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Today is Benjamin Franklin’s birthday.

Franklin was one of the founding fathers of the United States. He sat on the Continental Congress that approved the Declaration of Independence. He was a delegate at the Constitutional Convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution. He made a fortune as a businessman, and became one of the greatest scientists of his day. He was a prolific inventor, a successful diplomat, an early abolitionist, a philanthropist and a public-spirited citizen who formed the first public library and the first fire department in America — and we’re scarcely scratching the surface.

If he were still alive, he would be 300 years old today.

I don’t think he would have thought much of George W. Bush’s contention that the president can pick and choose the laws he will obey in time of war. I don’t think he would have kept quiet about it, either. You can bet that Karl Rove and company would work day and night to “Swift Boat” Ben Franklin.

He was born in Boston on Jan. 17, 1706, the 10th son of a soap- and candle-maker. Starting at age 12, he worked five years as an apprentice at his brother James’s newspaper, the New England Courant, establishing himself as a prankster and satirist, and, not for the last time, as “a little obnoxious to the governing party.”

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Franklin’s greatest public triumph was probably as a diplomat, persuading France to aid the colonies in their fight against the British. But he needed no revolution to be a revolutionary, for he changed the world by living in it. “The things which hurt, instruct,” he observed.

Middle-aged eyesight led him to design a single, all-purpose set of glasses — bifocals. A struggle to raise money for a public hospital led to a plan by which private contributions would be equaled by government funds, the “matching grant” formula in use to this day.

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“His demonstration that lightning was not supernatural had huge impact,” says Dudley Herschbach, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist. “Since lightning had long been considered a prerogative of the Almighty, Franklin was attacked for presumption, vigorously but in vain.”

Pat Robertson and the Intelligent Design crowd would feel right at home attacking Ben Franklin.

Herschbach, a Harvard University professor who has lectured frequently on Franklin, says: “Franklin’s scientific curiosity extended far beyond his adventures with electricity. He made important discoveries and observations concerning the motion of storms, heat conduction, the path of the Gulf Stream, bioluminescence, the spreading of oil films, and also advanced prescient ideas about conservation of matter and the wave nature of light.”

I wonder how Franklin would respond to the Bush Administration’s steady dismissal of global warming? If he dared to say a critical word, we can be sure they would dismiss him as a dangerous crank.

Franklin now seems the safest of the founders to celebrate, but when he died, in 1790, he was mistrusted by many in power as a Francophile synonymous with the excesses of the French Revolution. The Senate rejected a proposal to wear badges of mourning in his honor. A year passed before an official eulogy was delivered…

And I thought Americans hated France only because they were right about Iraq when George W. Bush was wrong.

Nasty characters in politics are nothing new. You can bet that if Ben Franklin were targeted by a Pat Robertson or a Karl Rove, he would know how to fight back.

We don’t get many leaders like that nowadays.

Happy birthday, Ben.

Last night the History Channel ran a long show on Abraham Lincoln, and these comments by Matthew Pinsker, author of Lincoln’s Sanctuary, sort of leaped out at me:

He gains a measure of empathy for people who lose loved ones. You know, this is a president who sends young boys to die in a war, and understands what that means to a family: death and tragedy. And it makes him a far more sympathetic figure as a leader, because I think the general public, through a variety of images and stories and decisions he made, realized that he was a kind of empathetic figure, in a way that they were not used to in the White House. And so it separates him from other people. It’s why he gained this image as Father Abraham.

He’s riding out the the Soldiers’ Home one afternoon in the summer of ’62, and he comes across a train of ambulance wagons that are carrying back bodies of wounded soldiers from the Peninsula Campaign, which was one of the pivotal turning points in the history of the war. And it was a brutal campaign with terrible loss of life and devastation to the Union forces.

Now, the president eagerly went up to them and was anxious to converse with them about the real conditions of affairs. That he reached out to them, risking whatever criticism or complaints they would have, in order to make contact, to talk to them. And some people who aren’t as empathetic don’t want to be exposed to angry widows or disgruntled wounded soldiers or others. Lincoln’s the opposite. And for me that defines his greatness.

Mediocre presidents hide from bad news. Great presidents reach out for it.

Personally, I think Pinsker gives George W. Bush way too much credit, calling him “mediocre.” Mediocrity is beyond this president’s reach.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground…. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.

— Frederick Douglass

I wonder, sometimes, whether we’re doing the right thing in the way we honor civil rights pioneers like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks.

There’s scarcely a politician in the country today who has anything but warm words of praise for King and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Which is strange. During King’s lifetime, there were armies of politicians resisting the civil rights movement every single step of the way.

Rosa Parks came to public attention by being arrested. She was hauled to jail; mug shots and fingerprints were taken. Martin Luther King was arrested many times. He was vilified in language that makes my face feel hot even today.

His non-violent movement was met with dogs and clubs, tear gas, firehoses, guns and bombs. But today, politicians of almost every political stripe stepped up to podiums across the nation with smiles and glowing words about the civil rights movement.

Have we really changed so much since the 1960s? I doubt it.

Tomorrow, many of those smiling politicians will go back to work tying the law in knots to find ways to disenfranchise black voters. It won’t be on account of race — oh, no — they’ll have to find some dodge to explain it. They will approve tax breaks carefully calibrated to benefit millionaires, and then plead poverty to make cuts in programs for poor people.

I wonder whether we’ve made a mistake making Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks icons of the civil rights movement. I don’t think they ever intended to be put on pedestals and serenely admired as heroes of a glorious past. I don’t think they ever intended their struggle for social justice to be turned into an historical relic.

Some of the old injustices are gone, thank goodness, but there’s plenty of injustice left. To honor the memory of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, we need to carry on the work. We need to press the fight against injustice wherever we find it.

How can we tell whether we’re doing it right? There will be an army of politicians resisting every single step of the way.

This case is playing out in the Ohio Supreme Court, right here in Columbus, Ohio:

Joy and Carl Gamble say they just want to retire peacefully in the dream home where they’ve lived for more than 35 years. But the Cincinnati suburb of Norwood has other plans for the property.

Using its power of eminent domain, the city wants to take a neighborhood that it considers to be deteriorating and boost its fortunes by allowing a $125 million development of offices and shops.

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Joy Gamble speaks bitterly about the couple’s ordeal and what it meant to see their home of 35 years, purchased after years of savings, in danger of demolition.

“When the municipalities and the people that have lots of money decide they want what you have, you don’t own it,” Gamble said. “You bought it, you paid for it, you kept the taxes up, you kept the appearance up, but it wasn’t yours.”

It might be hard to believe, but blogger Hetty Litjens seems to have a considerably harsher opinion of the Bush Administration than I do. I’ve often seen a headline from Hetty’s blog and thought, “Woo hoo! Tell it!” Then I read the blog entry itself and think, “Uh, I’m not really sure I want to link to that.”

This entry, too, comes on pretty strong. But I think it makes a point about the very nature of civilization. I have taken the liberty of reformatting the excerpts below:

When Christianity took over from the belligerent and greedy Roman empire, it did so on the basis of new ideals and tenets. These were essentially Pax et Justitia, Peace and Justice, as exposed by St. Augustine. Peace can only be based on justice. These ideals met with general acceptance and resulted in the success of the Christian church. When things went wrong in the Church it was because it became entangled in power and wealth.

“Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”

“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?”

— De Civitate Dei (The City of God), Book IV, Chapter IV.

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St. Augustine changed the course of history by giving a new alternative to the reign of war, his new tenets were Peace and Justice. These were the guiding principles of our Christian civilization for hundreds of years. George W. Bush is wiping out not only the American Constitution, but also the attainments of thousands of years of civilization.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow sees where the above the law presidency is heading:

Why do liberals have to act like Chicken Little every time the president exercises his constitutional authority to rob banks?

Please note that in the real world, the arresting officer would be charged with treason.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held the first day of confirmation hearings today for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. I suspect Alito caused a bit of a panic at the White House and among Republican lawmakers when he said this:

And there is nothing that is more important for our republic than the rule of law. No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law, and no person in this country is beneath the law.

Panicky Republicans consoled themselves by looking at Alito’s record and realizing he was just kidding.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

[W]hen a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts “our citizens at risk” by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn’t seen “Sleeper Cell” because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.

That the White House’s over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney’s disingenuousness. In last week’s oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, “The match is about to begin,” and, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president’s excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn’t rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.

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The highest priority for the Karl Rove-driven presidency is … to preserve its own power at all costs. With this gang, political victory and the propaganda needed to secure it always trump principles, even conservative principles, let alone the truth. Whenever the White House most vociferously attacks the press, you can be sure its No. 1 motive is to deflect attention from embarrassing revelations about its incompetence and failures.

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The louder the reports of failures on this president’s watch, the louder he tries to drown them out by boasting that he has done everything “within the law” to keep America safe and by implying that his critics are unpatriotic, if not outright treasonous. Mr. Bush certainly has good reason to pump up the volume now. In early December the former 9/11 commissioners gave the federal government a report card riddled with D’s and F’s on terrorism preparedness.

The front line of defense against terrorism is supposed to be the three-year-old, $40-billion-a-year Homeland Security Department, but news of its ineptitude, cronyism and no-bid contracts has only grown since Katrina. The Washington Post reported that one Transportation Security Administration contract worth up to $463 million had gone to a brand-new company that (coincidentally, we’re told) contributed $122,000 to a powerful Republican congressman, Harold Rogers of Kentucky. An independent audit by the department’s own inspector general, largely unnoticed during Christmas week, found everything from FEMA to border control in some form of disarray.

Yet even as this damning report was released, the president forced cronies into top jobs in immigration enforcement and state and local preparedness with recess appointments that bypassed Congressional approval.…

THE warrantless eavesdropping is more of the same incompetence. Like our physical abuse of detainees and our denial of their access to due process, this flouting of the law may yet do as much damage to fighting the war on terrorism as it does to civil liberties. As the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus wrote in The Huffington Post, every defense lawyer representing a terrorism suspect charged in the four years since Mr. Bush’s N.S.A. decree can challenge the legality of the prosecution’s evidence. “The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill,” Mr. Garbus explains, as the government refuses to give the courts information on national security grounds, inviting the dismissal of entire cases, and judges “up and down the appellate ladder” issue conflicting rulings.

Far from “bringing justice to our enemies,” as Mr. Bush is fond of saying, he may once again be helping them escape the way he did at Tora Bora.

In T. H. White’s novel, The Once and Future King, the wizard Merlyn lives backwards in time. In the twelfth century, when he advises the young King Arthur and his foster brother Kay, he is an old man who remembers the twentieth century, when he was young. From the book:

Kay looked up, with his tongue between his teeth, and remarked:

“By the way. You remember that argument we were having about aggression? Well, I have thought of a good reason for starting a war.”

Merlyn froze.

“I would like to hear it.”

“A good reason for starting a war is simply to have a good reason! For instance, there might be a king who had discovered a new way of life for human beings — you know, something which would be good for them. It might even be the only way of saving them from destruction. Well, if the human beings were too wicked or too stupid to accept his way, he might have to force it on them, in their own interests, by the sword.”

The magician clenched his fists, twisted his gown into screws, and began to shake all over.

“Very interesting,” he said in a trembling voice. “Very interesting. There was just such a man when I was young — an Austrian who invented a new way of life and convinced himself that he was the chap to make it work. He tried to impose his reformation by the sword, and plunged the civilized world into misery and chaos. But the thing which this fellow had overlooked, my friend, was that he had had a predecessor in the reformation business, called Jesus Christ. Perhaps we may assume that Jesus knew as much as the Austrian did about saving people. But the odd thing is that Jesus did not turn the disciples into storm trooper, burn down the Temple at Jerusalem, and fix the blame on Pontius Pilate. On the contrary, he made it clear that the business of the philosopher was to make ideas available, and not to impose them on people.”

I know we could never get George W. Bush to read a big thick book like this. But I wish we could get some studio to do a faithful animated version of the whole book and put it on a DVD for him to watch sometime when he doesn’t feel like working.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy on Alito’s credibility problem:

Every Supreme Court nominee bears a heavy burden to demonstrate that he or she is committed to the constitutional principles that have been vital in advancing fairness, decency and equal opportunity in our society. As Judge Samuel Alito approaches his confirmation hearings next week, the more we learn about him, the more questions we have about the credibility of his assurances to us.

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Alito was 35 when he applied for an important political position with Attorney General Ed Meese during the Reagan administration. Alito sought to demonstrate his “philosophical commitment” to Meese’s legal outlook….

The views expressed there raise serious concerns about his ability to interpret the Constitution with a fair and open mind. When this embarrassing document came to light, he faced a difficult decision on whether to defend his 1985 views or walk away from them. When I and others met him a short time later, he appeared to be renouncing them — “I was just a 35-year-old seeking a job,” he told me. But now he’s seeking another, far more important job. Is he saying that he did not really mean what he said then?

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In 1990, during the confirmation process on his nomination to the 3rd Circuit, Alito disclosed that his largest investment was in Vanguard mutual funds. To avoid possible conflicts of interest, he promised us that he would recuse himself from any case involving “the Vanguard companies.” Vanguard continues to be on his recusal list, and his investments in Vanguard funds have risen from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands. Nevertheless, in 2002 he failed to recuse himself when assigned to sit on a case in which three Vanguard companies were named parties and listed prominently on every brief and on his own pro-Vanguard opinion in the case.

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Alito’s words and record must credibly demonstrate that he understands and supports the role of the Supreme Court in upholding the progress we’ve made in guaranteeing that all Americans have an equal chance to take their rightful place in the nation’s future. “Credibility” has rarely been an issue for Supreme Court nominees, but it is clearly a major issue for Alito.

Last night, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann had a thought about Pat Robertson’s pronouncements:

When somebody swears in a particular way, we’ve all heard somebody else respond in those situations, “Do not use the name of the Lord in vain.”

I was told by a biblical student that that admonition has been completely misunderstood — that when the Bible says, “Do not use the name of thy Lord God in vain,” it really means, “Don’t be so presumptuous as to claim God told you and only you what He thinks of something.” … Is that not sort of a description of what Pat Robertson’s doing here?

Hugh Thompson Jr. died today. We are all poorer for the loss.

In 1998, he received the Soldier’s Medal, the army’s highest award for heroism not involving actual conflict with an enemy.

But in 1968, he was shunned. His patriotism was questioned. He received death threats. Thompson, a military helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, had protected unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai from a massacre by American soldiers.

Tempers ran high in those days, just like today. Plenty of American hot-heads called Lt. William Calley, who led the massacre, an American hero, and vilified Thompson and the other men who stopped it. Calley was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison, but Richard Nixon commuted his sentence.

From BBC News:

Mr Thompson and his crew came upon US troops killing civilians at the village of My Lai on 16 March 1968.

He put his helicopter down between the soldiers and villagers, ordering his men to shoot their fellow Americans if they attacked the civilians.

“There was no way I could turn my back on them,” he later said of the victims.

Mr Thompson, a warrant officer at the time, called in support from other US helicopters, and together they airlifted at least nine Vietnamese civilians — including a wounded boy — to safety.

He returned to headquarters, angrily telling his commanders what he had seen. They ordered soldiers in the area to stop shooting.

But Mr Thompson was shunned for years by fellow soldiers, received death threats, and was once told by a congressman that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai.

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Mr Thompson died of cancer. He had been ill for some time and was removed from life support earlier in the week.

Even Fox News, whose commentators are quick to question the patriotism of anyone who stands up against the Bush Administration, today called Hugh Thompson Jr. a hero.

The wheel of history turns. Time sifts right and wrong.

Hugh Thompson Jr. was a hero. I hope there will always be Americans like him.

My guess is that Pat Robertson just can’t endure the idea that people aren’t talking about him. He craves that hit of publicity, and he doesn’t care whether it’s good publicity or bad. But he has to say ever more outrageous things:

Pat Robertson suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent stroke was the result of Sharon’s policy, which he claimed is “dividing God’s land.” … Robertson called the 1995 assassination of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin “the same thing.”

Update: The company Robertson is keeping these days! From the Washington Post:

The television evangelist Pat Robertson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not agree on much, but both suggested yesterday that the severe illness of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was deserved. Both men’s comments were immediately condemned by religious leaders.

Crooks and Liars has posted a video clip that shows me I should be watching David Letterman. Interviewing Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Letterman said (my transcript, from the clip):

Letterman: I’m not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling about sixty percent of what you say is crap. But I don’t know that for a fact.

Bandleader Paul Shaffer: Sixty?

Letterman: You say sixty percent, Paul?

Shaffer: Sixty percent?

Letterman: Sixty percent. That’s just a — I’m just spitballing here.

Think Progress says the Bush Administration has neglected coal mining safety:

Phil Smith, the communications director for the United Mine Workers of America, said that while citations have been issued, the fines assessed for safety violations are too small to force large corporations to make improvements. “The problem with the current laws is enforcement.” According to an AFL-CIO analysis, the Bush administration cut 170 positions from federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and has not proposed a single new mine-safety standard or rule during its tenure.

And there’s a reason for that. The Washington Post reported that West Virginia coal firms raised $275,000 for Bush.

I wonder whether the Administration will be donating that money to charity now, like some other politically embarrassing contributions.