During the civil rights movement, African-Americans who took part in marches, sit-ins, or any sort of public action, knew that they had to appear in their best Sunday churchgoing clothes. (As Maha of the Mahablog notes, this was done at Dr. King's express request: http://www.mahablog.com/2007/01/16/augment-the-objections/#comments)

This was the ultimate job interview, and their goal was to impress the people reading about them in the newspapers or watching them on TV with how sober-minded, serious and responsible they were. Even the signs they carried came from professional print shops.

It worked: Their fellow Americans saw the marchers and were impressed by their responsible demeanor. LBJ was able to push through the Voting and Civil Rights Acts in large part because of the sober-minded and adult demeanor of the marchers.

Then came the hippies. The "levitate the Pentagon" types. The trust-fund babies who went around with long stringy hair and beards and an aroma of pot and unwashed body. They did a very good job -- of turning off Middle America. They helped elect Richard Nixon, who then proceeded to keep America in the very war the Pentagon-levitators protested. Eric Alterman notes: (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14134971/#060808)

The first serious historical research I ever did was when I was researching my honors thesis as an undergraduate. I wanted to study the origins of neoconservatism, the Six Day War, and Vietnam—this was back in 1981—and my adviser, Walter LaFeber—insisted that I learn a little context first by examining the attitudes of the entire country to the war and the antiwar movement. I poured over the polling data and found to my surprise, that in many ways, the antiwar movement was counterproductive. Many Americans didn’t like the war but they really hated the counterculture. If supporting Nixon was a way to get back at the hippies and protesters and rioters, they were willing to do it, even if it meant extending a war they thought to be already lost.

This is borne out by a study done in the immediate aftermath of the Kent State shootings. It may be shocking to some of us today to realize that a non-trivial portion of Americans had no problems with students and protesters being shot to death by the National Guard, but the study shows exactly that (http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/36/83/e5.pdf). This was in large part because many Americans feared that -- in the wake of the assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK, and other prominent figures -- the country was falling apart, and order had to be restored somehow.

And yet we have, four decades later, the same people doing the same schtick with the same utter lack of awareness at how the rest of the country sees them

Sorry, but you can't pin all the bad press on the FBI or CIA. If the counterculture's bad reputation with Middle America was all J. Edgar Hoover's fault, then how come Hoover wasn't able to do the same thing to the civil rights movement? Remember, Hoover hated MLK Jr. and was desperate to discredit Dr. King -- and even bugged his hotel rooms to gather evidence of trysts -- but failed in the end.

From one of the few sensible respondents to this article:

There's still a huge amount of classism in feminism. Helen Gurley had affairs with married men before marrying David Brown and makes no apology for them, and she's reviled as a hussy. Kate Millet runs around on her husband with both men and women, and she's exploring her sexuality.

Don't get me started on Kate Millett. She was so happy to see the Shah overthrown, not realizing what anyone with even a cursory understanding of Middle Eastern culture would know would result: Namely, in the murders of gays and lesbians and the reinstitution of sharia as a tool to subjugate women. The Westernized Iranians she dealt with pre-Revolution were considered tainted elitists, and so had no power once the mullahs took over.

Obama himself can only do so much. He can order that the laws not be enforced, but that doesn't permanently solve the problem. Fortunately, it looks as if even the Republicans are realizing that coddling right-wing terrorists and their sympathizers is not a wise move.

"Given the network of blogs that criss cross America, there is no lack for information about any aspect of our civic lives."

Except very few blogs do actual reporting -- they comment on, and link to (if they're ethical) news stories developed by newspapers and sometimes TV or radio networks.

When those go away, what will the blogs feed upon?

The researcher here is, whether she's conscious of it or not, going to make big bucks by playing off male fears of non-passive women. Just look at how this article got all the pooooor widdle frightened tinfoil-hate-wearing males to flood this letters thread inveighing against The Eeeevil Feminists Who Took Their MANHOODS!

Look up your nearest local one here: http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets

My favorite is this one: http://www.stpaulfarmersmarket.com/

So true, it had to be repeated.

The high-functioning folks on the autism spectrum do NOT, contrary to the fears of parents of low-functioning children, believe that low-functioning children should not be assisted towards higher-functioning lives. And yes, the decades-long trend towards expanding the autism diagnosis umbrella is causing two separate problems: Not only is it confusing people whose sole knowledge of autism is of the violent and low-functioning types, it's also creating the false appearance of a raging autism pandemic, which charlatans like Andrew Wakefield exploit.

Instead of sinking money into things like chelation therapy (i.e., pumping kids full of dangerous toxins to rid the body of far less harmful vaccine toxins that left the body long ago), the high-functioning folk advocate 1) the cessation of treating autism as a one-size-fits-all condition, and 2) spending the money currently wasted on dangerous "cleansing cures" on therapies that actually do work.