REPUBLICANS: STILL DELUSIONAL

A recent poll seems to have slipped under the radar except in academic circles, or maybe I just missed it:

A few months ago, the Tobin Project sponsored a YouGov poll to be put in the field on American attitudes towards foreign policy and national security. Dartmoth political science Benjamin Valentino conducted the poll....

You can look at all of the topline results here, with party-line breakdowns to the responses....

There's a lot in this poll that might be of interest to you, depending on your interests, but (via Jim Lobe) I'd just like you to know that 63% of Republicans still think Iraq had WMDs in 2003 (click to enlarge):





And (as noted by Daniel Drezner) that birth-certificate thing is still an open question in the GOP, with more than 63% of Republicans now believing Obama is foreign-born, and nearly 15% of the rest saying they don't know (click to enlarge):





Yes, 8% of Republicans used to think Obama was eligible to be president by birth, but now think he wasn't, in addition to the more than 55% who say they never thought he was eligible by birth.

Dear Beltway elite: both sides do not do it. Republicans are crazy.

(Via Juan Cole and Reza Marashi on Twitter.)

IS THIS A RIGHT-WING "DOCTRINE OF INFALLIBILITY"?

Jake Tapper reports:

The family of slain U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was killed with guns tied to the Fast and Furious program, issued a statement Wednesday afternoon accusing President Obama of compounding their family tragedy by invoking executive privilege....

Terry family attorney Pat McGroder on Wednesday released the following statement from Terry's parents Josephine Terry and Kent Terry Sr.: "Attorney General Eric Holder's refusal to fully disclose the documents associated with Operation Fast and Furious and President Obama's assertion of executive privilege serves to compound this tragedy. It denies the Terry family and the American people the truth."

... Earlier today, Josephine Terry was on Philadelphia Talk Radio 1210 WPHT.

Asked about the president's assertion, she said, "The only thing I can say is, if he did that they apparently don't want Issa to get the documents to see what’s in there." ...

I would like to see a resolution that -- in a different, utterly non-partisan way -- gets to the truth and hold somebody accountable for what happened to Brian Terry. But what's going on in Congress is not about Brian Terry, and everyone can see that.

Do you remember the summer of 2006? A group of 9/11 widows were seeking answers from the Bush administration about what had happened to their husbands and thousands of other people. Ann Coulter had a book to sell, and she made the round of TV talk shows saying things like this:

MATT LAUER: ... this part is the part I really need to talk to you about: "These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband's death so much." Because they dare to speak out?

COULTER: To speak out using the fact they are widows. This is the left's doctrine of infallibility. If they have a point to make about the 9-11 commission, about how to fight the war on terrorism, how about sending in somebody we are allowed to respond to. No. No. No. We have to respond to someone who had a family member die. Because then if we respond, oh you are questioning their authenticity.

For some thoughts about that, let's go to ... um, Jake Tapper, on June 9, 2006:

She [Ann Coulter] has a -- she has a perfectly acceptable argument, a perfectly intelligent argument in her book Godless....

And the argument is that the Democratic Party and the liberals constantly bring out spokespeople whom [sic] are unassailable: Cindy Sheehan, John Murtha, the 9-11 widows, etc. And -- and it becomes -- any time you question what they're saying -- "How dare you question these people?" And that's a -- that's a perfectly respectable and honest argument.

Funny thing -- I don't hear Tapper saying anything like that right now. Nor -- astonishingly -- does Coulter seem to be making an intellectually consistent argument:

Eric Holder lied. Brian Terry died.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) June 20, 2012

What?! No railing against the Terry family's moral "infallibility"? I'm shocked, Ann. Shocked!

GUN-THERISM

In addition to believing that gun control led to the Holocaust, Joe the Plumber thinks Fast and Furious was an Obama/Holder plot to put through "draconian" gun laws. Here's a campaign video he's put out:





If you don't feel like watching the whole thing, here's a still:





Of course, believing this nonsense doesn't make Joe the P unusually paranoid by the standards of the modern GOP. As The Hill notes, the NRA scored today's contempt vote, which means that if you voted nay, your NRA letter grade for the year will be lower and you've opened yourself up to election-year charges of being a filthy gun-grabber -- gun incorrectness, you might say.

John Aravosis says,

The NRA doesn't score issues that it doesn't consider dealing with gun control. And we know that the real motivation behind the GOP investigation of this issue has been some crazy conspiracy that this is all part of an Obama plot to take away our guns. So it's no surprise that the NRA is treating this issue as a key vote for them.

I assume the full House vote will be scored by the NRA as well, which means that every Republican, and quite a few red- and purple-state Democrats, will vote yea.

And the message that an Obama second term will bring radical restrictions on gun owners -- which is exactly as crazy as birtherism -- will have effectively become mainstream.

****

ALSO, TOO:

Newt Gingrich, on CNBC just now, endorsed nutty conspiracy that #fastandfurious was put in place to enact gun control.

— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) June 20, 2012

BOTH SIDES DO IT!

CNN tells me that the House panel vote finding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt was 23-17, "on strictly partisan lines."

What?! This happened without a single Democratic vote? Haven't we repeatedly been informed by our betters in the media that votes (such as the House vote on health care reform) don't really count if all the "yea" votes come from one party? Why didn't Congressman Issa reach across the aisle?

I'm joking, of course. This is a Major Constitutional Crisis -- that's what our media betters are about to tell me. Tens of millions of Americans without health insurance was just something bratty kids fought over in a sandbox.

EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE: IT'S BEEN CLAIMED FOR NON-PRESIDENTIAL COMMUNICATIONS AND ON BEHALF OF PREVIOUS PRESIDENTS

I'm in somewhat over my head talking about the Obama administration's assertion of executive privilege regarding internal Justice Department documents in the Fast and Furious case, but I don't buy the notion that there's something unprecedented about asserting this privilege for documents that don't involve direct communication with the president doing the asserting:

"How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over documents he's supposedly never seen?" [Senator Charles] Grassley said in a statement.

Well, in 2001, less than a year after his inauguration, President Bush claimed executive privilege for FBI documents in a decades-old scandal:

President Bush invoked executive privilege today for the first time in his administration to block a Congressional committee trying to review documents about a decades-long scandal involving F.B.I. misuse of mob informants in Boston.

The chief of staff of the Justice Department's criminal division, Michael Horowitz, told Congress that the documents in question were, in the words of Media Matters, "deliberative DOJ documents, not documents pertaining to the president or the White House."

I'd also note that in 1986, President Reagan invoked executive privilege after nominating William Rehnquist to be chief justice of the Supreme Court -- but the documents Reagan wanted to shield had been generated nearly two decades earlier:

President Reagan refused this evening to allow members of the Senate to see internal memorandums that William H. Rehnquist wrote from 1969 to 1971, when he was a high-ranking Justice Department official in the Nixon Administration....

The documents dealt with civil rights, civil liberties, wiretapping and surveillance of radical groups....

Reagan eventually backed down in that case -- but please note that he was attempting to protect documents that weren't even from his administration.

I'm not offering an opinion as to the appropriateness of this practice. I'm just saying that previous presidents have had a fairly flexible view as to when the privilege applies. So I'd say that what Obama is doing is hardly unprecedented, much less totalitarian.

EVEN IF IT'S AN OUTLIER, THE BLOOMBERG POLL DISPROVES THE "OBAMA'S HORRIBLE MONTH" MEME

I think it's conceivable that Barack Obama would beat Mitt Romney by a comfortable margin if the election were held today, but, yeah, he's probably not really leading Romney by 13 points, as the new Bloomberg poll suggests. This poll is very different from other recent polls:

According to Real Clear Politics, every poll over the last month shows President Obama and Mitt Romney somewhere between zero and four points of each other.

But why aren't the other recent polls showing that Obama is sinking fast? The meme-setters of the journalistic world have been telling us for weeks that Obama's campaign is flailing -- reviews range from "underwhelming" to "truly terrible" -- while Romney's campaign is increasingly "confident." So If Obama's doing such a crappy job, and Romney's campaign is so awesome, why isn't Obama averaging, say, a 6-point deficit, which an outlier Bloomberg poll might correct to something like a 4-point lead? How do you get a 13-point lead, even with a skewed poll, for a guy who's running the worst general-election campaign since Dukakis, which is what I'd understand Obama to be doing if I'd just arrived from another planet and started reading the political press?

The fact is that Obama's campaign isn't struggling, while Romney's campaign is gaining traction with precisely two groups: right-leaning older whites and mainstream journalists. Yes, it's probably still a tight race. But Romney remains the sourest, most unpleasant general election candidate since Bob Dole, and he seems to think that snarling like a talk radio host is what he has to do or he'll lose his base. This thing won't be a blowout, and the super PAC money really hasn't kicked in, but maybe Obama really will win handily.

ROMNEY/DOORMAT '12

If you're not sick of this sort of thing by now, Politico has the latest in Romney VP speculation. Today, the inside dope is that Tim Pawlenty is the guy at the top of the short list.

We're told that it's Pawlenty because his regular-guy background and style contrast nicely with Romney's patrician bearing; we're told that Pawlenty has been better on the stump campaigning for Romney than he was campaigning for himself; we're told his evangelicalism would help Romney with the base, though he doesn't talk about it in a way that alienates swing voters; and we're told that his wife and Ann Romney get along well.

But as you read the Politico story, you get the feeling that the real reason Pawlenty might be the one is that (unlike certain other short-listers) Pawlenty is really, really low-maintenance:

And what do top officials at Romney headquarters love about Pawlenty?

"They respect people who are loyal and show up and work hard, and he has done both in spades," the former Pawlenty official said. "From the perspective of Boston, I think that really matters.... he's an articulate, effective, economical messenger for the campaign."

In contrast to some of their higher-maintenance surrogates, the plain-spoken Pawlenty travels with no entourage -- not even the "body guy" that even most House members travel with. Often, a Romney campaign volunteer meets him when his plane lands. But at an appearance for Romney in North Carolina recently, he rented his own car and drove himself to and from the airport. The local reporters were shocked when they followed him out to his car and watched him drive himself away.

When the campaign makes a request that he fly somewhere, according to a person familiar with the conversations, the former governor just says cheerfully: "Send me my ticket."

In other words, Pawlenty doesn't expect Romney to do much of anything to help him out. That's what Romney finds most appealing about him.

I suspect that Romney looks at the American people and judges us by the same criterion.

This has been stuck in my head all day, so here it is:

ON GUNS, MUCH OF THE RIGHT IS JUST AS STUPID AS JOE THE PLUMBER

Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, now running for Congress, is being mocked for a campaign ad in which he blames the Holocaust on gun control:





This is not a silly, cockamamie notion that would occur only to a pathetic grifter like Joe the Plumber -- it's a silly, cockamamie notion that has been advanced in all seriousness by the still-deemed-respectable National Review, by Ph.D. and alleged serious scholar John Lott, by the feared lobbying outfit Gun Owners of America, and by this sheepskin-wielder, writing for the Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law (I'll leave it to you to decide how respectable that publication is).

It is regularly stated -- probably in your local paper's letters column at one time or another -- that one or another of America's gun control laws is a word-for-word translation of Nazi gun control laws; (see, e.g., this and this and this and this).

The notion that gun control is neo-Nazism has been pushed most vehemently by a group called Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, which sells items such as this:





This craziness has been out there forever. If the media finally notices it because it came from Wurzelbacher, maybe the media should have been paying attention all these years.

(The Straight Dope does a good job of debunking this nonsense here.)

THE GROWN-UPS ARE IN CHARGE

ABC is reporting that the Romney campaign isn't even bothering to vet Marco Rubio for the VP slot. I don't have much to add to what others are saying -- I agree that this leak could theoretically be a head fake by the campaign, though most observers seem to think it isn't, in which case the rejection of Rubio means that Romney has given up on trying to win Hispanic votes and is now trying to get elected exclusively by rolling up the score with non-college-educated whites. I'd add that maybe Romney thinks running with Rubio would effectively be like running with Rubio's best-known champion, Jeb Bush; Romney, who strikes me as quite insecure, may be trying not to be overshadowed by that Big Kahuna and his famous family.

But what I want to bring up is the pettiness of the whole thing. The report comes on the publication date of Rubio's memoir. Um, twist the knife much, Romney campaign?

And now there's this from BuzzFeed:

Rubio Ally Fingers Romney Adviser As Possible Leak Source

A top ally to Marco Rubio suggested that a prominent Romney aide was the source of the ABC News story today that Romney is not considering the Florida senator as his running mate.

"Do remember that Stuart Stevens was Charlie Crist's guy," Ana Navarro told BuzzFeed, referring to Rubio's Republican-turned-independent opponent in the 2010 Senate race. "The guys who did all of that oppo and attacks on Marco were none other than [Romney advisers] Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer."

... "I think it's interesting that the only person being singled out in this rumor is Marco," said Ana Navarro, an adviser to one of Rubio's strongest backers -- former Gov. Jeb Bush....

So this is how your team operates, Mitt? Your subordinates use the campaign not to do what helps the campaign, but to settle scores in a small-minded, childish way? Yeah, I'm so looking forward to having you and your crew in the Situation Room dealing with a 3:00 A.M. crisis.

Last September, The New York Times ran a profile of Stuart Stevens. He comes off as a guy who really, really thinks he's The Most Interesting Man in the World:

The man in charge of reshaping Mitt Romney's image as a presidential candidate ... has skied the last 100 miles to the North Pole and eaten his way through Europe's three-star Michelin restaurants.

...he has picked up his share of critics who say that his ego can be outsize and that he can be sharp-elbowed with rivals. Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, ... called him "a slippery character."

... "He is not a political consultant out of central casting," said Stephen Merrill, a former governor of New Hampshire. "When you sit down with him, you never know if the first sentence is going to be, 'I'm going to sail around the world,' or 'I'm going to write a book about moon exploration' or 'I'm going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.'"

... Those who do not like Mr. Stevens find him cocky -- someone who thinks he is smarter and better than many in the business -- and Mr. Stevens might not disagree. Nor does he much care about being liked. He likes politics for its blood-sport aspect...

He is also an extreme-sports aficionado....

... His life as a political consultant, Mr. Stevens wrote, "served as an outlet for my violent tendencies."

In other words, he's kind of a self-satisfied dick. And he's proud that he's a self-satisfied dick. If this profile is accurate, he seems like a guy who'd go rogue because it suits his own needs.

It's striking to me that Romney's top guy seems to have no idea what it's like to have ordinary workaday responsibilities, or to have to get along with people in a society, because he can always swan off to some other continent when the mood strikes him. Seems like exactly the wrong worldview for public service.

EVERY STORY ABOUT ROMNEY AND WAWA MISSES THE POINT, INCLUDING THE DEBUNKINGS

As you may already know, Mitt Romney made a campaign appearance in which he talked about going to a branch of the convenience-store chain Wawa, where -- to Romney's amazement -- you can choose a sandwich using a touchscreen. An edited clip of Romney's Wawa remarks played on an MSNBC daytime show and made him appear as if he's out of touch with ordinary people's lives:





But it turns out that Romney wasn't calling this Wawa touchscreen service "amazing" because it was foreign to him -- he was making a point about innovation in the private sector and the lack thereof in the public sector. You see, if you want to do a change of address for your small business, you have to fill out 33 pages of forms -- repeatedly! Public sector sucks, private sector rules! MSNBC sucks, Romney rules! End of story!

Right?

Nope. There's more to talk about here. Romney is making a preposterous apples-to-oranges comparison. Here's the longer clip:





Notice what Romney says, starting at about 2:02. I'll highlight the point where he starts trying to pull the wool over your eyes:

I met an optometrist this morning ... and this optometrist wanted to change his billing address. He'd moved his office from one side of town to the other -- same zip code, same post office -- but he wanted to change his address. He got a form from the federal government -- this is so he can get reimbursement from the federal government for the services he provides for the poor and seniors.

The form he gets to change addresses is 33 pages long -- 33 pages long! He calls someone to ask how to fill it out -- he calls someone in government. They tell him what to do. He sends it in. They send it back -- wasn't done right, gotta do it again, another 33 pages. He calls another person. They tell him what to do. Doesn't get it right the second time. Third time's the charm, though.

This takes several months, during which time he's not getting the checks for the work he's doing for people who need his care. That's how government works.

Then I was at a Wawa's. I went to order a sandwich. You press the little touch-tone keypad, all right? You just touch that, and, you know, that sandwich comes, you just touch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, there's your sandwich. It's amazing! People in the private sector have learned how to compete! It's time to bring some competition to the federal government and get it smaller, and respond to the customers, which are you!

See what he did there?

He lulled you with words about the post office and the zip code and all that. He wants you to think you have to fill out a 33-page form to register a business change of address with the post office. (Nonsense -- you can do it online, and the form is no more onerous than a typical online shopping form.)

This optometrist had a lot of pages to fill out because he's providing Medicare and Medicaid services.

(Note what Romney says -- "this is so he can get reimbursement from the federal government for the services he provides for the poor and seniors.")

Do we not have Medicare and Medicaid fraud in this country? Do you think we might have a bit more Medicare and Medicaid fraud if we applied the same level of scrutiny to providers' records that we have for ordering a sandwich at a convenience store?

Oh, and does Romney seriously think that private-sector health care is a low-paperwork enterprise?

I think everyone in America with private-sector insurance could disabuse him of that notion.

****

There's a lot about this clip that infuriates me. In the first part of it, he brags about knowing how to innovate because when he was governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to poach Massachusetts companies and he tried to poach California companies. Why are we supposed to think that's a good thing? We're competing with other countries, but we're focused on stealing jobs from other states, which adds zero to the number of net jobs in America. The main benefit is to companies, which get bigger and bigger tax breaks, starving the state and local beast so potholes go unfilled and schools go underfunded. And many of those companies grab the tax breaks, stay a few years, then skip town anyway. That's a system Romney is proud of?

****

UPDATE: OK -- Tommy Christopher of Mediaite found the Medicaid service provider change of address form and it's (PDF) two pages long, plus two pages of instructions. Four -- not 33.

Maybe Romney's optometrist pal is confusing this with a form from, say, Aetna or United Health.

****

AND: Hmmm, maybe Romney really does want Medicare/Medicaid oversight to be at a convenience-store level.

MAYBE THEY CAN TRADE TEENAGE HAIR STORIES

Politico reports:

Liberty Plaza Events has signed on musical acts Lynyrd Skynyrd (Aug. 26), Trace Adkins (Aug. 28) and Kid Rock (Aug. 29) for the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

So wait -- Mitt Romney, the guy who once forcibly chopped off the hair of a long-haired prep school classmate, is going to be serenaded at the Republican convention by a band named after a teacher who disciplined the band members in high school for having long hair?

In 1970, [Ronnie] Van Zant sought a new name. "One Percent" and "The Noble Five" were each considered before the group settled on "Leonard Skinner", a mocking tribute to a physical-education teacher at Robert E. Lee High School, Leonard Skinner, who was notorious for strictly enforcing the school's policy against boys having long hair. [Gary] Rossington dropped out of school, tired of being hassled about his hair. The more distinctive spelling was adopted before they released their first album.

(Full story here.)

The members of Lynyrd Skynyrd mended fences with Leonard Skinner after they became successful. Before he died, Skinner said nice things about them:

"They were good, talented, hard-working boys," Mr. Skinner once told The Florida Times-Union. "They worked hard, lived hard and boozed hard."

It would have been nice if Romney and his target, John Lauber, could have had a little reconciliation. Never happened, though, did it?

WILL IT TURN OUT THAT THERE ARE NO HEALTH CARE WMDs AND THE MANDATE NEVER MET ATTA IN PRAGUE?

You know what I think when I read this Kevin Drum paragraph about the Supreme Court's pending health care decision?

If the court does overturn the mandate, it's going to be hard to know how to react. It's been more than 75 years since the Supreme Court overturned a piece of legislation as big as ACA, and I can't think of any example of the court overturning landmark legislation this big based on a principle as flimsy and manufactured as activity vs. inactivity. When the court overturned the NRA in 1935, it was a shock -- but it was also a unanimous decision and, despite FDR's pique, not really a surprising ruling given existing precedent. Overturning ACA would be a whole different kind of game changer. It would mean that the Supreme Court had officially entered an era where they were frankly willing to overturn liberal legislation just because they don't like it. Pile that on top of Bush v. Gore and Citizens United and you have a Supreme Court that's pretty explicitly chosen up sides in American electoral politics. This would be, in no uncertain terms, no longer business as usual.

I read that and I think it's 2003 all over again.

Back then, I couldn't believe that people whose opinions I respected were still struggling with the question of whether the Bush administration was making a wise move by going into Iraq; now, I can't believe that people I respect are still asking, "Could it be? Is it really conceivable that the Supreme Court is highly politicized?"

Kevin Drum himself came around on the Iraq War a week and a half before it began. As Atrios said at the time, what took him so long? But people like Drum just can't believe that people in positions of great responsibility might be acting in utterly bad faith, or might have effectively joined a political cult that believes extremist zealotry is reasonable behavior.

And what the Drums of the world always struggle to grasp is the degree to which decision-making on the right is done on the basis of "whatever liberals hate must be wise and responsible and good." Ultimately, the war was pursued and fought because it was the perfect wedge issue; Citizens United was decided the way it was because liberals rail against corporate power; and the health care law will be partially overturned in the way likely to cause maximum political pain for the Obama administration.

If you're Kevin Drum, you can't really believe that powerful people who hold positions of great responsibility act like this. You can't believe, for instance, that they'd saddle their own political primaries with a Sheldon Adelson just because freeing people like him to give unlimited cash pisses us off. Even now, they can't believe the Supreme Court will overturn a law that reduces government spending, and that Republicans in Congress won't replace it with something that addresses the country's real health care problems in some serious way.

But that's not how it goes anymore. Right-wing decision-makers, first and foremost, want to crush liberalism. They are not acting in good faith. And everyone needs to grasp how seriously messed up a political system is when half its actors are out of control in this way.

ANN ROMNEY: WE HAVE SO MANY HOUSES WE DON'T NEED TO JET OFF LIKE THOSE OBAMAS

This is getting a lot of attention:

Ann Romney, the wife of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, said Monday that she doubted she and her husband would vacation overseas as frequently as the Obamas if her husband were elected.

Romney was responding to a question from WJR Detroit's Frank Beckmann, who asked Romney if her family would be vacationing abroad as frequently as the Obamas.

"I doubt that," Romney replied. "Our vacations and our happiness come from being with our children and our grandchildren."

But I think what Mrs. R says after that is most telling:

But the potential future first lady didn't rule out vacationing at all, noting the Romney family has their "own places for that."

Yeah -- it's easy to have a staycation when you've got so many lovely places in the United States to, um, stay: the $3 million place in New Hampshire; the $12 million house (about to be vastly expanded to more than 11,000 square feet) in La Jolla, California; and the modest house they purchased in Belmont, Massachusetts, in 2010, which runs to a mere 3,000 square feet (plus private courtyard).

The Obamas have a nice house in Chicago. But that's all they own: one house. The Romneys own multiple pleasure domes (and used to own more). And I'm not even counting the houses owned by the five sons.

So, yeah, they've got a lot of options for R&R. I'm sure they have no idea that other people, including the well-to-do Obamas, don't live this way.

****

ALSO, TOO:

RT @glomad67: @PragObots So, Ann Romney doesn't like people who vacation in foreign countries, but hiding her money there is just fine?

— GottaLaff (@GottaLaff) June 18, 2012

RIGHT-WINGERS ARE ODDLY DELIGHTED BY OBAMA POOP JOKES

Yeah, this is nasty -- though it's not the first time wingers have delighted in their own scintillating wit after making an Obama/outhouse joke:

Outside the Montana state Republican Party convention this weekend was an outhouse labeled the "Obama Presidential Library" and covered in painted-on bullet holes.

Inside the outhouse contained a fake birth certificate for Barack Hussein Obama, according to the Helena Independent Record....

There have been politician poop jokes since at least the days of Nixon and Agnew (oldsters will remember this poster imagine Nixon on the crapper), so, um, neither side has taken the high road on this sort of thing.

But I do find a particular category of anti-Obama poop/outhouse merchandise that I don't find for any other politician:




Don't like that design? You can get a stein with this variant:





Or one of these, or one of these, or one of these...

I just don't find this for any other pol: "Back in a minute -- I have to a Bush"? No. "I have to take a W"? No. "I have to take a Romney"? No. "I have to take a Palin"? No. "I have to take a Clinton"? No. This seems to be limited to Obama. Draw your own conclusions as to why other pols are linked to crap, but right-wingers laugh when you say Obama is crap.

I'M BACK

Thanks, Tom and Crank, for filling in while I was gone. I'll be back in a little while with some posts.

And in Related News, Irony Is Still Dead

Antonin Scalia is shamelessly trying to one-up John Yoo, according to this piece about his new book:

A new book co-authored by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and legal writing expert Bryan Garner accuses judges – including some on the Supreme Court – of loose and unprincipled decisionmaking that has tarnished the reputation of the judiciary.

In case it's unclear from the excerpt, Scalia thinks loose and unprincipled decisionmaking is very bad.

Welcome to the SCOTUS Shortlist

The second most notablie thing about the recent 9th Circuit decision on Prop 8 was the hilariously overwrought dissent, written by one Justice O'Scannlain. Referring to the President's call for "respectful conversation", he launches into this tirade:

Today our court has silenced any such respectful conversation. Based on a two-judge majority’s gross misapplication of Romer v. Evans...we have now declared that animus must have been the only conceivable motivation for a sovereign State to have remained committed to a definition of marriage that has existed for millennia....Even worse, we have overruled the will of seven million California Proposition 8 voters¹ based on a reading of Romer that would be unrecognizable to the Justices who joined it, to those who dissented from it, and to the judges from sister circuits who have since interpreted it.

He gives away the game with that "definition of marriage that has existed for millennia" schtick. (SPOILER ALERT: not so much.) When you see a judge recycling wingnut talking points, you pretty much know all you need to know.

Now, O'Scannlain is someone I wrote about 6 years ago. It was a case in which the 9th Circuit ruled that schools could ban homophobic t-shirts, and of course he wrote the dissenting opinion ("School administrators are now free to give one side of debatable public questions a free pass while muzzling voices raised in opposition", says O'Scannlain, speaking up for the right of kids to say certain classes of human beings shouldn't exist).

Back then I looked up his record, and found that he really was as wingnutty as the tone of his dissent suggested. From that post, 6 years ago:

O'Scannlain is hardly the First Amendment absolutist he sounds like in his dissenting opinion. In the past, he has argued against free speech rights for performance artists and government whistleblowers, and in favor of free speech rights for potentially violent anti-abortion fanatics and landlords who discriminate on the basis of religion.

In other words, he's an activist judge who pretty much rules as an ideological conservative, and principle be damned. Just the sort of disgraceful behavior that, if he keeps it up, will probably get him appointed to SCOTUS.

Since that time, he has also ruled that repeatedly tasering a pregnant woman isn't excessive force.

O'Scannlain is 75 years old, so of course he's far too old to be considered for the Supreme Court. If you want to know what kind of judge President Romney would appoint, though, I'd say he's a pretty good model.

Irony Just Threw Up in its Mouth a Little

There's a post at National Review about the President's no-deportation order titled Executive Overreach.

It's by John Yoo.

Comment would be superfluous.

YES, BIG BROTHER IS READING YOUR E-MAIL – AND PRETTY SOON HE'LL BE WATCHING YOUR EYEBALLS AND BODY LANGUAGE, THANKS TO MICROSOFT

By The New York Crank


Welcome to the new police state.

Advertising Age, an advertising trade newspaper, has revealed that back in 2010:

 “Microsoft sought to patent an advertising engine that gauges people's emotional states based on their search queries, emails, instant messages and use of online games, as well as facial expressions, speech patterns and body movements. The ad engine is device-agnostic; as Microsoft noted in its application, ‘client devices" could include personal digital assistants, smart phones, laptops, PCs and gaming devices.’” 

Wait a second, just wait a second! I have a problem with some of this. And its use as an “ad engine” is the least of it.

It’s not so much tracking search engine queries that sends chills up my spine. That’s old news. You go to look up, say, “navel lint” and some website pins a cookie to your hard drive. The next thing you know, you’re getting pop-up ads for belly button cleaners, lint tweezers, lint brushes, navel jewelry and pulled pork belly sandwiches at your neighborhood takeout joint. So big deal.

But e-mail? They can read your e-mail? Isn’t that qualitatively the same as illegally tapping somebody’s phone or stealing and reading somebody’s snail mail? And instead of saying to the person on the Microsoft staff who thought of this, “This kind of hacking is against the law and is legally and morally repugnant. You have a criminal mind and you’re fired,” .....Instead of that, they give the guy money and a team to develop the technology?

And then they start reading your facial expressions, presumably through that little chat lens on the top of your screen that you thought was there so that you could have face-to-face conversations with your mom in Mumbai or your pop in Peroria.

What’s the next step?

Well, if I can think of the next step, so can some errant cops, or political thugs, or crypto-fascists, or Mitt Romney. They can catch you frowning at the news that Scott Walker won in Wisconsin, or screaming at the computer screen whenever you catch Mitt lying through his teeth again.

And then they can check your e-mails to see if you were one of the people who’s writing to friends and acquaintances, urging them to vote Democratic.

And then they can come for you and take you away.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Cross-posted at The New York Crank