Wiener’s new book How We Forgot the Cold War is a travelogue of visits to sites across the US (plus one in Cuba and one in Grenada) where the Cold War is publicly commemorated. As different as they are—among them are half a dozen presidential libraries, a general’s tomb, missile silos, a VIP fallout shelter, a CIA museum that’s closed to the public, and a proposed $100 million Victims of Communism museum, a grandiose project that was never built—all of them are notable for a curious lacuna: the Cold War itself, or perhaps more accurately, the neo-conservative, triumphalist narrative about the Cold War that has been so successfully projected onto the memory of Ronald Reagan.

Let’s face it, we know the Internet was invented to showcase cats, and we may have reached the absolute end of the Internet with this latest entry into politics. However, Hank the Cat may face some obstacles in his Senate run, because well, you have to be (technically) human to be elected. Rombot: Barely human.

So in essence, what I’d just read was yet another exercise in punching hippies (particularly straw hippies) in order to try and somehow equate progressives (i.e., the people who so far have been right about pretty much everything) with Tea Party members, and with a nice steaming chunk of juicy “you hate Obama ‘cuz you’re white!” race-baiting tossed in, which is ironic as hell because some of the most biting critics of Obama are in fact African-Americans.

The cover of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice features a dramatic picture of a burning bus and the mug shots of Freedom Riders who’d been jailed in the notorious Parchman Mississippi State Prison. Most of us are familiar with these images. Ray Arsenault’s book provides the stories behind the pictures — and so much more.

Tonight, on the 47th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination of we’re doing something a little different–discussing the Zapruder film and other footage from that day, along with the event itself and how Kennedy’s assassination changed America.

I was two years old then, so all I recall was my dad having me watch the funeral on the teevee. But as I grew up, it was impossible to ignore the impact of that day in Dallas on our collective psyche as a nation. Questioning authority, distrust of government, conspiracy theories, the war in Viet Nam, civil rights, hippies, Nixon (and all he did both good–like EPA and OSHA–and bad). How would thing be different if Kennedy had not been shot? Hard to say.

Monday, around 11:20 PM EDT, an arrest was made in connection with Saturday’s attempted car bombing in New York City’s Times Square. Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old US citizen, was apprehended at JFK airport while attempting to board a flight to Dubai.

Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster (Holt, 2008) is a remarkable and very relevant book. The author spent more than a year working with an icon from the second half of the twentieth century, McGeorge Bundy, as he struggled to compose his memoirs. Bundy was one of the most influential figures in a postwar generation of smart, energetic, confident, well-born men who transformed universities, politics, and foreign policy in Cold War America. As Goldstein explains, Bundy was the central character in David Halberstam’s rueful parable of The Best and the Brightest. He was one of the Masters of the Universe who brought the United States into a terribly self-defeating and enormously destructive war in Vietnam. Readers today might naturally wonder about the parallels with the architects of the twenty-first century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the investment strategies and corporate management philosophies that brought the world economy to its knees.