Politics in the Zeros: Populist Party Platform, 1892 (It could have been written for today)

Liberal Values: Nuclear engineer at Cern Lab arrested for alleged ties to al Qaeda

Alas, a blog: Every time a racist criticizes the president, someone cries, "racism."

Seeing the Forest: Modern Governing

AfterDowningStreet: Rep. Obey joins us idiot liberals

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: NYT out of ideas...Coffee talk...The Corner in a corner...Conservative gullibility...Bad faith and sloth...Politico Fail...Beachwood Reporter...Anatomy of a column...WaPo partisan goldmine...World Nut Daily...

You may remember Officer Justin Barrett, a Boston police officer who inserted himself into the Henry Gates controversy by sending out an inflammatory, racist e-mail to friends and media outlets in which he referred to Professor Gates as a "banana eating jungle monkey." Now, he's claiming that his first amendment right to free speech is being infringed upon and that the Boston PD violated his civil rights by suspending him:

Justin Barrett, the Boston police officer suspended from the force for his e-mail likening Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., to a “banana-eating jungle monkey,’’ has filed a lawsuit against the Police Department, police commissioner, and mayor, saying the city violated his civil and due process rights.

The 18-page lawsuit accuses the three parties of “conspiring to intentionally inflict emotional distress and conspiring to intentionally interfere with the property rights, due process rights, and civil rights of the plaintiff.’’

According to the lawsuit, the mayor and commissioner’s actions caused Barrett pain and suffering, mental anguish, emotional distress, posttraumatic stress, sleeplessness, indignities and embarrassment, degradation, injury to reputation, and restrictions on personal freedom. Read on...

Barrett and his Lawyer are trying to conflate criticism of speech and free speech itself just like Sarah Palin has in the past -- criticizing my free speech is taking away my free speech.

Read Joe Trippi's piece.

It appears to me that the McCain campaign may be executing a classic "Race? Not me!" campaign.
The past 24 hours reflect exactly how to pull it off with nary a fingerprint that matters.

First you help inject race into the campaign and raise its focus as an issue (as the McCain campaign did yesterday with a little door opening from Obama himself).

Second - this unleashes energy and anger in the African American community (energy that often the African American candidate, Obama, can not control). Leaders like James Clyburn take to the airwaves - and cable channels have two African Americans debate who is or isn't raising race. In any case black faces dominate the cable airwaves and some of those faces are angry.

Third - McCain then appears to speak in front of an all black audience. White swing voters think "see, he isn't racist". And if the crowd applauds so much the better, if it boos him for tactics real or imagined white swing voters see a white guy "who is at least trying" and angry blacks who are not being duly appreciative of his effort- either way it isn't good for Obama. McCain speaks today before the largely African American National Urban League.

Coincidence?...read on

I was talking to Howie Klein a couple of day ago about the anniversary of MLK's "I Have A Dream I remembered that McCain voted against the proposed national holiday back in 1983.

In a Feb. 9 "Hardball" interview with Chris Matthews, McCain compared his evolution to that of one of his political heroes, former Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. "I believe that Barry Goldwater, to start with, regretted his vote on the 1964 Civil Rights Act," McCain said. "I think that Barry grew, like all of us grow and evolve. In 1983, when I was brand-new in the Congress, I voted against the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King. That was a mistake, OK? And later I had the chance to ... help fight for ... the recognition of Dr. Martin Luther King as a holiday in my state."

Just think about the fact that he voted against the holiday to begin with. What does that tell you about him and his views of race in America? Why did it matter to him that he was brand spanking new to Congress when he denied MLK his rightful day of celebration? He brings up Goldwater in 64 as some sort of wingnut justification. Well, he had almost twenty years to think about it by then and he still voted against MLK day. I'm glad Sam Stein caught this too and wrote a good piece on it.

In 1983, McCain voted against passing a bill to designate the third Monday of every January as a federal holiday in honor of King. Four years later, then-Arizona Governor Evan Mecham rescinded Martin Luther King Day as a state holiday, saying it had been established through an illegal executive order by his Democratic predecessor.

McCain said he thought Mecham was correct in his decision.

Two years after that, McCain's viewpoint began to change, but only gradually. In 1989, he urged lawmakers to make Martin Luther King Jr. day a state holiday, but said he was "still opposed to another federal holiday."