Last Call Before The Inevitability

The Prop 8 defendants shot down Wednesday are still trying to piss in the punchbowl, it seems.  They have filed an emergency petition with Justice Kennedy to stop same-sex marriages, just to piss everyone off.

The application argues that the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Proposition 8 case is not yet “final,” so the stay must remain in place. The Supreme Court ordinarily does not issue its formally binding ruling – known as the “judgment” – in a case from a federal court of appeals until 25 days after it releases its “opinion.” Because the Court issued its opinion in the Proposition 8 case on June 26, it would by default not issue the judgment until Monday, July 22. (The 25th day is July 21, a Sunday.)
The principal point of that delay is to permit the losing party to prepare and submit a petition for rehearing to the Justices, though such petitions are as a practical matter never granted.

 The parties could ask the Supreme Court to expedite the release of the judgment. That is in fact what occurred last week in the “Baby Girl” Native American adoption case. After a request by the petitioner, the Court ordered the mandate issued in 7 days, rather than the usual 25.


Absent such a request, most observers expected that same-sex marriage in California (in the places in the State it did become available) would not begin again for roughly a month. Even if the court of appeals was not required as a matter of law to wait, that appeared to be the more measured and prudent course. But the Ninth Circuit acted more quickly, lifting the stay before the Supreme Court’s ruling became effective.

And this has apparently pissed off the God botherers.

Whether the emergency request to Justice Kennedy can succeed is unclear. But it is unlikely. As a formal matter, the Ninth Circuit did not put the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Proposition 8 case into effect prematurely. The Supreme Court held that the proponents of Proposition 8 could not file appeals in federal court. That ruling says nothing about imposing or lifting a stay on same-sex marriage. The court of appeals likely has the authority to act with respect to its own previously entered stay, which is a form of controlling its own docket. Although the court of appeals had previously stated that they stay would remain in effect until the Supreme Court’s ruling was final, it presumably can change its mind.

Put another way, before the Supreme Court issued its judgment the Ninth Circuit could not issue a new substantive ruling on Proposition 8′s constitutionality or the standing of the parties to appeal. The court of appeals lacked jurisdiction over those issues while the case was in the Supreme Court. But I am not aware of authority for the proposition that the court of appeals lacked the power to modify its own stay.

In other words, they're just being douchebags.  Here's hoping Justice Kennedy tells them to screw off.

Last Call For James Clapper's Job

Slate's Fred Kaplan won't be the last person calling for President Obama to can Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.  For once, Kaplan is correct.

If President Obama really does welcome a debate about the scope of the U.S. surveillance program, a good first step would be to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.” As we all now know, he was lying.

We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying. In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did. He replied:

“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

Not good enough, not even friggin' close.  I can understand the debate over whether Clapper lied, but not when Clapper himself admitted lying to Congress and admitted it on national TV.  That's suicidally stupid in a intelligence officer, much less DNI.

Nor was this a spontaneous lie or a lie he regretted making. Wyden revealed in a statement today that he’d given Clapper advance notice that he would ask the question and that, after the hearing, he offered Clapper a chance to revise his answer. Clapper didn’t take the offer.

Nope.  Lying to Congress openly is bad enough.  Lying to Congress openly and not being smart enough to recognize it when you're in charge of the nation's entire intelligence gathering apparatus?  Obama should clean out Clapper's desk himself and hand him the box and a pre-paid cell phone so Clapper can call someone and get a friggin clue.

Sorry James, you gotta go.

Last Call For Second Amendment Remedies

Tell me again how the Tea Party is a non-violent movement of "concerned citizens" again and not a bunch of heavily armed bullies making threats.

A caller on a tea party-sponsored conference call Wednesday suggested that the way to change Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME)’s mind on immigration reform would be to “shoot her.” According to Think Progress, the violent suggestion was not condemned, but met with hoots of laughter by others on the call.

Far-right conservative group The Eagle Forum held the call, which featured Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)’s communications director Stephen Miller and the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector. The suggestion that Collins should be shot came when the call moderator turned the discussion over to callers.

An individual identified as “Bob from Maine” said, “I’m from Maine and our tea party will be meeting up next week. What is the best way that we can get our senator to listen to us?”

“Shoot her,” said another caller, who did not identify himself.

The call to violence was met with laughter by the people on the conference call. No one on the line raised any audible objection.

Hmm.  There's a term for using violence or the threat of violence to affect a political outcome, but apparently we only reserve such a term for those of a darker-skinned or non-Christian persuasion.  I'm sure joking about assassinating members of Congress is all fun and games until one of them gets shot in the head or something.

Keep it up, conservatives.

Sometimes The Bad Guys Win, Too

Cincinnati is a mostly a good city and I've come to learn to like it, if not love the city and the people who live in and around it.  But don't forget for a second that the Queen City is home to a number of huge corporations who don't give a damn about the people other than lip service:  Proctor & Gamble, Great American Insurance, Fifth Third Bank, Kroger, and in the latest example of stunning greed, Western and Southern Insurance Group.

The Anna Louise has been housing women since 1909 in the same charming, dormitory-style building that looks like a plantation home. Although it began by helping young, ambitious types who were pouring into then-booming Cincinnati, it later became geared toward women who needed a fresh start; some have left abusive husbands, others are transitioning from foster care to adulthood while others are recovering prostitutes and drug addicts.

The historic downtown Cincinnati neighborhood where the women live, known as Lytle Park, became an important part of their recovery, since most were coming from dangerous parts of the city where it'd be easier to slip back into their former ways of life.

Western & Southern executives, whose headquarters sit across a park from the Anna Louise, offered to buy the Anna Louise for $1.8 million several years ago, less than half its value. The Anna Louise declined and won $12.6 million in federal and state tax credits to renovate the home, where some rooms are smaller than 100 square feet and all the women have to share bathrooms and one kitchen.

Days before the renovation was to begin, Western & Southern sued over a zoning issue and a judge ordered an immediate construction halt until the legal fight was resolved. The Anna Louise and its supporters didn't back down, vowing to fight Western & Southern with everything they had — until last week when they inked a deal with the company to sell the home for $4 million.

Leaders at Cincinnati Union Bethel, the nonprofit that runs the Anna Louise, said they sold reluctantly because they couldn't afford to fight any longer.

So a women's shelter standing for over a century will be obliterated because they were lowering the property value, so W&S threw their considerable weight around in the city until they could force a sale.  They'll make they money back on yet another overpriced gentrified hotel downtown that they'll own.  No doubt the employees there won't have a union, won't be paid very well, and will "be lucky to even have" the jobs this will create.

Company CEO John Barrett has long said it was time for the women at the Anna Louise to leave the neighborhood to make way for economic development. He plans to turn the building into a boutique hotel and envisions transforming the neighborhood into a hub of activity with restaurants and bars.

"This truly is a win for everyone and will make Lytle Park a destination like no other," Barrett said in a Monday news release announcing the Anna Louise sale.

Barrett, who has repeatedly declined requests for an interview, has become a loathed figure at the Anna Louise, not only for his tireless efforts to acquire the property but also for the way he has talked about the women living there, repeatedly referring to them as recovering prostitutes and saying they just don't belong in the neighborhood.

As far as where the women will go?  Well, who cares?  It's not W&S's problem anymore.   Maybe Cincinnati will do something about it after some national shaming...but I doubt it.

Haters Gonna Hate

Well, if this story is true, I hope this guy gets to cool his jets in prison for a very, very long time.

A 39-year-old Muslim cab driver who served in the Iraq war says that an executive from an aviation company accused him of being a jihadist and broke his jaw in what activists are calling a hate crime.

Mohamed A. Salim told The Washington Post that Emerald Aviation President Ed Dahlberg attacked him after he picked him up at Country Club of Fairfax in Northern Virginia at around 2 a.m. on Friday. Dahlberg had been drinking and was told that he would have to finish his open beer before getting into the cab.

Salim recorded audio of the encounter on his cell phone. 

Dahlberg's rant, as recorded on the phone, is pretty horrific.  It's just straight, raw, hate, bred by a decade plus of stupid, ignorant Islamophobia.

Dahlberg was charged with misdemeanor assault and police are determining if charges should be elevated to a felony hate crime. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Monday said that medical records and the 11-minute cell phone recording were being used as evidence in the case.

In a statement, Dahlberg’s attorney, Demetry Pikrallidas, admitted that his client “became rather emotional as the discussion turned to jihad and 9/11, and especially heated on the subject of jihadists who want to harm America.”

But Salim is an Iraq War veteran.  Unreal.  Just unreal.  And yet the haters on the right will now ruin Salim's life anyway.  It doesn't matter that he served his country in the military.  Muslims are nothing but subhuman animals to these morons and this is what they want to happen.

Keep openly backing these clowns, GOP.

Last Call

Maybe, just maybe, the Republicans in the Senate are going to lose this gun violence legislation battle after all, especially if somebody doesn't shut GOP Sen. James Inhofe up fast.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said Tuesday that the gun control debate doesn't have anything to do with the families of the Newtown, Conn., shooting victims, and that the only reason those families think it does is because President Barack Obama told them it did.

Eleven family members of Newtown victims were in Washington on Tuesday, meeting privately with senators to urge them to support a forthcoming gun package that would impose tighter background checks, crack down on gun trafficking and enhance school safety measures. Speaking to a handful of reporters, Inhofe said he feels bad for those families because they're being used as pawns in a political fight.

"See, I think it's so unfair of the administration to hurt these families, to make them think this has something to do with them when, in fact, it doesn't," Inhofe said.

When it was suggested that the families of Newtown victims actually believe the gun debate pertains to them, Inhofe said, "Well, that's because they've been told that by the president."

My main argument Saturday was that Republicans weren't going to pay a political price for opposing background checks.  It's entirely conceivable that Inhofe's idiotic statement here may just have changed the calculus on that, big time.

To recap, a sitting US Senator just told the families of the victims of a bloody massacre of six-year-olds that they have nothing to do with the gun violence debate, and that they are nothing more than pawns.  Even if Inhofe believes this, to actually say something that unrelentingly cold to reporters is a pretty awful thing to do.

Suddenly, the villain in this kabuki play isn't the caricature of Tyrant Obama, but Inhofe's own words.  That's a pretty big shift, potentially.

Still virtually no chance of this getting through the House.  But the Senate, well...there's light at the end of that tunnel.

The Senate will hold a preliminary vote on gun control legislation to break the Republican filibuster on Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced, after the Democrats pulled together enough votes from Republicans.

“We’re going to vote Thursday,” Reid said. “I’m going to file cloture on the bill tonight.”

Though Democrats do have the numbers to break the filibuster, they still might not have enough votes to overcome other procedural hurdles and hold an up-or-down vote.

They will after Inhofe's story gets wide play.  Cowardly Dems will have nowhere to hide on this one and neither will a number of Republicans.  If the point of President Obama's push on gun legislation was giving the GOP enough rope to hang themselves, Inhofe jumped at the chance to go first.

The Merchant Of Menace

Adidas, you're horrible, horrible people.

Kevin Ware broke his leg during an Elite Eight game on Sunday. Louisville handled it in classic, major college athletic fashion, by exploiting sentiment for profit. “Rise Up # 5″ Final Four t-shirts are already for sale on the team website. Proceeds benefit…the Louisville Athletic Dept and Adidas. Just shameless.

Damn right there is.

Both Sides Are To Blame, Right?

So if you're still wondering after the Steubenville trial "Well why don't more teenage girls report rape and sexual assault" and take the cases all the way to court, it's because FOX News will "accidentally" out you for retribution.

During correspondent Mike Tobin’s report about the guilty verdicts in the Steubenville rape case on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom, the girl’s first name was broadcast without being censored.

“We have not known, really, how the victim is doing, Mike,” host Martha MacCallum told Tobin. “Is there any information on that today?”

“Well, a relative tells me that she spends a lot of time in her room,” Tobin explained. “She has been back out playing sports, and through it all — you’ll be surprised to learn — she made the honor roll one more time.”

“A family representative says the remorse coming from the football players came too late,” the correspondent added. “We saw their reaction yesterday.”

At that point, the report cut to footage of one of the rapists, 17-year-old Trent Mays, apologizing to the victim in court on Sunday.

“I would truly like to apologize to [redacted], her family, my family and the community,” Mays said. “No picture [of the rape] should have been sent around, let alone even taken.”

Raw Story has redacted the victim’s first name from this report and the video below, but Fox News did not.

A Fox News editor’s note added to an Associated Press report published on Sunday insisted that the conservative network would not name the minors charged in the case.

“Editors’ Note: The Associated Press named the minors charged due to the fact they have been identified in other news coverage and their names were used in open court,” the note said. “FoxNews.com will not name the defendants.”

So hey, plausible deniability from the crew at FOX.  Because shaming the victim is really what it's all about.  "Oops, it would be awful if we accidentally let your name slip on national TV like that if you went to trial, dear."

Ahh, but FOX News isn't alone.  Not by far, you see, both CNN and MSNBC were guilty of the same awful act as well.

All three cable news networks aired a clip of one of the defendants, Trent Mays, apologizing to the victim in the courtroom. Mays had addressed the victim by name, which was not censored during CNN and MSNBC's broadcasts on Sunday and Fox News' broadcast on Monday. Local CBS affiliate WTRF also aired the clip without editing the victim's name out.  

Gosh, MSBNC AND CNN did it first.  Before FOX.

That's a hell of a message to send, yes?

Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla said two 16 year old girls are facing charges after allegedly making threats against the rape victim in Steubenville.

Abdalla said one teen turned herself in and the other one was arrested.

They are being held in the Jefferson County Juvenile Detention Center and will appear before Judge  Samuel Kerr Tuesday.

Death threats.  From other girls.

This is where we are in America.  Feel the pride.

We Come Not To Praise Hugo Chavez...

...but to bury him, as Zack Beauchamp reminds us.  Deep, deep underground preferably, because the guy really was a despot and a tyrant, not to mention an actual anti-Semite.  I know that term gets thrown around a lot, but he really did go after Venezuelan Jews as political and social enemies of the state and did nothing to stop the rise of that awful garbage in his populist bullying wake.

While even Chavez’s critics admit that he did attempt to address the plight of Venezuela’s poorest, the decline in economic inequality in Venezuela reflected a broader egalitarian trend in Latin America, and can’t be fully credited to Chavez’s policies. However, Chavez’ policies harmed Venezuela’s poorest in other ways: the value of the Venezuelan currency dropped while prices soared, making it harder for people to buy basic necessities, and crime skyrocketed.

Moreover, Chavez hurt the vulnerable in Venezuela in other ways. Chavez’s state-run media hounded Venezuela’s small, beleaguered Jewish population — he himself once said “Don’t let yourselves be poisoned by those wandering Jews.” A study released by the Kantor Center at Tel Aviv University found that Chavez’s rule “witnessed a rise in antisemitic manifestations, including vandalism, media attacks, caricatures, and physical attacks on Venezuelan Jewish institutions.” Indeed, roughly half of Venezuelan Jews fled the country because of “the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.”

Chavez also attacked Venezuela’s democratic political system. Human Rights Watch reported in 2012 that “the accumulation of power in the executive and the erosion of human rights protections have allowed the Chávez government to intimidate, censor, and prosecute critics and perceived opponents in a wide range of cases involving the judiciary, the media, and civil society.” Contra Serrano, Venezuela’s elections were not certified as “free and fair” by international monitors of late: Chavez had not allowed international election monitors to observe Venezuelan elections since 2006.

Absolute best case, Chavez was a terrible leader whose reign caused untold damage among the Venezuelan people.  Worst case?  Glad the guy's in the ground.

He won't be missed.

Orange Julius Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Politico rounds up TEAM WIN THE MORNING(tm) to bring us this microcosm of Fiscal Cliffmas:

House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t hold back when he spotted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the White House lobby last Friday.

It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal.

“Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f— yourself."

The harsh exchange just a few steps from the Oval Office — which Boehner later bragged about to fellow Republicans — was only one episode in nearly two months of high-stakes negotiations laced with distrust, miscommunication, false starts and yelling matches as Washington struggled to ward off $500 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts.

So yeah, that happened just a few days ago.   But both sides do it, right?  Get to open up with Tools of 2013 tag right off the bat.

Last Call

And David Brooks loves him some middle class suffering, because he's basically evil and it builds character, or something.

So Republicans have to realize that they are going to cave on tax rates. The only question is what they get in return. What they should demand is this: That the year 2013 will be spent putting together a pro-growth tax and entitlement reform package that will put this country on a sound financial footing through 2040. 

Republicans should go to the White House and say they are willing to see top tax rates go up to 36 percent or 37 percent and they are willing to forgo a debt-ceiling fight for this year. 

This is a big political concession, but it’s not much of an economic one. President Obama needs rate increases to show the liberals he has won a “victory,” but the fact is that raising revenue by raising rates is not that much worse for the economy than raising revenue by closing loopholes, which Republicans have already conceded. 

In return, Republicans should also ask for some medium-size entitlement cuts as part of the fiscal cliff down payment. These could fit within the framework Speaker John Boehner sketched out Monday afternoon: chaining Social Security cost-of-living increases to price inflation and increasing the Medicare Part B premium to 35 percent of costs. 

But the big demand would be this: That on March 15, 2013, both parties would introduce leader-endorsed tax and entitlement reform bills in Congress that would bring the debt down to 60 percent of G.D.P. by 2024 and 40 percent by 2037, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office. Those bills would work their way through the normal legislative process, as the Constitution intended. If a Grand Bargain is not reached by Dec. 15, 2013, then there would be automatic defense and entitlement cuts and automatic tax increases. 

In other words, Bobo wants to make sure the middle class in America is destroyed, long after he's dead, and that it never rises again.

To get debt down to the levels we're not talking about trillions in spending cuts, we're talking about tens of trillions in spending cuts.  40 percent of GDP would be $6 trillion, from the $16 trillion we're at now, and it require not just balancing the budget and eliminating deficits, it means running up a surplus big enough to pay off the debt through either massive tax increases or massive spending cuts, or both.  At the very least, it would mean balanced budgets until at such time the GDP magically grew large enough so that $16 trillion WAS 40% of the GDP in 25 years.  Raise your hand if you think America's GDP is going to triple or so in 25 years with huge cuts on the menu in basic education and infrastructure.

Sure it will.  Laffer Curve!  

Bobo's just evil, and it sure doesn't matter to him if the middle class burns.  He's a rich snothead with a cushy columnist job.

Peace Through Superior Building Power, Part 2

If you're wondering what's so awful about Israel's "retaliatory strike" of building more settlements, as Emily L. Hauser explains, it's where the settlements are that matters.  As with any real estate issue, it's location, location, location. (emphasis mine:)

Yet if we’re to be brutally frank, bluster and threats are entirely unnecessary. Israel doesn’t need to convince the world of its position or to take extreme measures to make sure that Palestine’s nascent statehood dies in the cradle. All Israel needs to do is stay its decades-long course and keep sending out bulldozers.

Witness the report that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s morning-after response to the statehood vote is 3000 new housing units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as expedited work in the E-1 “envelope,” a development project intended to geographically join Jerusalem to the settlement of Maaleh Adumim and thus cut the West Bank in half. And thus destroy territorial contiguity for any Palestinian state. And thus drive a final nail in the coffin of the notion of two-state peace.

Though impressive in scope, there is, in fact, nothing new in these plans—indeed, even though Netanyahu committed to President Obama upon taking office that he would not build in E-1, that piece of it can’t be considered a breach with the past either. After all, Israel is forever promising the U.S. one thing and then doing quite another, in particular with regard to the settlements.

So yes, the reaction of the Israelis to the Palestinian recognition vote is very much an act of war.  Building a settlement corridor that would cut the West Bank in two is pretty despicable.  And yet, most Americans will shrug and say "Well how could that be bad?  Why are those awful Arab terrorists complaining about that?"

Now you know.

Peace Through Superior Building Power

Israel's response to Thursday's UN recognition vote granting Palestine "observer" status:  Kinda hard for you guys to have a country if we put our houses all over it.

Israel plans to build thousands of new homes for its settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, an Israeli official said on Friday, defying a U.N. vote that implicitly recognized Palestinian statehood there.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conservative government had authorized the construction of 3,000 housing units and ordered "preliminary zoning and planning work for thousands" more.

The official would not elaborate. But Israeli media said the government sought to hammer home its rejection of Thursday's upgrade, by the U.N. General Assembly, of the Palestinians to "non-member observer state" from "entity".

Hammer, nails, brick, mortar, drywall, concrete, bulldoze and shingle home that rejection, too.   Let's not forget the US has asked Israel before to chill with the settlement expansion in the West Bank, and that went nowhere fast as Netanyahu told President Obama to stick a 2 x 4 where the sun don't shine and Obama backed off.

Now after voting against the recognition of Palestine yesterday, it's not like the Obama administration can say a damn thing about this new and massive round of expansion, and the collective punishment of Palestinians continues unabated.

It's getting tiresome.

They Still Have Learned Nothing

Nearly three weeks after the election, and it's still Benghazi, all the time, with the right.  No better example of this than Col. Mustard, who knows all about racism and will tell you exactly how it works.

I know I sound like a broken record.

Everytime I think the Democratic race card players could not get more vile, more deranged, more patronizingly demeaning to blacks, someone manages to defy even my vivid imagination.

This time, it is the Editorial Board of The Washington Post, which issued a truly amazing screed (h/t Gabriel Malor) claiming that critics of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice are motivated by race and sex, as demonstrated by the facts that most are male and a significant percentage come from former confederate states.

Let me clue you in, Bill.  Nothing is more patronizing or demeaning to minorities like myself, particularly African-Americans like myself, than a middle-aged white guy deciding what should be patronizing and demeaning to blacks because you have decided that people like me are simply too ignorant to see your shining truth.

And yes, when a group of white GOP men in Congress, from mostly former Confederate states, decide that a high school valedictorian who is Rhodes Scholar with degrees in International Relations, a Phi Beta Kappa member, a National Security Council member under Clinton, and UN Ambassador under Obama is somehow both incompetent and unqualified to serve as Secretary of State, one has to ask the same questions as the Washington Post's editorial board as to why this is.

You might actually learn something if you choose to truly explore why you're in the wrong, but that level of soul searching is far too difficult.  It's better then to insult anyone asking those questions as "vile and deranged" and somehow pretend that Susan Rice's nomination to the office of Secretary of State is a personal grievance that must be rectified by no less than the President himself, because after all, you're just that important.

You keep on believe that, and we'll keep winning elections.  That seems fair.

How To Secede At Business Without Really Trying

Texas?  You have another Lone Star State-sized problem on your hands over this "secede from the union" nonsense.

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat. 

But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas nationalism — a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the 1830s and 1840s — it is a far more serious matter. 

The official in East Texas, Peter Morrison, the treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party, said in a statement that he had received overwhelming support from conservative Texans and overwhelming opposition from liberals outside the state in response to his comments in his newsletter. He said that it may take time for “people to appreciate that the fundamental cultural differences between Texas and other parts of the United States may be best addressed by an amicable divorce, a peaceful separation.” 

The online petitions — created on the We the People platform at petitions.whitehouse.gov — are required to receive 25,000 signatures in 30 days for the White House to respond. The Texas petition, created Nov. 9 by a man identified as Micah H. of Arlington, had received more than 116,000 signatures by Friday. It asks the Obama administration to “peacefully grant” the withdrawal of Texas, and describes doing so as “practically feasible,” given the state’s large economy. 

Last I checked this problem was settled about 1865 or so, and frankly this whole thing is getting silly.  Republicans lost an election, not a war.  If 116,000 Texans want to be shown the door over losing an election, well good luck to you.

Which side hates America now, huh?

Last Call

Meanwhile, some sobering perspective about the next four years.

A Jacksonville police officer has quit after admitting he told colleagues that he would volunteer to assassinate President Barack Obama.
Sam Koivisto told the Florida Times-Union on Wednesday that his comments had been blown out of proportion and that he'd planned to retire in five months anyway.

The 57-year-old retired earlier this month while facing an internal investigation into his comments to other officers after the election. He told them that if an order came to kill Obama, he "wouldn't mind being the guy."

So there's that.  You knows, because cops threatened to kill Dubya all the time.

No Defense Of The Indefensible

There's a huge difference between Israel's right to defend itself (which Palestinians in Gaza never seem to be entitled to) and what the son of former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon wants to do.  Maj. Gilad Sharon took to the Jerusalem Post with this missive:

The desire to prevent harm to innocent civilians in Gaza will ultimately lead to harming the truly innocent: the residents of southern Israel. The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences.
[...]
… We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.

Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.

If the government isn’t prepared to go all the way on this, it will mean reoccupying the entire Gaza Strip. Not a few neighborhoods in the suburbs, as with Cast Lead, but the entire Strip, like in Defensive Shield, so that rockets can no longer be fired.

There is no middle path here – either the Gazans and their infrastructure are made to pay the price, or we reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip.

There's a term for what Gilad Sharon wants to do here.  It's called "genocide".  That it is coming from an Israeli Jew is no small amount of irony.  When I said in yesterday's podcast that I feared this time would be different, that this time Israel would "go all the way on this" as Sharon so ghoulishly remarks without pity or remorse, this is why I believe it is coming unless there's a surprising and breathtaking turn of events that leads to a cease fire.

I hope for the latter.  I fully expect the former, except this time it will be tens of thousands of Palestinians who will die, along with hundreds of Israelis, before the fighting dies down for a bit.

We'll see.  I am not very optimistic.

The Maine Problem With The GOP Is...

...the head of the Maine Republican Party, Charlie "Whitey" Webster, and his views on minorities in New England.

The head of Maine’s Republican Party defended himself on Thursday over comments he made about black people committing voter fraud in his state.

In an interview with TPM, Charlie Webster said his remarks earlier in the week had been misinterpreted as racist, but he still insisted it was “unusual” to see so many black voters at the polls in an overwhelmingly white state.

Webster had claimed in interviews with local media outlets that having a high number of blacks showing up at the polls could be a sign of voter fraud. He vowed to investigate. That investigation would be conducted using his own private funds after he steps down from his party post on Dec. 1, Webster told TPM.

He also said he regretted some of the language he used in the previous interviews.

“I regret saying the word black because it wasn’t like I was singling out black,” Webster said. “The reason I said it, ‘cause I don’t know where you live, but where I come from in rural Maine, it’s a small percentage of the population. I think we’re the whitest state in the country. So if you go to the polls and see people who are black, it’s unusual. And when you see a lot of people who are black, like six or eight or ten people, you think, ‘Wow, where do they live?’ That was my point.”

Sorry, Charlie.  The problem is your assumption that when you see six or eight or ten black people, you automatically assume they must be committing a crime because your ignorant, sheltered self chooses not to realize that while Maine's percentage of black citizens is 1.3%, it still means 15,000 black people live in the state, asshole.

Try saying hello next time instead of practically calling the cops.

Last Call

The "We love America, why do you hippies hate it" right has decided that the real problem is...America.  Specifically, the America who voted for Barack Obama a second time, and therefore are no longer worthy of being saved by the infinite wisdom of the right, who this weekend has decided to wash their hands of the whole matter and want to burn the whole thing down.  Take Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO:

But, consider this: A president of the United States just ran a reelection campaign based on the promise of government largess, exploitation of class division, the demonization of success, the glorification of identity politics, and the presumption that women are a helpless interest group; and he did so while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the looming — potentially fatal — crisis that the country faces. And it worked.

Or his compatriot, Mark Steyn:

So Washington cannot be saved from itself. For the moment, tend to your state, and county, town and school district, and demonstrate the virtues of responsible self-government at the local level. Americans as a whole have joined the rest of the Western world in voting themselves a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. The longer any course correction is postponed the more convulsive it will be. Alas, on Tuesday, the electorate opted to defer it for another four years. I doubt they’ll get that long.

Gosh, it's almost like these guys are rooting for America to fail.  Some contrition from Tuesday night, right?

Collective Punishment, Ohio Republican Style

Ohio was the state that put President Obama over the top Tuesday night as record numbers of minority voters and women turned out in the President's favor.  The response from Ohio Republicans?  It's time to immediately punish the people of the state for allowing this to happen.  Time to punish working class voters:

For the chairman and chief executive of Murray Energy, an Ohio-based coal company, the reelection of President Obama was no cause for celebration. It was a time for prayer – and layoffs.

Robert E. Murray read a prayer to a group of company staff members on the day after the election, lamenting the direction of the country and asking: “Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.”

On Wednesday, Murray also laid off 54 people at American Coal, one of his subsidiary companies, and 102 at Utah American Energy, blaming a “war on coal” by the administration of President Barack Obama.”

...and time to punish women:

Last year, anti-choice advocates in Ohio pushed extreme legislation to ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which often occurs as early as six weeks, before many women may even know they’re pregnant. So-called “heartbeat” bills like HB 125 are so radical that they often divide the anti-abortion community, and this particular legislation has been stalled in the Ohio Senate since June 2011.

But now, thanks to significant pressure from the anti-choice groups who were the biggest proponents of the heartbeat bill last year, HB 125 may be up again for consideration in Ohio’s Senate as early as next week. 

The bill would functionally eliminate abortion in the state and makes no exception for the health of the mother, rape, or incest.  And this too:

The heartbeat bill isn’t the only anti-choice measure up for consideration in Ohio next week. A Planned Parenthood affiliate in Ohio notes that the Ohio House Health Committee has also scheduled a vote next week on a bill that would defund Planned Parenthood clinics in the state. 

And so the "payback" begins.   That's how Republicans in Ohio seek "compromise".  You get punished, and they tell you it's for your own good.  They want you to hate Obama, it's all his fault we have to do this to you, they say.

No contrition, no remorse, no soul-searching.  Not for a second.  You are the enemy to them, and you will now pay as a result.