Friday night links.

* Gingrich: "If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything," Sotomayor must be barred from the Supreme Court. Who does he think won the Civil War?

* Tom Tancredo: "I don't know" if the Obama administration hates white people.

* Sonia Sotomayor, notorious racist, ruled against people claiming illegal discrimination in 45 out of 50 cases. This goes along with Dave Sirin's piece on Sotomayor in The Nation to demonstrate that she is a moderate—likely too moderate—not some leftist firebrand. Anyone Obama picked to replace her would, from Newt's perspective anyway, likely be significantly worse.

* Earlier this month, a Twitter user in Guatemala was arrested, jailed, and fined the equivalent of a year's salary for having posted a 96-character thought to Twitter. @jeanfer faces ten years in prison.

* Nuclear power, too cheap to meter.

* Uhura, Dualla, and "Blacks in Space." I really think some nuance is being lost here; to take up just one point, Uhura isn't marginalized in the new Star Trek; if anything she replaces McCoy as the third lead.

* Jason Schwartzman's (fake) new sitcom on NBC, "Yo Teach," a viral ad for Judd Apatow's Funny People.

* Wikipedia has barred edits from known Scientologist IP addresses. Xenu weeps.

If ever a civil rights movement was needed in America, it is for the Republican Party. If ever we needed to start marching for freedom and constitutional rights, it's for the Republican Party. The Republican Party is today's oppressed minority, and it know [sic] how to behave as one. (via)

The New York Times has dueling op-eds on the FISA issue: the editorial board is unhappy with Obama, while Morton Halprin (who was spied on by Nixon) believes the FISA compromise is the best legislation we can hope for at this time.

I've already written about this (in both blogspot and Daily Kos flavors), but I have one or two things to add. First, on the merits of the FISA compromise, I think the bill itself is pretty awful, but telecom immunity isn't the awful part. I can't imagine the government making any other policy choice if it ever wants a private company to comply with its requests ever again. The problem here was and always has been Bush administration illegality, not telecom compliance—so the netroots are directing their fire in entirely the wrong direction. This TPM reader gets it right:

Before we all torpedo the best candidate we have had in 30+ years over this FISA thing, be aware of the two facts: (1) there is a long-established government contractor immunity doctrine in American law & what the telecoms did after 9-11 in obeying government demands for compliance is right in stride with that doctrine, and (2) in any event, the federal government is likely required to indemnify the telcos for any judgment or settlement they'd have to pay. Is this really the make-or-break litmus-test the netroots is clamoring for? No way. Is this just another example of liberals eating their own? You betcha.

As I was writing at the tail end of an Yglesias comment thread last night, the grandstanding you're seeing on the lefty blogs over telecom immunity seems to me to be misdirected anger over the dawning recognition that Bush and his cronies really are going to get away with everything scot free. Well, they are. Pelosi took impeachment off the table—wrongly, I think, though I understand the political calculus involved—and it's extremely unlikely there will be any substantive investigation of Bush following Obama's election. There never has been. We'll "turn the page." "For the good of the country," a criminal Republican administration will once again walk, and the really sad fact is the exact same bunch of thugs will probably pop back up yet another decade down the line to do it all again.

We lost the fight to hold Bush accountable when Pelosi took impeachment off the table. I'm sorry that's true, but that's reality, no matter what happens with FISA and telecom immunity or what anybody says on the Internet.

What's actually at stake now is the character of the *next* eight years, eight absolutely crucial years in a very precarious moment not only for this nation but for the entire world—and with regard to that struggle Obama is doing the right thing by taking the FISA issue off the table. He's being pragmatic. We need to be pragmatic too.

My media empire continues its slow takeover of the Research Triangle with an unprecedented two articles in this week's Independent, one reviewing a recent book on civil rights landmarks in the South and the other taking a look inside the Ron Paul Revolution.

Steve Coll in the New Yorker tries to figure out why the Jena Six case has resonated so loudly across the nation, and I think he nails it:

Many African-Americans understand the case not only as the civil-rights era redux but as a stark illustration of a here-and-now problem, one about which whites are mainly silent: the mass incarceration of black youths—America’s “school-to-prison pipeline,” as some scholars have christened it.

The number of blacks in prison has quadrupled since 1980. There are many overlapping causes, among them severe automated federal sentencing rules; a passionate but badly managed “war on drugs” prosecuted most heavily in African-American neighborhoods; and deepening inequalities in personal income and access to education, whose effects fall hardest on urban teen-agers. One study estimates that, if recent trends continue, a third of the black males born in 2001 can expect to do time.

Vanity Fair has the long, sad-then-happy-then-sad-again story of the people behind the famous Little Rock Central High photograph, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan.

Civil rights victory in Iowa (not a typo!): Judge strikes down Iowa gay marriage ban.

Because I know very little about the history of the city in which I live, I took a break from my traditional late-August lit-theory cram to read Osha Gray Davidson's The Best of Enemies, the book that's being assigned to all Duke freshpersons this year. I'm very glad they're reading this book—it definitely should essential reading for anyone arriving in Durham from other places. Davidson begins with a general history of Durham, especially the history of its African-American citizenry, before segueing into a history of the civil rights movement in North Carolina—but the focus is always on the antagonism and eventual strange friendship between Durhamite housing rights advocate Ann Atwater, a 390-pound African-American single mother, and C.P. Ellis, former Exalted Cyclops of the local Klu Klux Klan. It is on Ellis that the book hangs the weight of its subtitle, Race and Redemption in the New South, and the book fulfills that promise in what seemed to me to be the best and worst thematic senses—both the ecstatic possibility of redemption and redemption's sad limits. Through it all Davidson exposes the ways in which class considerations undergird racial assumptions, and in particular the way in which racial conflict has always served as a sort of heatsink for class resentment in America. And it's a great story. Check it out.