Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

This fight is for everything.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Dumbest Persyn On the InterTrons

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Amanda Marcotte.

Read my original post. Read the moronic response. And I mean moronic in the most gender neutral manner possible.

That, folks, is what it looks like when you take the short yellow bus to your Womyn’s Studies classes.

A.) I never advocated the study was accurate. Lindsay Beyerstein claims it is.
B.) I did state that it was anti-intellectual to jump the gun and call a study sexist before having read it.
C.) I think the re-writes of the study that appeared in the Scotsman and elsewhere are crap.
D.) Calling a study ‘cute,’ ‘self-serving,’ and ‘sexist,’ before even reading it is anti-intellectualism.
F.) Only in the weird world of Amanda Marcotte is having one author of a website ‘suggesting’ something to the other author an attempt to ‘control the womenfolk.’

The Scotsman article was stupid and a load of bullshit. So was Amanda’s response, to simply dismiss the study because of the article, without having read the actual study. And her utter inability to recognize that, and to simply launch into another one of her public displays of victimhood is precisely what I meant when I described her as a ‘feminist caricature.’

At least Amanda and I agree on one thing- there are many ‘layers of stupid’ here. I doubt we agree where those layers start and end.

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The Problem With Paul Krugman

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That Paul Krugman is an ideologue really doesn’t bother me that much. What bothers me is that he a wholly unoriginal, boring, and mean-spirited ideologue, and he occupies prime real-estate at the NY Times. If Krugman wants to dampen some of my criticism, he might take a cue from this Michael Kinsley piece on the flat tax:

The so-called flat tax is another hobby horse of the right that swept the nation, then got swept away. But someone forgot to tell Steve Forbes, the amiably blank-faced magazine heir, who ran for president on the issue in 1996 and 2000. Now he has a book out: “Flat Tax Revolution.” It’s getting the full fair-and-balanced treatment — that is, unashamed open-throated puffery — on Fox News and other conservative outlets. So even though the idea looks pretty dead right now, a stake through its heart might still be prudent.

The flat tax is a game of three-card monte that deliberately confuses the issues of simplicity, fairness and the total tax burden on society. A simpler tax system would be a very good thing: good for the economy, and good for everyone’s sanity. But contrary to what Forbes would have you believe, progressive tax rates — higher taxes on higher incomes — aren’t what make the current system so complicated. It’s as easy to multiply by 40% as it is to multiply by 17%. Even Republicans can easily do it — or hire someone to do it for them, if necessary…

Forbes figures that almost everybody would pay less under his proposal than under the current system. And just to make sure, he would let you opt to calculate your taxes under current rules, if you prefer. So everybody would pay less. That is swell. But it has nothing to do with the flatness or otherwise of the tax system. You could just as well combine a tax cut with a proposal to release all the animals from the National Zoo. People might like that too. A simpler tax system would be very nice. But find me some folks who would choose a flat tax over the current system even if it meant that they would pay more, not less. Then I’d be impressed.

That was, at least, fun to read.

(via the Washington Monthly)

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More Washington Idiocy

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And the war on the University continues:

Congress is taking the first steps toward pressuring colleges to maintain ideological balance in the classroom, a move that supporters insist is needed to protect conservative students from being graded down by liberal professors.

A resolution attached to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, which has passed the House Education and the Workforce Committee and is expected to be taken up by the full House in September, tells colleges to grade students on the basis of their mastery of subject matter rather than on their political views.

The provision makes no mention of specific political leanings, but represents a victory for conservative student groups who have been arguing for years that American universities are bastions of liberalism seeking to impose their liberal orthodoxy on dissenters.

The measure is not binding, but some higher education analysts caution that it is not to be taken lightly. Colleges and universities, they say, should consider this a warning shot from a Republican-controlled Congress fed up with the liberal academy.

”If the universities don’t move, all that’s going to happen is this will build,” said David Horowitz, a conservative author and a driving force in the free speech movement that inspired the resolution. ”They’re sitting on a tinderbox. Now we have resolutions. I guarantee you, if they thumb their noses at this, there will be statutory legislation.”

Bad bill. Via Jesse Taylor at Pandagon, who is quite exercised about this, which is only slightly ironic considering the a priori dismissal of a scientific study yesterday by feminist caricature and Pandagon co-author Amanda Marcotte. Perhaps we could implore Jesse to pass on some of his respect for the academy to his co-author, and maybe then she will actually read studies before labeling them ‘cute,’ ‘self-serving,’ and ‘sexist,’ even if on first glance they appear to conflict with her dogmatic worldview.

*** Update ***

And then you have things like this:

In addition to recruiting minority and female professors, especially in the sciences, the university could use the money to hire white men “who, through their scholarship and teaching and mentoring, in some way promote the diversity goals of the university,” she said.

As Zywicki notes, these guys aren’t helping us “protect academic freedom from bad ideas such as David Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights.”

Read the whole thing.

And maybe this will help some of you understand the corrosive impact of identity politics that Jeff Goldstein has been talking about for the past few days. Probably not.

And just go read this.

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Daily Plame Flame Thread

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Not much on the Plame front, but there is this:

There are basically two possible and quite divergent scenarios surrounding jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s involvement in the Plame/CIA leak case. It is quite possible that she had no ulterior or activist role in the leak and she really is just protecting her source(s) and her journalistic champions justifiably are standing by her. But a counter view, which I have been suggesting since February, is strongly emerging now, with a surprising number of Timesmen and Timeswomen (off the record) believing it, or at least fearing it is true.

One would think that, as worries about Miller’s true role rise with every day she spends in jail, The Times would finally answer a few questions about what it knows and when it knew it. Yet, in his eye-opening internal review of July 28, the paper’s intelligence reporter in Washington, Doug Jehl, revealed: “Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times declined to address written questions about whether Ms. Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson’s trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms. Wilson.”

Here we have a hint of the “split” at The Times. On one level is the top management — Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Bill Keller — who endorse Miller’s version that she was actually “reporting” on Plame in July 2003 and her view of herself as valiant defender of the First Amendment. A Times spokeswoman summed up the corporate bottom line last week: “Judy is an intrepid, principled, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has provided our readers with thorough and comprehensive reporting throughout her career.”

On another level, some of the paper’s elite reporters — not to mention some Times columnists — suggest in various pieces on the Plame affair that they are somewhat skeptical of her claim that she was contemplating writing a story on Plame in early summer 2003. The issue is critical because, if she was not actually talking to people about a story, what was she talking to them about?

Have at each other.

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More Gay Bashers

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Joseph Farah at WorldNetDaily pens a large missive titled ‘No On Roberts’:

Then, last week, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that Roberts had volunteered his services – pro bono – to help prepare a landmark homosexual activist case to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court…

He did his job well. But he didn’t serve the public interest. And he certainly no longer sounds like the carefully crafted image of a jurist who believes in the Constitution and judicial restraint.

The 1996 Romer vs. Evans case produced what the homosexual activists considered, at the time, its most significant legal victory, paving the way for an even bigger one – Lawrence vs. Texas, the Supreme Court ruling that effectively overturned all laws prohibiting sodomy in the United States…

Roberts was a partner in the firm. His job was not in jeopardy if he excused himself from the case on principled moral grounds. That would have been the honorable thing to do – either that, or resign from a law partnership that took such reprehensible clients…

Roberts did not have a moral problem with that. He did not have a moral problem with helping those activists win a major battle in the culture war. He did not have a moral problem with using the Supreme Court to interfere in the sovereign decisions of a sovereign people in a sovereign state. He did not have a moral problem coaching homosexual activists on how to play politics with the court.

Saturday, Bill Quick penned the following about others who had reactions similar to Farah:

Farking right-wing bigots. If Roberts had had the temerity to “aid and abet” the dreaded faggots, then no matter what his legal qualifications, these dreary homophobes wouldn’t be able to support him. I have no idea how any rational person can look at the barely concealed antics and agendas of these people, and not understand what disgusting, un-American creeps they really are.

It really is all about the sex to these guys. Nick Danger explains why not only is Farah wrong, but offensive.

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Ensuring Domestic Tranquility and Providing for the Common Defense

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I am sure this WaPo piece will create quite the stir:

The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.

The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.

Other than any friction there might be regarding Posse Comitatus, this is really not that big of a deal. This is precisely the sort of thing the military should be doing, and, if anything, this should have been done years ago.

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The Wrong Response to Terror

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Via the Brothers Judd, this silliness:

THE Government is proposing to rename ethnic minority groups along US lines in an attempt to strengthen and highlight their British roots.

Minorities could be described as, for example “Asian-British” rather than simply as “Asian” under proposals being considered by Hazel Blears, the Home Office Minister.

The plan to adopt the American practice of identifying ethnic heritage will be controversial with some British ethnic minorities likely to claim that it is racist. The idea was condemned as fatuous and retrograde by critics last night.

Ms Blears’s idea, outlined in an interview with The Times, would introduce “double-barrelled” nationality as a way of giving people pride in both their ethnic background and their Britishness.

“In America they do seem to have this idea that you are Italian-American, or Irish-American,” she said. “We don’t do that here.”

As OJ notes, “Why not go us one better and call them British?” I am sure Jeff Goldstein will have some trenchant remarks regarding this ‘idea.’

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