This is America, on Labor Day week in 2010. But in more ways than we like to notice, it feels like 1910. Somehow, the labor laws and basic protections that we once thought were part of the fabric of American democracy have been quietly excised. Of course, in the South, the postwar dream of free, prosperous, safe labor was never really there at all. The region has always been poorer. It's always had more rapacious bosses. And Southern workers (especially white ones) have always seemed mysteriously willing to take it, as far as often-condescending Northern liberals can tell.

It's the glaring question that sharp students always notice and want to ask about Southern politics: Why have poor white people, seemingly such obvious beneficiaries of progressive politics, never joined with their oppressed black neighbors to overthrow their outnumbered overlords?

Conservative habits tell much of the story. Racism has long kept white Southerners from forming the biracial alliance that progressives see as so obviously beneficial; but if racism is costly in this sense, in another it is a lucrative investment, and not casually abandoned. Gender norms keep the peace too. Southern white men have long understood that they are, as one historian has put it, "masters of small worlds," and a threat to one master is a threat to all.

But, despite the temptation to liberal arrogance, it'd be a mistake to imagine that poor white Southerners are befuddled fools, with no understanding of their class identity and class interest. That's the view of someone who won't grant the courtesy of knowing some of the history of workers in the region. And there's no better week than this one to remember.

On September 6, 1934 -- 76 years ago Monday -- gunmen guarding Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina opened fire on a crowd of picketing textile workers. They killed seven, and wounded about 30. If the history of industrial labor in the South has been a stage tragedy, this was the climactic moment; the rest, for white workers at least, is denouement.

The story of how white Southern workers ended up looking down the barrel of a gun starts, however, much earlier.

After the destruction of slavery in the Civil War, the last remaining pocket unconquered by industrial capitalism was opened up. Investors realized that the undeveloped South was easy pickings. Starting around 1880, textile mills abandoned the New England towns we associate them with -- Lowell, Lawrence, and so forth -- and moved to the Southern Piedmont, the region running from Virginia to Alabama that sits above the coastal plain but below the Appalachians. Think Greensboro, Charlotte and Birmingham.

At first running on water-power from Appalachian streams and labor power from uprooted farmers, the Southern mills quickly became the largest industrial enterprises around, the symbols of the New South. But this profit rested on intensive exploitation and domination: whole families worked in the mills, including children. The "mill-hands" received appallingly low pay, worked in nightmare conditions, and were utterly dependent on the companies: the general rule was that they lived in mill-owned villages, inhabited company-owned houses, shopped at company stores and went to company doctors. For a few years before going to work, the children might go to company schools, and the men played on company baseball teams. They even worshiped, typically, in churches that were paid for by the mill. (Of course, while the executives might pay the salary of the mill-hands' Holiness preacher, they wouldn’t dream of going to the same church themselves. The mill towns were strictly segregated along class lines, as well as racially. To the "uptown" folk, the mill workers were the "lintheads," their stunted, pale and diseased neighbors, to be pitied and loathed.)

The institution of the mill town was an endless paradox. It was a kind of half-prison, half-fortress. Mill-hands couldn't control their collective destiny, but they could, and did, control some of their own lives and take care of each other. Said one, Hoyle McCorkle, "It was a two-hundred-headed family. Everybody on this hill, we looked after one another." (Another paradox: McCorkle’s sentiment is both a statement of fact, and a glossing over of the widespread realities of alcoholism, early-and-often pregnancies and domestic violence.)

Mill-hands were plagued by pellagra, a malnourishment disease caused by their limited diets of pinto beans, mustard and turnip greens, fatback meat, and often little else. They lived in low-grade shotgun shacks. Yet for all that their conditions were brutal and the experience of industrial work was generally degrading and humiliating to these uprooted rural folk, they were still fed and housed. This was more than they could count on while back on the farm. And it was more than black Southerners could ever take for granted -- a grim privilege that the almost universally white and racist mill-hands were well aware of.

This system, stretched taut by irony though it was, remained stable until World War I. If the mill-hands kept quiet enough -- which they knew to do -- they could usually scrape by. But the mills overexpanded to meet wartime demand, and the tightly-drawn fabric of mill life started to unravel. Recession followed recession for textiles, and the whole industry was in depression well before the great crash in 1929.

To keep profits from sinking too far, the companies deployed then-voguish "scientific management" techniques. College-educated consultants -- often Northerners to boot -- working in the tradition of management guru Frederick Taylor patrolled the factory floors with stopwatches and clipboards, telling mill-hands how to do their jobs faster. Workers were decimated by layoffs, yet still found production quotas doubling, tripling, or more, while their pay stagnated or sank. For the masses of Southern textile workers, the depression was almost two decades long, and was associated with one word, describing the new factory regime: "stretchout."

The stretchout brought workers into the streets. "During the last few years men have been carried away from their work dead or unconscious. I ask you to read of the cruelty of Pharoah to the Israelites to get a comparison," wrote one. At one protest, a group of eight mill-hands carried a coffin down the street; a ninth was lying in it, dressed up as their superintendent. Periodically, the "superintendent" would sit up and ask, "How many men are carrying this thing?" "Eight," the marchers would reply. Then the faux-superintendent would command, "Lay off two; six can do the work."

A strike wave broke out in 1929, but it was spontaneous and ill-organized. A series of bloody crackdowns extinguished the flashes of protest easily enough -- most famously at Gastonia, N.C., where a fairly fraudulent trial followed a massacre, and ended with communist organizers fleeing to Russia.

Hope was renewed, after the failure of this first series of uprisings, by the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Mill-hands viewed the new president as a near-spiritual personal savior. In huge numbers, they wrote letters to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Wrote one, "I want you to know that I am for you in this most wonderful undertaking. I am a long ways from you in distance yet my faith is in you my heart with you and I am for you sink or swim." And they didn’t hesitate to tell him what they really thought. The mill bosses, wrote another, were "old slimy serpants crowling spiting their Poison fighting your program." In one now-famous letter, a mill-hand wrote to FDR, "You are the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch."

Yet the New Deal turned out not to be Kingdom Come for textile workers. Under the National Recovery Administration, various boards were set up to arbitrate between labor and capital, and new codes were written to regulate the industry. But Roosevelt let the companies write them. Ed Bruere, the head of the new Cotton Textile Labor Relations Board, scoffed, "Every introduction of improved machinery or technical methods is likely to be interpreted as stretchout." Bruere’s CTLRB received thousands of complaints from August 1933 to 1934. It ruled only one time in a worker’s favor in a wage-and-hour dispute.

Although they still felt the president himself was on their side, mill-hands understood that negotiations were over. After a summer of watching the textile companies flout their demands, Alabama workers decided they'd had it. The union, the United Textile Workers, was reluctant, but they walked off the job anyway in midsummer of 1934. Word spread up the Piedmont virtually overnight. Strikers piled into trucks and cars and raced from mill town to mill town to call mill-hands out to join them before the bosses could catch on. Since the strike was obviously happening one way or the other, the UTW -- a generally feeble and conservative union -- called a meeting, and endorsed the thing. On September 1, 1934, the general textile strike began. With participation between 200,000 and 400,000, from Maine to Alabama, it was the largest labor rebellion in American history to that point. The only prior uprising that exceeded it was the collapse of slavery during the Civil War.

But, while a general strike is an inspiring thing, it's not easy to pull off. Strikers quickly started finding themselves evicted from company houses, and homeless. As people who lived to hand-to-mouth, how could they last without paychecks? The UTW, broke and disorganized as it was already, was in no position to feed a few hundred thousand hungry people. The churches -- another common fallback -- were largely unfriendly. Worst of all, the federal government was nowhere to be seen, and state and local officials were getting their response ready.

In South Carolina, Gov. Ibra Blackwood rounded up a posse, promising to deputize "mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen." In Georgia, Gov. Eugene Talmadge declared martial law, and rounded up strikers in internment camps. (Newspapers in Nazi Germany crowed that this was a sign of fascism's coming global triumph.) Mill companies did what they had always done: buy up a quick-assembly industrial army -- some police, some goons-for-hire -- to menace picketers. And at Honea Path, on the sixth day of the general strike, the inevitable massacre happened.

It wasn't immediately obvious that it was all over then. 10,000 mourners showed up to the funeral for the Honea Path dead, seemingly defiant. (Nor was Honea Path the only case of violence, although it was the most famous. Machine gun nests became a normal sight on the roofs of textile mills during the strike.) Bessie Shankle remembered that her family "nearly starved to death" during the strike. Now they were being shot at too, and it had become clear that no help was on the way. After a few weeks, with the dead likely numbering in the dozens, the uprising began to disintegrate.

Roosevelt appointed a board to arbitrate a deal. But, revealing his lack of interest in the workers' cause, he put a Republican in charge, New Hampshire Gov. John G. Winant (no relation of mine). The Winant board sided with the workers on virtually nothing; Roosevelt politely asked the mills not to blacklist strikers -- a request that they denied. But the union, desperate to seem successful, wanly declared victory anyway. The workers, betrayed, walked away and never came back. "You seem to think we won something," wrote Mollie Dowd. "I just cannot see it and things here are in a much worse condition than they were three months ago."

The crushing of the strike imparted a clear enough lesson: keep your head down. For a whole generation of mill workers, the disaster became a taboo, bad luck even to mention. "I took a man's hat off his head and fanned him 'til he died, 'til the breath left him. But I ain't got no more to say into it. I've been trying to forget about all of that, and this is just bringing it all back up," remembered a veteran of Honea Path. When interviewed later, a daughter of a striker marveled that she didn't know the story herself. "I can't understand why my Dad didn't tell me. He could talk about the war and about people being blown to bits, but he couldn't talk about his neighbors being killed. It's like somebody trying to hide a dirty secret about their family, like they're ashamed."

After 1934, the labor movement would try every few years to organize Southern textiles. The rise of the CIO unions starting in 1935, left the cotton mills as the biggest industry without a major union presence. An attempt in 1937 failed when organizers tried to convince bosses that the union and the manager could be friends. The mill-hands were disgusted. A more serious campaign in 1946, dubbed "Operation Dixie," showed little ability to uproot or challenge the now-institutionalized and intensifying stretchout. Seeing no reason to go out on a limb again, the workers held onto their skepticism; little else had ever worked for them. The union, explained mill-hand Ila Dodson, is "nothing but trouble."

The basic tenets of 20th-century progressive politics in America -- unionism, the welfare state, public-safety regulations -- all failed the mill-hands, the largest class of industrial workers in the South. And the failure was spectacular, a once-in-a-generation trauma. The inability of New Deal liberalism to bring on board the Southern white working class was, it seems in retrospect, its ultimate undoing. Who was it that voted for Wallace, then Nixon, then Reagan? The depressing question points to the politically weak people for whom racism was the only bullet left in the chamber. We can't excuse their racism this way. But we can start to understand it.

The historian Robert Zieger has said that, although we are fond of thinking of the South as stuck in the past, when it comes to labor relations, Dixie is not where we have been. It’s where we are going. It is exaggerating, but not by too much, to say that the unraveling public safety state and the union-free country we know today emerged from the violence at Honea Path. This descent has been possible, in part, because we forgot about 1934. And we forgot about 1934 because the mill-hands did themselves. It was too painful to remember.

Referenced in this article

This article relies on the work of more scholars than I can name here. A good guide to this story, however, begins with "Like a Family," by Jacquelyn Hall et al., the true bible on the Southern textile mills. Other vital reading on the subject includes Bryant Simon's "A Fabric of Defeat," Glenda Gilmore's "Defying Dixie," Dolores Janiewski's "Sisterhood Denied," Janet Irons' "Testing the New Deal," John Salmond's "The General Strike of 1934," Douglas Flamming's "Creating the Modern South," Michelle Brattain's "The Politics of Whiteness," David Carlton's "Mill and Town in South Carolina," G.C. Waldrep's "Southern Workers in Search of Community," and Timothy Minchin's "What Do We Need a Union For?"

Anyone interested in more specific recommendations is welcome to ask in the comments, and I'll do my best to keep up.

Keller, an extremist Internet evangelist from Florida, spoke at a drab ballroom of the Marriott hotel two blocks south of ground zero for the launch of his Christian Center, a response to Park51. He told the audience, which included a couple of 9/11 Truther protesters, that he is scouting three possible locations for a permanent church.

Keller regularly assails Muslims as pedophiles and attacks Mormons and gay people. But his church has drawn no objections from opponents of the mosque who have consistently argued that the neighborhood around ground zero is sacred ground. Keller also has a history of trying to profit off of political controversies; last year, for example, he hosted a Birther infomercial.

The service was punctuated by gospel singing and a testimonial from a volunteer firefighter who was a first reponder on Sept. 11. Despite the small turnout, the service attracted journalists from the New York Times, the New York Post, AOL, Newsweek, Dutch television and the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, among others.

Playing to the press, Keller said several times he is not a "hate-monger" while also repeatedly calling Islam a "1,400-year-old lie."

Below is a sample of Keller's sermon, in which he goes after Beck and Rauf.

UPDATE: And here is video of me interviewing Vincent Forras, a onetime Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut and a volunteer firefighter. Before Keller's sermon, Forras spoke about his experiences on Sept. 11. He told me he considers the 9/11 Christian Center "a story of love out of tragedy."

 

Texas, where Democrats have been struggling for years to wage competitive campaigns, may seem like an unlikely battleground, especially in the climate of 2010. Today, not a single one of its statewide offices is occupied by a Democrat, and Democrats haven't won a U.S. Senate seat or the governorship in the last 20 years. The party's institutional failures have been all too apparent as its candidates have endured repeated embarrassing beatings in races initially seen as winnable.

Rick Perry exemplifies Democrats’ frustrations in Texas. Ascending to the governorship in 2000 (when George W. Bush left to become president), Perry has proven resilient despite some shaky poll numbers. Cultivating an image of something of a Texas Marlboro Man -- a label fashioned by Newsweek -- Perry’s hissing rhetoric against Democrats, his happy rejection of federal stimulus money, and his musings that Texas could secede have made him a conservative darling while earning him the enmity of liberals and many moderates.

Perry’s past successes -- he won reelection in 2002 and 2006 -- point to both his canniness and his vulnerability. In '06, Perry won with just 39 percent, and in this year’s GOP primary, he dismantled Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who had entered the race as a strong favorite, with withering anti-Washington broadsides. But fending off Hutchison, Perry created new cleavages in the electorate, earning resentment from a conservative business class that had long viewed him with unease. These subtle weaknesses give Democrats, who last won the governorship with Ann Richards in 1990, a real chance with White.

A popular two-term mayor of Texas’ biggest city, White was an energy executive and a top official in Bill Clinton's energy department. White can appeal to many moderates and independents -- swing voters generally alienated by the governor’s confrontational style. White’s background can also potentially connect with the businessmen and -women and country club Republicans who backed Hutchison in the primary.

To be sure, White is an underdog. Regardless of his image among detractors as a cowboy bumpkin, Perry remains a wily campaigner and an excellent retail politician, a sharp contrast  with the charisma-challenged White. And in a terrible year for Democrats, Perry will work assiduously to tether White to Obama, an approach that fits perfectly with his fondness for negative campaigning.

For his part, White must keep the race focused on Perry and state issues. With mediocre approval ratings, Perry is especially vulnerable on education: Texas schools have slumped badly on his watch and Perry has created widespread anger by stacking the state school board with religious conservatives. Perry’s inability to work with the GOP Legislature in many areas gives White an opening to brand him ineffective.

The wild card is immigration. Arizona's controversial new law has brought the issue to the forefront, but surprisingly, it hasn't been a major factor in Texas so far. Perry has refrained from the demagoguery that characterized his immigration posture in the past -- a sudden timidity that suggests the governor is afraid of further infuriating Latinos. Indeed, Latinos have never voted in equal proportion to their size in Texas, making up just 20 percent of 2008 voters while representing nearly 40 percent of the state's population They represent a sleeping giant Perry can ill afford to turn out.

Sporadic polling has given Perry modest leads, but with consistently less than 50 percent support. Perry’s base is West Texas and he will do well in Central and East, while White should be strongest in the cities and Hispanic South Texas. To win, White needs high urban turnout, principally in Austin and Houston, and victory in the suburbs, particularly around Harris and Dallas Counties, where more affluent voters have reservations about Perry (but also where anti-Obama preferences could outweigh their distaste for the Texas Marlboro Man).

The outcome will be critical to state and national Democrats. If White can win, it would revitalize the state party and give Democrats a foothold in the nation's fastest-growing state. A Democratic victory would also offset likely losses this fall in big states like Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Tennessee and end any national aspirations that Perry might have.

The implications for redistricting, which takes place before the 2012 election, are also significant. Texas is slated to gain three or four new House seats, and while the state's growth can be heavily attributed to Latinos, the Republicans who now run the state can be expected to draw three new GOP-friendly seats. But a Gov. White would change that with his veto power, forcing the GOP into a fairer redraw, one that might weaken the devilish red lines that produced today's ironclad 20-12 Republican delegation.

Most important, though, is what a triumph could signal for Texas Democrats in the next decade. If White can turn out Latinos, it could mean that Texas Democrats are finally crafting the formidable statewide base that they've been dreaming about for years. Victories in subsequent elections for the U.S. Senate and for all of the other statewide offices might suddenly be possible -- especially since Texas' congressional delegation includes several Latinos who could make appealing statewide contenders.

Yes, White is an underdog. But the opportunity for an upset exists -- and if he can pull it off, it will represent a crucial step for Democrats in Texas and across the West. Progressives should follow this one closely.

Does the president need to do anything, for 9/11? I'd be fine with him sitting this one out. The world does not need more pious platitudes delivered on the anniversary of still-unfathomable violence and pain and destruction.

Though I guess pious platitudes are preferable to lower Manhattan hate marches, like the one that will be held at the site of the World Trade Center on the anniversary of the attacks. And that hate march is pretty much why Obama will definitely not be in New York.

No matter where he goes, the president’s critics will likely speak out. If he doesn’t go to New York , Obama could be accused of dodging ground zero because of the Islamic center. If he does, he risks facing the anger of some Sept. 11 families and New York officials offended by his position.

Yes, but which of those criticisms will be the basis for Politico's big Sept. 13 story on Obama's stupid decision? I'm going with "he is perceived by some critics as being weak on national security issues." With quotes from Newt Gingrich and Peter King.

He now joins current federal prison inmate Bernie Kerik and bestiality enthusiast Carl Paladino in seizing on the mosque issue.

This e-mail that was just sent out to the list of conservative outlet Newsmax:

Urgent Message from Vito Fossella 

Dear Fellow Staten Islanders,

Please join us for a peaceful gathering near Rescue 5’s Memorial Garden, which is located on Clove Road between Targee Street and Richmond Road, at 1:30 p.m. this Sunday, September 5, 2010 to speak out on the proposed mosque to be built near Ground Zero.

...

Recently there have been efforts made to construct a mosque near Ground Zero. This proposal has met with tremendous opposition, not only throughout New York City, but across the country as well. We believe that this is not the right location. Just because something may be permitted, does not mean that it’s the right thing to do.

So let’s gather this Sunday and speak, which is our right and the right thing to do to continue to honor those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

Sincerely,

Vito J. Fossella

Paragraph four is the requisite "to be sure" graf, which explains that there is absolutely no reason why anyone should care about whether or not these two dudes like each other, while also justifying the writing of an article asserting otherwise.

There is, of course, no obligation for presidents to keep in touch with their predecessors, and there is no evidence that Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush bear any ill will toward each other. But their relations do seem particularly awkward — or, more precisely, nonexistent.

How to explain this non-issue? Well, George Bush broke this country in many ways, and Obama is fond of pointing out that he cannot personally be blamed for the terrible things Mr. Bush and his Republican Congress did, which is very rude of him.

But this entire piece is actually about the insane notion, popular on cable news channels and among Republican operatives, that President Obama should've actually thanked George W. Bush in Obama's sad speech announcing the pretend end of the pointless war that Bush started under false pretenses.

There is an obsession among these pundits and operatives with getting Obama to "admit" that he was "wrong" about "the surge." This petty grievance thrives because an entire class of people who were dreadfully wrong about everything desperately wish to be told that they were, in the end, right. About anything. It has nothing to do with any actual analysis of war strategy or evaluation of the conditions in Iraq today.

So, yes, Obama mentioned Bush in his speech, and said Bush loved the troops. Was that enough?

The White House declined to discuss the thinking behind that language. But Bush loyalists on Wednesday were more than a little miffed by it.

“I’m curious why he mentioned President Bush at all if he wasn’t going to give him credit for the surge,” said Gordon Johndroe, who was spokesman for Mr. Bush’s National Security Council. A former top Bush speechwriter and strategist, Peter Wehner, said the mention of Mr. Bush “was at best pro forma; at worst, it was patronizing.”

Our president is so rude to the man who granted him the privilege of trying to figure out an end game to a horrible, open-ended war, started for no discernible reason!

Paragraph one of Goldberg's complaint begins:

The Atlantic has a review of reviews of the Kos book. It's chock-a-block with Liberal Fascism bashing, mostly from people who I suspect haven't read it, plus activist Matt Yglesias who claims to have read it but has A) a very deep personal grudge against me and B) is an admitted fan of lying for political ends.

Paragraph two begins:

I haven't read the Moulitsas book, but I suspect the real differences are pretty obvious. While I do not smear all of my political opponents as monsters (people who say I do this, again, have either not read the book, are too blinkered to understand it, or are lying), it seems pretty clear that's exactly what Kos sets out to do.

In short, everyone who dislikes "Liberal Fascism" didn't read it or didn't understand it. Jonah Goldberg has not read "American Taliban," but he totally understands it, and it is bad.

Goldberg then quotes a reader who says he did read and understand the book:

When I read it, I was a little annoyed that you went so far out of your way to add repetitive disclaimers. I think you said something like “I don’t mean this to imply that today’s liberal are the same as these horrible people.” so often that it actually hurt the narrative of the book. After the fourth or fifth time I found myself saying “OK Jonah Jeez… I get it already… no connection.” But apparently you could have published a book which said nothing else and it still would have been indicted by the liberal intelligencia.

Because the name of the book was "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning." Goldberg doesn't seem to understand that constantly apologizing for stating what is supposed to be the thesis of the damn book may undermine said thesis, along with his claims to seriousness.

But the Daily News today has a story quoting mosque opponent Andy Sullivan speaking out against Keller. The twist is that Sullivan seems to object to the 9/11 Christian Center on primarily tactical grounds. Here's the passage:

Andy Sullivan, a leader in the movement to move Park51, said Keller's 9/11 Christian Center is "just what we do not need" near Ground Zero.

"This guy is going to justify all the people who call us bigots and racists for opposing the mosque," he said.

Sullivan, by the way, is a New York construction worker behind the "Hard Hat Pledge," which seeks to convince other workers to promise not to work on the construction of Park51.

Still no word on Keller's project from the Anti-Defamation League, Gov. David Paterson, New York gubernatorial candidates Rick Lazio and Carl Paladino, Mitt Romney, Dan Senor and Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer -- all of whom we have asked about the 9/11 Christian Center.

Here is Sullivan on Fox the other day:

Whether November will actually prove quite this gruesome for Democrats, I still have my doubts. The Tea Party has forced politically toxic nominees on the GOP in a handful of key Senate races -- candidates who would be certain losers any other year and who may well fall short even in this one. Plus, for all their troubles this past year, haven't Democrats proven something by winning special House elections in some very GOP-friendly districts?

But let's put the skepticism aside, buy into the panic, and stipulate (for now) that the Democrats will lose both the House and the Senate this November. This might just be where the fun begins -- at least if you're a fan of Republican infighting and back stabbing.

Fissures within the House and Senate GOP ranks have not been easy to spot since Barack Obama became president, with Republicans aligning in uniform opposition to virtually every major administration initiative. But among the party's leaders in both chambers, there are some serious personality, policy and strategic conflicts -- conflicts that figure to become more apparent if the GOP takes power.

Start in the House, where John Boehner, the GOP leader, can hear the footsteps of Eric Cantor. The two men don't care for each other and have been in an uneasy alliance since Cantor became the party's whip, currently its second-ranking spot in the House, after the 2008 elections.

Cantor, who at 45 is 15 years younger than Boehner, will soon be releasing a book called "Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders," co-written with Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy, two other House Republicans who are also significantly younger than Boehner. The book will be out on September 14, boosting Cantor's national visibility just as Americans begin focusing more on politics. The potential for Cantor to steal the spotlight from Boehner was apparently not lost on the current GOP leader. As Politico reported recently:

This is classic Cantor: a hyperambitious move to publish and push ideas he thinks will help rebrand the GOP, on his terms -- and not necessarily those of his boss, Minority Leader John Boehner.

If this were an isolated incident, it would pass without a peep. But it’s not: Cantor is earning a reputation for pushing his ideas so hard and so often that some GOP colleagues are questioning his motives. Is he guided by a burning desire to help the party -- or to boost himself?

This opens the door to plenty of potential mischief if Republicans do reclaim the House. Presumably, Boehner will be elevated to speaker -- it's impossible to see Cantor toppling him just after an election that Republicans perceive as a triumph. But that also means that Cantor should have no trouble grabbing the No. 2 slot, majority leader. And given his ambition, it's not likely he'll be content to hold that spot for very long, especially if he doesn't believe Boehner has any real sense of where he wants to lead the party. Indeed, while Cantor is releasing a book outlining his concept of conservatism, Boehner has struggled to produce a coherent blueprint for what Republicans would actually do with a House majority. 

This is not the recipe for a healthy leadership team. Any majority the GOP wins this year will be a narrow one -- subject to being tossed out in the '12 elections. That will only make Cantor and his "young gun" allies more impatient with Boehner's leadership, and more likely to undermine him. Boehner, of course, knows something about how this goes. After the 1994 GOP revolution, he earned the No. 4 slot in the House Republican leadership -- but four years later, amid complaints that he communicated poorly with members and botched the party's message on television, he was ousted in a coup and replaced by J.C. Watts.

Things may be just as fun on the other side of the Capitol. No, Mitch McConnell isn't in any danger of being ousted as the Senate's GOP leader. But he faces the very messy prospect of having to deal with a new batch of Tea Party-friendly ideologues -- far-right absolutists who won't be afraid to exercise the (considerable) prerogatives of a senator, even if it puts them at odds with McConnell.

And these Tea Party senators -- their ranks could include Marco Rubio, Sharron Angle, Rand Paul and Alaska's Joe Miller, among others -- will have a leader of their own: South Carolina's Jim DeMint. That's the same Jim DeMint who endorsed Paul over McConnell's protégé in Kentucky's Senate primary earlier this year.

DeMint and his fellow Tea Partiers represent a vocal segment of the GOP base: conservatives who were originally attracted to the party by its emphasis on low taxes and small government but who have watched too many party leaders in D.C. compromise on those principles. They’ve made excuses for decades, as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Republican Congresses expanded government and racked up massive deficits, but they're not willing to abide it any longer. And in McConnell, many of them see a 26-year incumbent who essentially personifies the D.C. Republican establishment.

In an interview this week, McConnell stressed that the Senate is likely to include several moderate Republicans next year, like Delaware's Mike Castle and Illinois' Mark Kirk. This may be true, but it will only make matters worse for the GOP leader if Republicans control the Senate. Uniting a Mike Castle and a Rand Paul is fairly easy now; you can concoct a moderate rationale for opposing Obama's agenda just as easily as you can concoct a conservative one. But if it's up to Republicans to advance an agenda of their own, or to work with the White House? Then the daylight between the Castles and the Pauls becomes problematic.

To be sure, DeMint will still have some new allies next year even if some of the Tea Party candidates lose this fall and even if the GOP falls short of a majority -- just as Boehner will still face a threat from Cantor if the party fails to win the House. (Actually, in that circumstance, the threat to Boehner will probably be worse.) But if the Republicans win both chambers, they'll suddenly own the spotlight on Capitol Hill -- and that's when Americans might start noticing that they aren't quite ready for prime time.

The piece, which ran under the headline "Authorities Were on High Alert for Possible Hijack Attempt" and was sourced to "one senior U.S. official," is simply no longer available on ABC's site. (It has been at least partially preserved on a few outside aggregrator sites.) But even though the story was taken down, ABC told Salon that it stands by the story.

The disappearance of the "High Alert" piece is another wrinkle in the saga of ABC's questionable reporting on the two Yemeni residents of the U.S. who were arrested in Amsterdam this week on suspicions of terrorism that quickly turned out to be unfounded.  We previously explained how a Monday night scoop on the case by Ross -- who has a history of passing along bad information on national security cases -- quickly fell apart. (The Monday story quoted an anonymous official saying that the Yemeni men were "almost certainly" on a dry run for a terrorist attack. They have now been cleared.)

ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told Salon on Thursday that the story about the "heightened state of alert" to a Mideast hijacking was simply replaced with the latest information about the Yemeni case (this is the URL where the "heightened alert" story used to live). Despite the fact that the story has been taken off line, the network is not retracting it.

"We fully stand by the reporting on the story. The story was overwritten and overtaken by the changing the story about the Yemeni men in custody. You should not read into that that we backed away," Schneider said.

It is not standard practice to pull a big exclusive story off line.

Contacted by Salon about the pulled ABC story, the Department of Homeland Security would not confirm or deny the thrust of Ross's  reporting.

"As we conveyed to the ABC investigative unit on Tuesday, we have no information of a specific, credible threat of hijacking related to Dubai," said DHS Spokesman Matt Chandler. He declined to comment further on whether there is a heightened state of alert.

In any case, the fact that ABC pulled the story did not stop it from spreading online. Here it is on Gawker. Here it is on the blog of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. And here it is on the website of several Michigan newspapers.

UPDATE: In an about face from what the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said earlier today, Gov. Bobby Jindal is now saying that there were "seven active production wells on the platform," according to a 4 p.m. ET Associated Press story. Jindal said the wells have now been shut down.

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The news today of a fire on the Vermilion Oil Platform in the Gulf of Mexico summoned fears of a disaster on the scale of April's Deepwater Horizon explosion. But how do the two incidents compare? Here's a look at what we know right now:

• Vermilion Oil Platform 380 is anchored approximately 100 miles off the Louisiana coast. Deepwater Horizon stood in 5000 feet of water at the time of the April explosion; Vermilion stands in a mere 340 feet of water, Bureau of Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz told the the AP.
• Coast Guard Petty Officer Matthew Masaschi told ABC that Mariner Energy has noticed evidence of a "slight oil sheen" near the platform measuring "one nautical mile by 100 feet." In comparison, two days after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in April, a sheen of one by five miles was reported. 
• The AP reported that a clean-up operation would be comparatively easy near the Vermilion since shallow-water spills do not require the use of "remote-operated vehicles access equipment on the sea floor."
• Vermilion's crew was significantly smaller than Deepwater Horizon's. The doomed oil rig that exploded in April had 126 crew members on board; 11 were killed by the blast, and 17 were injured. In comparison, Vermilion carried only 13 crew members, all of whom are accounted for. There is one reported injury.
• Schwartz, the Bureau of Energy Management spokeswoman, told the AP that there were "maintenance activities underway" on the oil platform and that the platform was not producing oil or gas at the time of the explosion.
• A press release from platform owner Mariner Energy said Vermilion was producing both oil and gas as recently as last week. The press release said, "During the last week of August 2010, production from this facility averaged approximately 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate." The Deepwater Horizon was drilling 8,000 barrels of oil when it exploded and had 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel on board.
• The oil leaking from Deepwater Horizon was not detected on the day the rig exploded. It was only two days after the initial explosion (and after the rig itself had sunk) that CNN reported the discovery of an oil slick at the site.