Fables of the reconstruction

Message: They're Nuts

releasing Obama's long-form birth certificate won't quiet the crazies. I would guess the Administration thinks so, too, and thinks the GOP presidential candidates will have to continue to cater to them. The media will consider the settled matter really, really settled, and make fun of Trump, et. al. if they continue to insinuate the contrary.

Worst Aspects of the Blogosphere: Two Examples

Item one:

The law firm that Congressional Republicans hired to defend DOMA dropped the representation, and Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy engages in a little propter hoc, saying that the public outcry among gay groups caused the firm "to discard its integrity when placed under fire." He calls this "the New McCarthyism" and says it's "shameful ... particularly given the nation’s sorry history of efforts to prevent effective legal representation of marginalized groups and unpopular causes." He then has to backpedal when it's pointed out that members of the majority party in the House of Representatives are not exactly an oppressed group, and further when it comes out that the lawyer involved didn't follow proper firm procedure in taking on a new, controversial client.  Nevertheless, he still thinks it's McCarthyism.

Item two:

Digby finds a story that the United States is enacting rules regarding how to get a passport that would be almost impossible to comply with, and posts, "Keeping Them Out ---Or Keeping Us In?" and compares it to the Berlin Wall:

This is Big Brother stuff --- they are setting up a series of roadblocks to use "just in case" they want to deny someone a passport. The question is, who and why? Basically, this will potentially deny US citizens the ability to travel outside the country. It may not be a wall, but it functions pretty effectively as one if they want it to.

In comments, a couple people point out that the proposed form is to be used in cases where someone is applying for a passport for the first time and either (a) claims to be a natural-born citizen born outside the countryor (b) claims to be born in the U.S. but wasn't born in a hospital or whose birth wasn't recorded for more than a year. That is, in a rare situation where someone's right to claim citizenship isn't obvious from the record, amounting to about 75,000 cases every year (out of 14 million passports issued annually). Unlike Adler, Digby doesn't even bother to engage the contrary information and the vast majority of commenters run with the paranoia ball.

Most days there is no point in engaging things posted online, which is why I've largely stopped trying.

Update: This from Conor Friedersdorf is fucking idiotic:

The fact that bureaucrats at the U.S. State Department now feel empowered to demand information this personal, cumbersome and detailed as a condition of permitting an American to leave the country is as alarming an example as I've seen of how these people conceive of the relationship between a government and its citizens. There is only one appropriate response to many of the questions they pose: "It is none of your damned business."

As a condition of receiving a document which will be unquestioningly accepted as proof of your identity, yes, you have to demonstrate that you're eligible. 

Unfortunately, also, too, Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice picks up the scare thread from digby without adding anything. But to their great credit, many commenters at the site push back hard on the conspiracy theory.

DOMA: Fantacism For its Own Sake

The law firm that House Republican hired to defend DOMA decided to drop the representation. The lawyer at the firm who agreed to take the case, Paul Clement, quit, saying:

Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do. The adversary system of justice depends on it, especially in cases where the passions run high.

Which I agree with, wholeheartedly.

He also says:

Efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law.

Here's the fun part.

Clement will join the firm Bancroft PLLC, a small D.C.-based litigation boutique founded by former assistant U.S. attorney general Viet Dinh.

Who is Viet Dinh? Recall:

[Viet] Dinh, [principal author of the USA PATRIOT Act,] now a Georgetown law professor, urged the CPAC faithful to carve out a Bush exception to their ideological principle of limited government. "The conservative movement has a healthy skepticism of governmental power, but at times, unfortunately, that healthy skepticism needs to yield," Dinh explained, invoking Osama bin Laden.

Dinh brought the crowd to a raucous ovation when he judged: "The threat to Americans' liberty today comes from al Qaeda and its associates and the people who would destroy America and her people, not the brave men and women who work to defend this country!"

(Emphasis supplied.)

So Paul Clement quits over the principle that everyone, including bigots, have the right to due process, and goes to work with Viet Dinh, who doesn't seem to think much of limits on government power when it comes to "national security". And, I'll ask again, just who is Dinh referring to when he mentioned "the people who would destroy America", apart from al Qaeda? Any Americans on that list?

 

 

Actually, Republicans Did Vote to End Medicare

PolitiFact had no basis for saying otherwise. (I've lobbed an email in to them; I'm sure that will make them come around.) I figured the reason for this isn't just a mere fetish for false equivalence. Looking over their "Pants on Fire" ratings, the prior receipients were:

1. Reince Priebus
2. Michelle Bachmann
3. WorldNetDaily
4. Rick Santorum
5. Glenn Beck
6. Chain e-mail
7. Donald Trump
8. Chain e-mail
9. Chain e-mail
10. Tim Pawlenty
11. Bloggers
12. Michelle Bachmann
13. Mike Prendergast
14. CrossroadsGPS
15. American Action Network
16. Dan Coats
17. John Raese
18. Christine O'Donnell
19. Christine O'Donnell

Before we get to a Democrat, Nancy Pelosi. (The chain e-mails, bloggers, and anyone else you don't recognize on the list above are all conservatives.) Clearly, there must be an internal rule at PFact that you can't go more than 20 Republicans before dragging a Democrat in for balance.

 

Happy Zombie Jesus Day!

If an undead, long-haired, doe-eyed hippie comes shamblin' toward you, push someone else in his way and run like hell.

Republican War on the Poor

Assholes:

Under a new budget proposal from State Sen. Bruce Casswell, children in the state’s foster care system would be allowed to purchase clothing only in used clothing stores.  ...

His explanation?

“I never had anything new,” Caswell says. “I got all the hand-me-downs. And my dad, he did a lot of shopping at the Salvation Army, and his comment was — and quite frankly it’s true — once you’re out of the store and you walk down the street, nobody knows where you bought your clothes.”

Under his plan, foster children would receive gift cards that could only be used at places like the Salvation Army, Goodwill and other second hand clothing stores.

Hey, thrift stores have some nice stuff, but I don't think it's that much cheaper than Wal-Mart. This amounts to another step in the never-ending effort by rightwingers to humiliate the poor, with the bonus that it diverts dollars to religious organizations.  Grasping Christian fundamentalism continues to spread its tenacles.

See the Change

Pet peeve:

Huge surges among Hispanic populations in the Deep South could mean a political sea change over the next two decades, as immigrants become naturalized and they and their American-born children register to vote. ...

This is the correct usage of the phrase, meaning a slow and complete transformation. It just bugs me when people use it to mean a sudden change.

Philly's Stadium Zone

Duncan laments the fact that the Phillies' ballpark was built where it was:

As with many places, my stupid urban hellhole powers that be located the baseball stadium in-the-city-but-not-in-the-city, that is in a mostly isolated stadium complex not near anything else. It is served by the subway, so there's that, but it doesn't inspire people to come before or stay after and spend money in neighboring establishments because, well, there are no neighboring establishments.

Part of the problem is that nobody wanted it in their neighborhood. Locations considered for the baseball stadium included one just north of Chinatown which that community fought successfully. They saw the ballpark as a threat, not an opportunity, mainly because it would change the character of the neighborhood.

People like making more money, but they don't want anything to change to get it.

150th Anniversary of Attack on Ft. Sumter

At 4:30 a.m., April 12, 1861, a rebel cannon fired the first shot of the Civil War at Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. This act plunged the nation into a war in which over 3 million American men fought each other, and 625,000 people died.

Four months prior, a secession convention in South Carolina had issued a document titled "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union" which read in part:

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

The intellectual and moral heirs of the Confederacy now control the party of Lincoln and still claim the mantle of the Constitution while seeking the destruction of the union and the enslavement of workers.

 

Marketing [Insert Here] at Work

The perils of email marketing:

Crazy Curt in Libya

Oh great, Curt Weldon is in Libya, meeting with Gaddafi. No comment from the White House. Odd and a little worrying.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Election: 224 Vote Lead Out of 1.5 Million Votes Cast

This is the situation right now in Wisconsin:

Only 3 precincts left to count. Then, I assume, there is a mandatory recount.

Update 3:30 EDT: All precincts are in. AP says Kloppenburg has a 204 vote lead and 1,479,976 votes were counted. That's .01%.