Monica Potts sat down and read the study Ross Douthat cited in his New York Times op-ed that led him to the conclusion that "the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America." Potts spoke to one of the authors and ultimately found a somewhat different conclusion:

There are a couple of things to think about in regards to Steny Hoyer's Gitmo cynicism. The first is that closing Gitmo, like passing health-care reform, is not something the president can do through sheer force of will. The second is that the complete lack of urgency in attempting to close Gitmo, from the administration and Democrats in Congress, cements the notion on the right that the Bush administration was unfairly smeared for lawless and counterproductive national-security policies and that hyperbolic criticisms of said policies from Democrats were nothing more than unprincipled, bare-knuckle politics.

The place once known as "Bad" Baker County, Georgia, Historian Taylor Branch explains in the first book of his three-volume history of the civil-rights movement, is where a rather infamous chapter in civil-rights history took place. It involves the establishment of a legal precedent adopted through the kind of pretzel logic typical of attempts at legal reasoning involving black people prior to the 1950s. An all-white federal jury convicted white Sheriff Claude Screws of conspiring to violate Robert Hall's civil rights when he murdered him.

Ed O'Keefe provides some insight into the administration's decision making in the firing of Shirley Sherrod:

When this department was established in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln, he referred to it as the people's department," Vilsack told colleague Krissah Thompson in Feburary. "In order to be consistent with that legacy, it's necessary that our programs and our approach reflect an appreciation for everyone's rights. We took a look at [these] prior issues and are in the process of trying to address each of them."

The administration's handling of the Shirley Sherrod matter is truly embarrassing.

The NAACP's response wasn't any better. Didn't we learn anything from the ACORN controversy?

Y'all have killed the funniness of the Old Spice guy.

After my post on New York Gov. David Paterson signing a law getting rid of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk database, a reader e-mailed me to say that my statement that 80 percent of those stopped are black and Latino might actually be low. According to The New York Times' graph, the number is actually 87 percent.

Conservatives have sought to portray the plan to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero as a kind of end-zone dance on the part of Muslims worldwide, a celebration of the deaths caused by the 9/11 attacks. This doesn't really make much sense -- the organization building the center, the Cordoba House, is a moderate organization, and its leader, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, is known for his attempts to reconcile being a Muslim and being American. The necessary conclusion that one draws from the conservative argument is that there's no distinction between average Muslims and terrorists.