It says something about the desire of the Obama Administration to try to quietly and without consequence destroy anyone who makes any challenges to their shameful mistreatment of an alleged whistleblower that they waited to make their move, not just for the usual news black hole that is a typical part of the American weekend, but for a weekend when a single global event — the ongoing catastrophes in Japan — would consume what media and public attention exists:

P.J. Crowley is abruptly stepping down as State Department spokesman under pressure from the White House, according to senior officials familiar with the matter, because of controversial comments he made about the Bradley Manning case.

Midway through his presidency, when Bob Woodward about how history would judge the War in Iraq, George W. Bush responded: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Instead, in a 2006 essay in Rolling Stone, the prominent historian Sean Wilentz argued that a substantial majority of U.S. historians already considered the Bush administration to be a “failure” (81% in a poll conducted by the History News Network). Wilentz predicted that Bush would “be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”

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.

If we all stand together, we can turn around a horrific status-quo by putting cannabis in the realm of health, not law enforcement. Persuade our community leaders to stand up and speak for humanity and humane practices. For voters unsure of the result of legalization, let’s demand an immediate cease fire in the War on Drugs, to show that all hell will not break loose.

Sam Green’s Oscar nominated film The Weather Underground is an in depth look at the radical group which grew out of the Students for a Democratic Society and turned into a domestic terrorist organization opposed to racism, the war in Viet Nam and the oppression of people in the United States and around the world.

Anger at the United States government policies at home and abroad propelled this group forward. They were young, white middle class, intelligent, articulate and driven by what they saw was wrong with United States policies at home and abroad. To that end the group took to bombing government buildings, alerting the occupants in order to minimize casualties. Three members were killed while building a bomb, but no other live were lost, though millions of dollar worth of damage occurred, and a sense of fear was instilled in the American public. The group bombed the Capitol building and the Pentagon, broke Timothy Leary out of prison, and evaded one of the largest FBI manhunts in history.

Blind Ambition is—if you haven’t read it already—a great book for any member of the Firedoglake community to read. The entire complex of events that ended up with the shorthand name “Watergate” is incredibly convoluted; think of the Plame affair, multiply it by twenty, and extend the drama over twenty-six months—or twenty-six years, because really, the story did not end with Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974, and it hasn’t even ended yet, as John’s splendid afterward (which offers the most convincing explanation in print of what the Watergate burglars were looking for in DNC headquarters) makes perfectly clear. And Blind Ambition, John Dean’s memoir of his participation in the events, is the best single volume Watergate book, out of the literally hundreds of them, to get a full and three-dimensional understanding of the whole thing from start to finish, from the warped executive psychology that produced it (in one of the books funnier scenes young Dean is tasked with screening the avant-garde omnisexual drag queen extravaganza Tricia’s Wedding to see if a case can be made to clamp the filmmakers in leg irons, or something) to the most gripping mystery story history has ever given us.

Greetings, FDL book salon members, and welcome to Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland. It’s a bleak place, an America broken into pieces, cracked apart by disagreement over war and the method of prosecuting war; over race and racism; over whether you can dissent from official opinion and still count truly as an American citizen. It’s not at all like the country we live in, thank goodness. Rick’s written a powerful narrative here about how those cracks appeared in the American landscape, and about who started and widened them, and to what purpose. It’s a great read, rich in vivid, often chilling illustrations of the era.