When Rachel Maddow asked Kentucky GOP U.S. Senate nominee Rand Paul whether lunch counters should be allowed to discriminate and asked for a yes-or-no answer, Paul refused and launched into wandering allusions about freedom of speech and gun owners rights versus rights of private business.  Earlier in the interview he’d made it clear he thought “blurring the difference” between private and public businesses was dangerous, and that had he been in the Senate in 1964, he would have “led the debate” to modify the section of the Civil Rights Act pertaining to restaurants.  Maddow revealed him as an artless equivocator, but she could have nailed him for the bogus ideologue he is by confronting him with one undeniable truth: there simply are no “private businesses,” food serving establishments or otherwise, in our society. (More)

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In the days leading up to “Super Senate Tuesday” national political reporters and pundits were but all but wetting their thongs, boxers and briefs waiting for a voter backlash against incumbents, or an oracular sign that the teabaggers are taking over the Republican Party.  They got neither.  T-man Rand Paul won the Kentucky Republican Primary because his opponent had all the charisma of a 240-pound cow-chip.  And Democratic incumbent Senators Arlen Spector and Blanche Lincoln lost and are losing their primaries in Pennsylvania and Arkansas because voters  perceived them as political lizards, and not the cute little green kind  that sells auto insurance on TV.   (More)

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This Pulitzer Prize winner (and the basis for an upcoming PBS documentary) is the most horrifying book I’ve ever read.  Written by Douglas A. Blackmon, a son of the South who’s now the bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta, it destroys the myth that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation put an end to slavery in 1863 and replaces it with the reality of a nightmare that for millions of African American families lasted almost another 100 years.  Don’t try read this book in bed — it’s hard to sleep when you’re manacled to visions of beatings, lynchings, murders and rape, and chained to the biggest lie in our nation’s history. (More)

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Dear Mika: What a terrific show this morning — Morning Joe with no creamer, if you know what I mean!  Who else would have thought of putting Mike Barnacle on a panel to try and pick apart Eugene Robinson’s column on immigration “insecurity” in the Washington Post?  And who would have expected the two of them to agree on anything, especially that the surest way to stop illegal immigration would be to pass a law making it a felony for any employer to hire an illegal alien? (More)

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