Abdication of Conscience

From HUFFPOST:

CNN’s Chris Cuomo reached into the Republican Party’s past to find a quote that could haunt GOP lawmakers today as the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump gets underway in Congress.

In 1950, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) took on Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a member of her own party, in a speech she called a “Declaration of Conscience.” While Chase didn’t mention McCarthy by name, she urged her fellow Republicans to stand up for the basic American values being trampled by McCarthyism: 

It is high time that we stop thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry, smear.

Don’t leave out the horsewomen of calumny.

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Where’s the beef?

Alan Dershowitz has an essay over at THE HILL. He talks about how Rep. Maxine Waters told supporters to let Twitler officials and others in government know of their discontent by peacefully annoying them in public places. Well, poor Dersh! He opines that “rude extremists” are the bane of our existence! Nobody listens to the other side, and the new McCarthy era has begun!

Even old friends of his on Martha’s Vineyard are shunning him! Oh, the humanity!

(Full credit for #Martha’sVineyardStrong goes to Paleo at Daily Kos)

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TEXtbooks

From The New York Times:

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks.

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Femininnies

From Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic:

The McCain campaign has broken through a heretofore impenetrable barrier in quantum physics, experimentally proving the existence of unseen dimensions and, in the process, setting three of its surrogates on a pathway towards winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in the physical sciences.

Gov. Sarah Palin, campaigning, she said, in “real America,” which apparently includes part of North Carolina, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, calling for a media investigation to determine whether Americans are real or not, and today, McCain all-around best surrogate Nancy Pfotenhauer (pronounced — Foe-Ten-How-er, like proton power), said that parts of the state of Virginia, heretofore universally assumed to be in America, were not, in fact, in the country.

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