So much for raising the level of political discourse, even if he did laugh about it.

After meeting with business leaders in Sanford, LePage told WCSH-TV6 he was not attending Martin Luther King Jr. Day events in Bangor and Portland because he considered the group a special interest.

"They are a special interest," he told the station. "End of story. And I'm not going to be held hostage by special interests. And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they'd like about it."

When the reporter asked if his absence was an indication of a pattern, rather than an isolated incident, LePage responded by saying: "Tell `em to kiss my butt," he said, laughing. "If they want to play the race card, come to dinner and my son will talk to them."

LePage, a Republican who was sworn in last week, has a Jamaican son named Devon Raymond. Raymond watched on stage last week at the inaugural, along with LePage's four other children.

For my part, as a member of the political media, and a vitriol-spewing one at that, the Tucson shooting immediately made me ask myself the question: do I personally do anything to add to this obvious problem of a hypercharged, rhetorically overheated political atmosphere? And the unfortunate answer I came up with was, maybe. I've always told myself that what I do is different from what someone like Rush does, because I don't target classes of people and try not to exempt anyone (even myself) from criticism, or favor either party.

I've also counted on the belief that anyone who's willing to devote the mental energy to even follow whatever wild rhetoric I'm using is probably also smart enough to tell the difference between reality and hyperbole. I also hope that anyone reading my articles will get the underlying message that I'm pretty sure -- I hope I'm sure, anyway -- I'm conveying at all times, i.e. that violence is irresponsible, that we should use our brains instead of baseball bats to solve problems, etc.

But while I tell myself all these things, I also know that I would never talk to my wife or my mother the way I talk to Lloyd Blankfein. Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you've got? That's a question that I think has to be asked. It's certainly possible that we've all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I'm not just talking about Jared Loughner.

To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.

In its defense of the 1996 law, the government today stated:

DOMA is supported by rationales that constitute a sufficient rational basis for the law. For example, as explained below, it is supported by an interest in maintaining the status quo and uniformity on the federal level, and preserving room for the development of policy in the states.

When DOMA was enacted, the institution of marriage had long been understood as a formal relationship between a man and a woman, and state and federal law had been built on that understanding. But our society is evolving, and as is well-established, the "science of government . . . is the science of experiment." Over the years, the prevailing concept of marriage has been challenged as unfair to a significant element of the population. Recently there has been a growing recognition that the prevailing regime is harmful to gay and lesbian members of our society. That recognition has prompted ongoing dialogue and change in many states, with some states opting to authorize same-sex marriages and other states opting for other forms of legal recognition for same-sex couples, such as civil unions and domestic partnerships. Still other states have reexamined their legal systems and reaffirmed their support of their preexisting concept of marriage and provided that their constitution or laws authorize only marriages between a man and a woman. In the end, the large majority of states today do not recognize same-sex marriage.

But historian David Greenberg today tosses some cold water on the rosy depiction by libruls of Ike and his attitudes towards the military and cold war foreign policy.  Sample

In the geopolitics of the 1950s, moreover, Eisenhower was a Cold Warrior nonpareil. His Secretary of State John Foster Dulles belittled containment and talked with George W. Bush-like braggadocio of what he called "liberation" or "roll back"--an active program to free countries under Soviet domination. Dulles never quite pulled that off, but he did create a new American foreign-policy doctrine of "massive retaliation," the readiness to use nuclear weapons against conventional attacks. During Eisenhower's years in the White House, the nation's nuclear arsenal swelled from roughly 1,000 warheads to 23,000.

Nuclear diplomacy was part of Eisenhower's "New Look" foreign policy. So, too, was the brave new world of CIA-led coups and assassinations. It was Eisenhower whose CIA deposed the leaders of Iran, Guatemala, and possibly the Belgian Congo. The Eisenhower administration also planned the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba, which John F. Kennedy was left to carry out. These ruthless operations of Ike's may not have required a multibillion-dollar industry, but they hardly exemplified the anti-interventionist politics that today's farewell-address enthusiasts tend to share.

PARIS - After four weeks of steadily escalating riots across Tunisia, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali lost his grip on power Friday. Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannoushi announced he was taking over the North African country to organize early elections and usher in a new government.

News reports said Ben Ali, 74, had fled the country, but his whereabouts were not publicly known. Wherever he was hiding, the day's events suggested his 23 years as Tunisia's ruler were over, submerged by a wave of popular unrest set off by economic deprivation, official corruption and political frustration among the country's 10.5 million mostly Sunni Muslim inhabitants.

The spectacle of an iron-fisted former interior minister apparently being swept from office by an uprising of the unemployed and politically shut out was certain to be closely watched elsewhere in the Arab world. The region's many authoritarian governments, often in power without the underpinning of democratic elections, have come under increasing pressure from similarly frustrated youths.

While the John Wayne movie is sometimes thought to be a classic, it does not hold a candle to the Coen Bros. movie. The cast, the visuals all of it is good.