Once again, The Daily Show knocks it out of the park.

Emboldened by a stronger-than-expected finish in Iowa, Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum — a guy who, in December, insisted nobody ever died in America for want of health care — is doubling down on the crazy. Today he got in a pissing match with a college student over gay marriage, which is precisely the sort of thing that’s going to keep happening.

But the best gift he’s given so far is this:

One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a Libertarianish (sic) right. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional conservatives view the world. There is no such society that I am aware of where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

He said that. Really. The video is from a talking-head show, but it includes actual audio of Santorum explaining how it really is the government’s business what goes on in the bedroom. Remember, this is a guy who’s opposed not just to Roe v. Wade, but also to Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird — cases that establish the rights of persons both married and otherwise to buy birth control. It’s hard to imagine today, but there WAS a time when it was considered Constitutional and acceptable for a state to outlaw birth control, or to outlaw its sale to unmarried persons.

That’s the world Santorum wants to return us to. So please, GOP, please please please nominate this man. I beg of you. Really. Bring the crazy. Bring it all the way to next November.

PS: The New Republic has a great list of the craziest stuff Santorum’s said so far, but look for that list to get even LONGER, especially if he wins a primary.

Cops who order or engage in the kind of behavior outlined here should suffer lasting, serious repercussions, including personal liability to lawsuits. We’ve gone far enough with this immunity bullshit; departments feel free to violate the rules because there are not consequences. The balance of power is entirely too tilted towards the state. Insisting police commanders and patrolmen be held accountable is an excellent step in the right direction.

I alluded in the last entry to a problem in modern “journalism:” the apparent need to balance a story about party A lying with a story about party B lying, in order to preserve the superficial appearance of impartiality. Even if Party A does lie more than B, we’ve reached a point where this can’t be pointed out without claims of bias surfacing from party A, and being echoed by party A’s loyal mouthpieces, which is enough to muddy the water and prevent any real discussion of the mendacity.

This approach has allowed one party — the GOP — to basically say and do whatever they wanted, knowing full well their lapdogs at Fox would protect them, and knowing mainstream journalists NOT owned by major donors would be too timid to point out that “hey, these guys lie WAY more than the Democrats!”

A logical outgrowth of this is something like the Politifact Lie-of-the-Year thing, where a factually true statement (the GOP sought to end Medicare as we know it) is instead presented as a massive falsehood precisely because the ledger at previously-trustworthy Politifact is so full of Republican lies already that people were claiming Politifact itself was biased.

And, as Krugman points out, this is par for the course today.

Politifact, in naming the Dems’ claim that the GOP was seeking to end Medicare their “Lie of the Year,” have basically destroyed any credibility they had. That’s a damn shame; they’ve basically allowed themselves to be bullied into picking a Democratic point (a true one) as their “lie of the year” to avoid appearing biased, since the vast majority of their analysis suggests that the GOP engages in regular and shameless mendacity. The fact, as they say, have a well-known liberal bias.

Briefly, they’re calling it a lie because, if the GOP got their way, there would still be something called “Medicare.” It just wouldn’t have much in common with Medicare as it’s known today — but hey, if it’s got the same name, it must be the same thing, right?

Washington Monthly has more, as does MediaMatters.

Politifact, for its part, just doubled down, not unlike certain douchebag “marketing” professionals we could name.

It’s no longer okay for you people to be completely clueless about technology. KTHXBI.

We get it. You think you can be cute and old-fashioned by openly admitting that you don’t know what a DNS server is. You relish the opportunity to put on a half-cocked smile and ask to skip over the techno-jargon, conveniently masking your ignorance by making yourselves seem better aligned with the average American joe or jane — the “non-nerds” among us. But to anyone of moderate intelligence that tuned in to yesterday’s Congressional mark-up of SOPA, the legislation that seeks to fundamentally change how the internet works, you kind of just looked like a bunch of jack-asses.

[…]

But the chilling takeaway of this whole debacle was the irrefutable air of anti-intellectualism; that inescapable absurdity that we have members of Congress voting on a technical bill who do not posses any technical knowledge on the subject and do not find it imperative to recognize those who do.

People are starting to notice that many of the so-called terror plots the FBI quashes are entrapment exercises created by the FBI in the first place.

This makes us safer how?

Topical comic: “So You’ve Been Indefinitely Detained…” by Ruben Bolling. Enjoy.

TPM has a rundown that also includes some great quotes from the Florida Family Association, aka the right wing nutjobs who badgered Lowe’s into pulling their ads from the program:

The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.

In other words: “Your show about Mooslims doesn’t show them to be insane freaks like we all know they are! Fix it!”