TPM Reader JF has some perspective from our distant past (with a fascinating postscript – the poem is by Thomas Paine) …
As a fellow early Americanist by training, I thought Josh might find this worth a moment’s consideration: how much the US has (or hasn’t) changed in its tolerance of religious difference. To wit, the poem the amazing poem, “The Monk and the Jew,” which I happened across in a 3 June 1775 copy of the Virginia Gazette. (jpg attached, link here🙂
As we noted yesterday, the schools in Rialto, California – a town way out on the fringe of the LA sprawl, produced an assignment to ask 8th graders to “write an argumentative essay, utilizing cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.” I’ve seen a number of times where schools get into trouble on stuff kind of like this. And in some of those cases you can see how maybe someone had no ill-will but just approached something in a really stupid way. But I’m not seeing that here.
Rob Ford gives his first interview from rehab. And apparently it’s awesome. “Rehab is amazing. It reminds me of football camp. Kind of like the Washington Redskins camp I went to as a kid.”
Lynne Cheney: “Would Vanity Fair publish anything about Monica Lewinsky that Hillary Clinton didn’t want in Vanity Fair?”
For current Prime members, join us in our discussion of our upcoming Prime membership drive.
Leading GOP Senate candidate from North Carolina says we must “divide and conquer” those on public assistance? Watch.
Thom Tillis, the leading candidate in today’s GOP primary in North Carolina, was going off on the 47 percent way before Mitt Romney.
California school district revises assignment questioning whether the Holocaust actually happened.
The rate of teenage abortions per year is now lower than it was before Roe v Wade. See the chart.