“The attorney general fails to understand that self-defense is not a concept, it’s a fundamental human right of white people.” -NRA Executive Director Chris Cox

Fixed it for you Chris.   You’re welcome.

This from Slate…

Scalia the Mullah: The justice’s misunderstanding of morality, and how it leads him astray in cases about homosexuality.

In a speech last week titled “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters,” Justice Antonin Scalia told the North Carolina Bar Association that the court has no place acting as a “judge moralist” in issues better left to the people. Since judges aren’t qualified—or constitutionally authorized—to set moral standards, he argued, the people should decide what’s morally acceptable.

…and so on.   Nathanial Frank pegs it at the end of this piece, thusly:

Morality is not just whatever views a majority has long held, and it’s not simply what you learned on your mother’s knee or whatever it says in your faith’s scripture. Moral belief is a grounded judgment about what harms or helps living things.

(emphasis mine)   That.   Which leads to this:   Scalia, like a lot of homophobes, does not have a misunderstanding about morality; he has an assortment of smokescreens he hides his prejudices behind, that he calls morality.

They do that in the kook pews and that is why their moral judgements seem so haphazard and contradictory: They’re not making moral judgements, they’re jerking their knees, dancing from one thing to another to whatever tune their prejudices call.

The EFF as usual, gets it right…

In response to the recent news reports about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, President Barack Obama said today, “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls.” Instead, the government was just “sifting through this so-called metadata.” The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made a similar comment last night: “The program does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone’s phone calls. The information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the identity of any subscriber.”

What they are trying to say is that disclosure of metadata—the details about phone calls, without the actual voice—isn’t a big deal, not something for Americans to get upset about if the government knows. Let’s take a closer look at what they are saying:

They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don’t know what you talked about.

They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.

They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour. But they don’t know what was discussed.

“In theory, you could add the check of exposing the system to the light of day, but that means wrecking much of its intelligence value”, they’re saying over at Volokh, exposing to the light of day the usual contempt wingers have for democracy. That would be the Voters you’re talking about there Baker, and why goodness gracious the system Was exposed to the light of day, otherwise known as the Voters, we’re all arguing about it now aren’t we, and if they ever catch the whistleblower who let the voters know what their government was doing to them that person will think Bradley Manning had it easy.

But I am just a computer geek who just happens to be working on a space science program which will itself fling a fucking torrent of data back at planet earth for astronomers to make sense of. Every now and then I get a bit worried when I see the disconnect between my understanding of how electronic information systems work and everyone else’s. Then I see articles like that Forbes Magazine one where they described how Target figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents did and sent her helpful offerings of child care products and I feel a little better. Then I see this. Oh they’re not listening to our phone calls, just capturing the metadata…nothing to worry about citizen.

But never mind the metadata. If the deep secrecy going on here, where not just court orders are secret but the government’s interpretation of the laws its supposed to be following are secret too isn’t scaring the hell out of you then I have to wonder why you even bother following the news or taking the trouble to vote.

I am not an anti-government crank. I am a liberal FDR democrat. I believe in democracy. But for democracy to work you need elections, and for those to work you need voters who know what the fuck is going on. Oliver Willis stupid shit reductio ad absurdums notwithstanding. Nobody is demanding Geraldo Rivera follow CIA agents around with a TV camera while Jerry Springer provides a running commentary. But when oversight itself becomes a state secret, when the governments own interpretations of the laws binding it are kept from the voters, then it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen. I am not an anti-government crank, I am a liberal FDR democrat, and I believe in democratic government. And one reason I believe in democratic government is power corrupts. The light of day is a good thing.

Via Andrew Sullivan…Mark Oppenheimer, who thinks same-sex marriage might just pass muster as long as we still get to stigmatize someone…if not the homosexuals…

So here’s my question to Douthat, Maggie Gallagher, Ross Douthat Brian Brown, the world of conservative evaneglical preachers, and others who are so concerned about same-sex marriage: What does it do your perception of Ronald Reagan that he was a divorcé—and in being the first divorced president certainly helped remove any last shreds of stigma? Would you have voted against him for that reason—as many would have in 1952? Would you discourage people from listening to radio hosts who have divorces in their past (Limbaugh, Dennis Prager), or voting for divorcés like John McCain? If our goal is to work our way back to 1950 Marriage, how are we going to re-stigmatize divorce for wealthy white people? How are we going to make their divorces seem unseemly? In 1950, when a divorced woman moved into the neighborhood, people whispered about her. Are we prepared to whisper again?

As they used to say back in the day…matter of fact as some of my elementary school teachers used to say to my face…I’m the product of a broken home.   Oddly, I would not have known my home was “broken” had it not been for so many helpful adults back in the day.   Kids hear those whispers too Oppenheimer.   But that’s part of the fun isn’t it?

Here’s my problem with shaming divorcees..

That’s my dad under that sheet.   Mom divorced him when I was two and raised me herself.   And but for the fact that mine was a household with a single divorced women at the head of it, you might even say that I was raised in a good Baptist home.   But for that one fact.   I remember how mom was treated back in those days.   I remember how she raised me by setting an example.   Never mind church.   Yes I got taken to church.   She never cheated anyone, never took advantage, never said anything about anyone in my presence she wouldn’t have said to their face, never drank or uttered a curse word in my presence, paid her bills, lived frugally (well…we had to…) kept her promises and when she passed away people in the town she retired to would come up to me on the street and tell me what a ray of sunshine she always was.   But no…it was a shameful thing being a divorced woman.   The head of my household growing up should have been the crook.   Why, I might not be homosexual if my father had been there.   A boy needs a father, and better to grow up learning how to rob people of their savings than to be a homosexual.   Provided of course I share some of the loot with a few conservative think tanks.

Dad, let it be said, was always nice to me, and nice to mom.   To other people…not so much.   And mom loved him until the day she died.   But she knew better than to let me be raised by him.   Let me tell you a brief little story about that.   When I was a teenager dad was earning a semi-honest living driving trucks and cargo around the country.   More about that “semi-honest” part in a bit.   One summer mom felt comfortable enough letting dad take me with him on one of his cross-country runs and one afternoon we stopped somewhere to eat and rest up a bit.   I chowed down in the restaurant and Dad went into the bar next door.   He came back, sat across the table from me and with a cheerful smile pushed some papers and a pen across the table at me and asked me to make a mark on the dotted line.   I must have raised an eyebrow.   Just make a mark there, he said.   You want me to sign it, I asked?   No…just scribble something.   So I’m the obedient son and I did it, and he took the pen and papers back, folded them up and put them in his jacket pocket and smiled warmly at me and said, “You just made your dad five-hundred bucks.”

Aw gee Dad…

So I have this…hunch…that if he had remained the God Ordained Head Of The Household like he was God Ordained supposed to be I probably would not be the sort of person I am now, capable of passing the background check I could so I could be doing the work I do now at Space Telescope.   Still, he was my dad and I loved him all the same and I feel these bitter little smiles come out of me whenever I hear some jackass homophobe saying that you can love people without sanctioning their behavior.   You don’t say?   Know something about that do you? And one day when my brother and I discovered he had no stone for his grave I bought him one, and my brother paid to have it placed, and it reads “Beloved Father” because sometimes you do things not because of what was, but because of what ought to have been.

I have never regretted mom’s divorce.   Regretted dad couldn’t have been a better dad, but I suppose he actually did the best he could, the best that was within him to do, and he loved his sons and his wives (he married again…and…divorced again…) as much as it was within him to love anyone.   But without a doubt was absolutely for the best for both mom and me that I was not raised by him.   And piss on you Oppenheimer, if you think whispering shame at divorcees is a good thing.   Never dawns on the likes of you that divorce might actually be a good thing does it?   Never dawns on the likes of you that the shame you throw at single mothers is felt by their children does it?   We’re just collateral damage in your little culture war aren’t we?

Here’s the problem with jackass social conservatives like him…they seem not to be able to function socially without a bunch of arbitrary rules that can never be questioned lest they get utterly lost in the human relationship thicket.   They have no idea what the rules are for, other than they’re there to prop up some sort of civilized behavior, the reason for which they have no clue whatsoever.   Homosexuality is shameful because it’s against the rules.   Divorce is shameful because it is against the rules.   The rules are Very Important because without them we wouldn’t have a fucking clue how to behave toward our neighbors.

I have a wee suggestion.   Instead of shaming divorce, how about we shame spouse abuse.   How about we shame cheating.   How about we shame not setting a good example for children.   How about we shame not taking care of children. Ah…but spouse abuse was never one of the rules…was it?   Women having to submit gracefully and all.   And children…the only thing they’re good for is a reason why same-sex couples can’t get married and women can’t own their own bodies.   It’s not like we give a good goddamn about their health or feeding or educating them.

A one time shooting buddy of mine offhandedly remarked that my support of gun control democrats over right to keep and bear arms republicans   was, of course, all about my favoring sex and my sexual orientation over my right to self defense.   I countered as I usually do when that comes up, simply by stating that while I think a lot of gun control rhetoric is simplistic and naive at best, at least it’s grounded in one basic fact, that guns are dangerous, whereas getting whipped up in a hysteria over homosexuality not only makes no sense whatsoever, by attacking people’s ability to love and accept love from another you’re actually making civilization that much harder to sustain.   To nurture civilization, nurture things in its people like love, sympathy, trust, kindness. A little more love, or for that matter even a little more carefree happy sex, would probably go a long way toward making this poor angry world a much more peaceful one.   If I have to come down on one side of it, I will come down on the side of love, Every Time.

But there is also this…

Larry Pratt Agrees Race War Will Pit ‘Christian, Heterosexual White Haves’ Against ‘Black Muslim and/or Atheist…Have-Nots’

Last week, we reported that Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America joined conservative talk show host Stan Solomon to warn about President Obama’s alleged plans to incite violence and bring about a race war against white Americans.

I can’t begin to describe how much I despise it that people like this man have so thoroughly identified their cheapshit racism and hatreds with gun ownership.   I can appreciate how it is that bigots and thugs like guns.   But in a decent world they’d be keeping their mouths shut about it for the same reason Klansmen kept their faces hidden.   No sense in telling the cops who to talk to when there’s been a beating or a lynching.

Behold, the human gutter…

Later, Solomon mused that “the best thing that can happen to a liberal is to be mugged,” and wondered why Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) still supports gun control after she was mugged in 1995, to which Pratt replied: “Well, maybe she liked it.”

There’s the other reason I’ll stand with the democrats on this issue, even if it means they go further than I’d care to see on it. This element needs to be thoroughly defeated, humiliated, at the polls, so we can set about building a more peaceful and prosperous tomorrow.   The root of violence, the root I put it to you of all criminal behavior, is right there, in that man’s sneering contempt for a women who was mugged.

The thing sociopaths never get is the difference between laughing at the powerful and laughing at the oppressed.   Apparently some Colorado state representative spoke up recently in favor of a bill banning the carrying of guns on college campuses. Now I happen to think that’s a perfectly reasonable position for everyone, gun owners and second amendment believers like myself to take.   I also understand perfectly that the likes of the NRA and other Kultur Krieger would howl bloody murder over it for reasons that have essentially nothing to do with the ability of people to defend themselves from violence.

To the extent that any argument is being made here, it’s that guns in the hands of women can prevent rape, therefore banning guns from college campuses makes rape more likely to happen to young women, therefore if you believe in banning guns on college campuses you must think rape isn’t so bad really.   The level of cheap bar stool demagoguery here is breathtaking.   But wait…there’s more…

Naturally the right wing noise machine kicks into gear and tries to make this Colorado state representative into some kind of liberal Todd Akin.   The problem with doing that when you never saw anything wrong with Akin’s crack about legitimate rape in the first place completely escapes them…

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: The Most Horrible Hashtag Of The Week Thus Far, Explained

There’s this new hashtag #LiberalTips2AvoidRape that’s now on its second day of trending on Twitter: A really, really great expression of our shared humanity, and of the possibilities of feel-good, thoughtful conservative satire… this is not…

Satire, as every political cartoonist knows, is a powerful weapon against the brutal and the ignorant.   And never more so than when the brutal and ignorant try wielding it themselves.   It’s like one of those magical swords in fantasy stories that turns on its unworthy bearer.   Behold…

If you have the stomach for a torrent of rape jokes you should go browse that hashtag on Twitter.   Pay attention to what’s going on here.   This isn’t about guns.   This isn’t about the second amendment.   This isn’t about the ability of people to defend themselves from violence…

The ability of the common man and woman, and particularly of the weak and vulnerable, to be secure in their homes and their streets, to defend themselves from violence, is an eminently liberal concern.   That is not what the reactionary right is about.   They vigorously thump for their own right to self determination and self defense and sneer when the powerless and outcast assert those same rights.   This is about culture war.   Nothing else.

Here’s how some liberals are responding to the hashtag…

That’s the right approach.   And in that spirit I have some of my own.

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Focus on putting violent offenders in jail, not pot smokers

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Remove judges that think women provoke rape by dressing slutty and walking alone

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Teach boys their manhood does not depend on their ability to dominate women

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Prosecute those who protect rapists from the law, even if they happen to be Catholic priests or the Pope

#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Fire any politician who even utters the words “transvaginal probe” in the context of an abortion bill.

This just came across my Twitter stream…

Joseph Weisenthal ‏@TheStalwart There’s no empirical evidence or theoretical basis for arguing that cutting taxes is a means towards smaller government.

After the recent revaluations from former Florida GOP members that all that talk about voter fraud was itself fraud, you’d think people would finally stop listening to the rhetoric, and pay more attention to the behavior.

Yes, yes…they yap about “smaller government all the firggin’ time, but you need to understand what is meant in the first place by “smaller government”. It was never about reducing its staffage or its costs. Size is a relative matter.

What they’re talking about isn’t size, it’s power…specifically the power of the federal, not state level government. They want it small enough it can’t enforce equal rights laws. They want it small enough it can’t stop Wall Street and big corporations from raping the middle class. They want it small enough it cannot defend the rights of women, minorities, the poor, and the powerless. That is all that was ever meant by the term, “small government”.

So Romney is complaining that president Obama won because he promised the hoi polloi a lot of gifts.   But Romney was no slouch in that department either…promising even bigger tax cuts to the rich, less oversight of Wall Street and the finance industry.   So Obama promised gifts to the 47% and Romney promised gifts to the 1%.   So the reason Obama won is 47 is greater then 1.   Or in other less cynical words, you win elections by appealing to more voters then the other guy does.

I think the complaint here is that elections are still too fair to suit republicans.   Or maybe democracy.

Via Romenesko…

Hudson Register-Star reporter fired after refusing to allow byline on story

The Hudson (NY) Register-Star fired reporter Tom Casey after he refused to allow his byline on a budget meeting story that had two paragraphs inserted by an editor, who apparently wanted to create controversy for an editorial. Here are the inserted grafs:

At the start of the meeting some in the audience were upset over Third Ward Alderman John Friedman’s decision not to stand for the pledge of allegiance. While Hudson City Code does not require council members to stand for the pledge, Fifth Ward Alderman Robert Donahue, who had complained about the matter at a previous meeting and asked Friedman why he did not stand, was visibly upset.

No comment could be reached from either party concerning the matter, and it did not interfere with the meeting.

Sam Pratt reports “Casey had been under pressure by higher-ups at the paper to make an issue of Friedman’s choice, which the Alderman had exercised at some but not all previous meetings. Getting the matter into the body of a news story would give the paper’s management a predicate for writing an editorial about it. The day after the dispute, Casey was reportedly fired by editor Theresa Hyland at the insistence of publisher Roger Coleman.”

So…dig it…Casey’s editor inserted two paragraphs into his story just so the paper could write an editorial, presumably attacking Friedman’s patriotism. The reporter then refused to allow his byline on the story and so the publisher had him fired.   Because not standing up for the pledge of allegiance is a greater crime against America then not standing up for honest journalism and freedom of the press.

Hey Roger…you’d be running a much more efficient operation if you just got rid of all that pesky news gathering fluff you really don’t care about anyway and make your paper just one big opinion section. All your opinions of course…

Not going to link to them, but Politico is repeating the babble of some republican nutcase in Maine who can’t figure out where all the darkies were coming from on Election day…

The head of Maine’s Republican Party is claiming unknown groups of black people showed up in the state’s towns and cast ballots on election day.

“In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day,” Charlie Webster told Portland, Me.’s NBC affiliate on Wednesday. “Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in town knows anyone who’s black. How did that happen? I don’t know. We’re going to find out.”

Psst…hey Charlie…one of these days why not take a wee stroll outside your little all-white Maine neighborhood over to the colored side of town? Wow…didn’t know all those people were there did ya?

I just finished watching Rachel Maddow deliver a smokin’ hot riff on republican shock and confusion, as displayed on Fox last night, that the numbers they were certain were going to go massively in Romney’s favor didn’t. She showed clips from past Fox News predictions of a Romney landslide, showed that stunning live TV moment that’ll almost certainly go down in television history, when Rove got angry that the Fox News vote analysts called Ohio for Obama. Then…brilliantly…she added that no, the polls were not skewed, Obama was born in Hawaii, he didn’t raise taxes, the deficit hasn’t gone up, unemployment figures were not cooked, Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, climate change is real, evolution is real, FEMA isn’t building concentration camps…

…and god I hope I can get my hands on a video clip of it because it really said it all…especially how at the end of that grotesque litany of decades of republican right wing and religious right hallucinations she said that it is profoundly damaging to our democracy when one party is trying to cope with things as they really are and the other is living it it’s own detached insular fantasy world.

We need, she said thumping her pulpit, honest, good faith arguing and debating about policy…real argument not phony crap ginned up just to drive people to the polls or satisfy the pathetic conceits of religious and political fanatics…because it is in that honest debating of the issues that we have the best hope of finding answers that work. By cocooning in their own fantasy world the republicans have made that honest, good faith arguing and debating nearly impossible.

She said she hoped the shock of that collision with real numbers and real reality last night might break the bubble. I’ve heard others expressing this since last night, but I am not so sure. But there is the problem we face as a nation.  It’s the problem we need to address before we can really and truly get down to addressing any of the others. The polls were not skewed. The unemployment numbers were not rigged. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Climate change is real. Evolution is real. FEMA is not building concentration camps. Homosexuals are not demon possessed tools of satan. Two plus two equals four. If any of this distresses you be assured that reality does not care about what you believe or about you.  It just is what it is.  You need to care about reality.  If you can’t bring yourself to do that critically, honestly, with your eyes wide open, without letting your cherished preconceptions blind you to simple facts, don’t be bellyaching about the moral relativism, hedonism, nihilism whatever of the world around you. The nihilist is you.

This from Michelangelo Signorile this morning…

In 2006 Romney went on to stop the publication of an anti-bullying guide for public school students, because the term “bisexual” and “transgender” were used in a passage discussing harassment against students. These and other actions were a stark turnaround from when Romney had, in his Senate run in 1994, told gay activists that he was better on gay issues than Ted Kennedy, claiming to support an array of rights for gays and saying that his voice would have more weight on the issue than Kennedy’s.

What seems clear now, looking at Romney’s record, in which he made a lot of promises to gays in those early years but never delivered, is that the pandering he did was to gay activists and the voters of Massachusetts, as the devout Mormon used that state as a stepping stone to the presidency.

This.   Romney’s constant verbal flip-flops and outright lying over the years make him appear to be a total panderer.   But he isn’t.   Look at his record, both in and out of public office.   There’s the man.   Bigoted.   Cruel.   Predatory.

Winger Eugene Volokh of the ersatz libertarian leaning Volokh Conspiracy gleefully passes on notice this morning that a lawsuit against Avis for discriminating against a straight customer can proceed.   The gist of it is that because Avis gave a discount to the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce they were discriminating against heterosexuals by charging them more in violation of California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act.   If you thought that libertarians were opposed to such laws to begin with you’d be right.   If you thought that most people who oppose such laws are libertarians you would be sadly mistaken.   And especially when they claim to be libertarians.

Pay attention:

Another thread of argument runs through AVIS’s briefs: … since Plaintiff could have become a member of the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association or the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce and thus qualified for its favored discounts …, there was no pricing discrimination…. [But this] assumes an evidentiary showing which has yet to be made…. [A]lthough AVIS repeats it often as fact, there is no evidence that membership in either International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association or the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce was open to Plaintiff when she rented her car….

Okay…but where was the evidence that membership in either organization was not open to this Plaintiff?   There isn’t any.   And even if it was, that still doesn’t make a case that Avis itself is discriminating against heterosexuals.   Perhaps they give a membership discounts to the International Heterosexuals Butthurt Because Gay Bars Can’t Be Raided And Their Customers Thrown In Jail Anymore Association as well.   Surely Plaintiff could have found solidarity there.

But never mind that.   Didn’t I hear somewhere that libertarians don’t like anti-discrimination laws to begin with?     Hahahahahaha….

Volokh commenter 1: “Is it me, or is this a case where the discrimination laws are shown to be working across the board, that is against gay discrimination against straights as well, and yet the two most ‘voted up’ posts here are of the ‘gays get special rights under this law’ variety. What in the world?”

Volokh commenter 2: “It’s not you. It’s principled libertarians exercising outrage and protesting about a private company’s business decisions, as they always tell us disadvantaged minorities (like straight white people) should do.”

Except of course, this is not a case about discrimination and that first commenter needs to look, really look, at why it’s getting applause from the gays get special rights pew.   Special rights are when that smaller kid you enjoyed beating up gets a protector and now you’re having to answer for your abusive behavior and being a bully isn’t fun anymore.

A libertarian would tell the person filing this lawsuit to go to hell, Avis can do as it damn well pleases.   Eugene Volokh and his peanut gallery enjoy the spectacle of laws intended to protect a despised minority being used against them.   How dare they think they were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Radley Balco tweets: “Surprised the Cato crowd is so big on Ryan. Votes don’t match rhetoric on fiscal policy, and he’s awful on social, civil liberties issues.”

Uh-huh.   I see you’re still taking their libertarianism seriously.   Something I discovered back in my libertarian days was you scratched the surface of a lot of them and you found a John Bircher who figured pot decriminalization would appeal to younger voters.

This started coming across the wire the other day and I just have to repost it here.   Alas, I’m suspecting many of my fellow Americans won’t even get it…

Yes, yes…I can hear it already.   King Henry didn’t redefine marriage, it was still one man and one women.   And the next woman.   And the next.   And the next.   And the next.   And the next.