Profound thoughts on Egypt

By applying my superior powers of inductive reasoning and analysis, I, like Paul, conclude as follows:

I don’t know anything, have no expertise, haven’t even ever looked at the economic situation. Hence, no posting. If there comes a point when I have something to say, I will.

Missile defense that doesn't work against missiles that our enemies do not possess

I give you the speech Obama should have given. Highlights:

Our so-called economic growth has powered along based on a series of financial bubbles, leading to ever-increasing instability, mass unemployment, and misallocation of capital. All things our vaunted financial innovation and market liberalism were supposed to cure. My best efforts to ease the burden of this calamity were thwarted by fools in both parties. The stimulus effort was of insufficient magnitude, while tax cuts and quantitative easing are ineffective. The result is sustained, record-high unemployment. Morever, the financial risks built into the system were transferred to you, the proletariat.

and . . .

As my predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower had foreseen, our military industrial complex has grown obese in the marketing of its herd of sacred cows. All manner of malfunctioning weapons systems that aren't needed continue to be churned out of the nation's factories. Missile defense that doesn't work against missiles that our enemies do not possess, and wouldn't use if they did possess them. And you voted for it, my friends. Yes, you ordered this shit sandwich. Whatever piece of crap is manufactured in your neighborhood has proven to be sufficient inducement for you to vote for whatever politician is more adept at prostituting himself to its promotion.

Think of what might have been, or what still could be, if you only you idiots could unite!

My buddy Karin . . .

. . . what a great post.

And how odd indeed.

Late Update: corrected the link.

The Sheriff speaks

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

"It's not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included. And that's the sad thing of what's going on in America. Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office."

He later added:

DUPNIK: Let me just say one thing, because people tend to poo-poo this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech. But it's not without consequences.

REPORTER: How do you know that that's what caused it.

DUPNIK: You don't.

It was just a matter of time

Needless to say, this graphic has already been taken down.

I hope Gabrielle Giffords pulls through.

RIP Judge Roll.

Burn in hell, Sarah Palin.

Here's some other morsels from our right-wing fellow country-men:

"I’ll tell you who should be tortured and killed at Guantanamo — every filthy Democrat in the U.S. Congress." — Sean Hannity

"To fight only the al-Qaeda scum is to miss the terrorist network operating within our own borders... Who are these traitors? Every rotten radical left-winger in this country, that's who." — Michael Savage

"Liberalism is the greatest threat this country faces." — Rush Limbaugh

"It is not a stretch to say that MoveOn is the new Klan." — Bill O’Reilly

"I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could." — Glenn Beck

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too." — Ann Coulter

"I don’t see any difference between [Arianna] Huffington and the Nazis." — Bill O’Reilly

"The Islamofascists are actually campaigning for the election of Democrats. Islamofascists from Ahmadinejad to al-Zawahiri, Oba -- Osama bin Laden, whoever, are constantly issuing Democrat talking points." — Rush Limbaugh

"There are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of ‘em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn’t become the [House] speaker." — Sean Hannity

What a wonderful world.

Late update: The shooter appears to have been some kind of Sovereign Citizen, which I've heard described as a libertarian on steroids. Too much Ayn Rand, perhaps, but the key ingredient seems to have been being a total nut-job. It will be instructive to see how much the over-the-top rhetoric from the extreme right pushed him over the edge. In any case, it was sadly inevitable that someone like Shooter would come along, and the rhetoric from the likes of Palin and Fox News would be the soundtrack.

Our greatest jurist's latest . . .

Scalia, again:

“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”

Such a gift to comedy. So, why am I crying? Perhaps because Scalia gets away with it, time and time again, and media still lauds him as a genius.

As one commenter on TPM has noted:

By Scalia's reckoning, the 2nd Amendment would be limited to blunderbusses since more modern weapons had occurred to no one.

The 14th Amendment provides:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

Basically, Scalia is saying (according to originalist doctrine), women may not be considered "persons" within the meaning of the constitution because this was not the "plain meaning" of the term at the time of drafting of the 14th amendment, which was adopted in 1868.

Another TPM commenter:

New Jersey allowed women to vote from 1790 until 1807. The Washington Territory proposed granting women the vote in 1854; it failed in the territorial legislature by only one vote. The Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and the Utah Territory did the same in 1870, though Congress killed that in 1887 with the Edmunds-Tucker Act. Colorado granted women the right to vote in 1897.

. . . I find it ludicrous to say that nobody had any inkling of expanded rights for women in 1868. It was a hot topic. The 14th amendment specifically mentions only men in Section 2, but it makes no such specific exclusion of women in the rest of the amendment. Why doesn't it? Why should the only "proper" reading be that any group not specifically mentioned (except white men, of course) were intended to be excluded?

Scalia is the worst kind of clown: a clown with lifetime tenure.

I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it . . .

Judy, Judy, Judy reminds us why she is so special:

"[Julian Assange] didn't care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out or determine whether or not it would hurt anyone."

Love 'ya, babe. Excellent stuff.

Your follow-up is equally priceless:

If anybody bothered to read the Iraq war stories they're now so busy criticizing, they would see that Julian Assange and I were involved in very different kinds of journalism. They are not morally equivalent. While we both sought to publicize official secrets, I and my co-authors at The NYT spent enormous time trying to verify the secret government reports and other WMD-related stories we published. Every exclusive story of mine appeared with a discussion of its context, the difficulty involved in corroborating the highly classified information, and an assessment by at least one independent expert and likely skeptic, often identified by name and organization. Julian Assange, whom I have repeatedly defended, did none of these things. He engaged in data dumping and left these vital journalistic tasks to the papers that used his information. I stand by my criticism of this aspect of his work, as well as by my conclusion that he should not be punished or even faulted for trying to ferret out government secrets. That is what journalists do. Rather, our government is to blame for failing to safeguard truly sensitive information, for grossly over-classifying too much of it, and now, I fear, for deciding to circulate less of it rather than figure out a smarter way to share more of it safely, as the 9/11 Commission recommended almost a decade ago.

So compelling. Ah, Judy, I miss those days when you graced the NYT with tid-bits like this:

Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq's nuclear program before Baghdad's defeat in the gulf war. Conscious of this lapse in the past, they argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a ''smoking gun,'' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.

It seems so long ago - 2002, when most of what Miller wrote was filled with many statements like "they argue", and "hardliners are worried", and "Bush administration officials", without ever identifying these individuals. Judy didn't trouble us with silly details like "the individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity".

At one point in my credulous youth, I believed the NYT justifiably held itself out as a credible newspaper, something Wikileaks never has had pretensions of doing. But, never mind: the distinction seems lost on Judy.

Go back to the aspens, Judy - Scooter is waiting for you.