Paul Fussell, the wide-ranging, stingingly opinionated literary scholar and cultural critic whose admiration for Samuel Johnson, Kingsley Amis and the Boy Scout Handbook and his withering scorn for the romanticization of war, the predominance of television and much of American society were dispensed in more than 20 books, died on Wednesday in Medford, Ore. He was 88.

From the 1950s into 1970s, Mr. Fussell followed a conventional academic path, teaching and writing on literary topics, specializing in 18th-century British poetry and prose. But his career changed in 1975, when he published 'The Great War and Modern Memory,' a monumental study of World War I and how its horrors fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility.

'The Great War,' a work that drew on Mr. Fussell's own bloody experience as an infantryman during World War II, won both the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the National Book Award for Arts and Letters.

'It is difficult to underestimate Fussell's influence,' Vincent B. Sherry wrote in 'The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War.' 'The book's ambition and popularity move interpretation of the war from a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a much more widespread cultural concern. His claims for the meaning of the war are profound and far-reaching; indeed, some have found them hyperbolic. Yet, whether in spite of or because of the enormity of his assertions, Fussell has set the agenda for most of the criticism that has followed him.'

The Great War and Modern Memory is still one of my favourite books. RIP, Paul Fussell.

NYT

Mississippi state Rep. Bubba Carpenter (R) said that it's OK for women to have coat hanger abortions because it's for a greater good.
A video obtained by Rachel Maddow's blog captures Carpenter saying he is proud of Mississippi's attempts to outlaw abortion outright, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled abortions legal in the United States.
And what about women who will perform self-induced abortions because they cannot afford to go out of state to get the procedure? 'Hey,' he says, 'you have to have moral values':

It's going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to– Roe vs. Wade. So we've done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They're like, 'Well, the poor pitiful women that can't afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger. That's what we've learned over and over and over.'

But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that's what we've decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.

These people are absolutely disgusting.

At 11 p.m Monday, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review (at Columbia University) published and posted its Spring 2012 issue -- devoted entirely to a single piece of work about the life and death of two troubled and troublesome South Texas men. In explaining to their readers why an entire issue would be devoted to just one story, the editors of the Review said straightly that the "gravity of the subject matter of the Article and the possible far-reaching policy ramifications of its publication necessitated this decision."

The article is titled "Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution" and it was written by James S. Liebman, Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White, Lauren Rosenberg and Daniel Zharkovsky. Los Tacayos can be translated from Spanish as "namesakes" and the two men at the heart of the story were, indeed, named Carlos DeLuna and Carlos Hernandez.. On December 7, 1989, this intense piece establishes beyond any reasonable doubt, Texas executed the former for a murder the latter had committed.

The Review article is an astonishing blend of narrative journalism, legal research, and gumshoe detective work. And it ought to end all reasonable debate in this country about whether an innocent man or woman has yet been executed in America since the modern capital punishment regime was recognized by the Supreme Court in 1976. The article is also a clear and powerful retort to Justice Scalia in Kansas v. Marsh: Our capital cases don't have nearly the procedural safeguards he wants to pretend they do.

Continue reading.

Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, a tea party activist that's appeared several times on Fox News, and founder of an organization where Sean Hannity serves as an advisory board member, said in a sermon recently published to YouTube that America's greatest mistake was allowing women the right to vote, adding that back in 'the good old days, men knew that women are crazy and they knew how to deal with them.'

In the video, published to YouTube in March, Peterson explains that he believes women simply can't handle 'anything,' and that in his experience, 'You walk up to them with a issue, they freak out right away. They go nuts. They get mad. They get upset, just like that. They have no patience because it's not in their nature. They don't have love. They don't have love.'

Despite his statements being online for more than a month, Hannity welcomed Peterson on his show last Tuesday to castigate the Obama administration over 'taking credit' for the Osama bin Laden assassination — but the segment didn't exactly go as planned.

In his March sermon, Peterson adds that Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown Law student who recently spoke to a House Democratic hearing on contraception coverage, was actually revealing 'all the sex' college students are having. 'It's really all about maintaining the freedom to kill babies in the womb,' he says. 'Women are now degraded. Women have no shame.'

At roughly 8:30 into his 12-minute sermon, he doubles down, amazingly, saying that he believes America went wrong when it gave women the right to vote.

Video and more at Raw Story

[Link: www.rightwingwatch.org...]

The Greene County, Virginia Republican Committee publishes a monthly newsletter for members called "The Constitutional Conservatives." The newsletter is heavy on Tea Party rhetoric about how Obama and liberals are ruining America, and so forth. But even by these standards, an item in the March newsletter stands out.

In the "Whitehouse Watchdog" column, editor Ponch McPhee says that American cannot survive four more years under Obama, a "political socialist ideologue" who is "unlike anything world history has ever witnessed or recognized." McPhee argues that Americans will have no option "but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November:"

We have before us a challenge to remove an ideologue unlike anything world history has ever witnessed or recognized.

 

An individual who has come to power within a Nation which yields it's strength over the entire world.

 

An elected leader who shuns biblical praise, handicaps economic ability, disrespects the honor of earned military might.

 

In the coming days and weeks  ~ we the people must come to grasp as a common force, our very soul's, that our future as a sovereign nation is indeed at risk.

 

If every single individual that you know, would contact 25 other individuals  ~ we can make a difference that will be heard across the Commonwealth and in Washington.

 

The ultimate task for the people is to remain vigilant and aware  ~ that the government, their government is out of control, and this moment, this opportunity, must not be forsaken, must not escape us, for we shall not have any coarse but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November ~ This Republic cannot survive for 4 more years underneath this political socialist ideologue.

[Link: thinkprogress.org...]

The fallout over Rep. Allen West's (R-FL) Joe McCarthy-style accusation that "there's about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party" continues. West has not backed down from his ludicrous assertion that membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus is akin to Marxism and has even sent out a fundraising letter bragging about the comments and asking for donations to help him fight the "distortions of the corrupt liberal media."

This morning, in an interview with CNN's Soledad O'Brien, West repeated the charges but refused to identify which members he believed to be Communists[...]

Transcript and more at link.

[Link: thinkprogress.org...]

[...] while the National Review has decided to very publicly purge itself of white supremacists and racists, bigotry toward Muslims appears to go unchallenged in the pages of the magazine and on its blog, National Review Online (NRO). NRO contributing editor Andrew McCarthy, who accused President Obama of standing with the Muslim Brotherhood against 9/11 families in his post "The President Stands With Sharia," told Rep. Peter King's (R-NY) hearing on the radicalization of American Muslims:

What "radicalizes" Muslims is Islam -- the mainstream interpretation of it. The "radicals" propagating it do not need the "captive audience" provided by the prison environment. The "radicalization" is happening in plain sight.

The denigration of Islam and Muslim Americans isn't limited to McCarthy's screeds. A number of noted Islamophobes are regularly given free rein to guest post on NRO's site or write in the magazine, including:

Robert Spencer, who just last month concluded that "Islamic supremacists" may have subverted the "U.S. defense against jihad terror," because the man who heads the Central Intelligence Agency's Counterterrorism Center -- and is credited with crippling Al Qaeda and other militant networks in Pakistan -- was identified as a Muslim in a Washington Post profile.

David Horowitz, who, in an interview last year, stated, "What has the Arab world contributed except terror?...The theocratic, repressive Arabic states do no significant science, no significant arts and culture."

Daniel Pipes, who, in the pages of The National Review in 1990, wrote, "All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most."

The National Review has been notified of the Islamophobic statements made by a number of their contributors in the past. To date, they appear to have decided to do nothing. Perhaps now is the time for The National Review to take a hard stance against all bigotry, intolerance and racism.

[Link: thinkprogress.org...]

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) argued that women should be allowed to make choices over their own bodies, while blasting Obamacare on Meet The Press. Without noting the irony of the GOP war on women targeting Planned Parenthood, abortion services, and contraception coverage, Bachmann said women need to be allowed control over their own bodies:

BACHMANN: What we want is women to be able to make their own choices [...] We want women to make their own choices in healthcare. You see that's the lie that happens under Obamacare. The President of the United States effectively becomes a health care dictator. Women don't need anyone to tell them what to do on health care. We want women to have their own choices, their own money, that way they can make their own choices for the future of their own bodies.

TP has the video. Also note:

Bachmann doesn't believe a women's right to choose applies in all cases, though, promising on the presidential campaign trail that in addition to supporting an abortion ban, she wouldn't allow exceptions for rape or for the woman's health.

[Link: thinkprogress.org...]

Like any state legislature dealing with 8 percent unemployment and thousands of its residents facing disenfranchisement, the Tennessee Senate is targeting the menace of underage hand-holding.

Last week, the Senate passed SB 3310, a bill to update the state's abstinence-based sex education curriculum to define holding hands and kissing as "gateway sexual activities." Just one senator voted against the legislation; 28 voted in favor.

Since the bill specifically bans teachers from "demonstrating gateway sexual activity", educators would be prohibited from even demonstrating what hand-holding is. Breaking these laws could result in a lawsuit, as Hunter from Daily Kos notes:

If your teacher teaches you anything about sex that isn't specifically on the approved curriculum, like demonstrating "holding hands" for the class instead of quietly tsking about the dangers it poses, they can be sued.