In the face of national outrage over its “Papers Please” act, which effectively requires brown-colored Arizonans to carry their birth certificates with them at all times or face imprisonment, Arizona has decided to — you guessed it — double down.

Gary Pierce, commissioner on the Arizona Corporation Commission, responds to Los Angeles’ boycott of Arizona businesses, in a letter to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa:

I received your message; please receive mine. As a statewide elected member of the Arizona Corporation Commission overseeing Arizona’s electric and water utilities, I too am keenly aware of the ‘resources and ties’ we share with the city of Los Angeles.
…
If an economic boycott is truly what you desire, I will be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation. I am confident that Arizona’s utilities would be happy to take those electrons off your hands. If, however, you find that the City Council lacks the strength of its convictions to turn off the lights in Los Angeles and boycott Arizona power, please reconsider the wisdom of attempting to harm Arizona’s economy.

As Pierce notes, there’s one thing that Arizona certainly doesn’t lack: the strength of its convictions.

They’re going to fight for their right to harass brown people — even if it brings their economy to its knees.

Primary season is just warming up, and already the Teabaggers have scored a major victory against Republican incumbents, snuffing out Bob Bennett (R-UT), one of the most conservative members of the Senate, for not being conservative enough.

Bennett told the Associated Press he has not ruled out a write-in campaign.

Split votes, here we come.

Party on, Tea People!

The Maine Republican Party has just embraced the batshit brigade. At their convention last night, they adopted a platform straight out of Alice in Wonderland:

An overwhelming majority of delegates to the Maine Republican convention tonight voted to scrap the the proposed party platform and replace it with a document created by a group of Tea Party activists.

The official platform for the Republican Party of Maine is now a mix of right-wing fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories.

The document calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, demands an investigation of “collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth,” suggests the adoption of “Austrian Economics,” declares that “‘Freedom of Religion’ does not mean ‘freedom from religion’” (which I guess makes atheism illegal), insists that “healthcare is not a right,” calls for the abrogation of the “UN Treaty on Rights of the Child” and the “Law Of The Sea Treaty” and declares that we must resist “efforts to create a one world government.”

Hoo boy.

The whole document, which is written in a hamfisted style intended to mimic the Declaration of Independence, is here if your head hasn’t already exploded.

Conservatives in general and Republicans in particular have chosen to bet the farm on the idea that government in and of itself is a bad thing. And every time they are voted into power, they do everything within their means to make that abstraction a reality.

Government is inefficient, they say, and then create odious budget deficits to prove their point.

Government cannot support itself, they say, and then explode the national debt to prove their point.

Government is bad for the economy, they say, and then destroy American jobs to prove their point.

For Chrissakes, they famously declared their intent to “drown government in a bathtub.” Why on earth would you ever choose them to run your government?

And yet we do. And are invariably surprised to reap the whirlwind.

In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman illustrates how the BP oil spill exemplifies this phenomenon. The jury is still out on a comprehensive picture of the causes of the spill. But it’s clear even now that the destruction of common sense regulation during the Bush administration played a huge role.

[T]here is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.

The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.

For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.

Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years.

For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)

Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more. Protecting the environment was presumably the last thing on these government employees’ minds.
…
In any case, now is the time to make that break — and I don’t just mean by cleaning house at the Minerals Management Service. What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.

Conservatives in general and Republicans in particular have no interest in the success of our government. Knowing that, we should never allow them to be in charge of it.

Never again.

No, really. Fuck ‘em.

Despite their protestations to the contrary, they are the single worst thing that’s ever happened to the American economy.

In addition to being the reigning champs at creating gargantuan budget deficits and exploding the national debt, they are also reprehensible job killers.

But don’t take my word for it. Try the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

The next time you hear a Republican use the term “fiscal responsibility,” try not to hurt yourself laughing.

Now that two of the three branches of the Federal Government have fallen under the depraved spell of the New American Socialist Regime, it’s up to the states – and their spunky conservative residents – to take things into their own patriotic hands.

And boy have they ever.

Here’s a patriot’s grab-bag from the last couple of weeks:

Louisiana

While the elephant in the room is busy wading ashore, it’s good to see my home state is still able to conduct business as usual:

Persons who have have been qualified to carry concealed weapons should be able to keep them strapped on in a church or temple as a way to enhance security, a House committee said today.

The Committee on the Administration of Criminal Justice voted 8-3 for House Bill 68 by Rep. Henry Burns, R-Shreveport, sending it to more debate on the House floor.

Praise god and pass the ammunition.

Oh, and side note? Even Fox News is now calling bullshit on the Obama-acted-slowly-on-the-oil-spill-so-it’s-just-like-Katrina meme. So I think it’s safe for the rest of us to drop it now, too. That didn’t take long.

Tennessee

…and no, the Nashville flood wasn’t his Katrina either.

In other Tennessee news:

Right-wing extremists who question the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency tried to take on local law enforcement recently — and they seem to have come out on the losing end.

First, a Tennessee man was arrested after walking into his local county courthouse to try to effect a citizen’s arrest of a grand jury foreman who had refused to investigate President Obama’s legitimacy to serve — an encounter partially caught on video. That enraged one Georgia-based member of the far-right OathKeepers group. Responding to a call from an extremist leader, he drove to Tennessee with an AK-47 in a bid to get his comrade released — only to wind up getting arrested himself.

Luckily these “citizen’s” [sic] are working “in mass” [sic]. Otherwise you might mistake them for yokels who’ve never actually read the Constitution and, I dunno, arrest them or something.

Ohio

Samuel Joe the Plumber wins a seat on his county’s Republican committee.

Oklahoma

It’s official: it’s now illegal to be a woman in Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma Legislature voted Tuesday to override the governor’s vetoes of two abortion measures, one of which requires women to undergo an ultrasound and listen to a detailed description of the fetus before getting an abortion.

Though other states have passed similar measures requiring women to have ultrasounds, Oklahoma’s law goes further, mandating that a doctor or technician set up the monitor so the woman can see it and describe the heart, limbs and organs of the fetus. No exceptions are made for rape and incest victims.

A second measure passed into law on Tuesday prevents women who have had a disabled baby from suing a doctor for withholding information about birth defects while the child was in the womb [read: it's okay for doctors to not tell expectant mothers about birth defects if they think it would cause them to abort].
…
[Governor] Henry has signed two [other provisions] into law: a measure requiring clinics to post signs stating that a woman cannot be forced to have an abortion, and another making it illegal to have an abortion because of the sex of a child.

Two other anti-abortion bills are still working their way through the Legislature and are expected to pass. One would force women to fill out a lengthy questionnaire about their reasons for seeking an abortion; statistics based on the answers would then be posted online. The other restricts insurance coverage for the procedures.

Taken together, the various pieces of legislation would make Oklahoma one of the most prohibitive environments in the United States for women seeking to end a pregnancy, advocates for women and family planning said.

Virginia

Speaking of outlawing women, Virginia Attorney General and End Times warrior Ken Cuccinelli, not content with legalizing sexual profiling in his state, is now on a crusade to ban breasts from his DOJ:

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli apparently isn’t fond of wardrobe malfunctions, even when Virginia’s state seal is involved.

The seal depicts the Roman goddess Virtus, or virtue, wearing a blue tunic draped over one shoulder, her left breast exposed. But on the new lapel pins Cuccinelli recently handed out to his staff, Virtus’ bosom is covered by an armored breastplate.

When the new design came up at a staff meeting, workers in attendance said Cuccinelli joked that it converts a risqué image into a PG one.

The joke might be on him, said University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.
“When you ask to be ridiculed, it usually happens. And it will happen here, nationally,” he said. “This is classical art, for goodness’ sake.”

As turned off as he is by tits, though, it’s nothing compared to how he feels about science:

An investigation by Ken Cuccinelli of a climate scientist who was caught up in last year’s “Climate-Gate” flap is being likened to a “witch hunt” — even by global warming skeptics.

South Carolina

Thankfully, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham is focusing on larger questions, such as what rights should be afforded to terrorist suspects:

There seems to be a strong sentiment in Congress that the only constitutional right suspected terrorists have is the right to bear arms.

“I think you’re going too far here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday. He was speaking in opposition to a bill that would keep people on the F.B.I. terrorist watch list from buying guns and explosives.

Say what?

Yes, if you are on the terrorist watch list, the authorities can keep you from getting on a plane but not from purchasing an AK-47. This makes sense to Congress because, as Graham accurately pointed out, “when the founders sat down and wrote the Constitution, they didn’t consider flying.”
…
Graham wanted to make it clear that just because he doesn’t want to stop gun purchases by possible terrorists, that doesn’t mean he’s not tough on terror.

“I am all into national security. … I want to stop reading these guys their Miranda rights,” he said.

To sum up: right to remain silent not okay for terrorists; right to buy guns and explosives okay for terrorists.

And last but not least, Arizona

Oy. Where to begin?

The newly-minted Arizona Gestapo is already asking brown citizens for their papers:

A Valley man says he was pulled over Wednesday morning and questioned when he arrived at a weigh station for his commercial vehicle along Val Vista and the 202 freeway.
…
Abdon was told he did not have enough paperwork on him when he pulled into a weigh station to have his commercial truck checked. He provided his commercial driver’s license and a social security number but ended up handcuffed.

An agent called his wife and she had to leave work to drive home and grab other documents like his birth certificate.

Is it any surprise that one of the Republican State Senate backers of the bill subscribes to the twitter feeds of two white nationalist organizations?

Don Black is a Florida-based white supremacist who is banned from the UK for inciting hatred. Arizona State Senate Majority leader Chuck Gray—a proponent of the recent immigration bill—follows him, and another white power feed, on Twitter.
…
[The] Twitter account [of white nationalist organization Stormfront], and another neo-Nazi feed linked to it, are among 4,819 that Arizona State Senate Majority Leader Chuck Gray follows. Stormfront does not reciprocate, however—the group follows no one. Which means that Gray, or whoever is responsible for his Twitter account, sought out the racist organization specifically and decided its tweets were essential reading.

Knowing that, would it further surprise you to hear that the bill’s author is also really into white nationalism? From the New York Times:

The state senator who wrote the law, Russell Pearce, had long been considered a politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party — often to the delight of his supporters. There was the time in 2007 when he appeared in a widely circulated photograph with a man who was a featured speaker at a neo-Nazi conference. (Mr. Pearce said later he did not know of the man’s affiliation with the group.)

In 2006, he came under fire for speaking admirably of a 1950s federal deportation program called Operation Wetback, and for sending an e-mail message to supporters that included an attachment — inadvertently, he said — from a white supremacist group.

The “papers, please” law is so popular among flyover conservatives that Arizona may find it’s started a trend. Minnesota wants it and Florida teabagger favorite Marco Rubio is all for it now that he’s realized he was pandering to the wrong constituency when he said he was against it.

Truly, Arizona is flying off a cliff on rollerskates and crapping its pants all the way down. But there’s a certain freedom in that kind of release, and once the shit starts flying it’s hard to get it back in the old bottle:

Just a week after signing the country’s toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.

Just in case that doesn’t make school time trauma-free for Jim-Bob and Cindy-Lou, this ought to do the trick:

The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.

Does the list of unacceptable accents include “Inbred Redneck?”

After a week of national anxiety over an uncertain response to the largest oil spill in history, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar painted the picture in stark terms on Sunday:

“It potentially is catastrophic,” Salazar said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “I think we have to prepare for the worst.” Salazar said later in the program that “it is indeed a massive oil spill.”
…
“While there have been blowouts in the past, we have never seen anything that has been quite of this magnitude.”
…
“So our job is to keep the boot on the neck of” BP to ensure it meets its obligations, Salazar said.

Indeed, British Petroleum is legally responsible for the spill, caused when the blowout prevention measures on its oil rig Deep Horizon failed. And they will be responsible financially for the costs incurred by other agencies in responding to the accident.

But while BP is in first position of responsibility, the blame is not solely theirs. To begin with, while the jury’s still out, it looks like the response from the federal government was sluggish, due to the trust it put in BP’s initial – deeply flawed – assessment of the situation:

The Obama administration has publicly chastised BP America for its handling of the spreading oil gusher, yet a review of the response suggests it may be too simplistic to place all the blame for the unfolding environmental catastrophe on the oil company. The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP.
…
BP officials, even after the oil leak was confirmed by using remote-controlled robots, expressed confidence that the leak was slow enough, and steps taken out in the Gulf of Mexico aggressive enough, that the oil would never reach the coast.

Comparisons with George W Bush’s anemic response to hurricane Katrina are tempting. Even the shape of the black oil slick, seen above, seems to mimic the pinwheel shape of that hurricane as it heads straight towards New Orleans. But the differences are stark. While Katrina was a natural disaster, the BP spill was caused not only by an oil company, but by regulatory policies which failed to ensure that their safety measures were adequate. Following the blowout, the government largely took BP’s lead when it came to assessing both the cause and the prognosis. Not exactly a portrait of a robust regulatory environment.

Hopefully, the lessons learned will actually scare their way into legislation. There are early signs of the possibility:

[Mr. Obama] maintained that he continued to “believe that domestic oil production is an important part of our overall strategy for energy security,” addressing concerns about whether the administration would stick with its plan to increase drilling in the gulf.

But administration officials left open the possibility that they might reconsider the decision to expand offshore drilling if conditions in the gulf worsened. Mr. Gibbs said there would be “an extensive environmental review before deciding” on issuing new drilling leases.

A good first step, if it happens. The thing to keep an eye on, though, is whether new regulations regarding platform and drilling mechanism safety appear. If they don’t, the lesson will have been wasted.

And what does the anti-regulatory crowd have to say about the spill? Another ghost-written gem from Sarah Palin’s Facebook page:

We’ve all been shocked and saddened by the tragic events in the Gulf of Mexico. My heart breaks for coastal residents who are facing fears of the unknown impacts of the oil spill.

But it doesn’t break enough to actually want to do anything about it:

I repeat the slogan “drill here, drill now” not out of naiveté or disregard for the tragic consequences of oil spills – my family and my state and I know firsthand those consequences.

She knows firsthand, and as she says, “from the heart.” She just doesn’t give a fuck. Holding on to her best slogan for 2012 trumps whatever horrors await the Gulf Coast when that ever-growing oil slick touches down.

“Drill, baby, drill.”

Pat Buchanan is ebullient at the thought of the coming White Uprising:

Why are the Tea Partiers not intimidated the way Republicans often are? Why is the charge of racism not working?

First, they do not feel the guilt of country-club Republicans.

Second, they know it to be untrue. While Tea Partiers are anti-Obama, they are also anti-Pelosi, anti-Martha Coakley and anti-Charlie Christ. The coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.

Black America seems united. White America is the house divided, for it is in the womb of white America that this new people is gestating and fighting to be born.

And Pat’s standing ready with the forceps.

In addition to not understanding the Constitution – a profound political document that they have cheapened by fetishizing – Sarah Palin and her Tea People also have a poor grasp on the colonial history that they idolize. Far from embodying the spirit of the original Tea Party, they resemble nothing more than King George himself.

House Democrats are tired of waiting for President Obama to slow-walk the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell until after the November elections. Looks like they’re going to try it without him.

Not content with codifying racial profiling as its police officers’ solemn duty, the Arizona legislature has now officially demanded to see Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Reason for cautious optimism regarding Obama’s SCOTUS pick – maybe:

President Obama thinks Republicans will engage in a full battle over his Supreme Court nominee regardless of the person’s ideological leanings, and in some ways “that realization is liberating for the president” to choose whomever he pleases, an administration official told TPMDC.
…
“It doesn’t matter who he chooses, there is going to be a big ‘ol fight over it. So he doesn’t have to get sidetracked by those sorts of concerns,” the official told me. The GOP has attempted to obstruct “anything of consequence” put forth by the Obama administration since he took office, the official said. “The president is making this decision with a pretty clear view that whoever he chooses is going to provoke a strong reaction on the right,” the official added.

It’s one thing to be a total pussy. It’s another thing to be a big, fat, lying pussy.

More evidence that the Tea People don’t really believe their own propaganda:

Congress will not consider legislation to give the District of Columbia voting rights this year because the bill was clogged with “issues” such as gun ownership, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced this morning.

The “gun rights” issue Hoyer is referring to is a “poison pill” amendment that Republicans attached to the D.C. voting rights bill, requiring D.C. to scrap its gun restrictions before its citizens are allowed to have the vote. I guess taxation without representation is okay with conservatives, as long as it’s in a Democratic district.

Holy shit! The gummint wants to put a microchip in your “vaginal-rectum area“!

Reason magazine recently featured an article by Jacob Hornberger in which he made short work of one of my key complaints about libertarianism – namely, that it is less a political philosophy than a religion because it argues the merits of an imaginary society while criticizing a real one. My view has been that arguments in favor of libertarianism are largely nonfalsifiable because libertarians are unable to point to a working example of the government-free Utopia they espouse.

Not so, says Hornberger:

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

So there you have it: the United States in 1880 was a “golden” example of a libertarian society.

Taking Hornberger’s lead, Mark Sumner, a Daily Kos contributor, weighs in on the virtues of this “golden” example of libertarianism in an excellent diary:

Ah, the 1880s. I can hear people getting wistful from here.
…
It was a golden age without labor laws in which only 5% of people faced the awful restriction of an 8 hour work day while 3 times that many were blessed with a workday that was 12 hours or longer. Many industries, breweries for example, had a standard workday of 15 hours. And with all the extra freedom of that age, many children were able to experience the blessings of back-breaking labor starting every day by the time they reached the age of 10, with more than a third generating freedom dollars before they turned 15.

Of course, that wasn’t hard since this was a golden age of few public schools. Except it wasn’t. Public education was common across the country, even in remote communities. Even the tiniest frontier village rarely went long without a school, many states had organized school districts, and in a good number of areas the ratio of teachers to students was actually higher than in our own socialistic era. Perhaps what Hornberger meant to say was that there were few schools available to minorities. In many areas minorities lived with “compulsory ignorance,” as they were not only excluded from public schools, but discouraged (often violently) from seeking education. That accounts for a literacy rate of less than 40% among African-Americans in 1880. As laws changed and more schools became available for all, that rate grew by more than 30% over the next three decades. However, white literacy remained about the same — not surprising since whites were already suffering from those socialistic public schools well before 1880.

It truly was a golden age. One in which, thanks to that lack of nasty safety requirements and the troublesome health organizations, the average lifespan was all the way up to 40! An age in which, unfettered by the shackles of regulations on clean water and Hitler-like restrictions on sewage, 50,000 Americans died of cholera. An age in which parents could experience the ultimate freedom endowed by watching 1 child in 5 die in infancy, and 1 out of 3 fail to reach adulthood. Those numbers are for white Americans. Minorities experienced even more of the freedom that comes from burying your children.
…
An age without communist limits on commerce or immoral government tests, where thousands of Americans each year died from tainted food. Where you didn’t need no stinkin’ license to hand out medicines. An age free from the horrors of the FDA where parents could feel good about using a childrens’ cough remedy laced with opium, cocaine, formaldehyde, and wood alcohol. An age when nobody told us how much lead we could have in our water, or how much soot we could have in our air. An age where the injured and elderly had the God-given right to starve.

It was a golden age of rights for women in which… oh, wait. Sorry. I forgot for a moment that women don’t count when measuring freedom. Good thing, since in 1880 they couldn’t vote, were excluded from many occupations, faced restrictions on their ownership rights, and were often treated as the property of their husbands. Naturally, their reproductive rights consisted of the right to reproduce — or die trying.
…
[A]ctual Libertarians realize that for individual rights to have any meaning, they require the presence of a body that can ensure those rights. They know that freedom can’t be maintained in an absence of information, and that there must be agencies that create the transparency needed for effective individual action and ensure there are consequences to dishonesty. Real advocates of the free market realize that term has no meaning unless the market is free from coercion and the law is not defined by “might makes right.” They know that individual freedoms are incompatible with a system where corporations are treated as super-citizens and that Libertarianism requires that workers be more valued that abstract entities that live only on paper.

The difference between actual Libertarians and Republicans hiding from their tarnished name is quite easy. Actual Libertarians are concerned about the freedom of individuals. Conservatives use Libertarian as a code word meaning “I want to continue to enjoy all the privileges I do now, but I don’t want to share them with you and most of all I don’t want to pay any taxes.” Push come to shove, they’re happy to abbreviate that to “Screw freedom. I just don’t want to pay taxes.”

Pulling snippets doesn’t do the article justice. It’s worth reading in its entirety.

Poor Mitt Romney. He’s going to be reading ledes like this one every day between now and the day that he concedes the 2012 Republican primary race:

Mitt Romney on RomneyCare: The former Massachusetts governor talks about the subtle differences between his state’s health care reform and that signed by President Obama.

And Poor John McCain.

Yes, it’s still true: Republicans are despicable. Even to their own people.

Did you know that promiscuous women cause earthquakes?

I can’t think of a better argument for drug legalization than this one.

Lucy gets her football ready – again:

“I’m optimistic that maybe the Democrats won’t go forward with the [Financial Reform] bill as it is,” [Sen. Olympia] Snowe [R-Maine] told reporters outside her office. “Over the next few days, hopefully, something will change to make that possible. I don’t see why it would be impossible because frankly I think that there isn’t that much of a gap.”

Would such an agreement be possible within the week, to keep within the Democrats’ preferred timeframe?

“I think it certainly could be, absolutely,” Snowe said. “I’m always willing to be the only Republican if it’s the right thing, and it’s important to do the right thing on this.“

As she’s said before, when history calls, history calls.

Governor Rick Perry (R-Texastan) thinks W was the Best. President. Evah.

At the end of the day, when the history books are written, I think George W. Bush will go down as a very, very good President. Approaching great? I don’t know yet because I don’t know if we’ve seen the –

A year and a half since he’s been out of office, this may be a little bit early to write George’s history. But here’s why he was an incredibly good President: because this man kept America safe. […]

Anyone who is not a rank political hack, who has an agenda, and looks at this President’s efforts — I mean, there are two things that I think people judge Presidents on: their safety and the economy.

No doubt. One of the most epic terrorist attacks in world history, a soaring deficit, and a near-economic collapse later, George’s posterity is sitting pretty.

Speaking of keeping America safe:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and US officials say two leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq have been killed in a joint Iraqi-US operation.

Mr Maliki said on national TV that the Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who led an affiliate group, were dead.

US Vice-President Joe Biden said their deaths were “potentially devastating blows” to al-Qaeda in Iraq.

You know – the “al-Qaeda in Iraq” that didn’t even exist until Rick Perry’s BFF invaded the country.

Ah, chastity:

When Pat Bond told her lover Henry Willenborg, a Franciscan priest, that she was pregnant, he urged her to have an abortion.

Bond, who was 28, had a miscarriage and then became pregnant again. This time Willenborg’s superiors urged her to give up the child for adoption.

Bond, from Missouri, kept the child but agreed to a vow of silence. In a signed contract with the Catholic Church, she undertook to keep the priest’s identity secret in exchange for financial support for her son, Nathan.

In America, Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy and Austria,women made pregnant by priests have signed such pledges in exchange for hush money from the church.

Deus vult, and all that.

Looks like Jews for Sarah Palin may have launched their web site a little too soon:

“Hearing any leader declare that America isn’t a Christian nation and poking at allies like Israel in the eye — it is mind-boggling to see some of our nation’s actions recently, but politics truly is a topic for another day,” Palin said.

In some ways the really noteworthy thing here is that Palin specifically combined her denunciation of religious minority groups with an attack on Barack Obama’s insufficient fealty to Israeli government policies. The two themes were in the very same sentence.

Jim Crow is alive and well in Arizona. Thanks to the Arizona legislature, having brown skin is the only probable cause police now need to pull you over and ask for your papers. Jawohl!

This is pretty much all you need to know about the Republicans’ loyalties when it comes to passing meaningful financial reform.

The Douchebag Council at Pat Robertson’s Liberty University argue that unless employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference, deviant sex offenders are going to rape the bloody stumps of paraplegic veterans.

For Mitch McConnell, telling lies is like breathing:

CANDY CROWLEY (CNN, Sunday): The president says you are being deceptive in describing this bill.

MCCONNELL: Well, Candy … there is a bailout fund in the bill that was reported out of the Banking Committee, the partisan bill that came out of committee on a party-line vote.

CROWLEY: But that still does not–

MCCONNELL: I don’t think that’s in dispute.

CROWLEY: But that bailout is funded by the banks themselves, is it not? It is not a taxpayer bailout?

MCCONNELL: Well, Robert Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, says it is a bailout fund.

***

When Mitch McConnell has to misquote me to find evidence he’s telling the truth, he is desperate. No, Senator, I never said Dodd’s finance reform bill contains a bailout fund. The fund in the Dodd bill is a $50 billion liquidation fund designed to keep the creditors of distressed banks from jumping ship so fast they’d cause widespread financial panic before the bank’s operations could be wound down. And the cost of that liquidation fund would be paid entirely by Wall Street’s biggest banks. So it’s not, I repeat not, a bailout fund.

As always, Eugene Robinson nails it:

The overhyped Tea Party phenomenon is more about symbolism and screaming than anything else. A “movement” that encompasses gun nuts, tax protesters, devotees of the gold standard, Sarah Palin, insurance company lobbyists, “constitutionalists” who have not read the Constitution, Medicare recipients who oppose government-run health care, crazy “birthers” who claim President Obama was born in another country, a contingent of outright racists (come on, people, let’s be real) and a bunch of fat-cat professional politicians pretending to be “outsiders” is not a coherent intellectual or political force.

Speaking of the incoherence of the Tea People:

Tea party activists are divided roughly into two camps, according to a new POLITICO/TargetPoint poll: one that’s libertarian-minded and largely indifferent to hot-button values issues and another that’s culturally conservative and equally concerned about social and fiscal issues.
…
The results, however, suggest a distinct fault line that runs through the tea party activist base, characterized by two wings led by the politicians who ranked highest when respondents were asked who “best exemplifies the goals of the tea party movement” — former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a former GOP presidential candidate.

Call it the Dingbat/Wingnut split.

Finally, there is much to criticize about the Obama administration. Thinking that America’s success is measured by how much the rest of the world hates us is not one of them.

Happy Monday! The crazy continues, even when we’re busy. Here’s a taste of what I’ve missed over the past few days:

The big news, of course, is Goldman Sachs getting caught selling its customers securities they knew would fail, and then betting against them. But you already knew that. And is this really surprising to anyone at this point?

Here’s some stuff you might have missed:

Notorious bigot and former Republican congressman Tom Tancredo wants to “send Obama back to Kenya.”

Celebrated bigot and erstwhile Sheriff Joe Arpaio kills an epileptic man:

A man died from a brain hemorrhage after Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers refused to give him his anti-seizure medication and put him in a cell with a concrete floor and walls, his daughters say.

The family says the Sheriff’s Department knew of Joseph Phillippi’s medical history because he had suffered multiple seizures when he was denied his medication during a previous incarceration.

The Oklahoma legislature wants to create a State Militia – using taxpayer money of course – to protect itself against Federal tyranny:

[State Sen. Randy Brogdon, R-Owasso], who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, said in an AP story Monday that a citizen militia is authorized by state law and the U.S. Constitution and that the Second Amendment “deals directly with the right of an individual to keep and bear arms to protect themselves from an overreaching federal government.”

At the time, Brogdon and some local tea party leaders indicated a militia could be used to stop federal encroachment into state’s rights. Brogdon has since said he spoke only of a new National Guard-type unit to aid the state during civil emergencies. In a number of media appearances this week he said he never used the term “militia” in his AP interview.

Brogdon used it five times.

“Is a state militia a good idea? It probably is. Because it, again, it would just reinforce the, the attitude and the belief that you and I have the right to keep and bear arms and to provide and protect our families from an overreaching federal government. I think it’s a great idea,” Brogdon said in the interview conducted last week.

Don’t like the Federal government? Think it’s “tyranny” any time your party is out of power? Why not declare yourself a sovereign citizen:

Sovereign citizens are anti-government extremists who believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or “sovereign” from the United States. As a result, they believe they don’t have to answer to any government authority, including courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, or law enforcement.

This causes all kinds of problems—and crimes. For example, many sovereign citizens don’t pay their taxes. They hold illegal courts that issue warrants for judges and police officers. They clog up the court system with frivolous lawsuits and liens against public officials to harass them. And they use fake money orders, personal checks, and the like at government agencies, banks, and businesses.

Sounds like fun!

Shocker: Americans hate Sarah Palin and her teabagger army:

In a new CNN/Opinion Research poll, the ephemeral nature of the Tea Party movement is once again revealed. When asked for their opinion of Tea Parties, respondents were decidedly unenthusiastic.

While the total numbers for support and opposition are tied at 27%, the support numbers have declined since January and those strongly opposed have doubled.
…
A mere 4% reported having attended a Tea Party rally or meeting.
…
These numbers confirm previous polling that shows the Tea Party to be a much smaller phenomenon than the impression given to it by the media. It incorporates a tiny percentage of the population and is widely disliked.
…
The Tea Bag sag coincides with the plummeting popularity of the Tea Bag Hag, Sarah Palin. The CNN poll showed Palin’s favorability rating at 39% (55% unfavorable). 69% of respondents said that she is not qualified to be president.

Maybe when she finally manages to reunite church and state, her followers’ “prayer shields” will be able to protect her from those kind of numbers.

Speaking of the Tea Bag Hag, this story is priceless:

A couple of weeks before the Alaska legislature began this year’s session, a bipartisan group of state senators on a retreat a few hours from here invited Gov. Sarah Palin to join them. Accompanied by a retinue of advisers, she took a seat at one end of a conference table and listened passively as Gary Stevens, the president of the Alaska Senate, a former college history professor and a low-key Republican with a reputation for congeniality, expressed delight at her presence.

Would the governor, a smiling Stevens asked, like to share some of her plans and proposals for the coming legislative session?

Palin looked around the room and paused, according to several senators present. “I feel like you guys are always trying to put me on the spot,” she said finally, as the room became silent.

And speaking of being put on the spot:

With partisan charges over financial regulation legislation sharpening and intensifying, Senator Scott Brown said yesterday that he would follow GOP leaders and vote against the current version of the bill.
…
Brown, whose vote could be critical as Democrats seek to find a GOP member to avoid a filibuster, assiduously avoided talking about specifics.

When asked what areas he thought should be fixed, he replied: “Well, what areas do you think should be fixed? I mean, you know, tell me. And then I’ll get a team and go fix it.’’

When you want the American public to believe you’re fighting the big banks instead of fellating them, who you gonna call? Why, Frank Luntz, of course:

The crux of [Mitch McConnell's] criticism is that the bill “institutionalizes… taxpayer-funded bailouts of Wall Street banks.” He knocked the expansion of power at the Fed and Treasury, while sounding the alarm on Wall Street accountability. If the outline of his speech sounds familiar, it’s because it is the exact argument pollster Frank Luntz urged Republicans to make earlier this year in a widely publicized memo. Compare the excerpts below (emphasis mine):

Luntz: “The single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout.”

McConnell: “We cannot allow endless taxpayer-funded bailouts for big Wall Street banks. And that’s why we must not pass the financial reform bill that’s about to hit the floor.”

Luntz: “Taxpayers should not be held responsible for the failure of big business any longer. If a business is going to fail, not matter how big, let it fail.”

McConnell: “[The Dodd bill] gives the government a new backdoor mechanism for propping up failing or failed institutions…. We won’t solve this problem until the biggest banks are allowed to fail.”

Luntz: “Government policies caused the bubble and its ultimate crash. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Reserve, and the Community Reinvestment Act all had a role in the catastrophe. The government inflated economic bubbles with easy credit policies.”

McConnell: “It also directs the Fed to oversee 35 to 50 of the biggest firms, replicating on an even larger scale the same distortions that plagued the housing market and helped trigger a massive bubble we’ll be suffering from for years. If you thought Fannie and Freddie were dangerous, how about 35 to 50 of them?”

Have you heard the new one that Republicans are pushing? Outrage that 47% of American households don’t even pay taxes. It’s bullshit, of course. 47% of Americans receive enough tax credits to wipe out their federal income tax burden. But they still pay payroll taxes and state income taxes, which disproportionately impact lower-income taxpayers (when was the last time you heard a rich guy bitching about his payroll tax?). Of course the hilarious element of all of this is watching Republicans complain about people not paying enough taxes. Take it away, John Stewart.

On that note, if you’re bummed out that rich people didn’t get a tax break this year like the other 98% of us, why not make a donation to help them out?

GetEQUAL is an equal rights advocacy group founded by Robin McGehee and Kip Williams, the co-directors of last Fall’s National Equality March on Washington. As part of their larger goal of demanding equal rights for the LGBT community, they have partnered with Lt. Dan Choi to carry out direct actions aimed at lighting a fire under the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.”

GetEQUAL’s first action took place on March 18th, when Dan Choi and fellow serviceman Capt. Jim Pietrangelo were arrested for handcuffing themselves to the White House gates and calling for President Obama to make good on his promise to repeal DADT. The display was coordinated with a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office in San Francisco, where four GetEQUAL members were arrested while protesting Congress’ failure to pass the Employee Non-Discrimination Act.

In Robin and Kip’s own words:

Our mission at GetEQUAL is simple: to create a movement of everyday people—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and straight—who are dedicated to bringing about full legal and social equality. We believe there are millions of Americans who are tired of waiting and are ready to act. Our goal is to serve and grow this constituency by helping them take strategic, coordinated, bold action to demand equality, and to hold accountable those who stand in the way.

We know it will take all of us working together to reach our goals, so we seek to create a broad and inclusive community. GetEQUAL will bring together people of every sex, gender, race, class, age, ability, look, religion, family status, or citizenship; those who can contribute in small ways, and those who are able to put themselves on the line. United, we can build a more powerful movement to demand change. We invite you to join us, and ask your friends and family to do the same.

Join with us.

Take bold action to demand equality for LGBTQ people. Don’t accept excuses, delays, compromises, or empty promises. Hold accountable any person or organization who stands in the way. Push back, rise up, and speak out against all forms of discrimination that plague our community.

Take the pledge.

Join the fight.

Help us make this one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Carl Paladino is the Tea Party candidate for Governor of New York. WNY Media today posted a piece on Paladino that is getting some attention.

Last week, we received a deluge of emails that Carl Paladino had sent to a veritable who’s who of Buffalo-area politicians, media types, hangers-on, hacks, and appointees. Mostly, these are chain emails with a long provenance, including hundreds of email addresses of current and past recipients.

The piece then goes on to give a sampler of the emails, many of which are sexually explicit, and some of which are downright weird (one video he forwarded was of a woman having sex with a horse). But the most telling are emails like these:

1. In December 2008, Paladino forwarded a message entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” including a video clip showing African tribesmen dancing in a village. This video is very popular in the white supremacist community and has been posted at the Neo-Nazi Stormfront website.
…
4. Here’s a cute email from October 4, 2009, which portrays President Obama and the First Lady dressed in 70s pimp/prostitute/blaxploitation garb.
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7. One email entitled “demotivated” included several phony “motivational” posters, along with this one: [an image with the title "run niggers, run!"]

Predictably, Paladino’s campaign is trying its best to ignore the emails. But they did issue this little gem of a statement:

Carl Paladino has forwarded close friends hundreds of email messages he received [sic]. Many of these emails he received were off color [sic], some were politically incorrect, few represented his own opinion, and almost none of them were worth remembering.

We’re not surprised the political establishment feels threatened by Carl’s drive the [sic] take Albany back for taxpayers. Our campaign won’t be wading through the details of what is just another liberal Democrat [sic] blog smear. It figures that members of the Party [sic] who brought us record taxes, record spending and record debt would want to change the topic from reform to having sex with horses and S&M parlors.

Yeah, right? Because liberals are always thinking about things like bestiality.

Oh, wait…

I’d rather not post the images here – they just give me the creeps. But you can see them here if you’re so inclined.

The National Review has been the standard bearer for the putative “intellectual Right” since its formation in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr. Whether it remains so is a subject open to debate. This weekend has added another little morsel to that discussion.

John Derbyshire, a contributing editor at National Review, was invited to address the Black Law Students’ Association of the University of Pennsylvania Law School last week as part of a panel discussion. The subject: Revisiting Race and Remedies: Should the Government Play A Role in Eliminating Racial Disparities in Education and Employment? He has since published the text of his remarks at his web site.

Here are a few of the things this conservative intellectual had to say to the audience of black intellectuals who had invited him into their home:

[R]acial disparities in education and employment have their origin in biological differences between the human races. Those differences are facts in the natural world, like the orbits of the planets. They can’t be legislated out of existence; nor can they be “eliminated” by social or political action.
…
Our species separated into two parts 50, 60, or 70 thousand years ago, depending on which paleoanthropologist you ask. One part remained in Africa, the ancestral homeland. The other crossed into Southwest Asia, then split, and re-split, and re-split, until there were human populations living in near-total reproductive isolation from each other in all parts of the world. This went on for hundreds of generations, causing the divergences we see today. Different physical types, as well as differences in behavior, intelligence, and personality, are exactly what one would expect to observe when scrutinizing these divergent populations.
…
We all notice the different physical specialties of the different races in the Olympic Games. There was a run of, I think, seven Olympics in which every one of the finalists in the men’s 100 meters sprint was of West African ancestry — 56 out of 56 finalists. You get less pronounced but similar patterns in other sports — East African distance runners, Northeast Asian divers, and so on. These differences even show up within sports, where a team sport calls for highly differentiated abilities in team members — football being the obvious example.

We see the same differences in traits that we don’t think of as directly physical, what evolutionary psychologists sometimes refer to as the “BIP” traits — behavior, intelligence, and personality. Two of the hardest-to-ignore manifestations here are the extraordinary differentials in criminality between white Americans and African Americans….

This is what passes for intellectual conservatism in 2010.

Whatever your feelings about Maureen Dowd, there’s no denying that she’s now number one with a bullet when it comes to commentary on the Catholic church, its despicable Pope, and its love affair with pedophilia.

From today’s New York Times:

To circumscribe women, Saudi Arabia took Islam’s moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Muhammad; the Catholic Church took its moral codes and orthodoxy to extremes not outlined by Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is surrounded by strong women and never advocates that any woman — whether she’s his mother or a prostitute — be treated as a second-class citizen.

Negating women is at the heart of the church’s hideous — and criminal — indifference to the welfare of boys and girls in its priests’ care. Lisa Miller writes in Newsweek’s cover story about the danger of continuing to marginalize women in a disgraced church that has Mary at the center of its founding story:

“In the Roman Catholic corporation, the senior executives live and work, as they have for a thousand years, eschewing not just marriage, but intimacy with women … not to mention any chance to familiarize themselves with the earthy, primal messiness of families and children.” No wonder that, having closed themselves off from women and everything maternal, they treated children as collateral damage, a necessary sacrifice to save face for Mother Church.
…
As the A.P. reported [on Friday], the Oakland diocese recommended defrocking Father Stephen Kiesle in 1981. The priest had pleaded no contest and was sentenced to three years’ probation in 1978 in a case in which he was accused of tying up and molesting two boys in a church rectory.

In 1982, the Oakland diocese got what it termed a “rather curt” response from the Vatican. It wasn’t until 1985 that “God’s Rottweiler” finally got around to addressing the California bishop’s concern. He sent his letter urging the diocese to give the 38-year-old pedophile “as much paternal care as possible” and to consider “his young age.” Ratzinger should have been more alarmed by the young age of the priest’s victims; that’s what maternal care would have entailed.
…
While the Vatican sat on the case — asking the diocese to resubmit the files, saying they might have been lost — Kiesle volunteered as a youth minister at a church north of Oakland. The A.P. also reported that even after the priest was finally defrocked in 1987, he continued to volunteer with children in the Oakland diocese; repeated warnings to church officials were ignored.

The Vatican must realize that the church’s belligerent, resentful and paranoid response to the global scandal is not working because it now says it will cooperate with secular justice systems and that the pope will have more meetings with victims. It is too little, too late.

The church that through the ages taught me and other children right from wrong did not know right from wrong when it came to children. Crimes were swept under the rectory rug, and molesters were protected to molest again for the “good of the universal church.” And that is bad, very bad — a mortal sin.

Justice John Paul Stevens’ retirement announcement is less than a day old, and already the Party of No is lining up its objections to the imaginary nominee for his replacement, who has not yet even been announced.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL):

The product of [Sonya Sotomayor's] confirmation hearing was a near-universal rejection of President Obama’s empathy standard, the flawed notion that judges should allow personal feelings, political opinions, and social views to guide judicial decision-making.
…
I hope I will be able to support the individual selected by the president, as I have a majority of his judicial nominees. But, as I have said before, I cannot and will not vote for a nominee with a record that fails to demonstrate a commitment to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the oath of a judge.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX):

Our nation deserves a Supreme Court nominee who is committed to deciding cases impartially based on the law, not on personal politics, preferences, or what’s in the nominee’s ‘heart.’

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

As we await the President’s nominee to replace Justice Stevens at the end of his term, Americans can expect Senate Republicans to make a sustained and vigorous case for judicial restraint and the fundamental importance of an even-handed reading of the law.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT):

As I have said for many years, someone who would be an activist judge, who would substitute their own views for what the law requires, is not qualified to serve on the federal bench.

Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) – before Stevens even announced his retirement:

[Whether Republicans filibuster] will all depend on what kind of a person it is. I think the president should nominate a qualified person. I hope, however, he does not nominate an overly ideological person. That will be the test.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA):

The Judiciary Committee will take the time needed to ensure that the President’s nominee will be true to the Constitution and apply the law, not personal politics, feelings or preferences.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-C Street):

I hope President Obama’s pick will unite rather than divide the country (translation: I hope he picks a slavering wingnut).

A shocker from The Times today: Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, goes on the record to say that George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld were aware that hundreds of innocent men were being detained at Guantanamo and that they covered it up for fear of discrediting the Guantanamo detention program:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
…
Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.

When do the Bush administration criminal trials start?

Oh, right…

President Obama responds to Sarah Palin’s comments on the nuclear treaty he just signed with Russia:

Palin, the former vice presidential candidate, has not been shy about criticizing Obama’s policies and this week weighed in on his revamped nuclear strategy, saying it was like a child in a playground who says ‘punch me in the face, I’m not going to retaliate.’

“I really have no response to that. The last I checked, Sarah Palin is not much of an expert on nuclear issues,” Obama said in an interview with ABC News.

Pressed further on Republican criticism that his strategy restricts the use of nuclear weapons too much, Obama added:

“What I would say to them is, is that if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.”

Booyah.