Rand Paul: Conservative, Libertarian, Segregationist

Yesterday, NPR was sniffing around the question of whether Rand Paul would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if he had been in the Senate.

That's a significant and uncomfortable question for any libertarian-inspired, small government conservative. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made every lunch at the local diner and every trip to Woolworths into a federal matter because it banned racial discrimination in relation to serving customers, hiring workers and management, promoting people to new positions, and just about every matter connected to the conduct of private business.

If you like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, you see the federal government acting with real heroism to overturn a monstrous system of segregation that made the American South an evil place of racial hate, intimidation, violence, and deprivation. I read about the fight over the Civil Rights Act every day for months when I was a 9 and 10 year old kid. I'm proud to say that I've always supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even though I'm embarrassed to say that the legislation was so desperately needed in my country and I'm doubly embarrassed to say that because I'm white and people like my relatives were enforcing segregation in the South and more silently discriminating in the North.

But if you're a libertarian conservative, you would be more likely to see the federal government acting in a completely illegitimate and unconstitutional manner to force private businesses to serve African-American customers, hire African-American employees, and promote African-American employees when hired. If you're a libertarian conservative, you value the freedom of white employers to serve, hire, promote, and fire who they want over the freedom of African-Americans to shop, work, and receive recognition for their efforts.

Moreover, the Civil Rights Act violated libertarian/conservative principles of federalism because it represented a massive expansion of the power of the federal government in relation to the states. In many ways, the Civil Rights Act was even worse the New Deal from a "federalist" point of view. Where the New Deal offended federalist sensabilities by establishing a number of new federal programs and regulations, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 overturned a vast web of state laws pertaining to race in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only vastly increased the power of the federal government, it curtailed the power of Southern state governments in the area of their highest priority--race relations.

These were the reasons why Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and these are the reasons that Rand Paul would vote against the Civil Rights Act if it were brought back up for a vote today.

Paul explained [to the Louisville Courier-Journal] that he backed the portion of the Civil Rights Act banning discrimination in public places and institutions, but that he thinks private businesses should be permitted to discriminate by race.

In an ideal world, Rand Paul would take the country back to the period before 1964 when private businesses were free to discriminate against African-Americans in any way they wanted.
To be fair, Paul should get credit for his honesty on the issue. Even though the Republican Party has been the party of conservative white racial backlash against Civil Rights ever since Goldwater's candidacy in 1964, few if any Republicans have acknowledged their opposition to what they have to view as one of the "original sins" of big government in Civil Rights legislation.

But that honesty doesn't make him qualified to be a U. S. Senator from Kentucky.

Or anywhere else.

RSI Sends Money to Conway

Jack Conway won a close primary over Dan Mongiardo yesterday evening. A couple hours later, RSI sent him $25 and will volunteer to make phone calls after another donation. The fall campaign for Kentucky's open Senate seat will be a tough but winnable battle for Conway. RSI urges everyone to help as much as possible.

The Profound Truth of the Ken Griffey Scandal

Sports fans know that fading mega-star Ken Griffey jr. was caught napping in the clubhouse during a recent Seattle Mariners game. The underlying truth of Griffey's little nap was that baseball is b-o-r-i-n-g. And there's the pitch--ball one.

It's More Than Lebron Losing

Lost in all the commentary on Lebron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers "losing" to the Boston Celtice is the fact that the Celtics "won." The Cavs might be built more for the regular season than the playoffs, but the Celtics got their act together from a mediocre regular season, won their series with the Cavs 4-2 and looked good doing it.

There's a lot of criticism for the way GM Danny Ferry put together the Cavaliers, but the critics don't mention the extraordinary success of Danny Ainge in Boston. When the Celtics are healthy, they start Paul Pierce, Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, Rajon Rondo, and Kendrick Perkins. Except for the very serviceable Perkins, all of these guys are likely Hall of Famers. Of course, Pierce, Allen, and Garnett are one step beyond their primes. But they're still All-Stars when they get it going and Rondo has been such a good point guard that the Big Three almost always has it going.

Ultimately, the Celtics won the series more than Cleveland lost.

With Friends Like Randall Kennedy, Elena Kagan Doesn't Need All the Enemies She's Going to Have

In "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King criticizes white Southern ministers for responding to the civil rights movement in Birmingham with "pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities."

Unfortunately for Kagan, that's pretty much what she got from Randall Kennedy's effort in HufPost to defend her record on minority hiring as Dean of Harvard Law School. Kagan's problem is that Harvard only hired only hired 7 women and one member of a racial minority in the 32 law school searches that occurred while she was Dean from 2003 to 2009.

Maybe Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond would approve. Otherwise, these numbers look bad. By not hiring any black faculty, Harvard Law is implicitly claiming that there were either zero or one black legal scholar who was qualified for either entry level job offers or senior appointments. That's barely tokenism. And the situation with women isn't much better?


By way of comparison, my former political science unit had ten searches and had a fairly even distribution between white males (2), African-American males (2), and white women (3). We weren't exactly paragons of diversity and presently we're back to three white males. But we were much more effective than Harvard.

However, perhaps Harvard's poor minority hiring record doesn't reflect on Elena Kagan herself. Maybe Kagan didn't have very much influence over hiring new professors or maybe there was some sort of institutional priority to hire for legal fields in which women and African-Americans were severely under-represented.

That's the question that Prof. Randall Kennedy tried to address in his op-ed and there was undoubtedly some hope that Kennedy's being black would give him more credibility on the issue.
But it's hard to be very credible while being sanctimonious and irrelevant.

According to Kennedy, Kagan aced her "race relations law" class from Kennedy as a law student and went on to clerk for Thurgood Marshall before settling in as a law professor back at good ol' Harvard.


Good for her.


Kennedy also claims that Kagan is "committed to a vision of racial inclusiveness that reflects the best of our national traditions." That sounds great if Kagan was also committed to using her position to further that vision. Otherwise, Kagan's vision of racial inclusiveness is more of a "pious irrelevancy" than anything else. Indeed, if Kagan did have a "vision of racial inclusiveness," that would increase her responsibility to ensure that Harvard Law School hired a diverse faculty and magnify her failure to do so.


Kennedy goes on to claim that Kagan didn't really have the power to do much about minority hiring anyway. "First, it is mistaken to suggest, as some have, that the Dean of Harvard Law School is responsible for all that happens or does not happen with respect to hiring."


Perhaps she wasn't responsible for "all" that happened in relation to hiring. But Kennedy makes it clear Kagan had real power rather than just a positionk. He goes on to say that "the Dean is the single most influential member of the faculty. One does not get hired at the law school without the Dean's blessing." It also turns out that Dean Kagan was a member of the "Entry Level Appointments Committee" that Kennedy himself chaired.

In other words, Kagan had real responsibility rather than merely formal responsibility for the lack of minority hiring.


As Dean, Kagan was much more worried about ideological diversity than racial or gender diversity and invested a great deal of her credibility in hiring conservatives like Jack Goldsmith. Like a lot of moderate Democrats, Kagan seems to be more interested in conservative ideology than the various ideological positions of the left. There was certainly an argument for this during the Bush years. Given the tilt of Bush administration judicial appointments to the right, it could be claimed that Harvard could not adequately train lawyers unless they were exposed to enthusiastic representations of conservative views. Likewise, it might be argued that an agenda to hire conservatives would bias the hiring process toward white males like Goldsmith because relatively few female and African-American lawyers are conservative.


In other words, hiring conservatives was not necessarily a bad thing.

However, feminism and African-American perspectives are also important to American law and are becoming more important as more women become lawyers and the American mainstream has been transformed in the ways needed to better integrate African-Americans. Kagan's focus on conservatives tends to distort the law by narrowing the scope of theoretical conflict to white male liberals and white male conservatives with only token representation from lawyers like Kagan and Kennedy.

In practice, Kagan's "vision of racial inclusiveness" boils down to a white male cockfight between liberals and conservatives.


Kennedy seems to recognize that Kagan's record of concern for minority hiring is still thin. So he rolls out the "santimonious triviality" of citing that Kagan supported fellowship programs for minority law students.


As if that really mattered to the issue of faculty hiring.


I basically support Kagan. In fact, I highly doubt that Obama could have nominated her at all if Kagan in fact had proved successful at diversifying the Harvard Law School faculty. But she's starting to look like a lightweight who's main skill is the politics of personal relationships.

Still, Randall Kennedy's defense makes Elena Kagan look worse than she probably is.


Maybe Kagan needs to find smarter friends than she had at Harvard Law School.

Elena Kagan Celebration Continues--Madonna Version

The Elena Kagan celebration continues at RSI. This morning "Celebration" by Madonna.

"Celebration"

I think you wanna come over,
yeah I heard it through the grapevine.
Are you drunk or you sober?
Think about it, doesn’t matter
And if it makes you feel good then I say do it,
I don’t know what you’re waiting for

Feel my temperature rising
There’s too much heat I’m gonna lose control
Do you want to go higher, get closer to the fire,
I don’t know what you’re waiting for

Come join the party, yeah
Coz anybody just won’t do.
Let’s get this started, yeah
Coz everybody wants to party with you.

Boy you got a reputation, but you’re gonna have to prove it
I see a little hesitation,
Am I gonna have to show you that if it feels right, get on your marks
Step to the beat boy that’s what it’s for

Put your arms around me
When it gets too hot we can go outside
But for now just come here, let me whisper in your ear
An invitation to the dance of lifeCome join the party, it’s a celebration

Anybody just won’t do
Let’s get this started, no more hesitation
Coz everybody wants to party with you
Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?

You look familiar
You wanna dance? Yeah.
I guess I just don’t recognize you with your clothes on… (laughs)
What are you waiting for?

Boy you’ve got it
Coz anybody just won’t do
Let’s get it started, no more hesitation
Coz everybody wants to party with you

Elena Kagan Just Wants to Celebrate

More music for Elena Kagan--

Rare Earth's "I Just Want to Celebrate."

I just want to celebrate another day of livin'
I just want to celebrate another day of life
I put my faith in the people
But the people let me down
So I turned the other way
And I carry on, anyhow
That's why I'm telling you
-
I just want to celebrate, yeah, yeah
I just want to celebrate, yeah, yeah
Another day of living, I just want to celebrate another day of life
-
Had my hand on the dollar bill And the dollar bill blew away
But the sun is shining down on me
And it's here to stay
That's why I'm telling you
-
I just want to celebrate, yeah, yeah
Another day of living, yeah
I just want to celebrate another day of living
I just want to celebrate another day of life
-
Don't let it all get you down,
Don't let it turn you around and around
And around and around
-
Well, I can't be bothered with sorrow
And I can't be bothered with hate, no, no
I'm using up my time by feeling fine, every day
That's why I'm telling you I just want to celebrate
Aw, yeah
I just want to celebrate yeah yeah
Another day of living, yeah yeah
I just want to celebrate another day of livin', yeah
I just want to celebrate another day of life
-
Don't let it all get you down, no, no
Don't let it turn you around and around,
And around and around, and around
Around round round 'round and
around round round
round don't go 'round

Damn That Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein pretty much gets it right on Obama's nomination of Elena Kagan when he says that Kagan looks a lot like Obama himself.

When Obama announced Kagan's nomination, he praised "her temperament, her
openness to a broad array of viewpoints; her habit, to borrow a phrase from Justice Stevens, 'of understanding before disagreeing'; her fair-mindedness and skill as a consensus-builder." This sentence echoes countless assessments of Obama himself.

Obama is cool. He makes a show of processing the other side's viewpoint. He's more interested in the fruits of consensus than the clarification of conflict. In fact, just as Kagan is praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing at Harvard's Law School, Obama was praised for giving conservative scholars a hearing on the Harvard Law Review. "The things that frustrate people about Obama will frustrate people about Kagan," says one prominent Democrat who's worked with both of them.

Still, I've been thinking that all day myself and hate to admit that Klein wrote it first. Damn you, Ezra Klein.

Elena Kagan "Celebration" Song

Here's some Kool and the Gang lyrics for Elena Kagan.

"Celebration"
-
Yahoo! This is your celebration
Yahoo! This is your celebration
-
Celebrate good times, come on! (Let's celebrate)
Celebrate good times, come on! (Let's celebrate)
-
There's a party goin' on right here
A celebration to last throughout the years
So bring your good times, and your laughter too
We gonna celebrate your party with you
-
Come on now
-
Celebration
Let's all celebrate and have a good time
Celebration
We gonna celebrate and have a good time
-
It's time to come together
It's up to you, what's your pleasure
-
Everyone around the world
Come on!
-
Yahoo!
It's a celebration
Yahoo!
-
Celebrate good times, come on!
It's a celebration
Celebrate good times, come on!
Let's celebrate
-
We're gonna have a good time tonight
Let's celebrate, it's all right
We're gonna have a good time tonight
Let's celebrate, it's all right
-
Baby...
-
We're gonna have a good time tonight (Ce-le-bra-tion)
Let's celebrate, it's all right
We're gonna have a good time tonight (Ce-le-bra-tion)
Let's celebrate, it's all right
-
Yahoo!
Yahoo!
-
Celebrate good times, come on! (Let's celebrate)
Celebrate good times, come on!It's a celebration!
Celebrate good times, come on! (Let's celebrate)
-
Come on and celebrate, good times, tonight (Celebrate good times, come on!)
'Cause everything's gonna be all right
Let's celebrate (Celebrate good times, come on) (Let's celebrate)...

Elena Kagan? I'll Be Surprised If There's a Vote

The definitive word is now out that Solicitor General Elena Kagan is going to be nominated for the Supreme Court by President Obama.

Lefties like Glenn Greenwald oppose Kagan because she's too closely aligned with conservatives and is pretty much a judicial blank slate because she's never been a judge. Likewise, Kagan seemed to be favorably toward the expansion of executive power during the Bush years, has been too close to Goldman Sachs, and did little minority hiring while she was the Dean of Harvard Law School.

That all bothers me as well.

But I'd be surprised if Kagan's nomination came to a vote.

The main issue is that Kagan was the leader in Harvard University's decision to exclude ROTC from campus as long as gays were excluded from the military.

That's a position I support.

But the Republicans are going to frame the Kagan choice as "Gay Rights vs America" and they'll most likely have a great deal of success in mobilizing Tea Party support as the Obama administration struggles to get beyond its initial tone deafness.

It's hard for me to see how the politics of the Kagan nomination are going to be anything but pretty grim because of the likelihood of Democratic defections. It's easy to see Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson declaring against Kagan as a way to stick it to the left. At the same time, it's hard to see Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu as standing up to conservative pressure to vote the "pro-military" values of their constituents.

That's four Democratic "no votes" right off the top of my head. So Harry Reid is going to start with 55 votes out of the 60 he's going to need to overcome the inevitable GOP filibuster.

I'm a big believer in fuzzy math. But I don't see anything fuzzy about the the math of a Kagan nomination.

Apparently, the Obama administration thought a Kagan nomination would be difficult to demonize.

They're in for a rude awakening.

A New Opportunity for the Right-Wing Fiction Machine

According to Chris Good of the Atlantic Monthly, Elena Kagan will be hard for conservatives to attack if Obama nominates her for the Supreme Court:

I asked Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network (a conservative group focused on judicial nominees) what conservatives are going to say about Kagan, and what Kagan's "wise Latina" moment, if there is one, will prove to be.

"She has been much more careful than Justice Sotomayor. She never would have said something like that even if she thinks it. She's been so careful for so long that no one seems to know exactly what she does think," Severino said.

As if any of that's going to matter.

It's not like honesty is Job 1 on the right. If they can't find anything in Kagan's record to attack, they won't have any problems making things up. It might turn out that creative conservatives are consulting the collected works of Joe McCarthy, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Ann Coulter as they gear up for a Kagan nomination.

Time to Invade Nepal, Maybe Turkey Too

The Pakistani Taliban claimed credit today for the car bomb that fizzled last night on Times Square. No doubt Bill Kristol and other neo-conservatives will soon start calling for invasions of uninvolved countries like Nepal or Turkey.

Actually, India would be a better candidate.

The 9-11 attacks were launched by Saudi nationals and coordinated from al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. In response, the Bush administration invaded Iraq despite an enormous amount of evidence that al-Qaeda considered Saddam Hussein to be an enemy.

If the car bomb in NYC really was set by the Pakistani Taliban, the most likely country to be targeted by the neo-cons for invasion would be Pakistan's main enemy, India.

I guess India's lucky the bomb fizzled.

Brent Musberger: My Role Model for the Day

I had a Brent Musberger kind of situation today and think I handled it well.

Illegal Immigration--Why Do Much of Anything?

Peggy Noonan writes that the U. S. shouldn't pass any new immigration legislation until the "borders"--by which she means the Mexican border--are secure.

In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the commonsense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next.

But the federal government already puts an enormous effort into border security and illegal immigrants have to go to great lengths to get into the country undetected. Instead, it seems that the main "problem" is the Mexican population that's already here in the U. S.

But if the Mexican population is a problem, it's a problem that I tend to welcome. My favorite restaurant in my part of Kentucky is the Mexican-owned Italian restaurant, I like seeing the Mexican guys at the stores, and I like the Mexican guy who lives next door better than I like my Anglo neighbor. I want my daughters to learn Spanish and wish I'd remember more of my own Spanish from high school.

In general, I appreciate Mexico and wish the Mexicans well. The drug cartel problem in Mexico is a great deal worse than the "illegal immigration" problem in the U. S. and we're the major cause of that problem because of our national hunger for "illegal" drugs. What I'd like to see is some sort of system that authorizes parts of the rural population in Mexico to circulate back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. In this way, Mexicans wouldn't have to risk death to enter the U. S., but they would also have the option of going back and taking up opportunities in Mexico after time in the U. S. I imagine that there will be less illegal immigration if there is more legal immigration.

I'd also like to see amnesty for the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. Once again, I want to go back to our problem--the drug problem. We have a couple of million people in jail for drug crimes, but millions more Americans ignore the drug laws in a way that's much more destructive to ourselves and Mexico than Mexican immigration. As a result, I don't think we in the U.S. have much credibility when we talk about the majesty of the law in relation to immigration. So, let's exercise a little modesty and forgive the transgressions of those who entered illegally from Mexico. Most of them seem to be making a positive contribution anyway.

Models In Need of an Airbrush

Above is a picture of a group of super-models who are modeling for Louis Vitton in Paris this year. Most of these women are in their early 20's, but they are so thin and worn that they look more like concentration camp survivors than anything else.

Camp survivors or drug addicts.

HuffPost cites readers at Reddit as saying:

"Seriously, though--how many of them have enormous foreheads and huge eyes? A lot of them are not attractive sans makeup. Their faces look smooshed; they're too damn skinny. Put down the coke straw and eat a cheeseburger, ladies!" and the more poetic "coke, coke, coke ,coke, heroine, coke, heroine, heeeey that one is smiling..., coke, heroine, heroine, coke, ..."

I would have put a couple of "meths" in with the coke and heroin cases.

Maybe all that airbrushing isn't so superfluous after all.

Crist Not Hitting Bottom Yet

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced today that he'll continue his campaign for Florida's U. S. Senate seat as an independent.

"My decision to run for the United State Senate as a candidate without party affiliation in many ways says more about our nation and our state than it does about me . . . As someone who served the people in Florida more than 15 years, from the state Senate to the governor's mansion, I can confirm what most Floridians already know. Unfortunately our political system is broken. I was never one who sought to hold elective office to demagogue, to point fingers. For me, for me, public service has always been about putting the needs of our state and our people first. And every single day, as your servant, I have tried to do exactly that."

Crist is counting on a groundswell of moderate opinion in his favor.

Good luck with that.

Joe Lieberman won as an independent in Connecticut because the GOP did not field a credible candidate, which meant that Lieberman was supported by Republicans as a way to undercut the Democratic candidate. However, Florida Democrats have a major candidate of their own in Rep. Kendrick Meek. Crist isn't going to get anywhere unless Meek closes up shop.

And that's highly unlikely.

The problem for Crist is the same as it is for almost any moderate. He wants to put "the needs of our state and our people first" but doesn't identify any specific ideas for doing so because that would put him in the crosshairs of the ideological battles between conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats.

Moderates generally like "compromise" and "bi-partisanship," but Crist is going to find out how poorly those principles play on the campaign trail. The right-wing views any politician who is willing to compromise with the Democrats as a "big-government liberal." Likewise, progressives view any willingness to compromise with Republicans as evidence of a politician's selling his soul to "corporate interests" and the Washington/media establishment.

And the worst thing for Charlie Crist is that both sides are right about him.

Sorry Charlie! But you still haven't hit bottom yet.

Fareed Zakaria Needs Smarter Super-Smart Friends

Fareed Zakaria's defense of Goldman Sachs in the current Newsweek has a Tom Friedman-esque air of "I was talking with a super-smart Wall Street guy on the flight back from London and he told me that this Goldman Sachs case is crap."

Like Friedman, Zacharia needs smarter super-smart friends feeding him his lines.

Maybe James Jones Shouldn't Have Known the Joke At All

Gen. James Jones, President Obama's national security adviser, is in some moderately warm water for telling a Jewish joke at a gathering at "The Washington Institute for Near East Policy – a pro-Israel think tank."

The joke scored a two-fer for Jones. First, he told a joke that relies on the kinds of long-time Jewish stereotypes associated with anti-Semitism from the expulsion of Jews from England to the Inquisition to the Holocaust. At the same time, he was telling the joke to a largely Jewish audience where a lot of people were guaranteed to be offended.

One person who attended the gathering noted the intense stupidity of Jones' story, "can you imagine him telling a black joke at an event of African Americans?" So what was the joke. Here's an account from Jake Tapper of ABC News.

Jones tells the joke “in order to set the stage for my remarks,” and then proceeds to tell the story of a “member of the Taliban separated from his fighting party.” The Taliban member stumbles upon a shack, which it turns out is a "little store owned by a Jewish merchant.'

“I need water,” the Taliban fighter says to the merchant. “Get me some water.”

“I'm sorry I don’t have any water but would you like to buy a tie?” the merchant says. “We have a nice sale of ties today.”

The Taliban warrior goes on a tirade against the merchant, against Jews, about Israel. “I need water you try to sell me ties, you people don’t get it.”

"Well I'm sorry I don’t have water for you,” the merchant says, “I forgive you for all of the insults you’ve levied against me, my family, my country...But I will help you out."

The merchant steers the Taliban towards a restaurant two miles away.

“They have all the water you'll need,” the merchant says.

The Taliban fighter walks towards the restaurant, then returns about an hour later.

"Your brother tells me I need a tie to get in the restaurant,” he says.

Ba-dum-bum.

Yeah, "Ba-dum-bum." That was hilarious. Personally, I've hated these kinds of jokes since I started college. Here, I'm an equal opportunity hater. I hate black jokes, Jewish jokes, Polish jokes, Italian jokes, and hillbilly jokes.

I hate it when I hear jokes about "hicks" as well.

It's all ugly. It's all crap. I'm rather proud that I've never remembered one of these jokes long enough to repeat it.

So what's Gen. James Jones have to say about it.

“I wish that I had not made this off the cuff joke at the top of my remarks, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by it. It also distracted from the larger message I carried that day: that the United States commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct.”

My wish is that Gen. Jones hadn't known the joke in the first place.

Sarah Palin as Stop Sign

The best thing about Gabriel Sherman's article on Sarah Palin in the New York magazine is the throw away line that Palin is the "president" or "CEO" of right-wing America.

But I see Palin more as a the right-wing's stop sign, the leading symbol of their refusal to accept the America in which they already live, the post-civil rights, post-feminism, post-gay marriage, macroeconomic America in which government acts on a large scale, a liberal black guy can be president, Mexican immigrants run the Italian restaurant down the street, and lesbian newlyweds are out gardening on weekends.

-

It's really too bad.

Rick Perry a Progressive at Heart

Well, sort of. In spring 2009, Texas governor Rick Perry was ready to rejoin the Confederate Army. This spring it's the Glenn Beck Army. That sounds like progress to me.