Ol’ man Mohney wonders about the protocol, and then ultimately spills the beans about a truly tedious and pretentious gal he dated back in the day.

I only remember her because he had the poor form to bring her to my apartment, whereupon her attitude produced near-immediate ridicule. And now, 20 years later, she’s become — per Mohney — a “Sarah Palin-like figure” back in Aladamnbama, apparently poised for election to statewide office, complete with a web site boasting of her right-winger bona fides and (I kid you not) the fact that her daddy was a star quarterback at Bama, played for Bear, etc.

Granted, the state in question is Alabama. But still.

Salon writer Michael Lind takes on the absurd lost cause in the wake of my adoptive state’s new textbook requirements:

By all means, let schoolchildren in Texas read Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. But there should be more material from the Confederate side of the conflict than that. For generations, apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that secession was really about the tariff, or states’ rights, or something else — anything other than preserving the right of some human beings to own, buy and sell other human beings.

That being the case, the education of schoolchildren in my state should include a reading of the Cornerstone Speech made by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, on March 21, 1861. With remarkable candor, Stephens pointed out that whereas the United States was founded on the idea, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,” the new Confederacy was founded on the opposite conception:

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically … Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Let the children of Texas compare what Stephens had to say about natural rights and human equality with Lincoln’s views on the subject, and contrast the ideals of the American and Confederate Foundings. That should make for interesting classroom discussions.

And more:

Toward the end of the war, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis came up with a plan. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, they proposed to save the Confederacy by freeing and arming slaves. In “Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War,” Bruce Levine quotes some typical responses. Brig. Gen. Clement H. Stevens: “If slavery is to be abolished then I take no more interest in our fight.” Gov. Zebulon Vance of North Carolina: “Our independence is chiefly desirable for the preservation of our political institutions, the principal of which is slavery.” Once it became clear that the only way to save slavery and anti-statism in the South was to abolish slavery and adopt statism, the malfunctioning Confederate Mind short-circuited completely.

Libtard patriarch Ron Paul’s son Rand won the GOP Senate primary in Kentucky this week, which was a big damn deal considering how the GOP establishment lined up behind his opponent. Ordinarily, I’d be all over this despite being across the ideological aisle from either Paul, since pretty much any smack to the GOP is a good one in my book. However…

It turns out the younger Paul (and maybe the older; apples and trees and all that) has such a doctrinaire view of state power and private property that he, apparently, opposes the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal to run a public business in a discriminatory way — i.e., the provisions that made segregated lunch counters illegal. He won’t come right out and say it, since it’s clear what will happen if he does, but on Rachel Maddow he came very close despite tapdancing around her questions and throwing out gun-rights nonsequitors. I don’t think his general election Democratic challenger is likely to miss this, and it seems like Paul is the sort of guy who doesn’t see the implications of his position — or how dramatically out of the mainstream they are, or how explosive that kind of revelation is likely to be. One of his lines in the Maddow interview was something like “I don’t know why we’re discussing a 40 year old law,” but “how would you vote on legislation like X” is a perfectly legitimate question to put to a candidate; he won’t get far with that kind of defense.

The video is long (about 20 minutes), but Maddow and Paul are able to have a respectful conversation about this despite Paul’s clear unwillingness to answer Maddow’s oft-repeated question with a straight answer.

USAToday: Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950.