In the World of Internet Forums, Keith Ellison Loses

From Fox News tonight:

Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison — the first Muslim member of Congress — says Bush administration actions following 9/11 remind him of the way Adolf Hitler's government expanded its power after the burning of Berlin’s Reichstag parliament building in 1933.
Ellison told a gathering of atheists recently — "It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I'm not saying [September 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box — dismiss you."

Ellison later told a writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune that examples of Bush administration actions fitting his Nazi parallel include the Iraq war, certain provisions of the Patriot Act, and the commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence.

(http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,289157,00.html)

The standard for forum flame-wars is that the first person to compare the other to the Nazis loses. That, however, won't happen here, because it might get mentioned as a footnote on the only even slightly conservative news channel, but no where else. I did find this (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/07/keith_ellison_goes_overboard.html) opinion article that also gives some nice background for those not familiar with the reference to how Hitler gained power. How does this sort of thing not draw an uproar? It's hard to make the argument "you may not like him, but he's no Hitler," I suppose, but if a conservative white guy makes that reference about a black politician even close to that, he'd be skewered alive by the media. Suggest Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton are ripping off their own donors? You could only be a racist. It can't be that their "charities" are just fronts for them to get rich. Nope. That's not it.

Well, Moeller pretty much told me I need to redo all the work I'd done over the weekend. And the way I was going to have to do it involved manually setting the maximum value for each axis individually. I found a way to automate it like I did before, though. It's not perfect (the legend sometimes overlaps the data), but I can fix the few problems manually and still save a lot of time. I'm supposed to meet with him and another researcher tomorrow morning to discuss which data sets to use as primary references and which to include only in the appendix. I also think I'm going to have to change my format since the thesis format regulations are stupid. They're written for all majors, so they assume things like "words are more important than figures" which is pretty much the opposite of how engineering actually works. Words are important, but they mean nothing without appropriate data. English majors is stupid.

Don't use your MP3 player in a thunderstorm. Could be bad. More tomorrow.