I'm going to bed after this, but I can't let it slip by: Passenger Cat Stevens Gets Plane Diverted.

This is where we loose it, when the guy who sang "Moonshadow" (and remains a peace activist, if not such an active musician) is denied entrance to the US for security reasons. Seriously. It's got to be the beginning of some sort of end.

Old Cat changed his name to Yusuf Islam a while ago, which makes for some funny AP copy too:

Islam was questioned by FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

After the interview, Customs officials decided to deny Islam entry into the United States.

Flight 919 continued on to Dulles after Islam was removed from the flight.

Islam would be put on the first available flight out of the country Wednesday.

Oh. Man.

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

President George W. Bush's campaign for a second term got a big break last week from the nation's historians. Responding to a national survey by George Mason University's History News Network, 81 percent of the 415 historians who expressed a view of the Bush presidency so far classified it as a failure and 12 percent see it as the worst presidency in American history.

But since Bush is Lord of the C-Students, I suppose this should be expected.

This is an important trend; one that's hopefully going to grow. Both Matt Ygelsias and Ezra of Pandagon have this weekend explained (regrefully) how they got to be pro-war.

Both follow a similar path. The prior experience of bearing witness to Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. The buying into the fraiming of the war as a binary choice (what do we do about Iraq? war or nothing). The general willingness to trust the President. Most interestingly, both cite the exposure to crappy radical leftism:

Ezra
I'm quite ashamed that, during the whole of the run-up, I never thought to notice that the President's rationales and statements were less credible and more infantile than those of the white-bearded peaceniks denouncing him on street corners. I just figured he couldn't possibly be this stupid, his advisors can't possibly believe his rhetoric -- I was still naive enough to believe in the majesty of the office and, even if the inhabitant was not of my choosing, I couldn't imagine him completely incompetent and corrupt (sometimes, the fact that I only started paying attention to politics around 9/11 really shows). I was, unfortunately, quite wrong.

Matt
...as my roommate at the time Jeff Theodore pointed out to me the other day, we were both bouncing around Harvard hearing all sorts of factually or logically deficient anti-war arguments. As this was the immediate context of our lives, it tended to harden our views in the opposite direction -- "look at all these silly anti-war people!"

There are other good instances really probing confessionals here (John & Belle Have a Blog) and here (Lawyers, Guns and Money)

This is really interesting stuff to me, and validates what I've been attempting to do with my past year's work. The complete collapse of high-quality liberal and progressive agenda-setting is one of the many specters haunting this election, and American politics in general. How long has it been since we've heard a coherant, comprehensive, logical, well-thought-out, ethically-edged, and positive (pro, rather than anti) message for anyone with any visibility? I was doing my own thing, but it wasn't until Howard Dean stepped up (go find that Sacramento speech that started it all... oh man, what might have been) that I heard anyone make a strong positive case against the war.

There's a chance we can solve this, that our generation -- the secondary population wave that's spawned from the baby boom -- can create a new liberal consensus for the 21st century and remedy the underlying problem that got us into Iraq. It's really up to us: god knows the Radical/Reactionary Liberal Establishment isn't going to get the job done. The Democratic party mainline is completely devoid of spirit. Generation X is too cynical and bitter to build consensus.

It's us or nobody, and my sneaking suspicion is that if we do it it's going to be an international thing.

An organization called Media Tenor did a quantitative analysis of the party conventions, confirming with science what many of us were already saying with intuition¹. The coverage was clearly slanted. No More Mister Nice Blog has the details.

¹ By intuition, of course, I mean noticing the fact that Ed Gelespie, chairman of the Republican party, was given a prime slot to offer his, uhhh, "commentary" on the Democrats proceedings.