The Rest Of The Week In Review

One day late, sorry, I was otherwise detained yesterday. But here's what I was thinking about last week that never made it over to the blog:

• When you combine the principled closure of the US Embassy in Belarus over their human rights abuses with the Federal Reserve plan to put a halt to credit card industry abuses, you'd almost think that this Administration is boldly standing up for Americans and citizens of the globe against suppression and depredation! That is, if you didn't know any better.

• The British Labour party was thrashed in provincial elections last week. Guess that "Third Way" politics popularized by Clinton and Tony Blair is faltering across the world. Labour needs to flip the script and prove that they are concerned with the interests of the people, as Hillary Clinton has tried to do.

• Ron Paul is still running for President, and still succeeding, thank you very much.

• I found this Susan Jacoby op-ed about how we're consistently talking to ourselves (in a political sense) was interesting. This is certainly borne out by the statistical reality of partisans tuning out opposing points of view. I try to at least read opinions from the other side, though I don't check my brain at the door when I do so.

• Hey, Jeffrey Goldberg? That blood on your hands isn't going to wash off, but it's good of you to keep trying.

• Some great trips down memory lane this past week. Rick Perlstein digs up two great speeches: Ed Muskie on rejecting the Republican culture of fear and William Fulbright on rejecting stupid wars. Meanwhile, Chris Hayes reviews an interesting book about the WPA. This is a reminder that another world is possible:

For someone like myself, whose most indelible memory of the U.S. response to a domestic natural disaster is the image of President Bush strumming a guitar while New Orleans drowned, and whose entire conscious political life has taken place in the wake of the Reagan revolution, the sheer scope and approach of the New Deal in general, and the WPA specifically, is unfathomably alien. A government that marshaled 3 million people to build ski lodges, repair roads, stage avant-garde plays, excavate Indian ruins, and grow herb gardens sounds more like a strange cross between pharaonic Egypt and the Berkeley City Council than the Washington of today, which has outsourced every core function, from tax collection to war fighting.

• Turns out that Vito Fossella, the Republican Congressman picked up for DUI last week, might end up spending a few days in jail as a result.

• You virtually never hear about good Congressional legislation that manages to pass, but this was a good one - a vote to reform the horrible working conditions on the Marianas Islands. This was ground zero for the Abramoff mess, and it's good to see order being restored.

• Vincent Fumo is a really bad legislator under criminal indictment in Pennsylvania, who used what little time he has left in the State House to claim that the General Assembly would probably enact slavery if they had the chance. Best of luck with his criminal trials.

• The slow creep of the military into a religious institution continues. The story of atheist Jeremy Hall's experiences in the military are harrowing.

• I have to sadly admit that I do quite a bit of work for G4, the channel which is now putting together a show about trying to get contestants to throw up. We really aren't a nation of idiots, but the idiots who rule the discourse think everyone's as stupid as they are.

• I pretty much never need to know about Barbara Walters' love life.

• Here's a really awesome story from The Guardian about Rock Against Racism in the 1970s. You'll never guess what side of the divide Eric Clapton and David Bowie come down on.

• And finally, an Italian government website posted the salaries of every taxpayer in the country - on purpose. Politics is different over there, to put it lightly.