Midday open thread

• Today marks the beginning of celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Mark Simpson, the South Carolina division commander for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, says tonight's secession ball is not a celebration of slavery or of the million or so fatalities resulting from the war.

  “Do we celebrate that? Heavens no,” he said. “War and death is never something to celebrate. But we do celebrate the courage and the integrity of 170 men who signed their signatures to the Article of Secession – the courage of men to do what they think is right.”

  Uh-huh. Courageous white men swearing their allegiance to slavery.  

  As Eric Foner writes today:

  A century and a half after the civil war, many white Americans, especially in the South, seem to take the idea that slavery caused the war as a personal accusation. The point, however, is not to condemn individuals or an entire region of the country, but to face candidly the central role of slavery in our national history. Only in this way can Americans arrive at a deeper, more nuanced understanding of our past.

• Joan Walsh suggests Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's civil rights comments (discussed here by Joan McCarter) "aren't the 'gaffe' of a possible 2012 presidential candidate, they're his opening salvo."
• AFSCME takes issue with a one-sided, union-unfriendly 60 Minutes report on state and local budgets.
• For the first time, spending on on-line advertising ($25.8 billion) will exceed newspaper advertising ($22.8 billion), an eclipse that has been building for several years:

  It isn't just that newspapers are facing fiercer competition from the Web. Recently released findings by Forrester Research show that U.S. consumers, on average, now spend as much time online as they do watching television. But they aren't spending less time in front of their TVs. What they are doing less of is listening to the radio and reading newspapers and magazines offline, Forrester says.

• A national survey shows a "profound maldistribution" of doctors who treat children in the United States despite a significant increase in both pediatricians and family physicians.

  Nearly one million American children in areas, often rural, where there are no local primary care physicians whereas many urban areas have an abundance of such doctors -- an average of one physician for every 140 children in some places, an analysis of national data revealed.

• Here's a cool research and trending tool, Google's Books NGram Viewer.  I plugged in unidentified flying objects, bungalow and condom. Caution: addictive.
• Corporate profits are off-limits for helping close the budget gap, but looting pensions is the latest round in the right's assault on the working class.
• All Japan wants from Santa is KFC. The colonel's chicken is so popular that the company's Christmas Party Barrels can be ordered up to two months in advance.
• Accent seems to be more important than looks in shaping our perception of a person, according to a new study.  An earlier study indicated that a foreign accent makes a person seem less truthful to listeners.
• Retail sales were up 5.5 percent through the end of the third quarter this year, and retail profits were up 7.5 percent. But retail hiring was only up 0.6 percent.
• "Austerity" was this year's top-searched word at the Merriam Webster website. "Pragmatic" was second.  No. 7 was "shellacking."
• Even though the United States added 30,000 troops to its military forces in Afghanistan in 2010, the war accounted for just 4 percent of coverage in major news outlets up to December, a slight drop from last year's 5 percent.
• Tea Party Nation founder Judson Philips, who thinks only property-owners should have the right to vote, also thinks it would be good to get rid of the United Methodist Church because it supported the DREAM Act and is more like the First Church of Karl Marx.