WILL NO ONE RID US OF THESE MEDDLESOME PRIESTS?

People on all sides of the abortion-rights debate are appalled at the practices at Kermit Gosnell's clinic -- but now Father Frank Pavone, the self-promoting head of an organization called Priests for Life, has declared that his group has the right to name the clinic's dead fetuses and babies:

... In the case of Dr. Gosnell, we have heard of the 45 babies retrieved from the clinic. And we have read the Grand Jury Report and heard the witnesses speak of "Baby Boy A," "Baby Boy B," Baby C, D, E, F and G.

But now it's time, in our collective journey through this nightmare, to connect with these children more directly. It's time to name the children. We have no evidence that anyone else has given them a name or was interested in giving them a name.... As Pope John Paul II wrote, "God ... has entrusted the life of every individual to his or her fellow human beings, brothers and sisters" (Evangelium Vitae, 76). From the point of view, then, that we are one human family called into being by God, these children are also ours. And that's why we can name them when nobody else has.

This is what Priests for Life has done. On Ascension Thursday, May 9, 2013, a simple ceremony was held in the chapel at the headquarters of Priests for Life in Staten Island, NY. We heard the Word of God, prayed for these babies, their families, and those who participated in their deaths. And we then named them. I chose the name "Adam" for "Baby Boy A" ... I named "Baby Boy B" Michael....

Most of the other names are gender-neutral, since we do not have information on the genders of most of the babies....

A question for the padre: Who the hell asked you to do this? As you note, the women who went to these clinics never, as far as you know, sought to do this sort of naming. The possibility exists that they've done it themselves. I assume you simply don't know.

I support abortion rights, but I can understand that a woman might choose, after an abortion, to give a name to her fetus. Maybe she'd be more inclined to do so after experiencing the ugly nature of Dr. Gosnell's practice. I don't know. And it's none of my damn business. If a woman wants to do that, it's her choice. If she wants to do it in conjunction with someone from her religious community, it's her choice. But no meddlesome SOB should run around naming her fetus for her.

This is the worst sort of paternalism (All your fetuses belong to us!) combined with a typical anti-abortion desire to portray the unborn as specially innocent so that that innocence can be appropriated, in the hope of getting some sort of reflected glory from it.

Father Pavone, by the way, is a well-connected right-wing operative who gave the invocation at a 2005 inaugural eve gala sponsored by the Traditional Values Coalition and attended by Karl Rove. He met privately with John McCain in the summer before the 2008 election as part of McCain's Catholic outreach efforts. He's affiliated with Father Paul Scalia, who's also an anti-abortion (and anti-gay) activist and who's the son of Antonin.

Father Pavone is best known for his frequent vigils at the bedside of Terri Schiavo, after which he repeatedly claimed to have made eye contact with her. He went on to publicly call Schiavo's husband a murderer. Father Pavone's work was recently curtailed for a year by the bishop of Amarillo, Texas, who grew weary of the lavish spending by Priests for Life. Pavone has friends in the Vatican, however, so he's free again to continue his work.

****

UPDATE, FRIDAY: What Pavone has done wins the K-Lo seal of approval.

THE FLAW IN THE DEMOCRATS' TED CRUZ STRATEGY

Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo sees a clever strategy in Democrats' frequent invocations of Ted Cruz, one that helps Democrats and GOP radicals, at the expense of more mainstream Republicans:

When [Harry] Reid insults [Cruz], and when [Cruz] gets under [Dianne] Feinstein's skin, that helps [Cruz] with the GOP base. When Democratic strategist James Carville goes on national television to acknowledge Cruz's talents and kinda-sorta suggest Democrats would be scared to run against him, we recognize that as tried-and-true but harmless ratfucking, to use the technical term. Cruz sees it as an opportunity to tout his conservative bona fides.

Everyone wins -- except the rest of the GOP.

"It is fair to say that there's a general sense that the more Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are the face of the Republican Party, the worse it is for the Republican brand and the better it is for Democrats," said a senior Democratic Senate aide.

Except that it doesn't really work that way, because Democrats don't have a noise machine capable of making these guys stand for the whole GOP.

The so-called liberal media will simply never be as nakedly ideological as the right-wing media. The right-wing media works hand in glove with the GOP to highlight every liberal or leftist or radical, in or out of the Democratic Party, with the shared goal of making all those people the faces of the party (while also laboring to make mildly liberal Democrats and Democratic ideas seem dangerously radical). By contrast, NBC and ABC and CBS and CNN and The New York Times and The Washington Post will respectfully highlight the progressive-seeming immigration stylings of Marco and Lindsey and Johnny Mac, and the liberal-seeming drone critique of Rand Paul, and will pay great respect to all sorts of people critical of the Democrats -- Simpson and Bowles on the budget, the whistleblowers on Benghazi -- which has the effect of making Republican ideologues on these issues seem reasonable.

Democrats might be able to flood the zone and make Cruz the face of the GOP if they were in campaign mode all the time, the way Republicans are -- Democrats did a pretty good job of making Todd Akin the face of the GOP in 2012 (it helped that Mitt Romney was also the rich, oblivious face of the party on pocketbook issues) -- but Democrats only seem able to do this in presidential election years. They couldn't even make Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, and Carl Paladino the face of the party in 2010 -- those loons were beaten, but the GOP triumphed otherwise.

It's worthwhile for the Democrats to try focusing on Cruz and his ilk, but they really need to work much harder, to make up for the lack of zone-flooding ideological-media firepower.

OOPS

Front page of today's New York Post:





Benghazi didn't make the front page of Murdoch's flagship U.S. tabloid -- not even up in the corner as a secondary headline. On the Post site as I type, Benghazi is the twelfth story under "Latest News," ranked below "Don't be a blockhead! Charlie Brown voice actor sentenced" and a story about a Staten Island barber who "allegedly killed his stylist co-worker during an argument over some broken clippers." Needless to say, Jodi Arias and (especially) the Cleveland story get the most play.

TBogg's take on all this:

Todays conspiracy theory: Obama released Amanda Berry from his FEMA rape house in order to overshadow the Benghazi hearing.

— TBogg (@tbogg) May 8, 2013

Well, the editors of New York Post knows their readers, and this Murdoch crusade doesn't appeal to them. Tabloid rules trump the right-wing narrative in this case -- as a rule, for tabloid readers and editors, the perpetrators of violent acts are the real objects of reader rage. The Benghazi hearings basically let the actual killers off the hook. Usually, that's what right-wingers complain that liberals do. Focus on the actual killers and the Post will pay attention. By contrast, this is like blaming society.

****

...ALTHOUGH: Tabloids certainly have blamed the authorities in the past -- crimes that took place when David Dinkins was mayor were the mayor's fault (though that wasn't the case during the mayoralties of Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch). I think, in general, macho men like Bush/Cheney in foreign policy and Giuliani on crime, especially post Louima/Diallo, have discredited the tougher-is-always-better thesis, even for the Post and its readers.

THE PRESIDENT OF RED AMERICA SHOWS HIS DEEP AND ABIDING RESPECT FOR THE FIRST AMENDMENT

Big victory for religious liberty: beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/J… Congratulations to the Kountze cheerleaders!

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) May 8, 2013

From the linked story:

Hardin County 356th District Court Judge Steve Thomas on Wednesday ruled in favor of the Kountze ISD cheerleaders in a case about Scripture banners, said Beaumont Attorney David Starnes....

Starnes represents the 15 cheerleaders in their fight to keep Bible banners....

Each game this season, the Kountze cheerleaders have made Christian-themed run-through signs for the football players. The signs, which featured scripture verses, went viral and have now been stopped by the school district's leaders who were told by a group the signs were offensive and against the separation of church and state....

Here's an example:





Gosh, only a silly liberal could look at a banner like that and think it represented government establishing a religion!

Maybe we should just concede the winger theory that the individual states have a right to establish their own religions. In blue America, I'm reasonably certain that we'd hash it out, embrace diversity, and decide we wanted to hold the line against a state-sanctioned faith. In red America, by contrast, the citizens who aren't evangelical right-wing Christians would swiftly learn just how welcome they are.

The reason the right is obsessed with the notion that Islam seeks to impose "dhimmitude" on non-Muslims, even in the West, is that right-wingers, if they had their way, would happily declare non-Christians to be lower-class citizens, people whose presence in America they merely tolerate.

****

UPDATE: Bonus reason we should actively encourage Texas to secede:

Right now Jodi Arias is regretting not killing an ambassador or Philadelphia infant.

— Rep. Steve Stockman (@SteveWorks4You) May 8, 2013

(Arias, about whom I know next to nothing, was found guilty of murder.)

THE GOP'S ANTI-HRC LONG GAME

It's obvious why the Republican Party is fixated on Benghazi, and Hillary Clinton in particular -- it's for this reason:





These are the voters Hillary Clinton showed she could appeal to, and Barack Obama couldn't, in 2008. They could put a lot of states within reach for her that were never in reach for Obama (West Virginia, for instance), and make it relatively easy for her to win states where Democrats usually have to work very hard (e.g., Ohio). Liberals may not fall for the Benghazi witch hunt, but these guys might.

Smearing Hillary in a way these guys find plausible is a small step if Republicans want to be able to beat her, but hey, every little bit counts.

It's hard for us to imagine now that Republicans will ever stop talking about Barack Obama as if he's the most evil human being ever to walk the face of the earth, but, really, they will stop. In the late '90s and 2000, it was impossible to imagine that they'd ever stop describing Bill and Hillary Clinton that way, but they moved on -- to Al Gore and the Dixie Chicks and Dan Rather and Michael Moore and John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi and then, of course, to Obama. They're going to let up a little on Obama after 2014, and Hillary's going to become the most evil person in the world again. They may even decide they kind of like Obama, if they can figure out a way to use that against her. It's going to be bizarre. And it's going to be as ugly as the Obama-hate has been.

REVERSE BRADLEY EFFECT IN SOUTH CAROLINA?

Mark Sanford beat Elizabeth Colbert Busch yesterday in a special House election in South Carolina, and it wasn't even close: Sanford beat Colbert Busch 54%-45%, despite a survey from Public Policy Polling showing Sanford with just a 1-point lead.

PPP seems to have been the only pollster seriously following this race, and previous PPP polls showed Colbert Busch with a lead. But I think PPP's failure to call this race is understandable. My guess is that poll respondents -- even respondents to PPP's robo-poll, who never spoke to an actual human being -- were reluctant to admit that they were going to vote for a philanderer. I think it's a reverse Bradley effect -- Republican-leaning voters in this district lied to PPP's poll robot just the way white voters lied (or used to lie) to pollsters about their intent to vote for black candidates, as in the 1982 California governor's race, in which pollsters overestimated the strength of African-American candidate Tom Bradley.

Pollsters have learned how to add questions to surveys that will tease out discrepancies between a respondent's stated preference for a candidate of another race and real likelihood of voting for that candidate. In hindsight, it seems that PPP (or another pollster) should have found a way to tease out a "Sanford effect." Then again, who knew? We naively thought these South Carolina Republicans really believe what they say about traditional values.

I'm predicting this won't be a problem in the New York mayoral race if Anthony Weiner decides to run. One way or the other, I think my fellow New Yorkers and I will tell you the truth about Weiner. I really don't think we're hypocrites or self-deceivers. That sort of phony sexual moralizing isn't likely to be a factor here. But we'll see.

JUST WHEN I WAS CONCERNED THAT RIGHT-WINGERS MIGHT RUN OUT OF PEOPLE TO HATE

The Baltimore Fox affiliate has found a woman who wants to arrange for Tamerlan Tsarnaev's burial at Arlington National Cemetery:

US Air Force (USAF) veteran Julie Frein said she is willing to give up her burial plot at Arlington National Cemetery to Tamerlan Tsarnaev - the deceased Boston bombing suspect.

The Anne Arundel County woman told Fox45 she feels the terrorist suspect should be able to be laid to rest and just wants it to all be over. "I feel sympathy for [his family] in that as long as this issue is open, they can't have closure," Frein told Fox45's Joy Lepola....

Frein served in the USAF for two years. Her husband served in the US Navy for 20 years.

I don't know what's up with this woman. She's weepy in the news clip (embedded below). She just seems sick of the rancor -- which means she's the most naive person in the world, because if Fox or Drudge gets wind of this, she's going to be subjected to a rancor-tsunami that's going to make her life a living hell.

And while I think it's a terrible idea to bury Tsarnaev at Arlington, I agree with Charlie Pierce that if we can chill out long enough to allow the burial of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Boston Strangler, we can let Tamerlan be put to rest somewhere, and hate what he did rather than hate his corpse, which can't harm us.

On the other hand, as Mother Jones notes, public anger that makes it hard to find resting places for notorious figures is nothing new. One curious detail from the MJ story:

Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley, was dissolved in sulphuric acid, Breaking Bad-style, to prevent admirers from visiting his grave.

A detail that's not in the MJ story: the same thing was said to have been done to John Wilkes Booth, according to this 1925 news story. On the other hand, Booth's niece said the same year that Booth escaped capture and lived for 38 years after his supposed death.

Now, you know what happens next, don't you? This story gets used in a right-wing game of ideological telephone, and we get told that this is something the evil, America-hating Obama government actually wants to do. It's already happening a bit: Joe the Plumber has a post up titled "Boston Bomber to Be Buried at Arlington," and there's a message-board thread titled "Obama Wants Tamerlan Tsarnaev Buried At Arlington." By Friday, I bet half the wingnuttosphere will think this idea was explicitly endorsed by the White House.

THE GUN ABSOLUTIST COMMUNITY IS AMERICA'S CONTROLLING, ABUSIVE BOYFRIEND

The claim that the fight for unrestricted gun access is all about freedom seems more and more ridiculous every day. The latest:

... The man behind an effort to put free shotguns in the hands of homeowners says he'll dole them out in the Big Apple by the end of the year -- and the lawmen may not be able to stop him.

"We’re coming -- and we're going to get shotguns into the hands of responsible citizens," said Kyle Coplen, who founded the nonprofit the Armed Citizen Project in January....

His privately funded group wants to give New Yorkers in high-crime areas a $200 shotgun and free weapons training -- assuming applicants pass all the legal background checks....

He fully expects to be branded an outlaw by gun-control advocate Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly but says New Yorkers in crime-ridden neighborhoods will embrace his program.

"I really don’t care what (Bloomberg) thinks...."

The point is, he doesn't care what New Yorkers think. We keep electing public officials who make no secret of their gun-control leanings. We approve those leanings. But Coplen doesn't give a crap what we think.

Or what residents of other big cities think -- this is part of a plan by his group to give away shotguns in fifteen cities, including (naturally) Chicago. Coplen's group has already started the project in Houston.

So let's see: We've got this guy going looking to pumping more guns into cities he doesn't live in. You've got the 3D gun guy openly seeking the day when people can download the blueprint for a printable gun and thus thwart all gun control laws. You've got the guy who promised to lead an illegal open-carry march from Virginia into Washington, D.C., this coming Fourth of July, daring the authorities to stop him (although that guy seems to be wimping out). You've got states endeavoring to nullify federal gun laws (even before they're passed) and local officials threatening not to enforce state gun laws. And you have a number of towns mandating gun ownership.

This isn't about freedom, unless you define "freedom" as "the freedom to do what gun lovers want." This is gun lovers saying they love America, but insisting that America behave the way gunners want and think the way gunners want and hey, America, are you checking out Senators Manchin and Toomey over there, you filthy slut? The gunners are America's bad boyfriend.

THIS, NOT WORKING CONDITIONS, SENDS BANGLADESHIS OUT INTO THE STREETS

The death toll in the garment-factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh has now reportedly exceeded 700 -- and yet this is the big protest movement in Bangladesh right now:

Violence erupted across Bangladesh on Monday as Islamist fundamentalists demanding passage of an anti-blasphemy law clashed with security forces, leaving a trail of property damage and at least 22 people dead after a second day of unrest....

The skirmishes began Sunday when thousands of Islamic activists staged a march on Dhaka, the capital, followed by speeches and a mass demonstration. The authorities say several hundred shops were vandalized, and local television channels showed fires in the central part of the city....

The confrontations escalated on Monday....

The march was organized by Hefajat-e-Islam, a group of Islamic hard-liners who have called for Bangladesh's Constitution to be drastically amended with a 13-point program that would ban intermingling between men and women and punish by execution Bangladeshi bloggers accused of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad....

I know little or nothing about Bangladesh. I don't really know for sure how these issues interact.

But it seems to me that we have a global economic system that isn't meeting the needs of the vast majority of the world's citizens, and is really shafting much of the world's population, the underpaid dead in that factory building being just one egregious example. And yet the response is not to fight capitalism, but to find some other explanation for why the world is out of joint.

I don't think there's anything inherently violent or repressive about Muslims. Moderate Islam has thrived across the globe over the centuries. It's just that right now repression-loving hardline Islamists are doing a bang-up job of providing an alternate explanation for the world's troubles in their sphere of influence.

And meanwhile the capitalist system goes happily about its business, largely untargeted and unblamed.

Here in America we've had a global financial collapse, and what's our biggest, loudest, most influential movement? A movement to repeal universal health care, reduce regulation of business, lower the taxes of the rich, and permit wider access to guns. So we're no better.

DIRTY TRICKS AND GAY-BAITING: WHAT GETS YOU A EULOGY ON THE HOUSE FLOOR IN 2013

I've been seeing a lot of right-wing bloggers' tributes to a man named Parker "Chip" Gerdes, who died this morning. Who was Chip Gerdes? Why is he being lavished with praise? Why haven't many of us heard of him till now?

Well, it appears that we weren't supposed to know about him. Robert Stacy McCain writes:

The first rule of Chip Gerdes was, nobody talked about Chip Gerdes....

Chip was a "black ops" guy, a disciple of the legendary Republican operative Roger Stone. He was adept at research and organizing, but his specialty was the kind of no-fingerprints political trickery that some people have termed "ratfucking."

Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation adds:

Chip was described on Breitbart earlier today as being an Alinsky for the good guys. That is an understatement if anything. Chip in some ways was a one man Seal Team 6 for the conservative movement. He knew the black arts of political intrigue and more importantly, he knew how to get things done in a way that no one knew he did it or at least no one could prove it.

So he was a political sleazebag, right? Oh, no -- as Jim Holt puts it, he was a patriot:

Chip worked on campaigns and operated behind the scenes to secure freedom and push the conservative cause. His contact list was extensive from local Illinois GOP leaders to Drudge and The Daily Caller.

And from Dana Loesch:

He met adversity with a fist, especially for his friends. There are only two people in this modern movement who were so steadfast in the face of it all, they are now both gone. Any time is always too soon for such a man. We saw him just this weekend. You never think a final goodbye is just that, but I’m glad we got one.

I imagine he's now giving a big hug to Andrew.

"Andrew" being, needless to say, Andrew Breitbart, the greatest human being to walk the face of the earth not named Reagan, in right-wingers' eyes.

So he was a ratfucking black ops guy who met adversity with a fist. And, under his Twitter name TookieW, he aimed a lot of homophobic tweets at a lefty blogger named Adam from a blog clled St. Louis Activist Hub, who tussled with him:








And these days, that's what gets you a eulogy on the House floor from a Republican congresswoman:

Today I want to honor a legendary man, a loyal soldier in the battle for freedom in this great country: Chip Gerdes of my neighboring state of Illinois. Chip suddenly passed away this morning in his home, where he was a loving father and a devoted husband. He was a devoted friend to me and my family, and a faithful patriot to so many. Chip is the type of person we all strive to be in politics. He reached across all divides to bring people together for a common purpose. I know Chip is smiling down on all of us today, cracking a joke about how serious we are about a man who never missed an opportunity to lighten the mood, and who would always fire up the room.Chip Gerdes will be missed by many, but his memory and his fight will continue. We love you, Chip. We already miss you and we will never stop fighting for what you devoted your life to defend: life, liberty, an the pursuit of happiness. Rest easy, my friend. We've got it from here.

Yeah, politics ain't beanbag. But when I was a lad, the sleazy operators were seen as sleazy operators. They weren't praised on the floor of the House as great patriots.

TERRORISM FOR THE HELL OF IT

So we learned about this today:

Authorities thwarted what could have been a deadly domestic terror attack last week when they raided the home of a militia-linked Minnesota man, law enforcement sources told ABC News today.

Buford "Bucky" Rogers, 24, was arrested Friday after an army of federal, state and local officials raided his home and discovered a cache of weapons including a Romanian AK-M assault-style rifle, several Molotov cocktails and what investigators suspect to be pipe-bombs, court documents said.

Jeanne Cooney, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis, told ABC News this morning that authorities rushed to arrest Rogers to get him off the street before he could proceed with his plans for an attack....

Cooney declined to say what the target of the attack was, but Montevideo, Minn. Police Chief Adam Christopher told ABC News Rogers had started a group called the Black Snake Militia, an organization with anti-government tendencies. Two senior law enforcement sources told ABC News Rogers appears to be a "militia"-type suspect whose targets potentially included local authorities....

The obvious takeaway here is that this guy was reportedly planning to shed blood in a spectacular way despite not being Muslim.

Beyond that, though, I'm struck by how ordinary some of Rogers's interests seem, if this is really his Facebook page.

On the one hand, it's been noted that he made many anti-government, Alex Jonesian remarks on Facebook:

The war is here tsa agents are doing random cheeks and shooting people for no reson

...ever one better get your guns ready cuz there comeing FEMA

And so on.

On the other hand, while his self-proclaims interests include

United States Militia, The Unorganized Militia, URBAN MILITIA - Military Store, I support the deployment of a citizen militia to secure our southern border ... Alex Jones ... National Rifle Association ... Ron Paul 2012

they also include

,Starbucks, Reese's, Selena Gomez, Universal's Halloween Horror Nights - Orlando (OFFICIAL), Bear Grylls, Criss Angel, Seal of Honor, Monster Massive, Game Informer, Converse, SuperheroStuff.com, Rockstar Energy Drink US, Anime, L ( Death Note ), Dodge, Mike Epps, vitaminwater, Michael Jordan, Cartoon Network, Domino's Pizza, Urban Freeflow, Jim Gaffigan, DC Shoes, Foamy The Squirrel : iLL WiLL PrEss, Walmart, Cheez-It, Netflix, George Lopez, Ellen Page, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Pee-wee Herman, ... Jackie Chan, Ford Motor Company, ... Carl's Jr., Redbox, Tapatío Hot Sauce, Gatorade, Metal Mulisha, Zumiez, Urban Dictionary, I am a Jamaican, Brock Lesnar, Bam Margera, ... Chicago Bulls, Dixie Carter President of TNA Wrestling, Jack in the Box, Undertaker - WWE Universe, The Official Ronnie James Dio Fan Page, Rey Mysterio - WWE Universe, Left 4 Dead 2, McDonald's, The Oakland Raiders, Marijuana is Safer, Cabela's, highDEAS, Boston Celtics, Philadelphia Phillies, Not Giving a Fuuck, Kevin Hart, "Mom, mom, mommy, ma, mom, mom, ma, ma, mommy, mommy... WHAT!!... hi!, Skittles ...

Oh, and he's a Juggalo -- a fan of the much-loved (and much-mocked) white rap duo Insane Clown Posse, and the acts on the ICP-affiliated Psychopathic Records.





This gets us back to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and the fact that so many people seem to be unable to reconcile his pothead, pop-culture-saturated, all-American lifestyle with involvement in the Boston bombings. Well, maybe it's not so odd. His brother seems to have become somewhat of a zealot -- but maybe our notion of terrorists as thoroughly focused monomaniacs needs to be revised. Between them, the Tsarnaev brothers seem to have been half in and half out of the world their peers were living in (Tamerlan had withdrawn quite a bit, Dzhokhar hardly at all). Bucky Rogers seemed quite focused on the militia movement, but ge also seemed to be am ordinary consumer of American culture.

It starts to seem as if planning terrorist acts doesn't involve all that much commitment these days. The plans and the encouragement are online (from Al Qaeda, from the militia/Alex Jones orbit, or whatever). The weaponry is ridiculously easy to come by. You can do this as a part-timer.

RIGHT STILL EXPECTING PUBLIC TO MAKE FINE DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN MUSLIMS AFTER DEMANDING OPPOSITE A DECADE AGO

The endless right-wing fist-shaking over Benghazi still seems to come down to this:

Documents from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council, first published in the May 13 edition of "The Weekly Standard," showed that senior officials from those agencies decided within days of the attacks to delete all references to Al Qaeda's known involvement in them from "talking points" being prepared for those administration officers being sent out to discuss the attacks publicly.

Those talking points -- and indeed, the statements of all senior Obama administration officials who commented publicly on Benghazi during the early days after the attacks -- sought instead to depict the Americans' deaths as the result of a spontaneous protest that went awry. The administration later acknowledged that there had been no such protest, as evidence mounted that Al Qaeda-linked terrorists had participated in the attacks.

So one set of Muslims was initially blamed for causing the violence, when in fact it was another set of Muslims? It amuses me to no end that the right is counting on the American public to be aghast at that.

The right spent most of the Bush years bamboozling the American public into believing that there was no difference between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda. President Bush repeatedly spoke of "the enemy," as if the two wars we fought were waged against one group of adversaries. This notion persists in the newly opened Bush presidential library:

Iraq and Afghanistan are not their own sections. Instead, they are conflated with the so-called "Global War On Terror" in a room called "Defending Freedom."

This effort worked spectacularly, and continues to work: a poll conducted lass fall shows that nearly half of Americans think Iraq was "directly involved" in 9/11.

And now the hope is that Americans will keep track of, and get worked up about, precisely which Muslims were initially deemed responsible for the Benghazi attack? Yeah, good luck with that.

THE ANTICHRIST GAP

People in South Carolina's First Congressional District like Elizabeth Colbert Busch and dislike Mark Sanford -- but Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are Hiler and Eva Braun, and so...

PPP's final poll of the special election in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District finds a race that's too close to call, with Republican Mark Sanford leading Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch 47-46. The 1 point lead for Sanford represents a 10 point reversal from PPP's poll of the race two weeks ago, when Colbert Busch led by 9 points at 50-41....

If SC-1 voters went to the polls on Tuesday and voted for the candidate they personally liked better, Colbert Busch would be the definite winner. That's why Sanford's campaign has tried to shift the focus toward national Democrats who are unpopular in the district, and that's been a key in helping him to make this race competitive again. Nancy Pelosi has a 24/61 approval rating in SC-1 and although voters don't like Sanford, they do like him better than Pelosi by a 53/37 margin. President Obama doesn't fare a whole lot better in the district. His approval is 39/54, and voters say they have a higher opinion of Sanford than him by a 48/44 spread....

We snickered when Mark Sanford began "debating" a cardboard cutout of Pelosi on the campaign trail. But it's working.

And, well, of course it's working. Remember Saul Alinsky's thirteenth Rule for Radicls: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Right-wingers rail against Alinskyite Democrats, but really, how often do Democrats ever actually go Alinsky? Whereas Republicans go Alinsky every hour of every day, in D.C. and (especially) in the right-wing media. Republicans turn every prominent Democrat into an Antichrist. Republicans carefully cultivate the hatred of Democratic Antichrists even when what supposedly makes them evil isn't front-page news. This gives every Republican a set of off-the-shelf demonization targets for every campaign.

If the special Senate election in Massachusetts remains tight, is Ed Markey going to be able to go after Gabriel Gomez by tying him to Mitch McConnell? Nearly 30% of the country doesn't know who the hell Mitch McConnell is, and I'm sure the numbers in Massachusetts are similar. By contrast, only about 10% of the country is unfamiliar with Pelosi, and half the country dislikes her. And no, this isn't because McConnell is in the minority party in the Senate -- nearly a third of the country doesn't know enough about Paul Ryan to form an opinion, and he was the damn VP candidate. Unfamiliarity with Eric Cantor is extremely high, and even John Boehner is unfamiliar to about one in five Americans.

They hate. They cultivate hate. And they win. Maybe even Mark Sanford can win.

BLOGROLL

I've updated the link for Aimai's blog, I Spy with My Little Eye, where she's been writing about everything from Proust to the Marathon bombing.

Also added: Hackwhackers, Tom Hull, Diane Ravitch, Reality Chex, RH Reality Check, squarelyrooted, and Reading Is for Snobs.

BOYS WILL BE BOYS, GIRLS WILL BE SLUTS, KATHLEEN?

Kathleen Parker writes in The Washington Post that she's horrified at the thought that the morning-after pill might be freely available to teenage girls:

They lost me at the word "women."

As so often happens in contemporary debate, arguments being proffered in support of allowing teenagers as young as 15 (and possibly younger) to buy the "morning-after pill" without adult supervision are false on their premise....

Fifteen-year-olds, where the Obama administration wants to set the limit, are girls, not women.

What's curious about this is that Parker didn't always feel unmitigated horror at the thought of teen sexuality -- or at least she wasn't always horrified by the thought of some teenagers having sex. And by "some teenagers" I mean "male teenagers."

Specifically, her own sons.

Back in 1999, the state of Oklahoma was considering a law that would define sex with a person too intoxicated to give consent as rape. Parker wrote an outraged column about the bill; she expressed scorn for one provision that didn't even make it into the final bill:

Another deleted provision defined rape as sexual intercourse with any female younger than 18. You think our prisons are overflowing now? Imagine prosecuting 17-year-old boys for having sex with their girlfriends.

As it stands, the bill draws the line at 16. In other words, any female younger than 16 who has sex with any male of any age, ipso facto, has been raped. Never mind that the girl may have been equally responsible. I've heard that sometimes girls actually request sex with their boyfriends, but it's probably just a vicious rumor....

To Parker, this was personal:

As a mother of show-stopper sons who are natural-born chick magnets, I'm outraged.

How old were her sons at the time? I don't have a full answer, but two years earlier, she wrote a column in which she mentioned that one of her sons was 12. So by the time of the Oklahoma column, he was presumably 14.

So, to sum up:

Back in 1999, Parker was horrified at the thought that young men could be charged with rape for having sex with partners under 16. She cited her own sons, one of whom was 14 and a "chick magnet."

Now she's horrified that 15-year-old girls might be able to buy emergency contraception because, dammit, they're just kids.

I don't think she's become more prudish about teen sex over the years. I think it just appalled her back in 1999 that teen sexuality could lead to negative consequences for her sons, and boys like her sons, who might attract sex partners just by dint of being "chick magnets." (They're not even seeking partners! Slutty girls just swarm to them!)

But now we're talking about girls facing consequences for ten sex. That's different. They're the same kinds of tramps who preyed on her entirely innocent sons; if something goes wrong for them, they have to pay.

Just to be clear about this: I don't think a teenager who has non-coercive sex with someone close in age should be charged with rape -- I agree with Parker about that.

But I also think it's appropriate to make emergency contraception available to teenage girls. Because, yes, boys will be boys and girls will be girls -- and I don't want to punish just one of those genders.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD RUBBISH

I saw this yesterday:

Conservatives are outraged after a Democrat in South Carolina allegedly insulted Republican Gov. Nikki Haley's Indian heritage at a party gathering in Columbia on Friday.

The state's Democratic Party Chairman, Dick Harpootlian, is believed to have said the party will take on the Conservative in the next gubernatorial race and send 'Nikki Haley back to wherever the hell she came from.'

Gov. Haley was born in the U.S. but her parents are from India.

Today I see that Harpootlian isn't apologizing. He's claiming he just meant that Democrats were going to send her back to her South Carolina county, a claim that suggests that he thinks the rest of us are either idiots or fellow bigots.

Harpootlian should just shut the hell up and crawl back into the hole from which he emerged. I don't care if he's a Democrat. It's obvious what he meant here.

Nikki Haley's parents are Sikh immigrants? I don't give a crap, any more than I give a crap that Michelle Malkin is Filipino. Criticize these people for what they say and do. Don't attack them on these grounds. It's as hateful coming from a Democrat as it is from a Republican.

(In Haley's case, there's plenty of substance to attack her on -- just this week, for instance, she signed an old-school nullification bill that effectively makes Obamacare illegal in her state. She does this and you have to attack her on ancestry? Seriously?)

I don't know much about Dick Harpootlian, but this 2011 post from a Daily Kos diarist, at a time when Harpootlian was trying to regain the party chairmanship, makes clear that the racist remark about Haley is just par for the course for him:

In 1998, Harpootlian assumed the office of Party Chair.... over the course of the next five years, Harpootlian presided over the systematic disintegration of the Democratic Party in South Carolina. Along the way, Harpootlian did make quite a name for himself.

When he issued a formal press release from Party headquarters criticizing Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Harpootlian coined the homophobic slur, "light in the loafers."

In another awkward and insensitive quote, Harpootlian responded to a question about the minority vote with the breathtaking comment, "I don't want to buy the black vote, just rent it for one day." ...

Over the intervening years, the Democratic Party apparatus in South Carolina has visibly deteriorated.

The diarist also pointed out that Harpootlian had made contributions to several less-than-admirable Republicans:

1. Jake Knotts ("Obama is a raghead!")
2. Henry McMaster (radical extremist on the Republican right-wing) and
3. Walt Wilkins (staffer for the segregationist, Strom Thurmond).

Alas, Harpootlian did regain the chairmanship. A year later, he was comparing Nikki Haley to Hitler's mistress:

Haley had appeared at a Republican press conference which was held in the basement of a Charlotte office building. On Wednesday morning, Harpootlian told South Carolina Democrats that Haley "was down in the bunker a la Eva Braun."

... Reached by phone Wednesday, Harpootlian told CNN he isn't backing down.

"Hell no. What am I apologizing for?," he said....

Harpootlian, thankfully, is out the door -- his term as chairman ended yesterday, and he's been replaced by Jaime Harrison, who's now the first African-American party chair in the state's history.

Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Dick.

A CHILDLESS GAY ELITIST NIALL FERGUSON DOESN'T DESPISE

You may have seen this about showboating right-wing economist historian Niall Ferguson:

Speaking at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., in front of a group of more than 500 financial advisors and investors, Ferguson responded to a question about [John Maynard] Keynes' famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of "poetry" rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive.

It gets worse.

Ferguson ... says it's only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an "effete" member of society. Apparently, in Ferguson's world, if you are gay or childless, you cannot care about future generations nor society.

(Ferguson has since walked the remarks back.)

I'll ignore the incongruity of a Davos-attending Mitt Romney endorser using "effete" as an insult.

I'll just point out that Ferguson doesn't think every posh childless gay person is unworthy of serious consideration as an economic thinker. On the contrary: Ferguson has lavished praise on the musings of openly gay Internet billionaire Peter Thiel. Thiel, of course, is a libertarian -- which would seem to be a more selfish, less future-generations-oriented ideological leaning than Keynes's. And yet Ferguson calls Thiel "one of the most interesting and original thinkers in America today" and says, "Damn. Peter Thiel is smarter than I am."

So what has Thiel done to make the world a better place for future generations? Let's ask Wikipedia:

In September 2006, Thiel announced that he would donate $3.5 million to foster anti-aging research through the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation....

On April 15, 2008, Thiel pledged $500,000 to the new Seasteading Institute, directed by Patri Friedman, whose mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems"....

In 2011 Thiel was reported as having given a total of $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute.... According to the Daily Mail Peter Thiel was inspired to do so by Ayn Rand's philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged....

In 2009, it was reported that Thiel helped fund college student James O'Keefe's "Taxpayers Clearing House" video -- a satirical look at the politics behind the Wall Street bailout....

In July 2012, after donating $1 million dollars in a single donation, Thiel became the largest contributor to the Club for Growth....

In December 2007, Thiel endorsed Ron Paul for President....

In 2012, Thiel ... put [his] support behind the Endorse Liberty Super PAC, ... whose purpose was to promote Texas congressman Ron Paul for president in 2012....

Thiel is the co-author, with David O. Sacks, of the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. The book was critical of what it perceived as political correctness and a dilution of academic rigor....

Oh yes, I'm sure that's all done more to make the world a better place than the theories of Keynes.

WWMLKD?

Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald reports on a planned act of armed civil disobedience from the gunners:

Libertarian activist and radio host Adam Kokesh is hoping to get 1,000 people to march on Washington on July 4 -- armed with loaded rifles. The plan, launched with a Facebook group today, is to gather on the Virginia side of the Potomac, where gun laws are lax, and then march across the bridge with loaded rifles slung over their shoulders into the District, where openly carrying weapons is generally prohibited.

"This will be a non-violent event," the Facebook group warns, "unless the government chooses to make it violent."

That's probably true. If the police allow this to happen, it probably will be peaceful -- right-wingers who engage in dominance challenges like this tend not to get violent, basically because the dominance challenge itself satisfies the desire for violence. In other words, these folks get off sufficiently on the notion that they're hurting and frightening us and we're afraid to stop them.

If this takes place and is successful, there'll be more and more demonstrations like this -- until the Overton window on guns moves that much farther to the right and more and more people question laws forbidding open carry. And so a few more of those laws will fall, and the gunners' insane notions will become more and more mainstream.

Misermix calls this demo a "dress rehearsal for the coming revolution." I disagree. This will just help the gunners get what they want working within the system.

If this takes place -- there are questions about whether it will -- I hope the authorities will turn it back with force but zero violence. The organizer claims his troops won't resist:

This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent. Should we meet physical resistance, we will peacefully turn back, having shown that free people are not welcome in Washington, & returning with the resolve that the politicians, bureaucrats, & enforcers of the federal government will not be welcome in the land of the free.

I'd like to see this march met by a King-like group dedicated to nonviolence. Imagine if, as the marchers crossed the bridge, they were faced with a group of D.C. residents -- unarmed, serious, dignified, young and middle-aged and old, maybe even dressed in their Sunday best, and determined to block the marchers' progress without force, merely by standing in place.

Yes, if we're talking D.C. residents, it's likely that the vast majority of them will be African-American. It's likely that the vast majority of the marchers will, um, not be African-American. I think that would tell a story right there about who the gunners are and what war they think they're fighting.

I don't think the gunners will stop winning every fight until some of us literally start facing them down. The Newtown victims have begun that process. But I think more of us are going to have to treat the gunners as if they're the Tiananmen tanks. Because, really, they don't need a revolution -- on their issue, they have government power on their side.

DID ANYONE READ THE REST OF THAT MARKEY/GOMEZ POLL WRITE-UP?

Democrats are freaking out and Republicans are doing the happy dance because Public Policy Polling has Democrat Ed Markey ahead of Republican Gabriel Gomez by only 4 points in the upcoming Massachusetts Senate election. Now, after the Martha Coakley/Scott Brown race, I'd never want to say a Republican can't win a race like this, but please read the PPP write-up to the end and note this huge caveat about poll respondents who haven't expressed a preference yet:

The pool of undecided voters ... sets up well for Markey- they voted for Obama by 18 points in November, 32% are liberals compared to only 25% who are conservatives, and 61% of them are women. Those are all demographics that ought to end up favorable to him in the end.

Er, yeah, I'll say.

What I think is going on here is that the right-leaning part of the electorate is paying a lot of attention to this race because right-wingers in America always pay more attention to politics than (most of) the rest of the population -- the right has successfully turned political ranting into mass entertainment that keeps the base engaged. So it'll take old-fashioned politicking to get Markey's voters focused -- but he's a veteran campaigner, and he's got the party behind him, so I still say it's his race to lose.

And no, I'm not impressed by this:

[Gomez is] up 47/31 with independents....

I don't believe the majority of those independents are genuine independents -- as I say all the time, the rightest of right-wingers love to proclaim that they hate both parties, but they inevitably vote for the most right-wing candidate in every race (or at least the most right-wing candidate they think can win). For comparison, let's look at PPP's last poll before the Scott Brown/Elizabeth Warren race, conducted November 1 and 2, 2012 (PDF): the results among independents were Brown 58%, Warren 39%. Let's look at the exit polls: Brown beat Warren among independents 58%-41%.

Warren won the race, 54%-46%.

If it's a tight race, Markey can call on various Obamas, Bidens, Clintons, and Kennedys, among others, to campaign for him. Who's going to rally the troops for Gomez? Tagg Romney?

MORAL EQUIVALENCE, GRADED ON A SOCIOECONOMIC CURVE

A confession from a known serial rapist and a DNA match to that serial rapist made clear, years after the fact, that the five young men arrested for the 1989 rape and near-murder of Trisha Mieli, the "Central Park Jogger," were innocent of that crime. The exonerations came after all five had served their full prison sentences. The case was the subject of an excellent documentary recently aired on PBS, The Central Park Five.

One of the talking heads in the documentary is Jim Dwyer, who wrote for Newsday at the time of the rape; he now writes for The New York Times. In the movie, he comes off as a voice of reason -- he's not one of the people who still believe the young men originally arrested for the crime actually committed it.

But today he's written a huffy column about a viewer of the documentary, Frank Chi:

Mr. Chi searched the Internet for the lawyer who prosecuted the case, Elizabeth Lederer. He saw that she was still an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and is an adjunct member of the faculty at the School of Law at Columbia.

Mr. Chi posted to Twitter, truncating some words to make them fit.

"Amazing that Elizabeth Lederer teachs at @ColumbiaLaw," he wrote. "Doe she teach how to force false confessions?"

He posted an online petition, solicited signatures on Twitter, and got a few thousand signatures.

And that's it. That's all that's happened. Columbia hasn't fired Lederer. She hasn't lost her ADA job. Oh, the reference to her work on the case was removed from her Columbia bio page. But that's it.

So what's Dwyer's conclusion? This:

It was a simple task to discover Elizabeth Lederer on Google, just as those boys were easy to find in the park. The petition has found someone to blame, repeating the very mistake of the injustice it deplores.

Yes, he actually wrote that: repeating the very mistake of the injustice it deplores. Sending five young people to prison for years for a crime they didn't commit is identical to posting an online petition in an attempt to get a prosecutor who helped secure that false conviction fired from one of her two prestigious jobs -- and failing to accomplish that. Ruining the lives of five poor nonwhite kids is the equivalent of creating a mild inconvenience in the life of a white professional.

But we do grade these things on a curve, don't we? If the perps are young and brown, we want to throw the book at them; if they're white and established and in nice suits, we think merely exposing what they've done is more than sufficient, because at that point they've "suffered enough." (See: everyone ever exposed as responsible for the financial meltdown.)

No, Lederer did not secure the convictions all by herself. Yes, the mood of the city made the convictions all but inevitable. And yes, the five did confess (falsely, under duress, and mostly without lawyers or parents present).

But Lederer won't even endorse the decision of her old boss, now-retired DA Robert Morgenthau, to push for the overturning of the convictions when the evidence pointing to Reyes came to light. And as Dwyer acknowledges, "Ms. Lederer wrongly told the jury that hair found in the clothing of one of the boys 'matched' hair from the victim, a seeming corroboration of the confused, rambling confessions. Even at the time, that overstated the evidence."

Oh, but she's one of us. So a petition linked on Twitter is like six years in the joint for, y'know, one of them.

****

The petition is here, by the way.

*****

UPDATE: Oh, almost forgot to add this, from Dwyer:

AboutNY: One Lynch Mob Not Enough? Let's Do Another #CP5 nyti.ms/16y9M15

— Jim Dwyer (@jimdwyernyt) May 3, 2013

"Lynch mob"? Against Lederer? Seriously?

THE MULTI-DECADE GOP OBSESSION WITH CARIBOU SEX

Timothy Egan has an opinion piece at The New York Times about the dominance of the House of Representatives by Republicans who are white, male, crazy, and extreme. The piece is well worth reading, but I want to focus on Egan's lede:

Not long ago, the congressman from northeast Texas, Louie Gohmert, was talking about how the trans-Alaska oil pipeline improved the sex lives of certain wild animals -- in his mind, the big tube was an industrial-strength aphrodisiac. "When the caribou want to go on a date," he told a House hearing, "they invite each other to head over to the pipeline."

Gohmert, consistently on the short list for the most off-plumb member of Congress, has said so many crazy things that this assertion passed with little comment....

Yes, apparently this did pass with little comment when Gohmert said it in February -- but maybe that's because the idea that the pipeline is a caribou aphrodisiac is an article of faith in the GOP. In 2008, Think Progress cited a Michele Bachmann interview:

"Some suggestions are that perhaps we would see an enhancement of wildlife expansion because of the warmth of the pipeline," she said during her Wednesday appearance on WCCO-Radio's "Jack Rice Show."

Bachmann noted a caribou population increase, from 2,700 to 30,000, since the Trans Alaska Pipeline System from Prudhoe Bay was built in 1977.

The pipeline has now become a meeting ground and "coffee klatch" for the caribou, she said.

TP also quoted Rush Limbaugh from a week earlier:

RUSH: Well, in fact, where the Alaskan pipeline is concerned, one of the original concerns was that the pipeline would upset the caribou population, and physically reduce it. Turns out the caribou have multiplied 'cause they like the warmth --

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: -- that surrounds the pipeline.

But the source of this notion was George Bush -- no, not the really stupid one, but the one who was supposed to be reasonably intelligent. Here's Poppy Bush in 1987, when he was vice president:

Bush made light of concerns of environmentalists that drilling [in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge] would spoil the refuge. He said similar concerns had been raised before construction of the Alaska oil pipeline, which environmentalists feared would hurt the caribou population.

"Caribou like the pipeline," he said. "They lean up against it, have a lot of babies, scratch on it. There's more damn caribou than you can shake a stick at."

Y'know, I think these folks really like talking about sex -- at least when it doesn't involve (ick!) humans.

SO WHAT IS OUR FAVORITE CARHARTT-LOVIN', ELITE-BASHIN' ALASKAN UP TO THIS WEEKEND?

Sarah Palin -- that lover of regular guys and hater of "elites" (hell, she even bashed Poppy and Bar Bush as "blue bloods") -- is having a regular gal's down-home weekend in Kentucky:

Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin will attend a fundraiser Sunday for the Headley-Whitney Museum in Lexington.

Palin and her husband, Todd Palin, will be guests of socialite and museum supporter Marylou Whitney and her husband, John Hendrickson, at the annual Brunch and Bibelots party.

The $150-a-seat event is held the day after the Kentucky Derby each year....

The Palins have attended equestrian events with Whitney and Hendrickson in the past, notably the Belmont Stakes. According to a 2010 Capitol Confidential report, Hendrickson knows Sarah Palin from when he lived in Alaska in the 1990s....

Whitney, who has homes in Lexington and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., has been a prominent supporter of The Headley-Whitney Museum, which her family helped found....

Here's some information about the museum:

George Headley had the money and talent to create his own little world of art. He did it with jewelry and curios he designed for the rich and famous, and with the gem he left Lexington, the Headley-Whitney Museum.

The designer, collector and socialite died in 1985....

George Headley studied art in New York and Paris before going to work for Paul Flato, the first celebrity jeweler in Beverly Hills. Headley then set up his own boutique in the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, designing jewelry for movie stars.

In 1949, Headley moved back to the family farm on Old Frankfort Pike. He lived at La Belle, a house designed by the noted local architect Warfield Gratz and built in 1936. Headley married Barbara Whitney, a sister of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.

Headley continued designing jewelry and bibelots, small curios made of gems and precious metals with intricate craftsmanship. Dozens of bibelots became the core of Headley's personal collection, and in 1968 he built a "jewel room" and library of art books beside his house.

He then opened his collection as the Headley-Whitney, adding a museum building in 1978....

In addition to being an artist and designer, Headley was quite a character, famous for his personal style, gregarious personality and lavish parties....

"His robe was a fur coat," [museum board chair Linda Roach] recalled....

But surely he wore work boots with the fur coat -- right? Otherwise salt-of-the-earth Sarah would never attend this soiree -- right?

WHAT RIGHT-WINGERS KNOW: YOU DON'T BRING NUANCE TO A PROPAGANDA FIGHT

A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine looks at Oregon's Medicaid expansion and finds that there's clear improvement in recipients' lives in only some areas. Now, how did the first opinion-shapers who read this study react to it?

Well, right-wing opinion-shapers got to the study first, and they did what they usually do: they went nuclear. The Cato Institute essentially declared Medicaid expansion, and thus Obamacare, utterly and incontrovertibly worthless:

Today, the nation's top health economists released a study that throws a huge "STOP" sign in front of ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion.

The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, or OHIE, may be the most important study ever conducted on health insurance.

... the OHIE's second-year results found no evidence that Medicaid improves the physical health of enrollees. There were some modest improvements in depression and financial strain -- but it is likely those gains could be achieved at a much lower cost than through an extremely expensive program like Medicaid....

Others on the right were equally unnuanced in their response to this study:

* Jennifer Rubin at The Washington Post: "Spending on Medicaid Doesn't Actually Help the Poor."
*James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, at Business Insider: "Bombshell New Study Shows That Expanding Medicaid Does Nothing To Improve People's Health"
*Philip Klein at The Washington Examiner: "Landmark Study Shatters Liberal Health Care Claims"

Now, right-wingers say that the right-wing information machine -- Fox, talk radio, right-wing think tanks, right-wing blogs -- is a necessary corrective to the "liberal media," i.e., what most people think of as the mainstream media. So that means the mainstream media was just as unnuanced in its trumpeting of the successes shown in this study as the right-wing opinion machine was in trumpeting the failures ... right?

Er, no. Megan McArdle rounds up the initial mainstream responses:

"Study: Medicaid reduces financial hardship, doesn’t quickly improve physical health" says the Washington Post.

The Associated Press headline reads "Study: Depression rates for uninsured dropped with Medicaid coverage"

At the New York Times, it's "Study Finds Expanded Medicaid Increases Health Care Use"

I think Slate is closer to the mark, though a bit, well, Slate-ish: "Bad News for Obamacare: A new study suggests universal health care makes people happier but not healthier."

It's only now, after right-wing propagandists have set the terms of the debate, that there's some pushback from liberals. And even some of that is nuanced. At The New Republic, Jonathan Cohn touts the positive results shown in the study, and says of conservative critics, "Did they read read the same study that I did?" -- but the title-bar headline for his piece is "Medicaid Expansion: Oregon Study Shows Benefits, Mostly." Kevin Drum writes a gosh-I'm-not-sure-what-to-think post titled "So Is Healthcare Worthwhile or Not?," then gets around to reading the study and boldly proclaims, "Followup: Medicaid Probably Does Improve Health Outcomes After All." Mostly! Probably!

Look, I think the liberals in this debate are being more honest. But that's the problem. Our side is dominated by honest brokers -- people who'd read this and lean toward the argument that the government-intervention glass is half full, or maybe a fair amount more than half full, but never that it's completely full.

The problem is, they're up against a right-wing information machine that's ready to shout to the world that not only is the glass half empty, but it's shattered, and pieces of broken glass are being nibbled on by your babies, while other shards are cutting a hole in your wallet pocket.

The right wins all the time because the right thinks the whole point of political debate is winning. Right-wingers instantly pounce on everything that might give them a win. They exploit everything that might give them a win in a way that maximizes the chance of a win. And they all instinctively know how to flood the zone whenever one of them finds anything exploitable.

Intellectual honesty and nuance can't compete with that.

THEIR POSITION ON BACKGROUND CHECKS IS "LIBERALS SUCK"

Mediaite's Tommy Christopher is banging his head on his desk because polls show that Americans' opinions on guns make no sense:

... Recently, Pew polled a group of people who presumably also support background checks at around 90%, yet only 47% of them were displeased that the Republicans killed the background check law. That means that a great many of the poll's respondents were "happy" or "relieved" that a law they supported did not pass. What the hell?

... in [a] Gallup poll out this week, respondents were asked "Do you think the Senate should or should not have passed the measure to expand background checks for gun purchases?"

A large majority, 65%, said yes, although that's significantly less than the 90% support background checks have enjoyed in nearly every poll.

Then, these exact same people were asked "Would you vote for or against a law that would require background checks for all gun purchases?"

Not only is this almost exactly the same question, but the wording on the second question is actually slightly stronger than the first. The result? 83% said they would vote yes, which means that 51% of the people who didn't say the Senate should have passed "expanded" background checks said they would, themselves, vote to pass background checks for all gun purchases.

So why would people who support stricter background checks not support a stricter-background-check law (even though they'd vote for one themselves in a referendum)?

Well, there's yet another poll today, from The New York Times and CBS, and it has similar results: 88% support for background checks on all purchases, but 41% support for President Obama's approach to the gun issue.

And that seems to be the point, at least according to one respondent:

"I'm for stricter gun laws, but the reason I favor the Republicans over the Democrats and the liberals on gun laws is because they have always been against the Second Amendment and the right to own guns," said Jim Hensley, 69, a Republican from Grandville, Mich., in an interview after the poll was conducted.

In other words: Republicans did what I didn't want them to do, Democrats wanted to do what I did want them to do -- but I still support Republicans because I've always heard that Democrats disagree with me.

Really, that's it: A lot of conservatives and right-centrists support the policy of stronger background checks, but they're so conditioned to distrust Democrats that they can't support the policy they support because Democrats support it.

This isn't about logic. It's about tribal loyalties and tribal hatreds, the latter reinforced by decades of tribal-hatred propaganda.

Mr. Hensley goes on to say:

"Yes, I believe the Republicans should have voted for background checks, and they should not legalize automatic weapons," Mr. Hensley added. "I was against the repeal of the ban on automatic weapons, and I don't support the N.R.A. But it's like marriage. You stick with your wife no matter what, and you don’t just ditch your political party on one issue."

So because of party loyalty, he opposes the party that does what he supports.

And in the Gallup poll, opponents of the actual background-check bill -- including the ones who'd have voted for a theoretical background-check referendum -- give reasons for their bill opposition that suggest loyalty to the NRA and its talking points:





Republicans and right-leaning groups understand how public opinion works. Democrats and liberal groups don't. Republicans and right-leaning groups know that the point is to create generalized feelings of hatred toward the other guys, as well as hatred on specific points, and reinforce that sense of tribalism every hour of every day.

It works. It's worked with virtually all of heartland white America. And our side still tries to fight back with logic and reason. That will never be enough.

WHY A TED CRUZ PRESIDENTIAL RUN COULD BE GOOD FOR THE GOP (AND BAD FOR THE COUNTRY)

National Review's Robert Costa tells us, breathlessly, that Senator Ted Cruz is seriously thinking about running for president:

... "If you don’t think this is real, then you're not paying attention," says a Republican insider. "Cruz already has grassroots on his side, and in this climate, that's all he may need."

"There's not a lot of hesitation there," adds a Cruz donor who has known the Texan for decades. "He's fearless." ...

"You bet, he's on my radar," says Chad Connelly, the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. "Conservatives think he's a rock star. I hear about him from everybody." ...

He has been out front on each issue, brashly battling Democrats and, if need be, his fellow Republicans. "He's the purest of the young conservative senators -- that's how we see him," says a consultant who works for a leading conservative group.

It's obvious that Cruz is a guy with an ego the size of a small galaxy, and it's obvious that he thinks the sun of moral righteousness shines out of his ass. I absolutely believe he'll run.

But even Robert Costa admits that Cruz doesn't have much of an organization. And we know from Jennifer Rubin that he's alienating fellow Republicans, herself included. As a politician, in McLuhanesque terms, he's too "hot." He's just the kind of crazy-base darling who looks as if he might steal the nomination from the GOP establishment, but never does.

And that's especially true because we know Rand Paul is itching to run. If they both run, right there you've got a big split in the crazy-base vote. And maybe base hero Scott Walker will run. And Rick Santorum could run again. And thus the base vote gets subdivided. (And I'm still betting Allen West will run.)

That's what always seems to happen in GOP primary season, right? It looks as if the crazies might nominate a basehead, but then a bunch of base-friendly candidates split the base vote and someone presentable and establishment-friendly emerges from the pack -- McCain in '08, Romney in '12, arguably even Bush in '00.

So a Cruz candidacy will help ensure that, once again, the GOP standard-bearer in a presidential year is a guy who doesn't really represent the true GOP. It'll be someone Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio (sorry, he used to be a tea party guy, but no true teabagger would even flirt with the immigration reform crowd). And once again the press will be able to put on blinders and pretend that Republicans aren't dangerously crazy.

And who knows? Maybe 2016's presentable standard-bearer will figure out what McCain and Romney couldn't, which is how to persuade the centrists that you're sane while reassuring the base that you're crazy. It's hard, but I fear it's not impossible.

EEEK! EEEK! SLEEPER CELL! (OR, MORE LIKELY, NOT)
(updated)

Three more arrests have been made in connection with the Boston Marathon bombing. So do we finally have our Al Qaeda sleeper cell? Is every right-winger in America going to react by doing an imitation of the restaurant scene from When Harry Met Sally?

Probably not. This is from the Boston Globe story (emphasis added):

Three college students have been arrested by federal authorities in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings, a law enforcement official familar with the case said this morning.

The Boston police Web page ... emphasized that there was no threat to public safety.

The three people were connected to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, the surviving bomb suspect, at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where Tsarnaev was a student. They allegedly helped him after the bombing, a different source told the Globe.

CNN quotes Alan Dershowitz seconding that point:

"If they knew about the bombing, if they were involved in the bombing, the charges would be conspiracy to do the acts for which the other man has already been charged," Dershowitz told CNN. "So it sounds like at this point in time the only evidence they have is actions that took place after the bombing."

And this is from a Fox News story:

Two of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s former UMass-Dartmouth classmates, Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, are from Kazakhstan and faced an immigration hearing this morning, sources said. Sources told Fox News they face obstruction charges in connection with the bombing. The identity of the third suspect is unclear.

Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov are suspected of taking computers and other equipment from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's apartment and trying to dispose of it after the bombings, sources told Fox News.

I don't know what happened here. Did these three sympathize, but cooperate only after the fact? Or did they merely have a late-adolescent reaction of loyalty to a friend, agreeing to throw out some of his stuff before people who were after him could get at it, not quite grasping the seriousness of what he'd done (anyone ever see River's Edge?), or somehow believing the authorities would be after him even though he was innocent? Or are none of these scenarios accurate?

The two named suspects were questioned a week and a half ago -- yes, they're the ones with the "TERRORISTA #1" fake license plate: the Daily Mail story about those people said that two of them were "named by neighbours by their first names Azmat and Diaz."

I'm guessing these guys are going to talk in exchange for some level of leniency. Or who knows -- maybe they really are co-conspirators. But either way, are right-wingers now going to stop whining that we lost our only chance to get to the bottom of this because we Mirandized Dzhokhar? Obviously we didn't. Obviously the authorities had a lot of investigative avenues to explore.

Oh, and while we're on the subject, remember that other terrorism case last month? The one involving ricin letters? Did any right-winger ever say that either of the (white Christian) suspects in that case should be tried as an enemy combatant rather than put through the criminal justice system? Did we ever hear a right-winger suggesting that either suspect should be held without having Miranda rights read? Even though it seems quite possible that the suspects -- neither of whom is a scientist -- might have had help making ricin? And if more than one person worked on those ricin letters, will anyone ever call that a "cell"?

(And I still say the last thing you would do if you were a terrorist is put a "TERRORISTA #1" fake license plate on your car. But then again, I'm not a right-winger.)

*****

UPDATE:

Brotip: Don't try to help your bro cover up a federal crime

— AdamSerwer (@AdamSerwer) May 1, 2013

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UPDATE: Andy Kroll of Mother Jones summarizes the criminal complaint. The tweet above is highly appropriate.


*****

(Globe and Fox stories via Memeorandum.)

MASSACHUSETTS GOP SENATE NOMINEE: YEAH, I WORKED FOR A GROUP EFFECTIVELY ACCUSING OBAMA OF TREASON, BUT NOT ON THE TREASON BITS

Garbriel Gomez, a private equity guy and former Navy SEAL, won yesterday's Republican Senate primary in Massachusetts and will face Congressman Ed Markey in the general election on June 25. Gomez, who was recruited by the national GOP, has a bit of controversy in his recent past, which he's trying to play down, with the help of National Journal:

Gomez served as a spokesman for the Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund, which ran a 22-minute video bashing President Obama for politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden. Gomez told the Globe he doesn’t have any regrets about speaking for the group. "Like anything else, I can't control who all those guys are," he said. "I'm not part of that group. I was just asked to go on a radio and TV show and talk about two points."

First of all, the video didn't just accuse the president of politicizing the bin Laden raid -- as I told you in February, it accused the president of deliberately endangering national security -- and putting Americans' lives at risk -- with leaks. The full video, entitled Dishonorable Disclosures, is here, but you can get a sense of it from this preview:





Gomez is right -- he "can't control who all those guys are." But he can control the people with whom he chooses to associate. What is he telling us? That, sure, these people have a few nutty ideas, but apart from that they're really good guys? And that it's OK to promote a video effectively accusing the president of treason (during the president's reelection campaign) if you don't directly accuse him of treason yourself?

And is Gomez keeping his distance from these people now? No, according to the National Journal story:

Now, the group is sending fundraising letters, seeking donations of up to $5,000 for Gomez's campaign.

Gomez aided and abetted a shameless campaign of swiftboating. He's taking money from swiftboaters. If this race becomes close, Markey should make Gomez's involvement in this group a centerpiece of his campaign.

GITMO ON THE HUDSON?

A couple of months ago I told you about Joe Lhota, a former Rudy Giuliani aide who's now running for mayor himself, as Giuliani's handpicked heir.

Well, now I see from the New York Times editorial page that Giuliani is selling Lhota as a guy who should be mayor because he'll deprive terrorist suspects of civil liberties:

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani went to a fund-raiser on Staten Island on Monday for Joseph Lhota, his former deputy who is running for Mr. Giuliani's old job. Thanks to a blogging reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, there is video of Mr. Giuliani reprising his role as the Mayor of 9/11.

"What you want to do with a terrorist? You don't want to prosecute him and put him in jail," he said. "You want to grab him, question him, and find out who else is involved. Find out what these networks are like. That's how we prevent further attacks. And we're going in exactly the opposite direction. We need a mayor who can speak up for that. We need a mayor who understands that, from having been at my side virtually every day for 40 days, from the moment the bombs hit until the moment we left office. Joe wasn't away from me for more than two minutes."

So vote Lhota because he -- as mayor -- will unilaterally make the decision as to whether terrorism suspects get Miranda rights, or trials, presumably ever. Even though terrorism is always treated as a federal crime.

Wait, there's more:

[Giuliani] said the police need to keep stopping-and-frisking because: bombers!

Yes, he did. Here's what Giuliani said about Lhota (at about 14:15 in the video below):

He's someone who will keep this city safe from Islamic extremist terrorists, and keep this city safe from criminals. To want to do away with Stop, Question, and Frisk, at a time in which this city is being targeted by people who want to drop bombs here, makes no sense in the world.

Yup, we have to continue stopping and frisking every young black male standing on a street corner in the city because otherwise we might not spot white Chechens driving bombs into Times Square in a stolen car.

Lhota will win the GOP mayoral nomination, and I don't care who wins the Democratic nomination, because I'll vote for anyone to keep Rudy's boy out of office.