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Today is the sixtieth anniversary of V-E Day, celebrating allied Victory in Europe at the end of World War II.

That’s one reason I’m free to get worked up today about the Kansas Board of Education offering “a new definition of science that does not rely only on natural causes.”

There will be no Victory in America Day, because the battle for liberty does not end.

Sixty years ago, this country’s commitment to liberty was more than mere lip service. Whether we are so committed today is in our own hands.

Kim Campbell, briefly Prime minister of Canada, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher:

Paul Krugman… wrote that he read Henry Kissinger’s PhD thesis, which is about what happens in a stable system — this time Europe at the time of the French Revolution — when one of the players is a rogue and doesn’t play by the rules. And he talks about all the rationalizations that people make, why they’re doing this. You know: “Well, they have to play to their supporters, and they’ll come on board soon.” And Krugman says as he’s reading this, he thinks “My God, I’m reading about the Bush Administration.”

I think when we face radicals — people who actually don’t accept the rules, who don’t accept the historical consensus of the separation of church and state, who have no respect for the notion of what science is, all of these kinds of things — it is so mind-boggling that people are kind of paralyzed. They don’t know what to do. And so they keep thinking, “Oh, it’s just a marginal thing, they aren’t really this focused at changing things.” And yet they are.

The discussion of Henry Kissinger’s thesis is in Paul Krugman’s book The Great Unraveling. I recommend it.

Revolutionaries depend on the incredulity of the rest of us. If you believe radical right revolutionaries mean to stop somewhere short of trampling on your rights, then they’ve won, you’ve lost.

A few days ago, griping about the media obsession with “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks, I wrote:

Have we forgotten how to say, “It’s none of my business?”

Since then, I’ve realized that we say it a lot. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “I know it’s none of my business, but…” Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of minding our own business.

This blog doesn’t get much traffic, usually. But in the last 24 hours, there have been about fifteen times as many visitors as on an average day. Almost every one of them found the site by Googling for “Jennifer Wilbanks.”

So tomorrow I’ll be posting my stunning exposé on Britney Spears’ pregnancy. It’s all the news you need to know!

That should run up the hit counts a little.

Janeane Garofalo on the PBS program NOW:

The right wing noise machine over the last forty years has spent an enormous amount of money and time convincing the people that the truth is a liberal bias.

…

The mainstream media has now given fact and spin equal weight in a “he said, she said.”

I saw Jon Stewart performing live earlier today. He’s a funny guy. The audience laughed and applauded throughout the show.

Ohio was a “swing state” in last year’s election. Jon asked whether we’d enjoyed having presidential candidates visit every few days to tell us how much they loved us. He asked whether we’d seen any of them since the election. They used us, he said, then threw us away “after they’d done their dirty, dirty business.”

It wasn’t all politics. He talked about buying a new computer that the salesman assured him was “more powerful than the computers NASA uses to launch the space shuttle.” Jon said his shuttle was just sitting in the driveway at home because his old Tandy computer wasn’t powerful enough to launch it.

Mostly, though, there was a political edge. Paraphrasing very loosely, he said this:

The divide in America today is not between religion and science. It’s not between conservative and liberal, or Republican and Democrat, or red states and blue states. The divide in America today is between moderates and extremists.

We’re all moderates here. We’re not shouting slogans. Nobody here has their mouth taped over with the word “Life.” Nobody here is carrying around a can of red paint just to throw on somebody.

You don’t see moderates standing in front of a building chanting, “Let’s be reasonable!” You know why? Because moderates have stuff to do. They’re too busy to travel around the country staging vigils for the TV cameras. That’s why the extremists seem to be winning. Moderates have stuff to do.

We’ve had a lot of presidents — some really good ones, and some really bad ones — and our government has survived through all of them. It will survive through these guys, too. They may try to bring it down, but they’ll fail, and here’s why: when things get bad enough, all those busy moderates — the ones with stuff to do — are going to say, “You know, this stuff can wait ’til tomorrow.” And they’ll rescue the country from the extremists.

But he said it better than I did.

One of the tough things about being absolutely certain you have the one literal, immutable truth must be learning something like this:

Satanists, apocalypse watchers and heavy metal guitarists may have to adjust their demonic numerology after a recently deciphered ancient biblical text revealed that 666 is not the fabled Number of the Beast after all.

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

That would be embarrassing, I should think, especially if you were accustomed to making fiery denunciations of your enemies based on the Book of Revelation.

Dr. Aitken said, however, that scholars now believe the number in question has very little to do the devil. It was actually a complicated numerical riddle in Greek, meant to represent someone’s name, she said.

“It’s a number puzzle — the majority opinion seems to be that it refers to [the Roman emperor] Nero.”

Revelation was actually a thinly disguised political tract, with the names of those being criticized changed to numbers to protect the authors and early Christians from reprisals. “It’s a very political document,” Dr. Aitken said. “It’s a critique of the politics and society of the Roman empire, but it’s written in coded language and riddles.”

Oh, so using God’s name to justify your own agenda isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s a time-honored tradition. I guess I owe an apology to all those currently taking the Lord’s name in vain.

During World War II, we had rationing, scrap metal drives, housewives working in defense factories. Soldiers faced death on the front lines, but every American was expected to make some sacrifices to help the war effort.

We’ve made a lot of progress since those days. Now the president can ship our boys and girls in uniform off to fight and die whenever and wherever he wants to. The American people — well, except for the boys and girls in uniform, of course — can sleep easy, knowing they will never be asked to make any sacrifices for the war effort.

So, how dare
Ward Sutton suggest that home-front patriots who have already gone above and beyond the call of duty should do even more?

When Ohio State University president Novice G. Fawcett retired in 1972, the Ohio legislature changed the law so that a new campus building could be named after him. Before that change, a state government building couldn’t be named after a living person. Politicians were left to hope that some later generation might see fit to bestow such an honor. After the law was changed, later generations became irrelevant. A sitting politician could place the laurel wreath upon his own brow.

No Ohio politician was more honored by naming buildings after himself than James A. Rhodes, governor from 1963-1971 and 1975-1983. I haven’t been able to find a complete list of state buildings named for him. There are at least three right here in Columbus: the state office tower just across the street from the State House, a hospital building at the Ohio State University Medical Center, and a building at the state fairgrounds. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’ve missed some.

The capper to Rhodes’ remarkable career of self-congratulation came on May 4, 1982, when he pushed authorization to build a monument to James A. Rhodes through the legislature, as a rider on a prison construction bill.

I called my state representative to protest. He said he had voted against the monument, but the prison bill was badly needed, so he had to vote for it. My question: Why did it have to be passed on May 4th? Why not May 3rd, or May 5th?

On May 4, 1970, thirty-five years ago today, National Guardsmen sent by Governor Rhodes killed four students and wounded nine at Kent State University. Rhodes was seeking a Senate nomination, so the day before the shootings he cranked up the heat, calling anti-war organizers “the worst type of people we harbor in America.” The killings thrilled a certain strain of conservative voter, so Rhodes never publicly breathed a word of sorrow or regret over the students gunned down on their college campus.

When Rhodes died in 2001, the Associated Press said:

Those close to him said he was saddened by the tragedy but blamed the turbulence of the war era and believed his action was necessary.

There is such a thing as coincidence, but human beings control legislative calendars. If Rhodes had been “saddened by the tragedy,” he wouldn’t have pushed for his monument to himself on the anniversary of the killings.

After Rhodes’ death, the sculptor who built the monument, a cast-metal statue of Rhodes, said he had engraved the names of the four dead Kent State students inside the hollow statue. It’s not enough. Not nearly enough.

In Memoriam

Allison Krause
Jeffrey Miller
Sandra Scheuer
William Schroeder

Four Dead in Ohio.

Update: Via a recent email message, here’s a Kent State scrapbook.

The Washington Post has a story titled Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP:

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

On November 4th last year, in an entry called Political Capital, I wrote:

You’ve spent your political capital, George. You’ve blown through it just like you blew through the budget surplus you inherited from the Clinton Administration.

You’ve got a deep deficit, George. You owe us.

So I feel like I’ve been ahead of the curve on the mandate issue.

From HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher:

Confronting an assertion that the new Republican budget, cutting $10 billion from Medicaid and adding over $100 billion in tax cuts for the rich, was a necessary setting of priorities to cut our huge budget deficits, Martin Short asked:

Would you say that the rich have gotten poorer under George Bush?

Discussing new polls showing George W. Bush’s approval rating at only 44%, Bill Maher said:

The American public always wanted to vote for a guy — and Bush was the perfect guy — who they’d want to have over for pot roast. And George Bush is that guy. He does that well. You’d like to have him over for pot roast. He reminds you of yourself.

Well, now he’s been over, he’s had the pot roast, but he’s getting drunk, and now he’s talking about stem cells and Terri Schiavo and gay marriage, and now he’s the guest that won’t leave.

Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

President Bush’s favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia:

government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God. It is the “minister of God” with powers to “revenge,” to “execute wrath,” including even wrath by the sword

…

The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible.

I kinda suspected Bush and his pals had a problem with democracy.

I’m a boomer. There was a time when I was proud of my generation. No more. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof explains why:

As a baby boomer myself, I can be blunt: We boomers won’t be remembered as the “Greatest Generation.” Rather, we’ll be scorned as the “Greediest Generation.”

…

As of 2003, the share of elderly below the poverty line had fallen by two-thirds to 10 percent – representing a huge national success. Retirement in America is no longer feared as a time of destitution, but anticipated as a time of comfort and leisure.

On the other hand, the proportion of children below the poverty line is still 18 percent, the same as it was in 1966. And while almost all the elderly now have health insurance under Medicare, about 29 percent of children had no health insurance at all at some point in the last 12 months.

One measure of how children have tumbled as a priority in America is that in 1960 we ranked 12th in infant mortality among nations in the world, while now 40 nations have infant mortality rates better than ours or equal to it. We’ve also lost ground in child vaccinations: the United States now ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio.

With boomers about to retire, I’m afraid that national priorities will be focused even more powerfully on the elderly rather than the young – because it’s the elderly who wield political clout.

There’s always a poll of some sort, called “QuickVote,” on CNN’s website.

A few days ago, they were asking whether the space shuttle was safe to launch. I didn’t vote in that one, because I don’t have the skills or the knowledge to make anything more than a wild guess. I’ll bet if I’d watched CNN’s reporting on the planned shuttle launch, I still wouldn’t have the skills or the knowledge to answer the question.

Yesterday, they were asking whether John Mason should marry his runaway bride, Jennifer Wilbanks. I didn’t vote in that one, either. I don’t know either of the people. I don’t know what’s been happening in their private lives. If you told me all their deepest, darkest secrets, I doubt it would shed any light on anything I should be worrying about.

Have we forgotten how to say, “It’s none of my business?”

North Korea is test-launching missiles. American soldiers are still being blown up in Iraq. We’re running up monstrous budget deficits. The economy is starting to sputter. Polar ice is starting to break up due to global warming. Uninsured Americans get sick and face financial ruin. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still out there, making plans.

The media should be shedding light on things we have a right to care about. Instead, they wallow in stories that are none of our business.

Now, here’s an interesting way to make America safer: not satisfied with just carrying a concealed weapon? In Florida, you can shoot first and ask questions later. The NRA promises to bring old Dodge City to other states, too:

A retired police officer in St. Petersburg, writing in the St. Petersburg Times, described the legislature’s bill as the “citizens’ right to shoot others on the street if they feel threatened” and asked, “Are they nuts?” That, we cannot answer.

We do, however, recognize a bad law when we see one, and any measure that increases the possibility of innocent people being killed or injured is a threat to public safety and does not belong on the books. This law, first of its kind in the nation, encourages people to be quick with guns, knives or fists. That’s scary. According to the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Inc., there are already “6 to 7 million untrained gun owners in Florida.”

Telling them that they need only feel threatened in a park or a hospital or a stadium or a domestic dispute to start pulling the trigger is tantamount to turning Florida into Dodge City.

That’s so macho!

Just by chance, today I heard Barack Obama’s keynote speech from last year’s Democratic Convention. It’s a good speech. If you missed it last year, give it a listen:

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our Nation — not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That is the true genius of America, a faith — a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm; that we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door; that we can have an idea and start our own business without paying a bribe; that we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution, and that our votes will be counted — at least most of the time.

This year, in this election we are called to reaffirm our values and our commitments, to hold them against a hard reality and see how we’re measuring up to the legacy of our forbearers and the promise of future generations.

And fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, I say to you tonight: We have more work to do

…

If there is a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there is a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for their prescription drugs, and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandparent. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties.

It is that fundamental belief — It is that fundamental belief: I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams and yet still come together as one American family.