I thought of this when I saw this comment in response to my pointing out that liberals are out of step with scientists in regards to nuclear power:

I agree with Sam C. Even if there is a medically significant difference in the background radiation levels, there is every reason to believe that the levels at Cornwall will remain stable regardless of the state of the infrastructure and of the diligence (or lack thereof) of the people who live and work there.

And one suicide bomber or rogue missle could also significantly change things for the worse at Sellafield.

I responded that it seems everyone has their own private “One Percent Doctrine.” The objection above is logically coherent, but one wonders about the utility of a police-state as a solution to the terrorist threat? Of course most people would object based on the fact that such actions have other consequences which we might not enjoy. Similarly, the presence of nuclear power plants does entail a certain level of risk, but their lack is not without consequence either. Both action and inaction in many situations have consequences, but partisans tend to be very careful in terms of weight or noting the alternative outcomes based on normative or cultural preferences. Rationality and rationalization are generally found together.

Since her earliest years, Sotomayor’s identity has been inseparable from her ethnicity — from the sofrito she watched her mother and aunts make on Saturday mornings to the dozen years she spent on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF.

But this intense ethnic sensibility has not corresponded with intense ideological views.

The argument is ludicrous on its face, because of course the agenda of PRLDEF is the intensely ideological — from its opposition to the death penalty to its spirited defense of racial preferences. So what is the evidence for the Post’s claim that Sotomayor is non-ideological? She never registered as a Democrat, she married a non-Hispanic, and she didn’t wear anti-war buttons in school. Convinced? Me neither.

No mention is made of her speeches, which are rife with the ideologies of moral and intellectual relativism and ethnic determinism. No discussion of Ricci or her other controversial decisions, nor of her judicial methodology, which searches frantically for facts or blithely ignores them depending on what best suits her agenda.

But the Post gives a useful peek at the sort of platitudinous, feel-good rhetoric we can expect to hear at the confirmation hearings this week. Those who have concerns about Sotomayor should be prepared to query the nominee on specific cases and speeches, and press here on her often-repeated and bold ideological views. There is plenty of material to work with, despite the Post’s puffery to the contrary.

Development depends on good governance. (Applause.) That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That’s the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans….

History offers a clear verdict: Governments that respect the will of their own people, that govern by consent and not coercion, are more prosperous, they are more stable, and more successful than governments that do not….

In the 21st century, capable, reliable, and transparent institutions are the key to success — strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges — (applause); an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. (Applause.) Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people’s everyday lives….

Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.

What gave this message special appeal — witness all those interruptions for applause — was of course its delivery by an African-American president of the United States, whose own father was born in and spent much of his life in Kenya. Thus Obama had special resonance when he dismissed African complaints that their troubles are the fault of Western oppressors:

Now, it’s easy to point fingers and to pin the blame of these problems on others. Yes, a colonial map that made little sense helped to breed conflict. The West has often approached Africa as a patron or a source of resources rather than a partner. But the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade, or wars in which children are enlisted as combatants. In my father’s life, it was partly tribalism and patronage and nepotism in an independent Kenya that for a long stretch derailed his career, and we know that this kind of corruption is still a daily fact of life for far too many.

I would say this is an example of Obama putting his eloquence to good use — as was, I believe, his Cairo speech in which he explained to
Muslims why America was not in conflict with them. Of course, as Obama is discovering, his eloquence alone is not enough to reshape the
world. But it can’t hurt.

The president’s column is, not surprisingly, the usual self-serving, tendentious twaddle that politicians of Left and Right turn out when a newspaper asks for an op ed. In it, he makes the now inevitable point that the current economic downturn is the “most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression.” As Hennessey shows with a chart from Donald Marron, that is just nonsense. The current downturn is not even the worst of the post-war era, at least not yet, although it is getting there. So far, the economy has contracted 3.6 percent. In 1957-58 it contracted 3.7 percent.

How bad was the contraction in 1929-33? The exact figure is 29.3 percent, eight times as severe as the current contraction. To be sure, the recession of 1957-58 and the Great Depression are over. We know where their bottoms were. That can’t be said of the current recession. There are signs that we are at or near the bottom and even that recovery might be stirring already, although unemployment, a lagging indicator, will almost certainly get worse for several months to come.

Still, it should be remembered that in the spring of 1930, when a group of clergymen visited Herbert Hoover to ask for a public-works program, the president told them in all sincerity, “You are six weeks too late. The depression is over.” Equally, however, when liberals ask for a blank check in order to fight “the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression,” it should be remembered that it’s a bit like calling a canoe that overturned in May, 1912, ”the worst shipwreck since the Titanic.”

We saw it with “Joe the Plumber.” This guy was minding his own business, playing with his son in his front yard, when Barack Obama made an unscheduled campaign stop in his neighborhood. This was no setup, this was no plot — Obama came to Joe, who asked him an uncomfortable question, to which Obama gave an even more uncomfortable answer. That was that. Within days, we knew everything there was to know about Joe — how he wasn’t a licensed plumber, how he’d had some tax problems, and — most shocking of all — “Joe” wasn’t his first name, but his middle name.

All for asking a question.

The tactic worked pretty well, and now it’s being applied to a Connecticut firefighter who had the gall to file a lawsuit that, at one point, crossed the bench of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.  The People for the American Way — a leftist advocacy group — is urging journalists to “look into” Frank Ricci, the lead complainant of the New Haven firefighters who sued the city after passing a test for promotion and nevertheless being denied the promotion because the city discarded the results due to racial-quota considerations. (Of the twenty who passed, nineteen were Caucasian and one was Latino.)

The People for the American Way certainly seems well-named. It has apparently become the “American Way” to engage in character assasination against individuals who succeed in standing up to their liberal betters — to expose and scrutinize every aspect of the lives, employing even the media to bring them down.

Sorry, Mr. Wurzelbacher and Mr. Ricci. You thought you could ask questions or stand up for your rights? You should have known better.

So instead Texas gets Gail Lowe as the woman in charge of overseeing the education of Texas children — a Republican who recently appointed extreme right-wing theocratic preacher David Barton as an “expert reviewer” of the state’s social studies curriculum.

“There was a lot of speculation that it would be Dunbar, but personally I found it very hard to imagine the governor would appoint somebody who has been so vocal about her hatred for public schools,” said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network.

The group issued a statement Friday morning condemning Lowe’s appointment. “Gail Lowe is hardly an improvement,” Quinn said, pointing to her recent appointment of conservative minister David Barton of Aledo as an expert reviewer of the social studies curriculum.

“The Barton thing just jumps out at me as an indication of where we go from here,” Quinn said. “It’s clear that the direction of the board is not going to change.”

Other groups praised the appointment. “Gail Lowe is a strong conservative, representing Texas values, and has long been a leader in the field of education,” the Free Market Foundation said in a news release. “We hope that the usual critics will rise above their religious discrimination of the past and allow Mrs. Lowe to focus on the important educational issues of our state.”

David Barton heads the fundamentalist organization Wallbuilders, and is opposed to the separation of church and state. In 1991, he twice attended and spoke at meetings of front groups for the white supremacist “Christian Identity” movement.

And now he’s influencing the social studies curriculum in Texas. Lovely! As any Texan will tell you, the state is enormous — and that means the textbook market is so huge that books recommended for public schools in Texas often influence publisher’s choices of which books they produce and sell to the rest of the country.

Barton isn’t the only extremist on the social studies panel, either; he has a partner in theocracy, Peter Marshall (no, not the “Hollywood Squares” guy), and together they’re already pushing the agenda: Gail Lowe, Politics and Social Studies:

It didn’t take long. Gail Lowe is already showing why the Texas Freedom Network is concerned about Gov. Rick Perry’s appointment of her as chair of the Texas State Board of Education.

Lowe appointed David Barton — head of WallBuilders, a far-right organization that opposes separation of church and state — to a panel of so-called “experts” helping guide the revision of social studies curriculum standards. Barton has already joined with a fellow “expert” on the panel, far-right evangelical minister Peter Marshall, in calling for the removal of progressive historical figures like César Chavez and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall from the standards. (Never mind that Barton and Peter Marshall are absurdly unqualified to be considered social studies “experts.”)

The Texas Freedom Network has more details on the efforts by Lowe and previous Perry appointee Don McLeroy to pack the social studies review panel with creationists and far right ideologues: A Look at the Texas Social Studies ‘Experts’.

UPDATE at 7/12/09 1:15:40 pm:

Note that Gail Lowe will not have to face a confirmation hearing until the 2011 legislative session, unless there is a special session before then. So she’s in charge for at least two years by fiat.

Partly because of Britain’s 19th-century history of catastrophic military ventures in Afghanistan, when it sought to secure the outer defenses of British imperial rule in India, the government faces an uphill task in rallying public opinion to the current conflict.

I realize this fits in with the popular myth about Afghanistan being the “graveyard of empires,” but the historical record doesn’t live up to the hype. Britain had precisely one “catastrophic military venture” in Afghanistan. That was the invasion of Afghanistan  in 1938, which culminated in the massacre of the British column on the retreat from Kabul in January 1842. More than 15,000 people — mostly camp followers and Indian sepoys, but also including some 700 Europeans — were wiped out by Afghan raiders and the bitter cold. But that was hardly the end of the story. An Army of Retribution soon came marching through the Khyber Pass. British soldiers briefly occupied Kabul and destroyed its Great Bazaar along with much else as an act of vengeance.

In 1878, another British army marched into Afghanistan and after some setbacks managed to emerge with what the British government wanted: a treaty that in effect made Afghanistan a British protectorate. Afghan foreign policy would henceforward be under British control and Afghanistan would become a buffer state between the British and Russian empires. That arrangement lasted until 1919, when following another brief uprising (the Third Afghan War), the British finally let Afghanistan go its own way — a move that had no detrimental impact on British security.

Was Afghanistan a nuisance to Britain in the nineteenth century? Certainly. Did Britain suffer a military catastrophe there? Yes. But that is far from saying that Afghanistan was the graveyard of the British empire or a place where the Brits were constantly defeated. That would be like saying that the United States had a history of “catastrophic military ventures” against the Native Americans because of the defeat suffered by Custer at the Little Bighorn or by General Arthur St. Clair in Ohio in 1791. Those were certainly serious setbacks (the Ohio defeat — little remembered today — was actually far more costly than Custer’s Last Stand) but they did not represent the entirety of the Indian Wars which, as we know, ended in a victory for the United States, not for the Sioux and Cheyenne.

Afghanistan is without doubt an extremely challenging place to fight in, and British, American, and other NATO troops have their hands full today with the Taliban and other enemies. But let’s not exaggerate the scope of the threat either today or in the past.