Media Matters calls out NPR for basically rolling over on the latest O’Keefe provocation.

Many right-wing talk radio callers are paid actors.

MeFi pointed this out, but the key posts to view are this Volokh Conspiracy post, wherein he notes that

I think there’s a good case to be made that taxing people to protect the Earth from an asteroid, while within Congress’s powers, is an illegitimate function of government from a moral perspective. I think it’s O.K. to violate people’s rights (e.g. through taxation) if the result is that you protect people’s rights to some greater extent (e.g. through police, courts, the military). But it’s not obvious to me that the Earth being hit by an asteroid (or, say, someone being hit by lightning or a falling tree) violates anyone’s rights; if that’s so, then I’m not sure I can justify preventing it through taxation.

Our counterpoint is the Onion story with the following headline: Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

A bit:

“The voters sent us to Washington to stand up for individual liberty, not big government,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said at a press conference. “Obama’s plan would take away citizens’ fundamental freedoms, forcing each of us into hastily built concrete bunkers and empowering the federal government to ration our access to food, water, and potassium iodide tablets while underground.”

“We believe that the decisions of how to deal with the massive asteroid are best left to the individual,” King added.

Don’t miss the sidebar summarizing either side’s arguments.

Just go look.

Somehow, they got around the 4th Amendment by getting a judge to sanction searching everyone in an apartment complex.

Christ. You know this whole thing is predicated on the notion that nobody caught in such a blatantly unconstitutional dragnet is likely to have the means to sue the shit out of them. I sure hope somebody does, though.

The ongoing efforts of Wisconsin GOP governor Walker’s administration to kill unions are just another part of the obnoxiously retrograde GOP agenda — attacking Planned Parenthood, attacking women, and attacking labor are all part and parcel of their worldview. It’s not about budget problems; hell, they created the budget problems.

It should come as no surprise, then, to realize that mining magnates like the Koch brothers are funding and backing the union-killing effort that has at its root the notion of ending collective bargaining for everyone.

Maybe nobody in your family is in a union, and maybe you’ve forgotten what labor relations were like before there were unions, but if you enjoy things like a 40-hour week, insurance, and safe working conditions, you have unions to thank. Support the Wisconsin union folks, and make sure your reps know that unionbusting won’t fly.

I’ve been meaning to point this Slacktivist post and its followup out for a while, and now’s as good a time as any.

As always, Fred Clark is worth reading all the way through. For both posts.

A moment, from the second post:

I continue to believe that when you encounter someone who is saying something that they know is not true, there is great power in saying as much. When someone says that they believe health care reform will lead to socialist tyranny, simply tell them that, “No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true.” When they say that “abortion is murder and America is a blood-stained, murderous country,” simply say, “No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true.” You will not need to raise your voice. Truth doesn’t require amplification to dispel falsehood. The falsehood wasn’t ever really there in the first place.

Justice Scalia: Women Don’t Have Constitutional Protection Against Discrimination.

I continue to contend that originalism as practiced by Scalia, et. al., is nothing more than an intellectually dishonest way in which to issue profoundly backward opinions, primarily about reproductive rights. As evidence, I offer this: I have yet to meet a pro-choice originalist.

Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is delivering an actual, no-shit, filibuster of the tax cut compromise bill. This is interesting because for many years, the “genteel” world of the Senate has rendered the actual “keep talking forever” aspect of the filibuster unnecessary; all that was necessary was to signal the intent of the minority party (or, I suppose, a coalition) to block cloture, and they wouldn’t force the drama to actually take place.

C-SPAN has live video, which you should watch just to say you’d seen one live.

(Extra Heathen points for any non-Erin parties who can properly identify the title quote.)

The cable-leak dump from Wikileaks has been kind of short of huge disclosures, at least until today. Apparently in retaliation for his arrest and possible extradition, Assange’s organization has dropped a new cache that, honestly, you should at least scan immediately.

Bruce Schneier has a modest proposal:

Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.

An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They’re afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism — or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity — they will be branded as “soft on terror.” And they’re afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they’re right, but what has happened to leaders who aren’t afraid? What has happened to “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?

An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers’ inability to take that kind of stand — and their inability to truly lead.

Some of them call terrorism an “existential threat” against our nation. It’s not. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn’t make an existential dent in our nation. Automobile-related fatalities — at 42,000 per year, more deaths each month, on average, than 9/11 — aren’t, either. It’s our reaction to terrorism that threatens our nation, not terrorism itself. The empty monument would symbolize the empty rhetoric of those leaders who preach fear and then use that fear for their own political ends.

Go read the whole thing.

Cry me a river, Family Research Council douchebags.

The Southern Poverty Law Center now considers the influential right-wing lobbying group a hate group because of its stance on homosexuality.

They’re right.

The ex-Majority leader has been convicted on a money laundering charge that carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Interesting bit over at Washington Monthly about recent dramatic shifts in Republican positions — and how they likely came about:

A few years ago, Republican voters, by and large, believed what the mainstream believed when it came to climate science. Then their party, its candidates, and its media outlets told these voters to stop believing the facts — and rank-and-file Republicans did as they were told. In effect, partisans on the right outsourced their evaluation of evidence to their party, and Republicans decided climate science is no longer worthy of support.

This happens more than it should. If I had to guess, if you asked regular ol’ Republican voters several years ago whether the United States should engage in torture, they probably would have said no. But then their party told them to change their mind, and they did. If you asked these GOP voters whether a health care mandate, in line with Republican proposals, was a reasonable policy, they probably would have said yes. But then their party told them to change their mind, and they did.

The right wing is freaking out over the idea that Obama is spending $200 million a day on a trip to India and Asia. By the way, the war in Afghanistan? That costs about $190 million a day.

The problem? It’s a complete lie, yet another example of the right wing echo chamber. They don’t care about truth.

Fortunately, at least some members of the media are paying attention, and breaking it down. The White House won’t (and shouldn’t) disclose actual costs and security measures on the trips, but Anderson Cooper pulled up figures for Clinton’s trip to Africa several years ago. Adjusted for inflation, that longer trip to more countries (6 countries in 11 days vs. Obama’s 4 in 9) cost the taxpayers some $5.2 million a day.

But the damage is largely done, just as it has been done countless times before. Some right-winger fabricates some piece of bullshit — say, death panels, or go back further to the Swift Boat horseshit in 2004 — and gets it into the media conversation from pundits and hacks like Limbaugh and Savage and Beck, and then gets quoted by party hacks like Michelle Bachmann, and a good chunk of our halfwit nation buys it and never hears the truth.

That’s how the GOP plays. They do it over and over; they do it far too often to claim innocence here. They are the party of open mendacity. This is what it means to be Republican in 2010.

That’s really pretty awful. This guy was the only vote in the Senate against the PATRIOT act, for Christ’s sake, and the nitwits in Wisconsin have replaced him with a Tea Party douchebag with zero actual policy proposals or positions.

Over at Kos: Four questions for Republicans, and four answers for undecided voters (click through for en-linkened sources):

Questions:

1. What was the average monthly private sector job growth in 2008, the final year of the Bush presidency, and what has it been so far in 2010?

2. What was the Federal deficit for the last fiscal year of the Bush presidency, and what was it for the first full fiscal year of the Obama presidency?

3. What was the stock market at on the last day of the Bush presidency? What is it at today?

4. Which party’s candidate for speaker will campaign this weekend with a Nazi reenactor who dressed up in a SS uniform?

Answers:

1. In 2008, we lost an average of 317,250 private sector jobs per month. In 2010, we have gained an average of 95,888 private sector jobs per month. (Source) That’s a difference of nearly five million jobs between Bush’s last year in office and President Obama’s second year.

2. In FY2009, which began on September 1, 2008 and represents the Bush Administration’s final budget, the budget deficit was $1.416 trillion. In FY2010, the first budget of the Obama Administration, the budget deficit was $1.291 trillion, a decline of $125 billion. (Source) Yes, that means President Obama has cut the deficit — there’s a long way to go, but we’re in better shape now than we were under Bush and the GOP.

3. On Bush’s final day in office, the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 closed at 7,949, 1,440, and 805, respectively. Today, as of 10:15AM Pacific, they are at 11,108, 2,512, and 1,183. That means since President Obama took office, the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 have increased 40%, 74%, and 47%, respectively.

4. The Republican Party, whose candidate for speaker, John Boehner, will campaign with Nazi re-enactor Rich Iott this weekend. If you need an explanation why this is offensive, you are a lost cause.

Oh, and odds are, you got a tax cut under Obama, too. But never mind that.

He’s apparently been whining about the left’s protests about foreign money in politics — which is an actual outgrowth of the Citizens United decision — and so said “You want to talk a little foreign money in politics? George Soros has admitted to donating $1 million to Media Matters for America.“

Soros is, of course, an American citizen.

The Washington Post covered her most recent debate, wherein it became clear that she did not understand that separation of church and state is part of the First Amendment:

Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O’Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons’ position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that “religious doctrine doesn’t belong in our public schools.”

“Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?” O’Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O’Donnell asked: “You’re telling me that’s in the First Amendment?”

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

“You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp,” Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O’Donnell’s grasp of the Constitution.

This woman wants to be a Senator. Seriously.

Update: TalkingPointsMemo has video.

With the exception of Mitt Romney, every Republican contender for the 2012 nomination is in the employ of Fox News.

It’s painfully obvious that most people are completely ignorant about not just taxation but also basic facts about where your tax money goes. This is particularly galling, since we live in an age of Miracles and Wonders where such answers are seconds away with any web browser.

Most Heathen understand how tax brackets work, of course, but I thought it might be useful to link to this rundown of where tax dollars actually go, from the folks at NPR’s Planet Money (which is in general very, very worth your time).

In the linked post, the PM guys provide a hypothetical receipt for a taxpayer who earned $34,140 and paid $5,400 in Federal taxes and FICA.

By far the largest chunks are Social Security (about 19% of the tax bill), Medicare (12%), and Medicaid (7%). Next up is interest on the national debt (5%), the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (4%). Where’s foreign aid? 0.8%. NASA? Half a percent.

Oh, and arts funding? Only 24 cents of this tax bill, which is a whopping 0.004%. Click through; it’s interesting — plus, it’s just plain responsible to have some notion of the relative sizes of the various Federal obligations.

Once again, Fred Clark knocks it out of the park. He begins:

Tea partiers tend to revere the U.S. Constitution in much the same way that many American evangelicals revere the Bible, which is to say they read it without comprehension, looking only for ammunition that can be used against their enemies. And since neither text was written for such a purpose, this so-called reverence is an exercise in illiteracy.

And it gets better from there:

“Stupid or evil?” is really just a way of exploring whether or not someone has provided sufficient evidence for us to conclude that they are not acting in good faith. The distinction may not seem to matter much, practically. A responsible citizen does not need to know precisely whether O’Donnell is really so astonishingly stupid as to believe what she’s saying here or so mendacious that she does not care that it is ridiculously false. Either way, she is clearly unfit for office.

The real kicker: what O’Donnell said in this context was that Obama was acting contrary to the Constitution because of the use of the word “czar” for some advisory positions, and we all know the Constitution insists quite clear that we don’t grant titles of nobility in this country.

No one is that stupid.

Yeah, me too. Herein find a discussion of Scalia’s apparent opinion that sex discrimination is constitutionally sound, since the “original intent” of the authors of the Constitution and the 14th amendment surely wasn’t to make women complete citizens.

Originalism seems more an excuse for holding unreconstructed 18th century views on white, male privilege than an actual respectable legal theory. (Are there any pro-choice originalists, I wonder? My guess: No, because originalism is an intellectual port of convenience for people who want to restrict that and other behaviors protected by the notion of Constitutional privacy, which was vague and uncertain prior to Griswold and Roe.)

(Confidential to R.M., formerly of Jackson: Not you.)

1 in 5 Americans believe Obama is a cactus. The Onion, once again, wins.

In Scissors for Hitler, Fred Clark explains how issues bubble through American society.

Not as sick as I was before, when it came with a host of other policies I found equally repugnant, but the Obama administration’s position on state secrets is just as antithetical to liberty as Bush’s. Frankly, I blame folks like Bush, Cheney, Addington, etc., who promulgated the notion of the imperial presidency so ceaselessly for eight years. Presidents of any stripe are loathe to release power; I noted at the time that such power grabs were likely to be permanent, and this is ongoing proof thereof.

Dammit.

You’re the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas.

Pastor Robert Jeffress of the First Baptist Church of Dallas gave a sermon a few weeks ago saying, among other things: “The deep, dark, dirty secret of Islam: It is a religion that promotes pedophilia — sex with children.”

TBogg: Sigh.

It is almost like the terrorists unleashed an unstoppable stupidity toxin into American airspace on 9/11. Yes, I know people like this have always existed. but in the good old days they at least had the decency to stay indoors gorging on Slim Jims and 84oz buckets of Mr. Pibb while watching Raymond reruns.

Fred Clark over at Slacktivist lays the righteous smackdown on the Liar Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Perkins appeared on Meet the Press opposite David Boies in the wake of the Prop 8 decision a week or so ago. Boies made absolute mincemeat of Perkins’ claims on camera:

“It’s easy to sit around and debate and throw around opinions — appeal to people’s fear and prejudice, cite studies that either don’t exist or don’t say what you say they do. In a court of law you’ve got to come in and you’ve got to support those opinions. You’ve got to stand up under oath and cross-examination. And what we saw at trial is that it’s very easy for the people who want to deprive gay and lesbian citizens the right to vote, to make all sorts of statements in campaign literature or in debates where they can’t be cross-examined.

“But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence. There weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science.

“… A witness stand is a lonely place to lie. And when you come into court, you can’t do that. And that’s what we proved. We put fear and prejudice on trial, and fear and prejudice lost.”

And that’s where Fred starts going to town:

In response, the Liar Tony Perkins, unable to support his assertions because they were not true, simply reasserted them. To any reasonable observer, this was not credible and the Liar Tony Perkins was exposed, yet again, as the Liar Tony Perkins.

But reasonable observers are not the Liar Tony Perkins’ target audience. “You can fool some of the people all of the time …” Abraham Lincoln said, and the Liar Tony Perkins never stuck around to hear the rest. He had found his calling.

Go read the whole thing.

Almost One in Five Americans Think President Obama Is a Muslim.

Here:

The RIAA and National Association of Broadcasters are trying to create a legal mandate for cell phones to have FM radios in them.

This is the modern communications equivalent of buggy-whip makers trying to get congress to force Henry Ford to bundle whips with the Model T. Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot.

The Tea Party has apparently come out opposed to Net Neutrality, on the grounds that it’s somehow an affront to freedom.

Can you see the corporate hands up those asses?

Radley “The Agitator” Balko points out just how little fact-checking happens on cable TV, and how brazen and shameless one can be in exploiting this fact. Wendy Murphy has made a career of being absurdly, obnoxiously wrong in ways that cannot be accidental — and yet she continues to get invited onto shows where she can spew her bullshit. And she doesn’t care. And she’s not alone.

Some of you are probably already aware of Conservapedia, the Schlafly-backed counterpoint to the supposed “liberal bias” of Wikipedia.

Obviously, such an undertaking — especially by folks who think the King James Bible needs to be retranslated to purge liberal bias — is bound to be chock full of hilarity, but nothing I’ve seen there so far prepared me for their new crusade: Insisting that General and Special Relativity are Liberal Conspiracies.

I Am Not Making This Up.

Rachel Maddow pretty much destroys Fox and their embrace of the Sherrod controversy, and subsequent (and ongoing) blatant hypocrisy.

When the Brietbart injected this bullshit into the mediasphere, Fox couldn’t contain their glee, and led the charge to get Sherrod dismissed. Their full court press was positively frothy. But we shouldn’t be surprised that, once the whole thing blew up, and people saw the whole, unedited tape, and it became clear that Sherrod’s speech was in no way racist, Fox changed their tune — this time, tut-tutting that the Obama Administration had jumped the gun in firing Sherrod, and expressing outrage at anyone would rush to judgement without getting the facts straight.

We’ve been through years of this with the doofuses at Fox, but it still astonishes me that they are so craven and so clearly uninterested in actual journalism.

No, I’m pretty sure there isn’t. (There’s another rundown over at Scalzi’s place, in case you weren’t keeping up.)

Constance McMillen has showed some rural fucktards in my home state that bigotry is really expensive. McMillen, for her part, has moved down the road to Memphis.

Last month, Texas Lt. Gov. Dewhurst insisted publicly that Phoenix, Arizona was second only to Mexico City in kidnappings.

Some journalists investigated, and found that (as expected) this was horseshit, and then said so, which irked Dewhurst.

“This is regrettably a new low for the Austin American-Statesman and for this particular group,” Dewhurst told NPR. “It shouldn’t be in the newspaper. It should be on the editorial page. I mean, for heaven’s sake.”

No, buddy, I don’t think so. Fact-checking politicians is exactly what belongs on the FRONT page, right where the American-Stateman put it. We live in a world where it’s astonishingly easy to do basic research; maybe you should try that before you go shooting your mouth off for political gain.

Democrats.

He totally nails it in Lara Logan, You Suck. In case you missed the context, Logan has become the de facto voice of “establishment” journalism that is shocked — Shocked! — that Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings included the damning and insubordinate comments that sank General McChrystal’s career in his recent story.

Some choice bits:

Anyone who wants to know why network television news hasn’t mattered since the seventies just needs to check out this appearance by Logan. Here’s CBS’s chief foreign correspondent saying out loud on TV that when the man running a war that’s killing thousands of young men and women every year steps on his own dick in front of a journalist, that journalist is supposed to eat the story so as not to embarrass the flag.

and

See, according to Logan, not only are reporters not supposed to disclose their agendas to sources at all times, but in the case of covering the military, one isn’t even supposed to have an agenda that might upset the brass! Why? Because there is an “element of trust” that you’re supposed to have when you hang around the likes of a McChrystal. You cover a war commander, he’s got to be able to trust that you’re not going to embarrass him. Otherwise, how can he possibly feel confident that the right message will get out?

True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth — spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department — but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?

And true, most of the major TV outlets are completely in the bag for the Pentagon, with two of them (NBC/GE and Logan’s own CBS, until recently owned by Westinghouse, one of the world’s largest nuclear weapons manufacturers) having operated for years as leaders in both the broadcast media and weapons-making businesses.

But is that enough to guarantee a level playing field? Can a general really feel safe that Americans will get the right message when the only tools he has at his disposal are a $5 billion P.R. budget and the near-total acquiescence of all the major media companies, some of whom happen to be the Pentagon’s biggest contractors?

Taibbi makes another point:

[T]he reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she’s like pretty much every other “reputable” journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you’re covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard?

Go read the whole thing. Really. (HT: @wilw)

The new Texas GOP platform apparently includes provisions cementing their opposition to all porn, all adult-oriented businesses, sodomy, blow jobs, gay marriage, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the income tax, anything to do with early childhood development programs, and (basically) the Supreme Court as well. Oh, and it cites the Bible as a reason to continue mollycoddling Israel.

There are two ways to interpret this.

It’s possible that the GOP are genuinely interested in making all the planks of their platform come true, and that they really are this ignorant, mean-spirited, bigoted, and theocratic. If that’s the case, we should run them all out of town on rails, because pretty much nothing in the platform is at all compatible with “land of the free, home of the brave.”

On the other hand, a more likely scenario is that the powers that be in the GOP don’t give a shit about any of this beyond using it to scare uneducated electorate into voting their way, and as a means to direct debate away from the actual agenda of the GOP — i.e., protecting wealthy interests. I’d argue that this is even worse, because it means they’re absolutely courting mob rule tactics in order to pursue antidemocratic goals, in which case they still ought to be run out of the state on rails.

In either case, progressive-minded voters statewide should insist that GOP candidates address this platform completely, explicitly, on every point, and as often as possible. Seriously.

Ol’ man Mohney wonders about the protocol, and then ultimately spills the beans about a truly tedious and pretentious gal he dated back in the day.

I only remember her because he had the poor form to bring her to my apartment, whereupon her attitude produced near-immediate ridicule. And now, 20 years later, she’s become — per Mohney — a “Sarah Palin-like figure” back in Aladamnbama, apparently poised for election to statewide office, complete with a web site boasting of her right-winger bona fides and (I kid you not) the fact that her daddy was a star quarterback at Bama, played for Bear, etc.

Granted, the state in question is Alabama. But still.

Salon writer Michael Lind takes on the absurd lost cause in the wake of my adoptive state’s new textbook requirements:

By all means, let schoolchildren in Texas read Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. But there should be more material from the Confederate side of the conflict than that. For generations, apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that secession was really about the tariff, or states’ rights, or something else — anything other than preserving the right of some human beings to own, buy and sell other human beings.

That being the case, the education of schoolchildren in my state should include a reading of the Cornerstone Speech made by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, on March 21, 1861. With remarkable candor, Stephens pointed out that whereas the United States was founded on the idea, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,” the new Confederacy was founded on the opposite conception:

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically … Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Let the children of Texas compare what Stephens had to say about natural rights and human equality with Lincoln’s views on the subject, and contrast the ideals of the American and Confederate Foundings. That should make for interesting classroom discussions.

And more:

Toward the end of the war, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis came up with a plan. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, they proposed to save the Confederacy by freeing and arming slaves. In “Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War,” Bruce Levine quotes some typical responses. Brig. Gen. Clement H. Stevens: “If slavery is to be abolished then I take no more interest in our fight.” Gov. Zebulon Vance of North Carolina: “Our independence is chiefly desirable for the preservation of our political institutions, the principal of which is slavery.” Once it became clear that the only way to save slavery and anti-statism in the South was to abolish slavery and adopt statism, the malfunctioning Confederate Mind short-circuited completely.

Libtard patriarch Ron Paul’s son Rand won the GOP Senate primary in Kentucky this week, which was a big damn deal considering how the GOP establishment lined up behind his opponent. Ordinarily, I’d be all over this despite being across the ideological aisle from either Paul, since pretty much any smack to the GOP is a good one in my book. However…

It turns out the younger Paul (and maybe the older; apples and trees and all that) has such a doctrinaire view of state power and private property that he, apparently, opposes the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that made it illegal to run a public business in a discriminatory way — i.e., the provisions that made segregated lunch counters illegal. He won’t come right out and say it, since it’s clear what will happen if he does, but on Rachel Maddow he came very close despite tapdancing around her questions and throwing out gun-rights nonsequitors. I don’t think his general election Democratic challenger is likely to miss this, and it seems like Paul is the sort of guy who doesn’t see the implications of his position — or how dramatically out of the mainstream they are, or how explosive that kind of revelation is likely to be. One of his lines in the Maddow interview was something like “I don’t know why we’re discussing a 40 year old law,” but “how would you vote on legislation like X” is a perfectly legitimate question to put to a candidate; he won’t get far with that kind of defense.

The video is long (about 20 minutes), but Maddow and Paul are able to have a respectful conversation about this despite Paul’s clear unwillingness to answer Maddow’s oft-repeated question with a straight answer.

USAToday: Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950.

Rampant homophobia is frequently an indicator of repressed homoerotic feelings. This time, it’s Christian Right leader George Rekers, caught traveling with a Miami-based escort from rentboy.com. More here.

Get breast cancer? Prepare to get dropped.

The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.

They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.

Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. […]

That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as “rescission,” for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.

But WellPoint also has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies, federal investigators told Reuters.

This is why we needed the HCR bill. This is why the bill won’t be the last bill we need.

Spot on:

The Confederacy, the secessions that led up to it, and the Civil War which followed, were about slavery. It is offensive that apologists would seek to whitewash this or, worse yet, deny it outright. As one of the guys who first described the Civil War (accurately) as “treason in defense of slavery” puts it, “Having our patriotism and love for the United States questioned by people who lionize the worst traitors in American history is bloody irritating.”

[…]

When confronted with words like “treason,” Confederate apologists like to mention that the Founding Fathers committed treason against England, and suggest that we celebrate the Founders because they won. It’s true that everyone likes a winner better, but that doesn’t mean that the Confederates were freedom fighters and the moral equivalents of the Founders. The Founders fought for the freedom of all men, and even though they fell short of realizing that ideal, they wanted to expand freedom rather than restrict it.

By contrast, the ordinances of secession adopted by Alabama, Texas, and Virginia make particular reference to the status of the seceding states, including themselves, as states whose laws authorize the ownership of slaves. The declarations of secession accompanying some of those ordinances, authored by special conventions of the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, you’ll see that they are all about slavery, expansion of slavery to the territories, return of fugitive slaves, and a refusal to submit to the lawful election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency because of his hostility to slavery. […]

But:

So if you are from the South, you have no need to apologize for the Confederacy. Even if your ancestors include men who fought and died for the Confederacy, this is not a matter which ought to cause anyone today to evaluate you as any different than anyone else. You are not your ancestors. You have to make your own choices, and one of those choices includes deciding whether or not to be proud of a Confederate ancestry. If I had Confederate soldiers among my ancestors (I don’t think I do, but you never know) I’d say I respected their bravery, and that I understood why they might have thought they were fighting for their country. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But at the end of the day, they were fighting for a morally indefensible cause and while I might prefer to remain silent about that, if forced I would have to admit that yes, I thought they were on the wrong side of the war.

Treason in defense of slavery is not a subject matter appropriate for any freedom loving people to celebrate. The Civil War had good guys and it had bad guys. The good guys were the ones who won.

TL;DR? The Civil War was unabashedly about two things: Treason and Slavery, both promulgated by the Confederates. The good guys won. EOT.

(Via Accordian Guy.)