Try again, Anonymous. If you're so intent on spamming your anti-feminist, anti-Muslim bigotry everywhere, you could at least provide a working e-mail. (Oh, and nice avoidance of the actual issues in my letter.)

Back to the grownups here:

Seven hundred years ago, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (including and especially China and Japan) were all mired in various forms of feudalism that kept their societies from embracing change of any sort, as it was rightly seen as a threat to the folks at the top of the pecking order (blue bloods/mandarins/bushi/etc.). It was this feudalism, rather than any religious philosophy, that held back these cultures.

Then the Black Death came, and devastated a European population and feudal social structure already weakened by a long famine. 70% of England's population died, with (as in the rest of Europe) the peasant population being the hardest hit.

But the Black Death, in severely reducing England's population of serfs and other unfree peoples, gave tremenous leverage to the surviving peasants: They could get more for their labor from their lords, and there was now more land freed up for them to use. In places such as Poland and Russia, where the plague's bite was less severe and the feudal structures stronger, serfs and peasants became less free, not more so, over the next half-millenium.

Arabic numerals.

Oh, and shall we declare a moratorium on taking seriously anyone who posts articles from the once-sane, now rabidly-Likudnik Richard Perle/Conrad Black PNAC abomination known as the Jerusalem Post? (Notice that none of the bigots ever link to Ha'aretz for their source material.)

Now that we've got that out of the way: The Muslim world wasn't the only one that was, right up to the Renaissance, more technologically (if not scientifically) advanced than Europe. The Chinese had gunpowder and block printing centuries before we did, but their feudalistic, innovation-skittish culture kept them from doing anything much with either; it was this feudalism -- a feudalism shared by the Middle Eastern cultures and Europe -- that held them back, not solely religion.

It was the breakdown of the feudal culture in Europe -- a breakdown which ironically enough was hastened by that great leveller, the Black Death -- that paved the way for free inquiry, which in turn led to the growth of both the scientific and democratic impulses.

Two things:

1) Ellison was in Ramadi, which is about the safest place in Iraq. They're not letting anyone stay overnight in Baghdad -- not even in the "safe" Green Zone (when Bachmann was there a few weeks ago, she and her delegation had to wear helmets and flak jackets at all times, and she was not allowed to be in Iraq for more than a few hours).

2) As the local online magazine Minnesota Monitor showed (http://www.minnesotamonitor.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2137), this was all about BushCo's desperate need to find allies among the people they're killing. So they sent America's first Muslim congressman to meet with Iraqi figures.

...notice their "bipartisan" kick? Where "bipartisan" means "caving to Bush except on weak and toothless legislation that allows him to do what he wants anyway"? http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/07/30/the-rubber-stampers-latest-contortion/

Am I the only one that gets a kick out of how whenever there's even a small jab at or hint of bias towards one candidate or the other the letters about sexism/racism/etc just flood in?

Uh-huh. I'm not a fan of Hillary and she's not my candidate, but Geez Louise, the most vocal of the anti-Hillaryites are flipping yobbos at times. You can hear the tinfoil crinkling from here.

Bonus points to tommydsz for managing to get mad at Conason for writing an article praising the candidate that he supports.

But Joe didn't crawl to Chicago and physically lick Obama's boots clean, so it doesn't count.

The people leaving the comments are just as whacked out as the people on the cruise. Seriously.

Meanwhile, because conservatives love nothing better to compare apples to oranges, our resident troll shows up to post a total non-sequitur whose only connection to your piece is that the word "cruise" is in it.

As Jon Aravosis says, if the surge is working, how come conditions in Iraq have deteriorated so markedly, even since the time that McCain and Lindsey Graham were there, that now they're not only NOT letting Congressmembers walk outside of the Green Zone, they're not even letting them stay overnight in the Green Zone before hustling them out of Iraq?

But he isn't, so it's not.

Your GOP/Media Complex in action.

As the Salon article from 2004 points out, David Vitter owes his political success to a not-so-subtle assist from Klansman and white supremacist ding-dong David Duke.

The emphasis on "traditional moral values" is just window dressing for the white voters. They all know it's code for keeping the uppity brown ones down. (This unholy mating of quasi-religious values and naked racism has been around ever since the Southern Baptist Convention and Southern branches of other denominations split from their main branches over the issue of slavery back in the 1840s. Note that the Klan uses Christian imagery, such as the cross, profusely.)

That's why Vitter can bury himself in hookers and it won't matter one whit to his white base. He doesn't stray where it counts for them: He keeps the brown ones down, which is exactly what they want him to do. Everything else is secondary.