Twirl them Hips Round and Round(up)....

Today's roundup brought to you by Lady Gaga's "Just Dance", official soundtrack of OCI 2009.

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Jena Six defendant gets out of Jena, thrives in New York.

The end of the all-White suburb? Wasn't that supposed to happen after Brown (but we're post-racist!)?

Kevin Drum asks how we counter the cranks, when cranks have access to far more megaphones than ever before? The only answer I can think of is demanding more aggression out of the mainstream media. If every time a Republican repeated the vile "death panels" lie, the Washington Post wrote a headline: "Republicans repeat 'death panels' lie", we might see some changes. Might.

Postbourgie argues that "Mad Men" may be fruitful ground for feminist analysis but it is not itself feminist.

Seth Freedman essentially agrees the Swedish "organ harvesting" story about Israel is rubbish, but nonetheless thinks the real wrongdoers are all the whiners who are calling it "anti-Semitic" (because it attacks Israel, y'see, not Jews). Absent from his column is the fact that the Swedish article "hooked" its coverage off the fact that several Jews (not Israelis) had been accused of organ-smuggling. He fails the test. (H/T).

TULIP reports on AFT efforts to assist Palestinian teachers' unions.

I'm doing guest boxing blogging at The Queensberry Rules this week. Two posts are already up: the first, on political judging and the boxing community's complacency, and the second, a more general stream of consciousness set of ideas.

The Chamber of Commerce wants to put global warming on trial, saying it'd be the Scopes trial of the 21st century. Matt Yglesias notes a couple reasons why this is idiotic, starting with the fact that evolution lost at the Scopes trial (the ruling was reversed on a technicality on appeal), as well as the general observation that 12 random lay folk aren't exactly qualified to resolve technical scientific disputes. I'd add this: I thought we all agreed that the fact we even had to have a Scopes trial was pretty disgraceful, no?