storming outside, but I'm definitely feeling sunshine breaking through some neo-con clouds..

Two conservative Time magazine columnists are on their way out the door: Neither William Kristol nor longtime contributor Charles Krauthammer will be on contract with the magazine starting next month. Mr. Krauthammer confirmed the news to Off the Record, and a spokeswoman for Time said Mr. Kristol's contract would not be renewed.

The exact reasons for the departures of Mr. Krauthammer and Mr. Kristol, both high-profile backers of the Iraq war, are not entirely clear.

But sadly, we're not completely rid of rightwing hackery at Time:

And according to two sources familiar with the discussions, Time is in negotiations with National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru to sign him to a contributor contract. Mr. Ponnuru, who in 2006 published The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life, has written twice for the magazine over the past month.

Via Talk2Action:

George Bush's nominee for Surgeon General has drawn a lot of heat for among other things, his crack-pot anti-gay views as a leader in the United Methodist affiliate of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. But a new report may finally sink his already controversial nomination in a sea of conflicts of interest that have marked his career.

Dr. James Holsinger has also been a longtime leader of the Confessing Movement in the United Methodist Church. The Confessing Movement is a rightwing "renewal group" affiliated with the Washington, DC-based Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), whose purpose for a generation has been to divide and disrupt the historic churchs of mainline protestantism in the interests of advancing neoconservatism and the religious right.

Holsinger was elected to the highest court in the Methodist Church a time when the IRD-affiliated church "renewal" groups had launched efforts to use church judicial systems to enforce their notions of orthodoxy, particularly on matters related to homosexuality.

Now, an investigation Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D. and Lawrence H. McGaughey, Esq., and published at Media Transparency, shows that Holsinger used the sale of a United Methodist Church-owned hospital in Kentucky, as a cash cow for his personal ambitions. It took years of litigation by the church to find out what had happened to its money, only to learn that Holsinger had diverted millions to endow professorships at the Chandler Medical Center at the University of Kentucky where he served as Chancellor and fundraiser-in-chief. Read more...

(Due to technical difficulties, we didn't get a round up yesterday, so today, we get a SUPER round up! ~Nicole)

Abortion concern trolls, human rights concern trolls and the plain old kind that should live under bridges. We need a study on how many species of rightwing troll there are!

Never mind the yellow ribbons, even the flag patches on troops' uniforms aren't made in the USA. Maybe conservatives can use that as an excuse for why their prayers go unanswered.

Web 2.008 - if it all came down to MySpace friends, Clinton and Obama would bury the field.

Holy Juice, the Moonies and Dinesh D'Souza.

Freedom of speech? Not while you're working!

"If you refuse to be daunted by anything less than impeachment, then you'll have no problem turning the government all the way to 11."

Welcome to Cheneystan - a nation of puppets, puppeteers and regencies where to dissent can have alarming (coincidental?)consequences and the name of the game is denial, whether plausible or not. What will it take to arouse the ire of the people? Can we continue believing that things will get better if we are patient...indefinitely? We've already created a situation where others don't have the luxury of patience anymore. If we are patient enough, we may find our right to speak up disappears. Meanwhile, the hating mob who enable the puppeteers still have the monopoly on impatience. Nor is there any real sign of a change.

Guest round up by Cernig @ The Newshoggers (newshog AT gmail DOT com).