I’m in a Ph.D. program in history. (Just before coming here, I wrote regularly here at Salon.) Studying history means that it’s my job to learn how to look for change in human action over time, to ask a certain set of questions: How does the old die, and how is the new born? What does it look like when change happens? Of course, mostly I read books and listen to my professors and colleagues. Lately, though, I’ve been getting a history lesson up-close.

Last week, I went to a political rally, here in New Haven where I live. (Full disclosure: I was one of the many people who contributed to organizing the protest.) On its face, it was a prosaic thing: people pushing back against cuts to the city budget that would hit their wallets, cut their benefits, speed up or privatize their jobs, hurt their schools, push them from their homes. But I couldn't help seeing it with the historian’s eye that I’m learning to use. And looking at it that way, I saw something I’ve never seen -- or felt -- at a progressive political event in my whole life (and I’ve been to a lot): Something new, being born.

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Sometimes it seems like everyone in American politics is playing God. For the past few weeks, it's been the Islamophobic right, busy declaring that lower Manhattan (and maybe Midtown too!) is holy ground, upon which Muslim shoes must not tread. (Not that they wear shoes in the mosque.) Now, it's us on the left, outraged as we are at the appropriation of the Washington Mall -- and the footsteps of the canonized Martin Luther King -- by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

So what makes for hallowed ground? The New York financial district is apparently too holy for a mosque, but not for strip clubs and bodegas and the rest of the features of a Manhattan neighborhood. (Nor, for that matter, does it seem to be too sacred for the financiers themselves. Aren't they the real bad neighbors?) And Palin and Beck and I could all agree that the Lincoln Memorial has transcendent symbolic importance. But the way it’s important to me and the way it’s important to them are different. If they thought their Saturday rally was about using the legacy of Lincoln and King to “restore honor” to America, it seemed to me to be about exploiting that legacy to smuggle in a different meaning about our history and national character. In other words, sacred places aren’t sacred in the same way to everyone. They’re contested terrain; when we see significance in a patch of dirt, we’re saying something about the meaning of past events there. And when we say something about the meaning of past events, we are always, truly, arguing about the present.

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Certainly, the right-wing pundits who've taken to Fox News to attack the NAACP have warped the story. Glenn Beck has laughed off the notion of Martin Luther King as a radical. "The Civil Rights Movement," Beck says, "has been co-opted by progressives." He's horrified by the idea that "you need civil unrest in order to meet demands" -- apparently forgetting that civil unrest is pretty literally what the Civil Rights Movement was. For guys like Beck, black people on the receiving end of fire-hoses and police dogs were sticking up for free enterprise. As he put it, "It's the same rights that Abraham Lincoln and blacks and whites fought for in the Civil War. Those were the same rights that King fought for. Tonight, we're going to talk about those rights, individual rights." So, Lincoln and King: proto-libertarian individualists. Bull Connor and George Wallace, on the other hand? Probably liberal fascists. (Remember, they were Democrats!)

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Today is my last day in this gig. It's time for me, sadly, to shove off.

I lucked into this job in the first place at a time when nothing like it was supposed to exist anymore. When casting around for work in New York a couple years ago, I'd never have guessed that I might have this kind of good fortune. Since then, I've written hundreds of posts and features, and it's been a privilege, for which I owe a huge debt to everyone at Salon who gave me more leeway than I probably deserved.

It's an amazing publication, committed all at once to serious news reporting, honest and hard-hitting opinion, the best popular feminist writing around, voluminous, brilliant books coverage, incisive and witty culture critics and a fantastic new food section. (Seriously, the number of these recipes I’ve used...) I could go on, but you can just click around for yourself. To manage all that while being independent, intimately involved with its readership, and, above all, good-humored makes this place a true treasure.

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Barton has apologized by now, under pressure from his party. But it's too late: This was what Mickey Kaus, the former blogger and defeated Senate candidate, calls a Category II Kinsley gaffe, in which a politician says something he means, but is embarrassed by. As Joan Walsh pointed out yesterday, the impulse to shield BP from responsibility is pretty widespread on the right.

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The candidate herself has been accused of shoving an employee while she was in charge at eBay. Apparently, a staff member named Young Mi Kim was helping Whitman prepare for an online interview. Whitman seems to have been unhappy with Kim's briefing, and either shoved her, or "physically guided her" out of the room. The resulting lawsuit was settled out of court and included a confidentiality agreement.

As Alex Pareene wrote yesterday, we recently found out that one of Whitman's sons, Griffith Rutherford Harsh V, was arrested in 2006 for battery, after breaking a woman's ankle at a bar in Palo Alto. Harsh, who was 21 at the time, apparently pushed Victoria Sanchez after she knocked off his hat and said, "Fuck your fraternity." Harsh disputed the story, saying she had pushed him and then stumbled, but a security guard corroborated Sanchez's account. Whitman bailed her son out, and charges were eventually dismissed.

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If only.

While the Gulf of Mexico oil spill that prompted the president's speech is an unprecedented catastrophe, it's nothing compared to what's ahead if we keep pretending that fossil fuels are cheap. Addressing our habits of carbon consumption isn't just the most important possible response to this particular disaster. It's probably the most important issue this president, or any other for the next few decades, will face. Moreover, there's a fairly clear solution that's already been outlined: at the moment, there's an implicit public subsidy for carbon use that enables our reliance, so the government needs to compensate for it by jack up the price of energy somehow. A cap-and-trade system is the preferred method here in much the same way that an insurance mandate was in healthcare reform: it's a politically palatable partial measure, but far better than nothing.

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Have you ever heard a better description of the Obama presidency than "medium big"?

The real question is whether Obama will push some scheme for pricing carbon. Although everybody seems to have forgotten about it, the House of Representatives has already passed a cap-and-trade bill in this Congress. The combination of this and the oil spill do seem to present a unique opportunity for the White House to grab hold of public opinion with both hands.

Ambinder writes,

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Then the New York Times goes and runs an urgent dispatch from "a tiki-lantern-lighted backyard garden in northwest Washington." This breathless report on a fancy Washington social gathering may have appeared under the heading "The State of Conservatism," but make no mistake, it’s grade-A, uncut Style-section writing: blissfully dazzled by the bright stars, their banter, outfits, food and drink. (Poached tilefish and grilled asparagus!)

The party was in honor of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the refugee writer from Somalia, by way of Holland, who has been happily appropriated by the neoconservative right because of her hostility to the religion of her upbringing, Islam. Although she identifies as a pro-choice atheist, Hirsi Ali is a heroic figure to the clash-of-civilizations set for her militant embrace of the values of the Enlightenment. She's a foreigner who's renounced the dark ways of her homeland, and loudly declared the superiority of Western culture, at no small personal risk.

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An unemployed accused felon named Alvin Greene appears to be their nominee for U.S. Senate. Party leaders had lined up a former state legislator named Vic Rawl as the chosen candidate against incumbent Sen. Jim DeMint, so they're wondering how the hell this happened. And talk is starting to circulate that Greene is some kind of Republican plant, aided by the other party. Said Rep. Jim Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, "There were some real shenanigans going on in the South Carolina primary. I don't know if he was a Republican plant; he was someone's plant."

I obviously don't know more about the situation in South Carolina than Clyburn, but I think the more pertinent fact is that nobody yet seems to know anything. So I'd like to mount a qualified defense of Greene.

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The question, though, is what happens when reality punctures the bubble, or if that's even possible. In Nevada, the Republican Party has just nominated a former state legislator named Sharron Angle, one of the Tea Party's favorite daughters, and, it seems, a full-time resident of the paranoid alternate universe.

Angle, it turns out, is some kind of member, or at least sympathizer with, a group called the Oath Keepers, an organization of current and former members of the armed forces, police and firefighters. (So it's not clear exactly how she even qualifies, since she's none of those things, but that's beside the point.) The Oath Keepers are organized around a list of ten orders that they have sworn never to carry out. They won't, for example, conduct warrantless searches, enforce martial law, or put Americans into concentration camps.

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First of all, though, maybe we all got a little ahead of ourselves in imagining that Halter had this thing sewn up. He was never ahead by more than a few points in a few polls. So it might be that Lincoln's comeback doesn’t need that much analysis at all. These things happen all the time.

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