Virginia celebrates Confederate History Month–psst, don’t mention slavery…

Fact-checking Michele Bachmann and commenting on Michael Steele’s fall from power

The anti-war movement seems to be at a crossroads these days. The rapid contraction of anti-war activism after George W. Bush left office caused many skeptics, including activists themselves, to wonder if most of the protesters had been more anti-Bush than anti-war. However, there are signs that the ranks of Americans who are determined to protest the evils of war, no matter which party controls the White House, is growing.

With the news that Military Commissions are likely to be our “First Line of Defense” for GWOT detainees including KSM, it appears that Chief of Staff “Beauregard” Emanuel has convinced President Obama Lincoln that in order to be “moving forward, not backwards”, he only has to nullify a good part of the Constitution, the Federal Judiciary and then surrender at Appomattox to South Carolina in order to form “a more perfect union confederacy”.

In the wake of the decision by the Justice Department to find the OLC lawyers who wrote the torture memo guilty only of “poor judgment” not professional misconduct, we need to take a closer look at the extreme views of one of the men exonerated and what this exoneration says about us as a nation and a people.

Dear President Obama;

I wanted to take the occasion of Presidents Day to write to you. Today is the day we celebrate the birthdays of two of our all time great presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

It is fitting that we celebrate the first of our presidents and the president who held the Union together and ended the precious practice of human slavery. These men stand as examples of what America can be and should be.

Mr. President, there is an issue that you have consciously ignored, the issue of the Bush Administration’s torture program. As someone involved in politics and activism I completely grasp the level of acrimony you would experience from the Republicans and the conservatives of this nation if you fully investigate the ordering and carrying out of torture.

There is no doubt your political opponents would seize on this and call it a political witch-hunt. They would use it against every Democrat in the nation this fall, as well as using it as an excuse to oppose your agenda for the rest of your term.

Yet, Mr. President, this should not matter to you. You took the same oath as Washington and Lincoln to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic.

General George McClellan had built a huge army during the Civil War. It was known as the Army of the Potomac. The problem was he built it and built it. And almost never used it. It seemed as if his objective was simply to make his army larger rather than actually using it to win the war. Eventually Lincoln had to fire him.

The parallels are striking. Rahm Emanuel seems to think his job is to grow the Democratic Party larger and larger, but he’s forgotten that his real objective is to win the war. We’re supposed to be aiming for real policy changes in the end. If we don’t get those policies, then Rahm’s Army of the Potomac will be useless.

Minor modifications on excerpts from the President’s remarks at a New Mexico town hall and the AMA address.

As said on battlestar galactica; this has happened before and will happen again.

It’s interesting to think about the connections between the shared anniversary of the birth of the nation’s greatest President, the birth of the man who formulated the the theory of evolution, the founding of the oldest and most respected civil rights organization and a day to acknowledge legalized state discrimination against same-sex couples who want to marry.