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.”
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.
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🙂
For reasons that escape me, this has gotten pretty little attention: The assignment sheet for that now-notorious “Holocaust yes or no” assignment at that school in Rialto, California included at length verbatim text lifted directly from a Holocaust denial site. It has all the stuff you’d imagine, the supposed lack of documentation for the Holocaust, claims gas chambers never could have worked, etc. You’ve got to see this.
In a stinging opinion that can only termed wild, a federal judge has completely shut down the on-going investigation into the recall election of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Notably, the opinion appeared to lean heavily on recent Supreme Court opinions that have removed most constraints on political spending.
Still trying to piece together the full implications of this important federal judge’s ruling in Wisconsin that commands prosecutors to stop their investigation of Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign finances from the 2012 recall election.
The judge has adopted the maximal position that political contributions are free speech and used that as the basis to shut down an ongoing criminal probe. He even goes so far as to praise the targets of the probe for their cleverness in finding campaign finance loopholes:
“The plaintiffs have found a way to circumvent campaign finance laws, and that circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted,” Randa wrote. “Instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech, an activity that is ‘ingrained in our culture.'”
More on the big legal win for Walker and conservative outside groups here.
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I just got an email from TPM Reader AM on the story of the Holocaust denial school assignment in Rialto, California. As he says, not only is the Holocaust one of the best documented atrocities in the entirety of human history. It is one of the best documented atrocities by the perpetrators themselves. Here’s TPM Reader AM followed by some personal reflections of my own …
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Pew Research is out tonight with a detailed public opinion survey of Ukraine. The results are fascinating and show the limits of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy of shaking Ukraine until it breaks, with the hopes of grabbing up the shards in the east. The main takeaways from the poll are that Ukrainians have little faith in the provisional government (solid but not overwhelming support in the west, very little support in the east) and are deeply divided over the question of the status of languages (Ukrainian and Russian). But they appear overwhelmingly opposed to any division of the country. And even in the east there is a general hostility to Russia’s interference in the country’s affairs.