The Commentariat -- December 22

** Historian Rick Perlstein, in a Salon essay, tells how race relations really played out in Haley Barbour's Yazoo City, Mississippi. This is a chilling must-read for anyone who thinks, as Barbour claims, that maybe it wasn't all that bad.

Glenn Greenwald: the New York Times again published classified secrets on their front page yesterday. If Julian Assange & Bradley Manning are going to be prosecuted for some unspecified crimes, then Times personnel & their high-level sources should be prosecuted, too.

Here's the new 2010 Census map that shows gains & losses of Congressional seats. For more detail, click on the map to go to the interactive New York Times map.Sabrina Tavernise & Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times: "The Census Bureau rearranged the country’s political map on Tuesday, giving more Congressional seats to the South and the West at the expense of the Northeast and the Midwest — changes that will have far-reaching implications for elections over the next decade." ...

... Michael Shear of the New York Times: "The conventional political wisdom is that the results of the 2010 census, announced Tuesday, are a big win for Republicans, who are largely dominant in the states where population increased. But Democratic officials in Washington are cautiously optimistic that the population shifts will still give them the opportunity to win new seats in Congress, especially in places where minority populations have exploded." CW: I agree with Shear on this. The more libruls who move to traditionally Republican states, the better the chance to dilute the conservative pools. ...

... Ezra Klein: "A lot of these changes are driven by Hispanic immigrants." This isn't going to help Republicans in the long run, but the redistricting would still hurt Obama in 2010. "If he gets 46 percent of the vote in Texas rather than 43 percent, he still gets exactly none of Texas's electoral votes. In total, this census takes six electoral votes from Barack Obama's 2008 haul." ...

... Shannon Travis of CNN: in the new Census numbers, experts see a short-term downside & long-term upside for Hispanics.

Here's some of Sen. Arlen Specter's spectacular swan song. He lays into both the Supreme Court & right-wing extremists:

     ... The CNN print story is here.

Legislating "Under the Cover of Christmas." Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy: despite a likelihood that the Senate will ratify the New START Treaty, Republican Senators continue to rail against the treaty & turncoat Republicans who voted in favor of world peace at Christmas-time. ...

... "Playing the Christmas Card." Dana Milbank: "Eight founding fathers of the [new Petulant Party] took the stage Tuesday morning in the Senate TV studio to provide an update on their latest cause: The defeat of the nuclear arms treaty with Russia.... They defied the recommendation of Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates (a Bush administration holdover) in their unsuccessful defense on Saturday of the 'don't ask, don't tell' ban on openly gay service members. And ... the Petulants' efforts to prevent the Sept. 11 bill from coming to the floor earned labels such as 'disgrace' and 'national shame' from the usually friendly hosts at Fox News."

Too many of our high school students are not graduating ready to begin college or a career — and many are not eligible to serve in our armed forces. I am deeply troubled by the national security burden created by America's underperforming education system.
-- Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education ...

... Education Fail. AP: "Nearly one-fourth of the students who try to join the U.S. Army fail its entrance exam, painting a grim picture of an education system that produces graduates who can't answer basic math, science and reading questions, according to a new study released Tuesday. The report by The Education Trust bolsters a growing worry among military and education leaders that the pool of young people qualified for military service will grow too small." Here's a pdf of the overview report by the Education Trust.

Rachel Maddow takes down Sen. Tom Coburn, catching him in a huge lie about the "reason" for his opposition to the 9/11 responders bill:

... Michael Shear: "... Republican lawmakers find themselves the target of ire and scorn from the most unlikely of adversaries: the firefighters and police officers who rushed into the burning twin towers on Sept. 11 nearly a decade ago and worked at the site for months afterward. That predicament crystallized Tuesday when Rudy Giuliani ... condemned his fellow Republicans as being on the wrong side of 'morality' and 'obligation' for failing to support legislation to provide medical benefits for the first responders." Includes video. ...

... Update. Alex Pareene of Salon: "Tom Coburn is finally dropping his threat to single-handedly obstruct the 9/11 first responders healthcare bill in the Senate ... because he won: The bill, which already went from $7.4 to $6.2 billion in benefits and compensation, is now down to $1.5 for benefits and $2.7 for compensation.... Coburn's ... real objection was that rich people were going to have to pay for non-rich people to have their illnesses treated."

Erika Bolstad of the Anchorage Daily News: "As Congress brings to a close its lame-duck session, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski has emerged from her historic write-in campaign as a key swing vote in the Senate on issues backed by the Obama administration."

David Catanese of Politico: "After embracing him in his 2006 upset win over GOP Sen. Conrad Burns, progressives turned on Montana Sen. Jon Tester in response to his vote against the DREAM Act on Saturday, complicating his prospects for reelection next year."

CW: just in case you think the conservatives on the Supreme Court are not "activist judges," Prof. Pauline Maier in a New York Times op-ed explains the intent of the Second Amendment:  James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment, wrote it & other amendments "to 'parry' the call for a second federal convention.... One of his proposed amendments promised that the people would never be subject to federal military rule because their 'right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well-armed, and well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country.'” In fact, Maier says, the militias are now defunct, but "one thing is clear: to justify such rulings [as District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago] by citing Madison and the other founders and framers would not honor their 'original intent.' It would be an abuse of history."

Greg Miller of the Washington Post: "The CIA has launched a task force to assess the impact of the exposure of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks. Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it's mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: W.T.F."

David Sanger of the New York Times: "... while [President] Obama is savoring another major victory..., his own aides acknowledge that the lesson of the battle over the [New START] treaty is that the political divide on national security is widening. The next steps on Mr. Obama’s nuclear agenda now appear harder than ever."

Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "President Obama’s advisers have been drafting an executive order that would set up a system for periodically reviewing the cases of Guantánamo prisoners whom courts have approved for detention without trial, officials said.... In broad strokes, it would establish something like a parole board to evaluate whether each detainee poses a continued threat, or whether he can be safely transferred to another country."

Bankers as Common Thieves. Andrew Martin of the New York Times: "In an era when millions of homes have received foreclosure notices nationwide, lawsuits detailing bank break-ins ... keep surfacing. And in the wake of the scandal involving shoddy, sometimes illegal paperwork that has buffeted the nation’s biggest banks in recent months, critics say these situations reinforce their claims that the foreclosure process is fundamentally flawed."

Lunar Eclipse

This is the best time-lapse I could find of last night's lunar eclipse. It's by W. L. Castleman of Gainesville, Florida. So far the "professional" efforts have been duds:

Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 December 21. Fortunately we won't have to wait 372 years for the next one ... that will be on 2094 December 21. -- Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory

... This got my friend Sharon E. thinking, & she checked to see what-all was going on in North America during the year of the last eclipse that occurred during the winter solstice. I've added a few:

New Haven, the first planned city in America, was founded as an "independent colony."

John Harvard died. He left his library & half of his estate to the local college. The school adopted the name Harvard College in his honor.

Jonas Bronck of Holland became the first European settler in the Bronx. (New Amsterdam was officially 8 years old & had 10,000 inhabitants.)

The Pequot War ends with the signing of the Treaty of Hartford. The treaty refers to three historic agreements negotiated at Hartford, Connecticut, which divided the spoils of the war.

The Swedish arrived on the ships Kalmare Nyckel and Fågel Grip to America, to establish the first settlement in Delaware, called New Sweden.

Anne Hutchinson was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy and moved to Rhode Island.

The Commentariat -- December 21

New York Times: "The House of Representatives gave final approval on Tuesday to a long-awaited modernization of the nation’s food safety laws, voting 215 to 144 to grant the Food and Drug Administration greater authority over food production." The bill earlier passed the Senate, which added exemptions for small producers. The President has said he would sign the bill as amended.

Wall Street Journal: "A Senate deal to fund the federal government until early March doesn't include money to enact the health-care overhaul or stepped up regulation of Wall Street, boosting Republican efforts to curb key elements of President Barack Obama's domestic agenda."

Washington Post: "New Internet access rules approved by federal regulators on Tuesday prohibit network operators from meddling with Web traffic into American homes but do not extend to the fast-growing market for smartphones and tablet computers. The regulations passed the Federal Communications Commission along party lines, with two Democratic commissioners reluctantly siding with agency Chairman Julius Genachowski in a 3-2 vote."

Eating or defeating your own is a form of sophisticated cannibalism. -- Arlen Specter, in his Senate farewell speech, or as he characterized it, his "closing argument" ...

... Philip Rucker of the Washington Post: "The Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democrat [Sen. Arlen Specter] berated his colleagues for stripping the 'world's greatest deliberative body' of its collegiality. In a bitter, at times angry, speech, Specter accused leaders of both parties of abusing the Senate's 'cerebral procedures' in the service of partisan rancor and gridlock."

CW: the other day Fox "News"" Shep Smith called out senators for opposing the 9/11 responders' bill but he didn't mention their names, nor did he identify them all as Republicans. Here, Smith gets specific:

... And here's Smith today, identifying Sen. Tom Coburn, who vows to block the first responders' bill, because the sponsoring senators say they have the votes to pass it:

     ... Alex Seitz-Wald has the story at Think Progress. ...

     ... Danny Yadron of the Wall Street Journal: "Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn will not allow a proposal that would cover health-care costs for Ground Zero workers to go through the Senate before Christmas, a Coburn aide told Washington Wire [WSJ] this morning." CW: remember "Dr. No" is a medical doctor.

Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy lets Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) have it in a pretty funny series of questions about DeMint's assertion that it's "sacriligious" for Congress to work on legislation during the Christmas season. Enjoy.

Statistics come to life when Swedish academic Hans Rosling graphically illustrates global economic development & life expectancy over the last 200 years. Thanks to Peter S. for finding this video:

In a New York Times op-ed, Larry David, who is rich, says "Thanks for the tax cut! ... Life was good, and now it’s even better. Thank you, Republicans. And a special thank you to President Obama and the Democrats. I didn’t know you cared."

Dana Hedgpeth of the Washington Post: "Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent roughly $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors.... But lawmakers, auditors and national security experts question whether the government is too quick to embrace technology as a solution for basic security problems and whether the TSA has been too eager to write checks for unproven products."

Charlie Savage of the New York Times: "The Justice Department has shut down a wave of high-profile investigations of members of Congress over the past few months, drawing criticism that the government’s premier anticorruption agency has lost its nerve after the disastrous collapse last year of its case against former Senator Ted Stevens." ...

... Hah! Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times: "When the Federal Election Commission voted last month to close an investigation into a $96,000 payment to Senator John Ensign’s former lover, it overrode the findings of its own staff lawyers, documents made public Monday showed. Lawyers at the F.E.C. counsel’s office said in a confidential report in March that Mr. Ensign’s parents and his campaign treasurer appeared to have violated campaign finance law when the parents made the payment to the family of the mistress, Cynthia Hampton, who worked for his campaign."

Dan Roem of the National Journal: "One of Pres. Obama's biggest supporters in the Senate in the past week is not even a member of his own party: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). Murkowski supported the president's position on the Senate's four biggest votes since last Wednesday. She and fellow Alaska Sen. Mark Begich (D) voted in favor of the tax cut compromise and to invoke cloture on New START treaty, the Dream Act and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Both senators also voted in favor of the final repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell on Saturday. No Senate Republican voted for all four bills other than Murkowski."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: "... while public opinion has changed in favor of gay rights over the past two decades, those attitudes are often not reflected in public policy, because the views of lawmakers, polls suggest, lag behind the public, and not just among social conservatives who have long opposed elements of the gay rights agenda on moral grounds.... Yet the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, first proposed in the Clinton years, remains stuck on Capitol Hill, in part because lawmakers are squeamish about language in it that would protect transgender employees. The 'don’t ask, don’t tell' repeal bill nearly died the week before it was passed." ...

... Jonathan Chait of The New Republic: "The progress of gay rights in the United States ... has been intoxicatingly rapid.... In part this reflects changes in the Republican Party, which is now dominated almost entirely by defenders of the economic prerogatives of the rich and barely pretends to care about the Christian right's agenda any more. In part it's a wildly successful effort by Hollywood to normalize homosexuality."

Hope Yen of the AP: "If government estimates hold true, the closely watched 2010 census will show America's once-torrid population growth dropping to its lowest level in seven decades. In Congress, the steady migration to the South and West should be a boon for Republicans, with GOP-leaning states led by Texas picking up House seats."

Aaron Lucchetti & Sarah Muñoz of the Wall Street Journal: "U.S. regulators are considering whether to require large financial firms to hold onto a chunk of executive pay to discourage the excessive risk-taking that contributed to the financial crisis, according to people familiar with the situation. Giant companies such as Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley that are considered critical to the U.S. economy, could be forced to award half or more of their executives' pay in the form stock or other deferred compensation, instead of up-front cash."

David Streitfeld of the New York Times: a new California law designed to protect victims of impending foreclosure from swindlers disallows attorneys from receiving payment prior to obtaining loan modifications; that sounds good, but it has meant that attorneys say they can't afford to take on clients who wish to contest foreclosure proceedings.

I just don’t remember it as being that bad. I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.... I was there with some of my friends.... We wanted to hear him speak.... I don’t really remember [what he said]. The truth is, we couldn’t hear very well. We were sort of out there on the periphery. We just sat on our cars, watching the girls, talking, doing what boys do. We paid more attention to the girls than to King. -- Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, believed to be considering a run for President, reminisces on halcyon days of the civil rights movement ...

... The Weekly Standard interview, by Andrew Ferguson, is here. Holly Bailey of Yahoo! News writes a follow-up story. ...

... Matthew Yglesias puts some actual historical perspective on Barbour's remembrances of the Yazoo City Citizens Counsel, "town leaders" whom Barbour credits with kicking out the Ku Klux Klan. Yglesia writes, "The Citizens’ Councils were ... the respectable face of white supremacist political activism." ...

... Jonathan Chait has more on Ferguson & Barbour's profoundly inaccurate depiction of history. CW: they of course get it ass-backwards. I don't agree with Chait's conclusion that Barbour can turn his murky history of race relations into a plus, & if he can, this country is worse than I thought. ...

... This Is Amazing. Conservative Jim Geraghty of the National Review agrees with me. He bases his opinion of Barbour's reported 1982 watermelon "joke."

... To read how really "upstanding" the Yazoo City Citzens Council was, see Charles Bolton's The Hardest Deal of All. The Yazoo City story is highlighted, but scroll down at bit to see all of it. Indirectly, via Ben Smith. ...

     ... Update, via Greg Sargent: After 24 hours of attacks from right & left, Haley Barbour tries to walk back his remarks about those swell fellows on the Citizens Councils. CW: too little, too late.