Whiskey Fire

Nino Dead

So Antonin Scalia is dead, and fuck him, that ancient unpleasant angry-assed bigot.

And there's this:

So...

GOP TO BLACK VOTERS: THE BLACK PRESIDENT IS NOT ALLOWED TO NAME THE REPLACEMENT FOR A SUPREME COURT JUSTICE WHO VOTED TO MAKE IT LEGAL TO SUPPRESS THE BLACK VOTE.

I predict massive black voter turnout this year, whoever gets the Dem nomination.

 

Some Choices Are Not Hobsonian, Particularly

I'm not really seeing the dilemma here....

Senate Democrats are considering a vote in the lame-duck session to force approval of TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL pipeline, a party aide said, a move that may bolster Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu’s re-election chances.

Catastophic environmental disaster balanced against the at best dubious benefits of continuing to acknowledge the existence of Mary Landrieu?

Not even a close one.

Beg pardon: not even a fucking close one. Let's keep this civil.

 

 

Those Big Words Which Make Us So Unhappy

Well gosh. I guess I am a liberal what hates...

I mean, according to Science.

Michelle Obama took some heat in 2008 for saying that, "for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country..."

As it turns out, that sentiment isn't all that unusual on the far left of American politics. According to a new Pew Research Center study, only 40 percent of consistently liberal Americans say they often feel proud to be Americans.

"Liberals" are on the "far left of American politics"? The things you learn from the Washington Post lint-catchers.

Because the WaPo opinion section is apparently surprised that a well-educated, intelligent black woman like Michelle Obama might objectively review all of American history and yet still harbor lingering skepticism about what promises as regards equality might stay kept.

Maybe she'd be more reassured if the South were not trying desperately to cling to racial supremacy.

But anyway, I am a proud American. I am a proud FDR American. New York City ethnic Irish, New Deal, Fuck the Fascists, fair play to all, one for all, all for one, damn the torpedoes and fuck the bigots.

I will not count myself proud to be an American unless I worked all my life for my fellows for:

Freedom of speech

Freedom of religion

Freedom from want

Freedom from fear

FDR's Four Freedoms. Worth fighting for.

Yeah, I'm a patriot. Always was.

I kind of think most right wing assholes don't so much have a coherent explanation for why they love America, as opposed to they are vicious racist assholes invoking patriotism because they are shitbrained ignorant fucks like Victor David fucknose Hanson.

It's a theory.

Hoarding Coins in the Competition Zone

Until now, I have not weighed in on the Great Platinum Koin Konspiracy of One-Thirteen, so I quite forgive you for not as yet having made up your minds regarding the wisdom of the ploy. Allow me therefore to present Dispositive Evidence as to why the president should immediately get on the phone to the Treasury and say, "mint me that coin right fucking now." And hang up.

Creating the platinum coin would piss off Megan McArdle. Ergo, minting the coin would be empirically correct.

McArdle's post is shouty gibberish of the "everyone is wrong except Megan McArdle" class, and need not detain us. All one ought to consider is that lazy hacks are not even right once an ever.

Which brings us by inevitable vicus of regurgitation back to Ann Althouse and environs. Althouse fondly imagines that she has slain K'Thruglu through an ingenious combined attack consisting of pig-ignorance, preening allodoxia, and willful idiocy. Which is to say, the usual horseshit.

Paul Krugman responds to the pushback he's received on "the trillion-dollar-coin thing":

There seem to be two kinds of objections. One is that it would be undignified. Here’s how to think about that....

The professor is about to teach us how to think. Get ready!

... we have a situation in which a terrorist may be about to walk into a crowded room and threaten to blow up a bomb he’s holding. 

Okay. A hypothetical. I'm up for hypotheticals. And it's an analogy, because the trillion-dollar-coin thing isn't promoted as a solution to terrorism. But terrorism is something that you can picture quite concretely and you understand it as very real and scary — unlike the debt ceiling problem which is awfully abstract. (Even to say "ceiling" is to resort to metaphor.)

Well, she concedes, or senses, that Krugman is using a metaphor and not advocating literal clown-based law enforcement, which is for Althouse a major achievement. However, "the debt celiling problem" is only "awfully abstract" if you are either genuinely or disingenuously sufficiently cretinous to take the several minutes it requires to understand it.

Which is why Althouse doesn't, or can't (who cares) acknowledge why the extended clown metaphor Krugman uses works. If a gang of utterly absurd cretins manages to engineer a ridiculously dangerous situation, what can you do but send in the clowns? It takes a joker to catch a fool.

I mean, look -- in 20-thousand-10 a lawless bunch came riding into town; they reached for their guns with their tiny little hands and they shot the sherriff down. They terrorized the citizens, they caused a saloon brawl, and no one would stand up to them, even though they were so small. 

So the platinum coin would come to right a wrong.

(Yes, yes, that is an obscure joke. Permit me my small joys, redsnouts. At any rate comparing The Tea Party to The Terror of Tiny Town is in every respect thoroughly cringe-worthily apposite.)

Nothing Althouse says equates to a "point"; she doesn't understand the actual issue, and on that basis crowns herself Queen Honeytwit of the Dipshits.

Like I said, same as it ever was.

 

Burning Flag Birthday Suit

I've never much hidden my overall dislike of the US constitution.

As a general rule, large groups of upper class Englishmen are incapable of producing anything except a bunch of crap you can never clean up properly, and the Founding Fathers were nothing if not upper class Englishmen, and hence, hateful twerps.

That an allegedly free people cannot stop unironically using puerile, self-abasing terms like "the Founding Fathers" speaks to our to our perdurable national mania for tongue-bathing obvious moral degenerates as long as they have some type of "patriotic" pedigree. That an allegedly free people cannot put a stake through the rotten heart of such vampiric malignancies as the Electoral College, the Senate, and (shudder) New Jersey speaks to the undeniably ossifying effect of our continued braindead, onanistic adoration of a shoddy, slapdash, cloddishly compromise document written by a gang of wig-wearing, fractious, syphilitic, slaveowning dickheads.

So much is clear, uncontroversial, and refreshingly devoid of hyperbole.

Hence I found this op-ed in the NYT more than a little surprising, yet quite welcome.

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

Shit yes!

To quibble, "evil" is useless as an analytical criterion, so I'd pinch-hit "undemocratic" for "downright evil." But the rest is unexceptionable.

Not kidding here, either. There is an intense censorship effect in Our Free Society against the idea that it is at all fair game to, of all things, think critically about the US constitution. This to me is the most interesting part of Seidman's piece:

Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is.

Bold mine.

You're just not supposed to think of the constitution as something certain people thought of and put into practice in specific historical circumstances. Even though that is all that it is. It is not Holy Writ, and to think of it as such is one of the following: childish, wicked, or dickish.

Childish.

I like liberty and the Constitution is its bulwark.

Wicked.

And if the Constitution is this obsolete and “evil,” then maybe secession isn’t off the table after all? . . . .

Dickish.

I big strong go boom-boom. (Paraphrasing)

Because democracy demands that if you wonder why Wyoming has the exact same Senate representation as a state where people live voluntarily, you've just peed on Jefferson's grave.

I would cheerfully pee on Jefferson's grave. And on Wyoming.

MAS. PowerTools provides the definitive case for why you can't entrust the defense of a stupid church to its halfwit clergy.

But the Founders built well, knowing that the Constitution—the documentary embodiment of the Rule of Law replacing the Rule of Man (or Rule of the King, as practical matters had it in the 1780s)—would work only if it became an object of reverence in place of a monarch among the people.

As a matter of history, this is fanciful garbage. As a matter of exemplifying modern "conservatism" as nothing more, or less, than dickless, vaginaless, mindless, conformist idolatry... well done, PowerLine!

I mean...

Hence most constitutional law professors treat the Constitution as a plaything from which to extract whatever outcome they want.

Because, you'll never catch out a "conservative" jurist ever doing anything of the sort.

These fuckers, they snort what they sell, and then they tell you, like butter wouldn't melt, that their powdery nostrils and red-rimmed crazy eyes simply prove that they so very dearly love the Jelly Doughnuts of Freedom.