Core Truths

1. But there is a deeper, more fundamental reason for these attempts by editorial writers in major newspapers to rehabilitate Ken Mehlman to be rejected. Beneath all civil rights struggle, at the very base of all struggles for rights and democracy there is the core moral value of equality. And equality is not a partial or sometimes thing. You don’t get to carve out an island of privilege for yourself, your family, your social circle or your minority group and have a right to call for everyone to acknowledge that attempt to equalize yourself with a privileged group. There is nothing easier than to be for the civil rights that you and your group are denied as you ignore other inequity. While the Republican Party is using hatred of Latinos, Moslems, the poor the destitute and numerous other groups as their central organizing tactic, I reject the attempt by even the well-intentioned members of the elite to obtain that status for the Ken Mehlmans who they went to school with, who they socialize with and who has access to the centralized power of the political and corporate elite.

   Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes, who goes on to explain why he's not going "There, there, you poor thing" at Ken Mehlman.
2. Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast offers up commentary around a piece by Eugene Robinson, the speech Walter Mondale gave in 1984, and the beginning of Lee Atwater's career:
   

   You'd think that Democrats would have learned from that. I realize that people who lean left tend to imagine a world that could be, the very shining city on a hill that Reagan only talked about but did little to achieve. We like to think that people are basically good, that their better natures can be appealed to even in times of crisis, that great things can be accomplished when we are just honest and true and work together. All this shows you what kind of chumps we are. Because Republicans know better. For every image of a gang of ironworkers marching down to Ground Zero from their work site with tears streaming down their cheeks becasue they want to put their muscles towards doing what they can to help, for every white person who stood side by side with black Americans fighting for equal rights in 1963, for every man who has helped escort women into women's health clinics, for every Aaron Feuerstein, who continued to pay his employees even after his factory burned down, there are a hundred people, their faces twisted with hate, sitting in their comfortable homes, listening to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and others blaming someone for their plight.

3. Fred Pohl won the Best Fanwriter Hugo (list of other winners included)!