Recently in Politics Category

In response to the bruhaha at the Washington Post, which included such erudite complaints as

One called me to complain about “promoting a faggot lifestyle.” Another complained about the photo in an e-mail to the two Post reporters who wrote Thursday’s story about the licenses: “That kind of stuff makes normal people want to throw up. People have kids who are being exposed to this crap. I will be glad when your rag goes out of business. Real men marry women.”

one blogger has this to say:

Your kids are not to blame for your politics. Your kids are not to blame for your decisions. Your kids are not to blame for any way in which you choose to live your life. Your kids are your kids, and they're people, and I know this is me saying this, childless whore, etc. And I'm not saying having children can't inform your worldview. I'm saying own your worldview as YOURS, instead of hiding behind your children's blankies and pretending you can't help yourself.

Jesus H. Gentle Cycle Christ, I hate this. Like, how are we to suppose this works, that you used to be a fair and decent person but then you had a kid and decided, "You know, white sheets look fucking good on me now!" You had a kid and then went, "Hmm, suddenly ladies kissing each other is just not on!" Bullshit. You always felt this way, and now you can justify it with somebody who is more into playing with blocks or reading comic books than realizing his parents are total assholes.

Problem is, he won't always be too into his own stuff to notice yours. So won't it be fun for junior to read someday that you used to be a good person and now you suck, and he was the line between before and after? And not only do you suck, but you're such a stupendous pussy that you can't even give yourself credit for the decision to suck, you've got to shove it off on him? Isn't that charming? Do these people listen to themselves?

You wanna be a bigot? You wanna hate gay people? You wanna wax redneck in the pages of the Post about faggot lifestyles and shoving things down people's throats? YOU DO THAT THEN. You just go do it. You go and do that all on your own, slick. You go and do that because YOU want to do it, you stupid motherfucker. You go and do that because you've taken a good long hard look in the mirror and decided that writing pissy letters to the paper about how you don't like reality anymore is the best way to spend your time. You do that because being a bigot is what you want to be.

Leave your children out of it.

(Via TBogg.)

Slacktivist:

One reason for the current non-debate over health care reform is that the Republicans and Democrats are playing different games. Democrats, and President Barack Obama especially, are playing Jeopardy. Republicans are playing Family Feud.

On Jeopardy, facts matter. On Family Feud, all you need to know is what 100 morons might've told some pollster.

More:

At the recent health care reform "summit," Republican leaders made it clear that they're not interested in playing Jeopardy. That would be a losing proposition against President Ken Jennings. Obama was eager to show that he really does have the right answers -- cost containment, near-universal coverage, lower premiums, better quality care, deficit reduction. All of that is well covered in the plan he's pushing and any attempt to challenge him on the facts would be doomed.

So the GOP has decided to play a different game -- to switch from Jeopardy to Family Feud. That way it's not about the facts, or about what works, or about the actual effect of actual policies on actual people. In the subjective guessing-game of Family Feud, none of that matters. Family Feud is all about perceptions -- about what those hundred people surveyed think or guess or dimly remember having heard something about.

And the Republican Party -- with tons of financial support from their allies in the health insurance lobby -- have been working very hard for many years now to make sure that those hundred people surveyed have a distorted, confused and mostly ass-backwards perception of the facts.

This is how you play Family Feud politics:

Step One: Redefine the facts. If a policy works, claim it doesn't. If it will lower premiums, say it will raise them. If it would reduce the deficit, claim it will bankrupt the country. Obfuscate. Distract. Confuse. Lie. Lie some more. Throw random nonsense at the wall -- death panels! -- and see if any of it sticks. Don't be troubled by contradiction or worried about consistency. It's perfectly fine to simultaneously propose eliminating Medicare while posing as its defender. That's absurd and confusing, but confusion is the whole point here. Confusion is good. If those hundred people surveyed aren't completely confused, then you haven't succeeded in rigging the game.

Step Two: Poll, poll and poll. Hire Frank Luntz. Poll some more. This is all you can afford care about. Family Feud politics isn't about ideology, principle, values, good government, effectiveness, solutions, reality, facts, science or truth. It's about perception and the shaping of that perception by any means necessary. Obsessively polling and recalibrating the message and then re-polling is the only way to be sure that you're shaping perception in a winning way. Keep this up until the polls show that the confusion and disinformation sown in Step One have taken root among the hundred people surveyed.

Step Three: Cite the polling data. Call it that: polling data. The word "data" there makes it sound kind of like you give a damn about facts or reality or truth-telling. You don't -- you mustn't if you intend to win this game -- but you need to sound like you do. Argue that the polling data proves that the right answer is unpopular and therefore wrong. Argue that the facts are contrary to the will of the people. Argue that it would be undemocratic, tyrannical even, to insist on the right answer when the majority clearly disagrees. If you do this properly, you can congratulate yourself for being a champion of the very people you're screwing over and even get some of them to thank you for robbing them blind.

Here's an excellent translation between what liberals are saying, and what the Teaparty retards hear.

From CBS:

BAD: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk.

WORSE: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk AFTER LEAVING A GAY BAR.

WORSER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar WITH ANOTHER MAN IN THE CAR.

WORST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a MARRIED state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

WORSTER: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, REPUBLICAN state senator from Southern California was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

WORSTEST: CBS affiliate CBS13 reports that Roy Ashburn, a married, Republican state senator from Southern California WITH A HISTORY OF OPPOSING GAY RIGHTS was arrested for allegedly driving drunk after leaving a gay bar with another man in the car.

Really, the jokes just write themselves.

Congressional Democrats grow a pair or two. Reid: GOP Should Stop Crying About Reconciliation.

"Realistically, they should stop crying about reconciliation as if it's never been done before," Reid advised the GOP. It's been done in almost every Congress. And they're the ones who used it more than anyone else."

Reid then rattled off a list of Republican legislative achievements that were pushed through the Senate. "Most of the stuff in the Contract for America was done with reconciliation; tax cuts, done with reconciliation; Medicare [prescription drug benefits], done with reconciliation," said Reid.

Wonkette: Black Man Puts His Feet On Desk, Wingnuts Furious.

A Pennsylvania college student was detained recently by TSA because he had Arabic language flash cards with him.

The following exchange took place between George and a TSA supervisor who questioned him:

TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11?
George: Osama bin Laden.
TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke?
George: Arabic.

At that point, the TSA supervisor held up George’s flash cards—which had words such as "to smile" and "funny" and on them—and said: "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?"

Tom "Racist As I Wanna Be" Tancredo kicked it off with an open appeal for literacy tests as a condition of suffrage, a tactic well known to my home state.

The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and "the cult of multiculturalism," asserting that Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn., ballroom that in the 2008 election, America "put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... Barack Hussein Obama."

Jesus.

This takedown at the Economist over his spirited and illogical defense of DADT is a complete and unalloyed delight.

This week, the Supreme Court put our democracy up for sale. FAIL.

His lips are moving. Seriously, how is it that Mr 9/11 Rudy G can say such crap with a straight face? Given that this is at least the second Republican functionary to insist that no terror attacks happened on Bush's watch, I think it's clear that this is a talking point being pushed by the GOP leadership. It's not possible that these people have forgotten about 9/11, anthrax, and Richard Reid. They Are Lying in a deliberate attempt to bamboozle the American people. Pay attention.

(That Rudy eventually recanted doesn't excuse this crap.)

Take a peek at his email of the year, in which a DoJ trial attorney discusses our detention policies in general and a particularly egregious one in particular, in which a US interrogator said to a detainee:

There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.

The attorney continues:

This was not a statement pulled from the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, nor archival evidence taken from reports smuggled out of one of Stalin’s gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than 7 years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible.

But even worse – far worse – is the fact that the government would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.

The word for this is obscene.

Our cousin, disgraced former congressman Chip Pickering (R - jackass), is apparently the sort of doofus who gets in fights with youth soccer coaches. Nice.

Or, at least, evil is still being perpetuated in our name. We can tell, because government hacks are still insisting that they can't be held accountable for kidnapping an innocent Canadian and ending him to Syria for torture:

Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal's McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he's 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was "rendered" -- despite his pleas that he would be tortured -- to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing.

[...] [T]he U.S. Government has never admitted any wrongdoing or even spoken publicly about what it did; to the contrary, it repeatedly insisted that courts were barred from examining the conduct of government officials because what we did to Arar involves "state secrets" and because courts should not interfere in the actions of the Executive where national security is involved.

Just so we're clear: This is the "there are no checks and balances," imperial executive POV. They get to do what they want, and nobody gets to second-guess them. Down this path lies all sorts of abuses, and it absolutely must be stopped. Mr. Arar cannot be alone; he's the unlikely guy who escaped the nightmare of extraordinary (and illegal) rendition. Someone needs to go to jail over this, but it's increasingly likely that no one will.

And that's very, very bad.

Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be.

Porn star Stormy Daniels (apparently a Baton Rouge native) is running against family-values escort-patron David Vitter for one of Louisiana's Senate seats. Don't miss the Q&A. (SFW.)

New York City now has an "Openly Heathen" council member - and he's a Republican. Fortunately, he insists that his faith will not drive his political agenda, so he's ahead of many Republican Christians already.

(Hat tip: Some Other Jackson Lawyer.)

Last night, he spent eight glorious minutes on a Glenn Beck parody that was pitch fucking perfect. Set aside the time and watch.

LA Times via JWZ:

Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."

How about we just limit it to scientifically valid treatments? How would that be?

Gawker: Americana That Barack Obama Has Made Un-American as measured by right-wing response, in addition to winning international prizes, includes:

• Puppies
• Classrooms
• Helping people
• Farming
• Doctors
• Beer
• Loving your wife
• Baseball and Basketball

and

• Checking out asses.

Related: What if Deep Impact were to happen now?

A few days ago, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL 08) spoke in Congress describing the GOP health plan as "Don't get sick, but if you do, die quickly."

His colleagues across the aisle were apparently annoyed, and some demanded an apology.

So he gave one:

NewsMax is running a column advocating a military coup.

UPDATE: That link is dead; here's another.

Check 'em out, in their own words.

Meet Your Conservative Movement.

Stay classy, GOP.

Reuters:

More than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient's physician, are rejected by California's largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation's biggest state

Sarah Palin is lying about health care reform. She is repeated spreading ideas that she knows to be untrue in order to further inflame her base. She is, probably, a craven and unscrupulous liar, unconcerned with the very real potential for disruption of discourse and actual violence created by spreading such lies.

The guy leading the Constitutional legal challenge to Prop 8 in California is uberconservative Ted Olsen.

He is, of course, nearly completely alone in the modern GOP.

How is it that the Onion manages to get so much right so often?

Congress Deadlocked Over How To Not Provide Health Care.

The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists.

There have been times when Democrats have run demagogic scare campaigns on issues like Social Security and Medicare. There are more than a few Democrats who believe, in practice, that government should be run for the benefit of government employees' unions. There are Democrats who are so solicitous of civil liberties that they would undermine legitimate covert intelligence collection. There are others who mistrust the use of military power under almost any circumstances. But these are policy differences, matters of substance. The most liberal members of the Democratic caucus — Senator Russ Feingold in the Senate, Representative Dennis Kucinich in the House, to name two — are honorable public servants who make their arguments based on facts. They don't retail outright lies. Hyperbole and distortion certainly exist on the left, but they are a minor chord in the Democratic Party.

It is a very different story among Republicans. To be sure, there are honorable conservatives, trying to do the right thing. There is a legitimate, if wildly improbable, fear that Obama's plan will start a process that will end with a health-care system entirely controlled by the government. There are conservatives — Senator Lamar Alexander, Representative Mike Pence, among many others — who make their arguments based on facts. But they have been overwhelmed by nihilists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. The philosophically supple party that existed as recently as George H.W. Bush's presidency has been obliterated. The party's putative intellectuals — people like the Weekly Standard's William Kristol — are prosaic tacticians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health-care reform mostly because passage would help Barack Obama's political prospects.

No part of this is untrue. What makes it more interesting is how obvious it is in the angles the Right takes in this debate; a frequent go-to position is that the Administration wants something other than what they're asking for, i.e. that they're negotiating in bad faith and have a sekrit plan to socialize everything, etc. The Right views everything in terms of party victory or defeat, and cannot conceive that the Democrats aren't doing the same thing. It's classic projection.

Radley Balko found that Alan Dershowitz is also bewildered about Scalia's anti-innocence position.

The Justice, we are reminded, believes that actual innocence is Constitutionally irrelevant if a person has been convicted in a "fair" trial. Dershowitz then asks:

Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: "Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she’s dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you’re dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you’re innocent."

Dershowitz then explores an angle I neglected in my prior post: Scalia is famously very, very Catholic -- and has said in the past that he would have to resign if his duties ever conflicted with his faith. The Vatican is no fan of capital punishment, and surely must view allowing an innocent man's execution as particularly egregious. How, Dershowitz wonders, does Scalia reconcile these positions?

Originalism -- that bankrupt notion clung to exclusively by Catholics and other pro-lifers -- aside, it's still hard to imagine how Scalia can actually manage to support the idea that it's Constitutionally okay to execute an innocent man as long as there was a trial at some point, regardless of new evidence or proof of innocence.

It really is extraordinary. Imagine: "Sorry, you had a trial, never mind that there's new evidence now that shows you to be the wrong guy. Say hi to God for me." Fortunately, his fellow justices (aside, of course, from Scalia's notoriously taciturn and undistinguished mini-me, Thomas) disagreed.

Seriously, check this out. You do not try to argue with the nutbird fringe; as someone once said, you cannot reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

Anyway, when asked why he (Frank) was supporting Obama's "Nazi" policies on health care, Frank gave both barrels:

"M'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it."

Just the other day I was wondering why Robert Novak hadn't been part of the chattering idiot masses spreading lies about every move of the Obama administration, and now I have my answer.

It's because Robert Novak, Douchebag of Liberty, is fucking dead.

From here:

[He got] E-mail asking me what my opinion about the current state of the health care debate is, and my response is: There’s a debate? Maybe I’m reading an archaic definition, but “debate” is not synonymous with “ignit bellowsacks at public meetings shouting stupidities to drown out discussion because doughy tearsquirter Glenn Beck told them to,” which is what appears to be going on at the moment. I’m sad for the Republicans, conservatives and others with actual, substantive objections to the current health care plan wending through Congress that a genuine debate is off the boards in favor of a strategy of uninformed tools making asses of themselves for the benefit of television cameras, but this is where that side is at right now. I will say, however, that when the whole of your health care debate strategy is to scream down any discussion at all, you’re pretty baldly acknowledging that you’ve got nothin’.

This is rich:

At the town-hall discussion in New Hampshire yesterday, President Obama addressed the ridiculous "death panel" argument the right has been carelessly throwing round. He noted, "The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican -- then House member, now senator, named Johnny Isakson from Georgia -- who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people's options. And somehow it's gotten spun into this idea of 'death panels.'"

The president's remark came soon after Isakson told Ezra Klein that Sarah Palin's attacks on this are "nuts." Isakson added, "You're putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don't know how that got so mixed up. It empowers you to be able to make decisions at a difficult time rather than having the government making them for you.... And it's a voluntary deal."

The problem, from Isakson's perspective, is that he's now inadvertently defended reality, when his party is committed to doing the opposite. Republican senators aren't supposed to debunk nonsensical talking points; they're supposed to repeat nonsensical talking points.

So, Isakson is left with an awkward task: walking back honest support for his own proposal.

The episode ends with Isakson proposing an essentially redundant amendment so he can claim he's tried to fix the whole "death panel" issue -- an issue that has never existed, since his amendment is substantially the same as the existing bill.

You Do Not Have Health Insurance. Go. Read.

You do not have health insurance. Let me repeat that. You do not have health insurance. (Unless you are over 65, in which case you do have health insurance. I’ll come back to that later.)

The point of insurance is to protect you against unlikely but damaging events. You are generally happy to pay premiums in all the years that nothing goes wrong (your house doesn’t burn down), because in exchange your insurer promises to be there in the one year that things do go wrong (your house burns down). That’s why, when shopping for insurance, you are supposed to look for a company that is financially sound – so they will be there when you need them.

If, like most people, your health coverage is through your employer or your spouse’s employer, that is not what you have. At some point in the future, you will get sick and need expensive health care. What are some of the things that could happen between now and then?

• Your company could drop its health plan. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (see Table HIA-1), the percentage of the population covered by employer-based health insurance has fallen every year since 2000, from 64.2% to 59.3%.
• You could lose your job. I don’t think I need to tell anyone what the unemployment rate is these days.**
• You could voluntarily leave your job, for example because you have to move to take care of an elderly relative.
• You could get divorced from the spouse you depend on for health coverage.

For all of these reasons, you can’t count on your health insurer being there when you need it. That’s not insurance; that’s employer-subsidized health care for the duration of your employment.

Once you lose your employer-based coverage, for whatever reason, you’re in the individual market, where, you may be surprised to find, you have no right to affordable health insurance. An insurer can refuse to insure you or can charge you a premium you can’t afford because of your medical history.

You do not have health insurance.

Siege reminds us of Bill S Sienkiewicz Friendly Dictator Trading Cards.

The DNC is actually shooting back about the GOP's "disrupt the town hall meetings with coached mobs" tactic.

Turns out, a certain Jackson lawyer isn't a natural born citizen EITHER!

Happy Birthday, old boy.

(Make your own.)

(Is Barack Obama an American Citizen?)[http://www.hereticalideas.com/2009/07/is-barack-obama-an-american-citizen/] explains much about the birther movement. All you gotta do to understand their POV is reject objective reality. Utilizing three alternative frameworks of reality -- one of which involves the Norse god Loki -- the author explains how Obama may in fact not be the natural born citizen actual evidence show shim to be. Heh. Here's a taste:

It might seem, to the average person, that the “Birthers” must have a tough time proving their case. After all, Barack Obama has released his Certification of Live Birth, which meets all the requirements for proving one’s citizenship to the State Department. The authenticity of the certificate has been verified by Hawaii state government. Moreover, Barack Obama’s birth announcement was found in two newspapers at the time, and such notices were provided directly by the Hawaii Department of Health.

Faced with this overwhelming evidence, the average person will no doubt shrug and consider the case closed. There is no question that the evidence points to the conclusion that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is therefore a “natural-born citizen.”

No question, that is, if you accept the dominant paradigm of metaphysical realism. That is, the idea that things exist independent of the mind and that those things are perceivable and knowable. Moreover, those who insist that Barack Obama is an American citizen also rely on philosophic naturalism–the idea that reality is subject to objective, knowable natural laws that can’t be tampered with.

However, if one rejects these two philosophic concepts, it’s quite easy to demonstrate that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore constitutionally ineligible to be President of the United States.

The best part? Such subtle takedowns are sure to be lost on birthers, at least one of whom will read this and, failing to understand the big words, forward it to all their like-minded compatriots.

Yesterday, Chris Matthews smacked around nutbird Congressman John Campbell on the "Birther" issue, and got him to admit that yes, Barack Obama is a natural born citizen of the US.

Add my right-winger cousin Chip to the parade of GOP types who can't keep their dick in their pants. Odds are this affair, the divorce connected thereto, and the lawsuit his wife just dropped on him are the reason ol' Chip's not still in Congress. Good riddance.

Now it's the turn of former Rep. Chip Pickering (R) or Mississippi, who appeared to be in line to grab Trent Lott's Senate seat and was allegedly offered the gig by Gov. Haley Barbour (his office denied this to TPMmuckraker), but decided instead to leave Congress altogether.

Pickering and his wife divorced soon afterward and now she is suing the novelistically named Elizabeth Creekmore-Byrd for "alienation of affection," i.e., for stealing her husband. What's more, according to legal papers filed by Leisha Pickering, some of the "wrongful conduct" between Pickering and Creekmore-Byrd (I guess that's what they call it down there?) took place at ... you guessed, the C Street group home up on Capitol Hill.

The kicker? This "C-Street" location is notionally a Christian fellowship facility connected to the uber-right-wing Family organization.

(Chip's grandfather and my great-grandfather were siblings.)

Hat tip: Mrs Heathen.

The old grinder broke. It probably wasn't more than a year old, but what do you expect when the most abused part of the machine (the doser lever) is plastic? Just another reason I will never buy anything with the name Gaggia on it again (the espresso machine being the other).

I did a quick check on the web, and no one would admit to having the parts I'd need to repair it, so I did a little modification with a Dremel to make it usable for a while, until I could figure out what to replace it with. Of course, a friend who has the same model and had the same breakage later told me that he was able to get replacement parts. Oh, well.

I spent several hours researching on home-barista.com. I can no longer find the gigantic head-to-head comparison series one of the founders of the site did from a couple of years ago, but I read it last Friday, and was all set to buy a $900 Macap grinder...when I stumbled across a message from the same guy suggesting that if you were doing low-volume work but wanted a good grinder—noisy, messy and slow, but with very consistent, very good results—you should consider one of a trio of low-cost grinders all using the same conical burr system.

Not many places seem to carry them, but I found a place that had the Ascaso/Innova I-2 grinder. When I showed Anne the one with the cow pattern paint job, well, we figured that if it was only decent, for $255, we had done OK.

I am pleased to say it is far more than decent. It is certainly better than the Gaggia MDF it is replacing. It took a while to dial in the grind, and the burrs will certainly become more seasoned over time, but even so, it is already pulling better shots, and the doserless form factor makes for less waste and less mess for a household that has maybe five shots pulled in a day.

I don't pretend to be a super-taster or even particularly sophisticated about my espresso making, but even if this is only taking us to an "above-average" place, well, it's definitely taken us up the scale. I now do believe it when the serious espresso guys talk about the grinder being the single biggest variable you can control in the quality of the coffee that you get from a particular bean.

They're talking about not releasing detainees even if they're acquitted. Goddammit, people, is it so hard to do the right thing?

On this Fourth of July, imagine for a moment what Hunter Thompson would've done with this Palin situation -- and with always-wrong Bill Kristol's prediction that she resigned to prep for a 2012 run for the White House. The country's less interesting without you, Dr Thompson.

The Minnesota Supreme Court has handed down its much-expected ruling in the heavily-litigated Minnesota Senate race from 2008 -- and it's a unanimous one -- deciding against Republican former Sen. Norm Coleman's appeal of his defeat in the election trial and affirming the lower court's verdict that Democratic comedian Al Franken is the legitimate winner of the race.

More.

Update: Coleman has conceded. It's over. Sixty, baby.

Heathen didn't like shit like this with Shrub in charge, and it's no more palatable with Obama in the White House. Detention without recourse or charge is contrary to everything we stand for as Americans, and it needs to stop. Just because you're on the right side of more issues than George does NOT mean you get a pass on crap like this.

President Obama wrote a note for a 10-year-old who skipped (the last day of) school to attend a town-hall appearance.

GREEN BAY, Wis. - Ten-year-old Kennedy Corpus has a rock-solid excuse for missing the last day of school: a personal note to her teacher from President Barack Obama.

Her father, John Corpus of Green Bay, stood to ask Obama about health care during the president's town hall-style meeting at Southwest High School on Thursday. He told Obama that his daughter was missing school to attend the event and that he hoped she didn't get in trouble.

"Do you need me to write a note?" Obama asked. The crowd laughed, but the president was serious.

On a piece of paper, he wrote: "To Kennedy's teacher: Please excuse Kennedy's absence. She's with me. Barack Obama." He stepped off the stage to hand-deliver the note -- to Kennedy's surprise.

(Updated: Link fixed.)

Granted, we can't expect the Right to actually honor it, steeped as they are in the politics of fear and bigotry, but take a look at this analysis of their opposition to same-sex marriage. Hint: it's got no rational legs.

The anti-gay-marriage soundbite, by contrast, makes no attempt at persuasion. It's like saying you oppose the Bush tax cuts because "I believe the top tax rate should be 39.6 percent." You believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman? Okay! But why?

The ubiquity of this hollow formulation tells us something about the state of anti-gay-marriage thought. It's a body of opinion held largely by people who either don't know why they oppose gay marriage or don't feel comfortable explicating their case.

In a liberal society, consenting adults are presumed to be able to do as they like, and it is incumbent upon opponents of any such freedom to demonstrate some wider harm. The National Organization for Marriage, on its website, instructs its activists to answer the who-gets-harmed query like so: "Who gets harmed? The people of this state who lose our right to define marriage as the union of husband and wife, that's who." Former GOP Senator Rick Santorum, arguing along similar lines, has said, "[I]f anybody can get married for any reason, then it loses its special place."€

Both these arguments rest upon simple tautologies. Expanding a right to a new group deprives the rest of us of our right to deny that right to others. If making a right less exclusive devalues it, then any extension of rights is an imposition upon those who were not previously excluded -- i.e., women'€™s suffrage makes voting less special for men.

(Via JeffreyP.)

Updated: Link fixed; high-order characters removed from quote.

Enjoy.

NPR is reporting that David Souter may retire, thereby giving BHO his first shot at the Court.

Excellent.

Arlen Spector has crossed the aisle. When Senator-elect Franken is seated, the Dems will be filibuster-proof.

Bill "Wrong About Everything" Kristol just won $250K from some conservative group despite being demonstrably wrong just about every time he's opened his mouth in the last 8 years.

What is wrong with these people?

This time, the victims are the TeaPartyTards. Check it out.

I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I'm still befuddled.

Option 1: It's a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn't bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.

Option 2: It's a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists ... only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform?

Nice. As Jon Stewart said earlier this week, all these hysterical wingnuts seem to have confused "tyranny" with "losing."

Stephen Colbert 1, Glenn Beck 0.

Mainstream conservative blog-and-news site TownHall (a property, it should be noted, of a Christian publisher) runs the "work" of Burt Prelutsky; HuffPo's Chris Kelly delivers a nice smackdown in response to Prelutsky's most recent hateful, racist blatherings.

Check it out.

Obama to overturn stem cell research ban.

NYT:

The secret legal opinions issued by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks included assertions that the president could use the nation’s military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and to conduct raids without obtaining search warrants.

[...]

The opinions reflected a broad interpretation of presidential authority, asserting as well that the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

Some of the positions had previously become known from statements of Bush administration officials in response to court challenges and Congressional inquiries. But taken together, the opinions disclosed Monday were the clearest illustration to date of the broad definition of presidential power approved by government lawyers in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In other words, preparation for a police state. The author of many of the memoranda was, of course, John Yoo, who also opined that "First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully" and that "the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically."