Can’t abolish what you want to abolish? Just starve it of resources.

Note what the current #2 song in the UK is:

Michael Moore has some facts for you.

Is Scalia the most vile person in Washington?

Washington, hell. Frankly, I like his chances in the regional bracket.

Go. Watch. Now.

(Via MeFi.)

This is what they WANTED. Attempting to negotiated with these halfwits is a fool’s errand, because they don’t care if we cut the budget in stupid, excessive ways.

Robert Reich at Salon has more.

I’ve contended for years that the justice’s much-discussed “originalism” was little more than a thin veneer over a legal mind more than happy to rule based on outcome rather than principle; he’s done it over and over.

So this development won’t surprise you at all. More here.

Serious question, though: Does anybody know an Originalist who isn’t pro-life? There’s nothing about the positions that should join them at the hip, and yet pretty much everyone I’ve ever encountered who claimed the former was also actively using it the further the latter. It’s almost as if they picked a doctrine to support their point of view! Which is convenient, since, like Scalia, it’s likely they don’t really mean Originalism anyway.

In other words, these actions will never be subject to legal scrutiny.

The only fix here is broad adoption of real encryption without back doors for snoopy LEOs. It’s not a question of stopping terrorism. It’s a question of preventing the state from having to much power with too little oversight.

The prosecution of Aaron Swartz was overtly, deliberately political, and had nothing to do with right or wrong.

Yet another reason why everyone involved in that railroading effort should be shunned forever from all reasonable society.

This is ridiculous, and MUST be protested and stopped:

The Department of Homeland Security’s civil rights watchdog has concluded that travelers along the nation’s borders may have their electronics seized and the contents of those devices examined for any reason whatsoever — all in the name of national security.

The DHS, which secures the nation’s border, in 2009 announced that it would conduct a “Civil Liberties Impact Assessment” of its suspicionless search-and-seizure policy pertaining to electronic devices “within 120 days.” More than three years later, the DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a two-page executive summary of its findings.

“We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits,” the executive summary said.

Seriously? Without SUSPICION? Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

Elizabeth Warren went knives out the other day, asking the SEC some very, very difficult questions about their “oversight” role.

Metafilter pointed us to The True Costs of Health Care back in November, and I’ve been trying in vain to write intelligently about it since then.

I’ve given up. I don’t think I can add much to the work already done here, other than to suggest you take a look. The so-called Obamacare improves our health care system in terms of access, but it doesn’t do much about costs. That’s the next step. Understanding how the system works now is imperative if we want to figure out how to be more efficient. And becoming more efficient isn’t optional; the growth curve for health care costs under the current system is unsustainable.

Obama has continued, and expanded, Bush’s position that on Executive say-so, it was okay for them to kill people — Americans — on the grounds that they’re terrorists.

A new memo obtained by NBC paints the broader picture of the thinking involved here, and it is a perfect example of the sort of power you don’t want governments to have. All you have to do is imagine how the worst possible person would abuse such a power.

A recent Wall Street Journal illustration of the upcoming tax changes used four example households.

The lowest household income used? $180,000 per year — for a retired couple! — which is more than 94% of all households.

The other examples:

• Single person, $230,000 (97th percentile)
• Single parent, $260,000 (1.5% of all US households)
• Married couple, $650,000 (top 1% of all households)

Median household income in the US, by the way, is a little over $45,000 per year.

Josh Marshall on the GOP’s plan to “fix” the electoral college.

On SNL on Saturday, Seth Meyers had this to say during Weekend Update:

Mississippi governor Phil Bryant on Wednesday asked the state legislature to declare President Obama’s new gun control proposals illegal, though I’m not sure if the Mississippi state legislature has that kind of power since it’s just 30 hissing possums in a barn.

It’s funny because it’s true.

They’re apparently setting up a committee to neutralize Federal laws they don’t like. Yeah, I’m sure this ends well.

The politically-ambitious US attorney proximately responsible for Aaron Swartz’s suicide has a history of legal bullying, including an ongoing attempt to seize a locally-owned motel under vague civil forfeiture laws.

Of course, it’s not just Ortiz. It’s entire bully-friendly criminal prosecution infrastructure. Civil forfeiture laws are fucking totalitarian, but law enforcement loves them because it means more toys for them in their endless and feckless drug war.

It’s got to change. But let’s start with Ortiz and her gang.

An internal memo makes abundantly clear what many on the left have been pointing out: the only reason the GOP has a House majority is gerrymandering; their own memo notes that Democratic candidates received more than a million more votes than Republican ones in this election.

How does this produce a House majority? District-line chicanery, made possible by stacked state houses. They can’t win on the merits, so they game the rules.

Larry Wilmore on the appropriation of Martin Luther King day.

Well, maybe a little, but there’s no way it could’ve compared with the experience of being there in 2009, after so much hard work and intense focus.

I am, however, a little sad that I wasn’t able to be there so that I could replenish by supply of this:

Yes, I bought some in 2009, and yes, it was good — if it hadn’t been, why would I want more?

It’s all over the news and opinion feeds that Mitt Romney did not attend the inauguration, and as such was the first losing candidate in 24 years to skip the ceremony.

That’s technically true, but only technically. As Talking Points Memo notes:

But that’s not really fair. By my count, he’s the first losing nominee since Michael Dukakis (24 years ago) who didn’t have a current elected position in DC when he was running. Bush (92), Dole (96), Gore (00), Kerry (04), McCain (08). In other words, the other guys basically had to be there, as presidents, vice presidents or senior members of the Senate.

So slam that job-gobbling Mormon for all sorts of other things, but not this. This one’s not fair.

A Utah businessman has been bragging about firing two workers to avoid the costs of “Obongocare” — and states he chose those workers because of their support for the President last fall. All this, of course, despite the fact that the business in question is too small to be affected by the new law.

“Obongocare.” The mind boggles.

From John Roderick, in conversation with John Hodgman:

It’s one thing to outlaw discrimination, an entirely other and much more difficult thing to end discrimination; one thing to raise taxes, an entirely other and much more difficult thing to persuade people that higher taxes benefit them. We have the harder job, and the onus is on us to do a better job. Conservatives base their appeal on greed and fear. If we truly believe that liberalism appeals to people’s generosity of spirit, we should be prepared to try harder and set a higher standard for ourselves than just shouting down the opposition. The Republicans own the tone of our national discourse now, and it’s a disgrace. High-mindedness is not naive, it is the soul of liberalism: an appeal to reason on behalf of justice.

Sure, he’s still dead, but it’s important to remember just what a fucking loon he was.

“REPUBLICANS ACCUSE OBAMA OF USING POSITION AS PRESIDENT TO LEAD COUNTRY“

Clinton/Biden 2016: Because Joe Shouldn’t Have To Move.

(For the purposes of comedy, we should should ignore that both are really too old to run again. At Inauguration Day in 2017, HRC will be about 68 and a quarter, and Biden will be over 72. Reagan, who was clearly too old, was two weeks shy of 70 in January of 1981.)

That is, of course, no surprise at all.

The national office of the Boy Scouts of America has taken the unprecedented step of reversing a local council’s Eagle award decision, officially denying Ryan Andresen the rank on the grounds that he is gay.

Advancement in the Boy Scouts is essentially automatic up until Eagle; you do your merit pages and whatnot, reach the requisite time in the prior rank, and you get promoted. Eagle is different; you have to complete a significant service project, and then go before a (local to your troop) committee for review. I always saw this step as a final check, so to speak, to avoid promoting fairweather Eagles not actually committed to scouting — resume padders or people otherwise unfit at the character level, I guess. My own committee had only one person on it other than my scoutmaster, if I recall correctly, but other councils may do it differently. In any case, it is that body whose decision is final. They forward the paperwork to some office, and your Eagle kit comes back to be awarded at the next Court of Honor.

That BSA would rescind the decision of a local council here is enormous, and it shows precisely how much of a pawn of right-wing interests the group has become — and makes it clear that cries of “well, it’s just the national office that’s bigoted; my local group is fine!” are misguided. That the Mormon church is the single largest supporter of Scouting is a major part of this problem.

It’s a damn shame. My experience with Scouting in the middle 1980s was formative and valuable. There are no mini-Heathen to steer away from it, but the overt, bigoted, rightward trend has absolutely kept me from volunteering my time with local scouting groups, which is something I always thought I’d be happy to do. I certainly never thought I’d feel the level of shame for their behavior that I do now. Dammit, I’m from Mississippi; I don’t need another group acting all stupid for me to be ashamed of — magnolia-tinged shenanigans take up enough of my head-shaking as it is.

Fortunately, it’s just about Robert Bork. The first two paragraphs:

Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.

Bork was born in 1927 and came of age during the civil-rights movement, which he opposed. He was, in the nineteen-sixties, a libertarian of sorts; this worldview led him to conclude that poll taxes were constitutional and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not. (Specifically, he said that law was based on a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”) As a professor at Yale Law School, his specialty was antitrust law, which he also (by and large) opposed.

In 1995, the NRA was pretty much just as useless and tone deaf as they are today. Eventually, George H. W. Bush got fed up and resigned. Go read the letter.

Still butthurt over the trouncing in November, the Koch political machine has set its sights on defeating a bill providing Federal aid to victims of Sandy, because (apparently) they should just suck it up.

Jesus these people are awful.

The recently deceased senior senator from Hawaii was also a complete and undeniable badass. Initially denied the right to serve his country because of his Japanese ancestry, he eventually managed to enlist.

Then this happened:

Inouye’s platoon had been ordered to capture a German strong point along the Colle Musatello Ridge, so naturally this guy decided to go in guns blazing. He led his team through intense fire to capture an observation post, a mortar team, and an artillery position (no bigs), and then moved his troops within 40 yards of a heavily-fortified defensive line, where they immediately came under heavy suppressing fire from three different heavy machine gun positions. Inouye didn’t give a fuck. He started chucking grenades like a madman, trying to blast the bunkers apart. This was fun for a while, but as he stood up to lob yet another explosive he was suddenly shot through the abdomen by a German MG bullet that passed all the way through his torso and came mere inches from severing his spine.

Naturally, this only pissed him off.

So, with the rest of his men pinned down by heavy weapons, the wounded Lieutenant grabbed a backpack of frags and started army-crawling up the ridge towards the enemy guns. As soon as he was close enough, he assaulted the first machine gun nest on his own, taking it out with a grenade from just five yards away and then clearing the rest of it out Al Capone-style with a spray of .45-caliber ammunition from his badass Tommy gun. When that one was taken care of, Inouye sprinted to a second position, dual-chucking two grenades that redecorated the walls of the bunker with Fascist parts.

Unfortunately, the time Inouye was headed for the third position, the Germans were ready for him – the dudes in this nest had just watched this insane-as-fuck little Japanese dude flying around bombing the shit out of their buddies, and these motherfuckers weren’t about to sit back and let Inouye just hand-deliver a fragmentation explosive into their rectums without a fight. So when Inouye was sprinting across open ground a mere 10 yards the machine gun nest, suddenly he saw a German dude pop up from behind a sandbag, aim a rifle-mounted grenade at him, and blast him at point-blank range with the WWII version of an RPG.

The blast covered Inouye with shrapnel and shredded his right arm to the point where it was barely still attached. This, however, failed to stop him. Inouye simply looked down at his useless arm (which was still clutching a hand grenade), pried the grenade out of it with his left hand, and lobbed it underhand right into the dumbfounded German’s face from about 15 feet away. The results weren’t pretty.

From this point on in the battle, Lieutenant Daniel Inouye of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team went into Total Fucking Berserker Meltdown Mode. He doesn’t even remember what happened next – but his awestruck platoon members sure as fuck do.

While still bleeding profusely from the mangled stump that used to be his right arm, Daniel Inouye ditched the grenades, unslung the Tommy Gun, and started firing it one-handed while running all over the goddamned battlefield like a fucking maniac, blasting the holy living shit out of anything with a gray helmet. He cleared out the third machine gun position with the Tommy Gun, changed the magazine, and then started running towards the main body of the enemy position, by himself, shooting the machine gun with his off-hand, wasting Nazis left and right in a hail of gigantic bullets. Finally, after rampaging like a madman, Inouye was shot in the leg, lost his footing, and fell down a hill. Unable to move, but unwilling to back down, Inouye propped himself up against the nearest tree, kept firing, and refused to be evaluated until his Sergeants had moved the unit into position and prepared defenses for the inevitable German counterattack. All told, he had killed 25 Germans and wounded 8 more, and he’d literally done it all single-handedly. When the men in his unit came to the hospital and recounted the events to Inouye, his exact words were, “No, that can’t be… you’d have to be insane to do all that.”

No shit.

Daniel Inouye received the Distinguished Service Cross, which was later upgraded to the Medal of Honor. He lost the arm and had it replaced with a badass hook, and after 20 months of surgery and recovery in various military hospitals, he went home, got a law degree, and worked as a prosecuting attorney. In 1962 he was almost unanimously elected to the Senate (thus making him the first Japanese-American in Congress) — he’s won the post nine times since then, making him the longest-serving current member of the Senate and the second-longest serving Senator in the history of the United States.

This, my friends, is a thing of beauty.

David Simon completely nails the bankrupt response to the Petraeus thing, and to all such scandals. A taste:

The arguments about character? That human sexuality isn’t the most compartmentalized element of our nature? That if someone will lie about sex, they’ll lie about other things? Really? No, sorry, fuck that tripe. Character has become the self-righteous rallying cry of far greater hypocrisy than any cheating husband. It’s the excuse that makes our prurient leer seem meaningful and reasoned.

The biggest paper in Oklahoma — named, of course, The Oklahoman — has taken the position, quite literally, that science should have no place in public policy.

It should not surprise you to learn that right wing billionaire Philip Anschutz is its owner.

It’s become a familiar line since Obama took office. Some $news_org will interview a high-earner to say something really fucking stupid like “I’m gonna make sure we don’t make more than $250,000 so we don’t have to pay higher taxes!”

These people are stupid, stupid, stupid, because they apparently have no idea how they’re taxed, and how incremental, graduated tax systems work. If the top tier starts at $250,001 of income, and somehow Obama gets a tax hike passed on that bracket such that the new rate is 50%, it doesn’t affect the taxes paid on the first $250,000 of income at all. The top tax bracket applies ONLY to the dollars earned over $250K.

Here’s a great rundown:

On more than one occasion, I’ve received an e-mail asking for advice on how to keep from slipping up into the next tax bracket. The motivation behind such e-mails is typically a misconception of how our progressive tax system works. What many people don’t realize is that our federal income tax brackets reflect marginal rates, not a rate that is applied to your entire income. Here’s a quick example based on current income tax rates…

For a married couple filing jointly in 2008, the 10% tax bracket covers income from $0 to $16,050. From $16,050 to $65,100 the tax rate is 15%. And from $65,100 to $131,450 the tax rate is 25%. A couple with a taxable income of $100k will be in the 25% tax bracket, but they won’t have to pay 25% in federal income taxes on the full amount. Rather, they’ll pay just 10% on the first $16,050, 15% on the next $49,050, and 25% on the last $34,900. This works out to $17,687.50, or an effective rate of just under 18%.

It IS true that, as income increases over the top stated bracket (over $388,350 in 2012), more and more of one’s income is subject to the highest bracket. Someone with an adjusted gross income of $390,000 pays the top rate on less than $2,000 of income, but someone earning $10,000,000 pays the top rate on nearly all their income. (This is not a bug.) But even at that level, they’re richer for every dollar earned; there’s no sense in curtailing or limiting income under the current US tax code.

This is, hands down, my favorite picture of the president and a visitor to date.

A group representing the core of the GOP House caucus published a copyright reform position memo on Friday that made ALL KINDS OF SENSE.

Consequently, of course, it’s been retracted, presumably to sprinkle it with insanity.

My longtime pal Philip grabbed another couple columns of data for each state (and DC) and threw ’em into a Google Docs spreadsheet. You saw before that college degree penetration correlates almost perfectly with Democratic voting in this cycle; here’s what we found when we looked at high school diplomas and income.

Diplomas

Not as clear. The top ten states break 60/40 for the Democrats, but the bottom ten are 80% Republican.

Income

The top ten states by income break 90% for Democrats, and the bottom ten are all GOP.

The more educated the state — as measured by the percentage of citizens older than 25 with a college degree — the less likely they can win it.

Naturally, we see good ol’ Mississippi on the right, but at least they’re not the WORST educated state. Thank God for West Virginia.

It holds up w/r/t regions and states, too; follow the link and scroll down for a county-by-county rundown of Florida. The blue areas are where universities are.

Check this out over at Mother Jones. It’s hard for me to envision a way the GOP can defend district-drawing tactics that give them the lion’s share of House seats in states where most people vote for Democrats, but there you have it.

To be clear, Dems have done this, too, and still do in some places, and it’s wrong when they do it, too. It seems to me that a state’s overall vote split and overall House split should be very, very close to each other. And if they’re not, then something is very wrong.

Lots more at MeFi. Make time.

The National Organization for Marriage is taking its show on the road — by which I mean they intend to step up their campaign to paint some American companies as gay-friendly specifically in places where being gay is very, very dangerous:

Their international outreach is where we can have the most effect…So for example, in Qatar, in the Middle East, we’ve begun working to make sure that there’s some price to be paid for this. These are not countries that look kindly on same-sex marriage. And this is where Starbucks wants to expand, as well as India. So we have done some of this; we’ve got to do a lot more.

Make no mistake about this: they are playing with fire, and will be responsible if their hate-mongering gets a minimum-wage barista beaten or killed for wearing a Starbuck’s hat.

DisappearingRomney.com tracks, in real time, the “likes” that the former candidate loses on Facebook.

h/t: Ol’ Rob.

How, exactly, were Romney and his supporters so completely surprised by last week’s results?

Bill “Nearly Always Wrong” Kirstol went on Fox yesterday and said “Don’t scream and yell when one person says, ‘you know what, it won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires.’ It really won’t, I don’t think.”

Stopped clock and all that, I reckon.

This article is a great rundown of how, exactly, conservative media’s bubble managed to misinform their audience so completely:

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday’s result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout — Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes. Joe Scarborough scoffed at the notion that the election was anything other than a toss-up. Peggy Noonan insisted that those predicting an Obama victory were ignoring the world around them. Even Karl Rove, supposed political genius, missed the bulls-eye. These voices drove the coverage on Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report, and conservative blogs.

Those audiences were misinformed.

Outside the conservative media, the narrative was completely different. Its driving force was Nate Silver, whose performance forecasting Election ’08 gave him credibility as he daily explained why his model showed that President Obama enjoyed a very good chance of being reelected. Other experts echoed his findings. Readers of The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other “mainstream media” sites besides knew the expert predictions, which have been largely born out. The conclusions of experts are not sacrosanct. But Silver’s expertise was always a better bet than relying on ideological hacks like Morris or the anecdotal impressions of Noonan.

Sure, Silver could’ve wound up wrong. But people who rejected the possibility of his being right? They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.

Again, for emphasis: the degree to which Fox & company feel free to simply LIE hurts them, and it’s hurting us as a nation. It needs to stop.

Make time for this, but if you can’t, here’s a transcript:

MADDOW: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately president of the United States, again.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math.

And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing.

And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone`s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually.

And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And U.N. election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.

Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole, because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides, both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country.

They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions.

And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff.

And the if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is snuck a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them.

And unless they are going to is secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we`re counting on you. Wake up.

There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let’s accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let’s move on from there.

If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everybody. Big night.

This is a distillation of something I’ve said for a long time — since Clinton, really. The GOP has abandoned reason and the enlightenment. They prefer doctrine to fact, since for them at the highest levels, the only thing that matters is what had worked at the polls. Facts have no special weight for them over lies if the lie works better in November, and several times now that’s worked, or at least seemed to. It’s this notion that gave us birthers, but also insane hostility to gays as a wedge issue, and Swift Boating, and a whole host of other mendacious angles promulgated by the right wing.

This has to change. Every bit of ingenuity wasted on lies to gain power is ingenuity we’re not using for the very real problems we as a nation face. We’ll all be a whole lot better off if we have two functional parties instead of a center-left party dealing in facts, and a right-wing party made up of insane fundies convinced the earth is 6,000 years old and that we’re being led to ruin by a Muslim Kenyan usurper.

“Mittenfreude.”

WhitePeopleMourningRomney.