Hang on, folks, the next few weeks are gonna get ugly:

On September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania killed almost 3,000 people. On September 12, the survivors, the families of the victims, the first-responders woke up to find their lives irrevocably altered — as did all Americans.

Ten years later, Yahoo! is asking: How have you changed since September 11?

Quite honestly, we haven’t. Other than being ten years older. But we can’t blame Osama for that.

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It’s not our place to be Shocked! by Rick Perry, mainly because we have standards for these things, and Deranger Rick is far from meeting them. (For the record, if you want to push our button, suggest that Barack Obama might meet Bobby Kennedy’s fate.)

So we’re still waiting to see how Rick’s act plays outside the Usual Venues, and it might be some time before we get an indication one way or another. Meantime, we are a little surprised that it’s not playing as well inside the Usual Venues as we had been led to expect. Here, courtesy of Salon’s Steve Kornacki, is the — pardon the expression — round-up:

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Our guest columnist is permitted to raise children by our overly lenient society.

My neighbor gave my 8-year-old toy dinosaurs.

I am a little shocked. She says she is a Christian, but the Bible doesn’t say anything about dinosaurs. Should I let him keep them, as long as he understands that dinosaurs aren’t real?

Even the PBS shows that he watches talk about dinosaurs and evolution, and how the scientists found these “bones” but the Bible doesn’t say that God ever created them, and the earth is only 6,000 years old, not old enough to have “bones” that they say are MILLIONS of years old!

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Forget everything you know about Rick Perry.

Including the things that frighten the shit out of you.

Congratulations! You’re now a Typical American Voter.

By reputation, Perry is the Teabagger From Hell, the one candidate with the ability to inspire the base and not scare off everybody else. He’s Shrub Redux, the idiot Texas governor with whom you’d enjoy sharing a pint while he drives the country off a cliff. He could win.

Or so we’re told.

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One candidate was conspicuously absent from Thursday night’s Republican debate. A candidate beloved by the base, feared by opponents, who could really blow this race wide open.

We’re speaking, of course, about Thaddeus McCotter.

[via Political Correction]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_iq5yzJ-Dk

Every fall, colleges around the country send a memo to their graying faculties, reminding the fogeys that the Fresh Young Minds about to invade campus are terrifyingly fresh — this year’s 18-year-olds were born in 1993, which means your Cobain favorites are now as culturally irrelevant as our Stairway/Gilligan mashups.

It’s the shallow end of Living Memory, a wonderful concept that defines our cultural moment — a moment you can effectively double, since today’s centenarians were born into a world that included the centenarians of their day. You can even triple it if you care to, allowing for a great-grandmother telling childhood stories about her great-grandmother: It’s not inconceivable that a centenarian today (b.1911) might recall tales from an earlier centenarian (b.1811) passed along by a 1711 baby who lived it.

So while it’s certainly freaky in 2011 to watch a 1956 clip of someone who witnessed an 1865 presidential assassination, it’s not that odd when you work the math. But it still doesn’t mean that kids today give a shit about Smells Like Teen Spirit.

[via Kottke]

Angry lefty website Firedoglake fired off an angry email yesterday on behalf of Dan Choi, the anti-DADT activist who first came to attention when he came out on Rachel Maddow’s show a couple years back — while still in uniform.

Choi was later honorably discharged, but FDL says the Obama Administration is waging a “vindictive campaign” against him, including “seizing his veterans disability checks” through a collections agency, and this:

Dan currently faces up to 6 months in prison for protesting DADT in front of the White House. He will be the first person in nearly a century to be put on trial over an arcane law written for and last used to silence important women suffragists.

While we have a lot of respect for Choi — we were watching Rachel that night — we have somewhat less respect for Firedoglake. There’s an annoying tendency among Angry Lefties to hit the Outrage Button too often — we may read ThinkProgress and Media Matters daily, but we usually find ourself thinking twice (and checking sources) before running an item from them. So much shouting hurts our ears.

It’s far worse with Angry Righties, of course. But the louder they get, the more we’re amused.

So when the FDL email was brought to our attention, our strong instinct was — well, not to doubt it, but at least to confirm it before paying forward the anger. In particular, we were curious about the Lead Outrage — a century-old law being dusted off to burn Choi. That would be vindictive.

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