StupidiNews!

• Hurricane season kicked off yesterday with Tropical Storm Alvin forming in the Pacific last night.
• North Dakota's only abortion clinic continues to fight to stay open as legal battles over local hospital admission privileges are going to court.
• At least six are dead in north Texas as tornadoes ripped across the Lone Star state near Cleburne.
• Growing evidence finds the housing recovery may be the beginning of another housing bubble instead in some markets.
• Technical difficulties have put NASA's Kepler exoplanet monitoring telescope out of commission, perhaps for good.

Last Call: Three-Front Threat

President Obama and the executive branch launched into action with a triple-pronged attack to stamp out GOP criticism on the week's three "scandals":  the IRS, Benghazi, and the DoJ.

First, Attorney General Eric Holder testified before angry House Republicans about the leak subpoenas served to the Associated Press and was in no mood for GOP nonsense from goons like Rep. Darrel Issa:

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Eric Holder and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) clashed as the Attorney General tore into the Republican oversight chairman's conduct as "unacceptable" and "shameful."

Holder slammed back at the GOP goofballs who couldn't resist making this all about them, and Louie Gohmert was especially idiotic for all of America to see.

Gohmert accused Holder and the Department of Justice of unfair targeting of Christian groups while failing to thoroughly investigate Tsarnaev, and said the FBI "blew it" by not following up after Tsarnaev had become "radicalized."

"Because of political correctness, there was not a thorough enough investigation of Tamerlan to determine this kid had been radicalized," Gohmert said, raising his voice at Holder.
Holder strongly refuted those charges and defended the FBI.

"You don't have access to the FBI files," Holder said. "You don't know what the FBI did. You don't know what the FBI's interaction was with the Russians. You don't know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to. You simply do not know that. ... I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know."

Gohmert grew irate, charging that Holder had challenged his personal character and continually tried to get a word in despite objections from other members of the Judiciary Committee.

He then rambled something that sounded like he was accusing Holder of "casting aspersions on my asparagus."

Then the White House released the Benghazi emails the GOP has been demanding.

Senior Obama administration officials contend the e-mails demonstrate the process of developing talking points for members of Congress to use in media interviews was not focused on politics but rather on events.

For instance, some of the e-mails expressed caution about what should be said publicly during an FBI investigation while others centered on the strength of intelligence at the time.

The White House said the e-mails it provided to inquiring lawmakers months ago and released on Wednesday aim to paint a fuller picture following what it described as a series of selective and inaccurate e-mails recently appearing in media reports.

"Collectively, these e-mails make clear that the interagency process, including the White House's interactions, were focused on providing the facts as we knew them based on the best information available at the time and protecting an ongoing investigation," said White House spokesman Eric Schultz.

The e-mails indicate the CIA was likely the lead organization in developing the talking points with the State Department recommending significant changes.

And while turf battles where a dead Ambassador is involved aren't exactly kosher, they aren't illegal.  Also, both the CIA Director and Secretary of State at the time have both resigned:  Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus.

On top of that, President Obama then asked for and received the resignation of acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller.

Seeking to regain the initiative amid a series of controversies that have threatened his second-term agenda, Obama said new leadership was needed to restore public confidence in the IRS, whose reputation for political independence has suffered a major blow.

With congressional investigations looming, Obama said he had told Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to seek the resignation of Steven Miller, the acting IRS commissioner, and Lew had done so.

"I'll do everything in my power to make sure nothing like this happens again by holding the responsible parties accountable, by putting in place new checks and new safeguards," Obama told reporters in the White House's ornate East Room.

The President has effectively cleared the air, and cleared the decks, all in one afternoon.  The GOP should have been more careful with what it wished for, because the President complied, and now we'll almost certainly watch them overplay their hand by moving the goalposts.

Obama is winning this battle, folks.  He's outsmarted them YET AGAIN and they despise him for it.

Crossing The Rubin Con Once Again

Jen Rubin, World's Worst Hack(tm) on Eric Holder and the AP subpoenas being the worst thing ever:

It’s time to clean house, get some real legislative oversight and make certain there are consequences (legal or political) for those responsible. And the president needs to come forward and answer lots and lots of questions.

Worst thing EVER.

One can only imagine if the Bush administration pulled this.

Ahem.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation improperly obtained calling records for more than 3,500 telephone accounts from 2003 to 2006 without following any legal procedures, according to a newly disclosed report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Instead, according to the 289-page report, F.B.I. agents informally requested the records from employees of three unidentified telephone companies who were stationed inside a bureau communications office.

Based on nothing more than e-mail messages or scribbled requests on Post-it notes, the phone employees turned over customer calling records, the report said.

On some occasions, the phone employees allowed the F.B.I. to upload call records to government databases. On others, they allowed agents to view records on their computer screens, a practice that became known as “sneak peeks.”

Moreover, the report found that the F.B.I. improperly uploaded into its databases large numbers of calling records without determining whether they were relevant to an investigation.

On four occasions, the bureau made inaccurate statements to a court that authorizes national security wiretaps about how it had obtained calling records, the report said.

And agents twice improperly gained access to reporters’ calling records as part of leak investigations.

Sure was unprecedented, yep.  You know, instead of just going through legal channels and informing the AP, all the folks screaming that Obama is "chilling free speech" seem to forget the last guy simply had the FBI take reporter's phone records and didn't give a damn.  We only found out several years after the fact.  Somehow, I don't see anyone recalling that....least of all Jen Rubin.

Ben-Gone-Zi With The Dawn

Surprise!  Last Friday's ABC News hit piece on the President over Benghazi was in fact Jonathan Karl being fed a line of crap and running with it.  Steve Benen:

It seemed as if the story was just about done, until Friday, when all of a sudden, it became front-page news again. What happened? This ABC News report detailed the process through which administration talking points were drafted in September, and included a quote from then-Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes that seemed to suggest the White House wanted to remove specific references to terrorist organizations and CIA warnings. At the same time, the Weekly Standard ran similar information, and the rest of the media pounced.

They shouldn't have. Jake Tapper at CNN reports today that ABC and the Weekly Standard reports were based on misleading information.

Oops.

CNN has obtained an email sent by a top aide of President Barack Obama, in which the aide discusses the Obama administration reaction to the attack on the U.S. posts in Benghazi, Libya. The actual email differs from how sources characterized it to two different media organizations.

The actual email from then-Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes appears to show that whomever leaked it did so in a way that made it appear that the White House primarily concerned with the State Department's desire to remove references and warnings about specific terrorist groups so as to not bring criticism to the department.

In other words, somebody deliberately fed Jon Karl a doctored or paraphrased letter that made it look like the White House was more concerned about covering the State Department's ass than getting to the bottom of Benghazi.  Jon Karl was given a juicy story -- both too good to pass up and too good to be true -- and got burned.  He's got zero credibility now, and he either lied and colluded with a false narrative in order to make the White House look bad, or he's not smart enough to know when he's being played. 

Either situation is fatal in the career of a DC journalist...although he probably has a long career at FOX News should ABC can him.

StupidiNews!

• The Army confirms that the NCO in charge of preventing sexual assault at Foot Hood, Texas has himself been accused of sexual misconduct.
• International yoga pioneer Bikram Choudhury has been accused of sexual assault and human trafficking.
• Some 89 medical professionals in nine cities were arrested in connection with the latest crackdown on Medicare fraud, with some $223 million in allegedly fraudulent billing.
• EU officials are probing oil pricing agencies for collusion, anti-trust violations, and oil price manipulation.
• Microsoft has confirmed that the update to Windows 8, codenamed "Blue", will officially be a free release later this year as Windows 8.1.

Last Call, Republican Pendejos

Meet Pablo Pantoja.  He's the State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the RNC.  If you're thinking "Wow, that's got to be an awful job" you've got something in common with Pablo Pantoja, because he just quit his job trying to convince Latinos to vote Republican in Florida and became a Democrat.

In his own words:

Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.

It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.

Ahh yes, last week's now-infamous Heritage Foundation immigration study suggesting those of Hispanic heritage weren't as bright as other folks.   That apparently was the last straw for Pantoja, but there's more:

The complete disregard of those who are in disadvantage is also palpable. We are not looking at an isolated incident of rhetoric or research. Others subscribe to motivating people to action by stating, “In California, a majority of all Hispanic births are illegitimate. That’s a lot of Democratic voters coming.” The discourse that moves the Republican Party is filled with this anti-immigrant movement and overall radicalization that is far removed from reality. Another quick example beyond the immigration debate happened during CPAC this year when a supporter shouted ““For giving him shelter and food for all those years?” while a moderator explained how Frederick Douglass had written a letter to his slave master saying that he forgave him for “all the things you did to me.” I think you get the idea.

When the political discourse resorts to intolerance and hate, we all lose in what makes America great and the progress made in society.

That's a hell of an admission from the guy hired by the Republicans for outreach to Latino voters.  He's basically saying that his job is not only impossible, but immoral as well.

Although I was born an American citizen, I feel that my experience, and that of many from Puerto Rico, is intertwined with those who are referred to as illegal. My grandfather served in an all-Puerto Rican segregated Army unit, the 65th Infantry Regiment. He then helped, along my grandmother, shatter glass ceilings for Puerto Rican women raising my aunt to become the first Puerto Rican woman astronomer with a PhD in astrophysics (an IQ of a genius as far as I’m concerned). Puerto Ricans, as many other Americans still today have to face issues of discrimination in voting and civil rights.

Regardless of what political affiliation people choose, my respect for some remains. I don’t expect all Hispanics to do the same (although I would hope so) but I’m taking a stand against this culture of intolerance. 

And yes, if I were Pablo Pantoja, I would have quit too.   I applaud his honesty and courage.  if only the rest of the Republican leadership would do the same...

We've Lost Another One, Guys

It grieves me to say this, but the forces of reason have lost Esquire's Charles Pierce to the Great Firebagging, as the mighty Wurlitzer of right-wing nonsense has driven my favorite blogger into calling for Eric Holder's resignation over yesterday's Associated Press phone record subpoenas.

This isn't hard. This is what made Egil (Bud) Krogh famous. This is what got people sent to jail in the mid-1970s. This is the Plumbers, all over again, except slightly more formal this time, and laundered, disgracefully, even more directly through the Department Of Justice. And of course, this is not nearly good enough. And even if you point out, as you should, that the AP is hyping this story a little — The government "secretly" obtained the records? Doesn't that imply that nobody knew the records had been seized? Wasn't there a subpoena? The phone companies knew. — the ignoble clumsiness of this more than obviates those particular quibbles.

Oh Charles.  Subpoenas aren't a quibble here, they're the heart of the case...and the law that could have protected the AP in this leak investigation by requiring a warrant before being able to subpoena phone records or media organizations over leaks was...wait for it...proposed by Senate Democrats and filibustered to death by Senate Republicans.  You're better than this.

That is all my arse. At the least, this was a counter-terrorism operation. (Why else would Brennan have been questioned already?). Which puts the whole business inside the White House. And you'd have to be a toddler or a fool to believe that Eric Holder could go off on his own and take as politically volatile a step as this. But, let us take the White House at its word. Eric Holder did this by himself. He should be gone. This moment. Not only is this constitutionally abhorrent, it is politically moronic. Nobody likes the press, I will grant you that, but the administration is soft if it thinks the public distrusts the press that much. And to have this genuinely chilling revelation emerge simultaneously with the Benghazi, Benghazi!, BENGHAZI! mummery and the IRS dumbassery is pretty much a full broadside below the water line of this administration's credibility. Good god, this is going to be one long-ass summer.

You're right about that, Charles.  And for the first time I can recall, you're part of the problem and not the solution.  Feel free to bemoan the administration, but you might want to check your own credibility, man.  You're taking on a lot of water yourself here.  You've been through this time and again.  You were there for the Clinton Rules.  You know what it means when the media turns on the Democrat and gets us 8 years of someone infinitely worse.

But Holder is not the problem and you damn well know it.

Sadly, Pierce is far from alone in calling for Holder's resignation from the left.

North Carolina GOP Unplugs Tesla Motors

Apparently, electric cars are totally unfair to auto dealers somehow.  So much so that North Carolina Republicans are pulling the plug on Silicon Valley darling Tesla Motors ever being able to sell a car there.  Slate's Will Oremus:

The proposal, which the Raleigh News & Observer reports was unanimously approved by the state’s Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday, would apply to all car manufacturers, but the intended target is clear. It’s aimed at Tesla, the only U.S. automaker whose business model relies on selling cars directly to consumers, rather than through a network of third-party dealerships.

The bill is being pushed by the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association, a trade group representing the state’s franchised dealerships. Its sponsor is state Sen. Tom Apodaca, a Republican from Henderson, who has said the goal is to prevent unfair competition between manufacturers and dealers. What makes it “unfair competition” as opposed to plain-old “competition”—something Republicans are typically inclined to favor—is not entirely clear. After all, North Carolina doesn’t seem to have a problem with Apple selling its computers online or via its own Apple Stores.

Still, it’s easy to understand why some car dealers might feel a little threatened: Tesla’s Model S outsold the Mercedes S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and Audi A8 last quarter without any help from them. If its business model were to catch on, consumers might find that they don’t need the middle-men as much as they thought.

Incidentally—not that he would be in any way swayed by this—I couldn’t help but notice that Apodaca received $8,000 in campaign contributions from the North Carolina Automobile Dealers Association last year, the maximum amount allowed by state law. I’ve reached out to the senator for further comment and will update this post if he replies.

Tesla's turning some heads in the RTP area, where they expect to have a showroom soon.  They're probably doing well in liberal Asheville, home of my alma mater.  The real issue of course is by taking dealers out of the picture, Tesla's business model is a direct threat to the dealership empires in the state, and they want Tesla gone.

Besides, NC Republicans hate electric cars or anything remotely environmentally friendly, so it's a double win for them.  I fully expect this bill to pass and Gov. Pat McCrory to sign it.

Free markets are for suckers, after all.  So much nicer to rig the game.

StupidiNews!

• A 19-year old suspect has been identified by New Orleans police in connection with Sunday's parade shooting that left 19 people injured.
• California Dem Gov. Jerry Brown is going up against his own party when it comes to spending the state's projected $4.5 million budget surplus.
• In a press conference with British PM David Cameron, President Obama vowed a thorough investigation into the IRS giving extra scrutiny to Tea Party groups.
• Creditors of the now defunct Lehman Brothers brokerage house say non-profits are on the hook for millions in bad derivatives trades, and will take them to court to get their money back.
• A new study finds that password strength indicators online do help users create better passwords, if the meters are set up correctly.

Planted Six Feet Under

Maybe my nieces and nephews will forgive our generation one day for failure on climate change, but I doubt it.

More than half of common species of plants and a third of animal species are likely to see their living space halved by 2080 on current trends of carbon emissions, a climate study said on Sunday.

Output of man-made greenhouse gases is putting Earth on track for four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100 compared with the pre-industrial 18th century, it said.

The unprecedented speed of warming will be a shock for many species, as it will badly affect the climatic range in which they can live, it warned.

Investigators from Britain’s University of East Anglia looked at 48,786 species and measured how their range would be affected according to models of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

Fifty-five percent of plants and 35 percent of animals could see their living space halved by 2080 at current emission growth for CO2, they found. The figures take into account the species’ ability to migrate into habitat that may open up as a result of warming.

This is a greatly conservative estimate.  The other end of the spectrum is that 80 years from now, Earth will be largely a wasteland with a broken ecosystem, and humanity is going to have tremendous difficulty even surviving.  That's not taking into account the massive superstorms that will pound the planet as a direct result of climate change.

We're decades past being able to save ourselves.  It's now a question of how bad we'll let it get.  The answer appears to be "an unabated march to catastrophe."

Selling Doom And Gloom

The gang over at WIN THE MORNING tried to slip this one out there Friday, but it got run over by the IRS story.  Still, expect more of the notion that the Democrats are increasingly doomed, because, well, they're always doomed.  Even when they win.

One of the Democrats’ most veteran strategists warns that the party is “in decline” and “at considerable risk” when President Barack Obama is no longer on the scene.

“Since Obama was elected President, the Democrats have lost nine governorships, 56 members of the House and two Senate seats,” Doug Sosnik, the political director in Bill Clinton’s White House, writes in a new memo.

Oh gosh, a former Clinton political director is warning that Barack Obama is screwing everything up.  There's a shocker.  So who else should we blame?  Sosnick provides a helpful checklist:

• Obama’s personal popularity does not easily translate for other candidates. The president is not building the Democratic Party’s institutional apparatus in a way that it will thrive when he’s gone.

• The losses in the 2010 midterms gave Republicans control of the redistricting process, which will be in effect until after the 2020 census. This gives the GOP a structural advantage in keeping the House.

• Millennials, born 1981 to 1994, and Generation X’ers, born 1965 to 1980, are voting Democratic, but a plurality identify themselves as independents — which makes them less reliable.

• Democrats cannot count on the same level of African-American turnout without Obama at the top of the ticket. Sosnik cites new analysis showing that in 2012 for the first time ever eligible black voters turned out a higher rate than whites.

Obama lost the House in 2010, thanks to "unreliable" voters (anyone under 50) and black voters who will abandon the party once Obama is gone.

In other words, Sosnik is blaming Obama, and me.   Black voters under 48.  Specifically.  And he's setting us up for the fall in 2014 and 2016.

Expect that to be the theme going forward from the Hillary camp.  Not all Obama Derangement Syndrome sufferers are Republicans.

StupidiNews!

• The toll of those injured in yesterday's mass shooting at a New Orleans second-line Mother's Day parade has reached 19, including 2 children.
• Some 30 years after the bombings he was convicted for, infamous Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal heads back to a French court to appeal his sentence.
• Former Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif 's party won nearly an outright majority of seats in this weekend's election, vaulting Sharif back to power.
• Bangladesh's parliament is considering raising the country's minimum wage from $39 a month after last month's deadly factory collapse toll reached 1,100 dead.
• An experimental parasail-powered flying car crashed near a Canadian elementary school in British Columbia, no serious injuries reported.

Last Call

Nobody likes the IRS, folks.  Republicans especially loathe it, because if the IRS doesn't collect federal taxes, there is no federal government.  That's fine with a lot of them, frankly.  (Medicare and Social Security of course come from some other place, so government better keep their hands off of it, derp.)

But if you want to know why the wingers are full tilt bloodthirsty over the IRS specifically, keep in mind these guys think an army of tens of thousands of IRS agents are going to kick doors down over enforcing Obamacare regulations.  In actuality, it's a form.

Of course, a form is reason enough alone for folks like PJ Media's Rick Moran to advocate violence against the Obama administration.

How many millions of Americans will think the new form junk mail and toss it? How many millions won’t understand they have to file the form with their tax return and be assessed the penalty? How many millions will refuse to fill out some of the information — and probably be penalized?

I am trying to imagine colonial Americans (or Americans of just about any generation prior to WW II) being faced with a government that demands such compulsory behavior in such an intrusive manner. It’s not hard to think that the tar, feathers, and pitchforks would come out and government workers would be subjected to a storm of protests and even attacks.

Most of modern America, however, is not made of such stern stuff. Most will submit to our masters at the IRS — meekly and with hardly a whimper — grateful for this beneficence from Daddy Government and willing to fill the data banks in Washington with our most personal, private information.

Yes, it's too bad the Tea Party folks aren't ready to violently attack government workers.  I'm sure they're just waiting for Rick here to go burn down an IRS office, and then armies of mobility scooters will blitzkrieg the DMV while their at it, because DON'T TREAD ON ME.

I understand assault and battery of a federal worker is one of those federal crime things, enforced by courts and people with guns.  But I'm sure Rick is ready to take them on in the name of watering the tree of Liberderp.

How about it, Ricky?

And The Things That We Fear Are A Weapon To Be Held Against Us

And speaking of rampant paranoia and wingers on epistemic closure vindication highs over this IRS nonsense, I wonder what our friends on the right would make of the fact that, unlike the current case of extra scrutiny of Tea Party organizations for non-political tax-exempt status that resulted in zero actual investigations, when a liberal Episcopal church in Pasadena said some critical anti-war things about Dubya before the 2004 election, well that resulted in the church being targeted by the IRS in a two-year long probe that eventually resulted in the church being cleared but the IRS saying the church was guilty anyway.

Somehow, this failed to rise to the level of anyone giving a damn about impeachment at the time, nor did it raise the question by the administrations supporters about the tax-exempt status of organizations of all political stripes engaging in political business.  Somehow we're supposed to ignore this, and the whole US Attorney scandal where political enemies of the Bush administration really were being targeted by the executive branch.

Instead we're supposed to believe that the Tea Party groups were being unfairly singled out as political groups dedicated to the end of the Democrats.  Sure.

"Maybe churches and 501(c)3 political groups shouldn't be tax-exempt at all," would be the thinking person's response.  Instead, it's Clinton Rules time.

Instead of going after all the awful things Bush/Cheney did and President Obama instead chose to turn the other cheek and move forward, the Republicans decide to repay him by making everything an impeachable offense until something sticks.

The cartoon soundtrack continues.   Or as David Waldman reminds us:

Remember the outrage over IRS targeting of Emerge America, seeking nonprofit status to train women Dem candidates? nytimes.com/2011/07/21/bus…
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 12, 2013

Remember the outrage over Bush-era IRS auditing of the NAACP? articles.baltimoresun.com/2004-10-29/new…
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 12, 2013

Remember the outrage over Bush-era IRS audits of Greenpeace? democracynow.org/2006/3/24/irs_…
— David Waldman (@KagroX) May 12, 2013

But Obama did it, so Worse Than Space Hitler.

Douthat's Revisionist His Story

Don't worry, white Christian male conservatives.  Ross Douthat sees your freedom right around the corner and declares that your decades-long nightmare of oppression at the hands of liberals, minorities, non-Christians and women is almost over as the IRS vs. Tea Party fight is the bridge too far that will allow you to throw off your shackles and finally assume your rightful position in American society...

Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status? Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker — an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings. 

You see, the massive spike in white supremacist activity and sovereign citizen groups, the major jump in Secret Service investigations of people making threats against the President, the folks screaming that Obama is the Kenyan Usurper, the Republican party officials sending racist emails about the President and his wife and kids,the accusations that Obama is a Socialist/Communist/Terrorist Muslim plant here to destroy our way of life...that has nothing to do whatsoever with conservatives or the Tea Party movement, because Ross Douthat says so.  And you should be ashamed for thinking otherwise.

The historical term for this kind of anxiety is “Brown Scare” — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past. As the historian Philip Jenkins wrote in 2009, Brown Scares no less than Red Scares recur throughout American history. They fasten on real-enough phenomena, from homegrown fascist sympathizers in the 1930s to the militia movements in the 1990s, but then wildly exaggerate both the danger these extremists pose and their ties to the conservative mainstream. 

See, liberals are the conspiracy freaks and nutjobs!  You all think there's a concerted effort to criminalize women making medical decisions about their bodies, to roll back voting eligibility among the poor, minorities, and the elderly, to criminalize the enforcement of and to nullify federal gun control laws at the state level, to criminalize LGBTQ Americans as second-class citizens who cannot marry those whom they love, and that the fringe elements that Douthat disavows aren't being completely embraced by potential 2016 presidential candidates in the GOP.  All of those things are filthy lies being told to you by the mainstream liberal media, clearly.

But moods and prejudices linger even after panics recede. The I.R.S. and the conservative movement have never been on the best of terms, and perhaps the recent abuses just reflect that longstanding tension. But I suspect it’s more than that, and that this episode will be remembered as one of the last embarrassments produced by our era’s Brown Scare. 

Years from now we'll all have a good laugh after these sane, not-insane, not-bigoted, completely average Republican conservatives impeach the President over the events of this week and eventually liberals will learn that they brought this upon themselves by going after white male conservatives, and then everything (and everyone) will be in their rightful place.  Just like 2001-2008.

You'll thank Ross for showing you the way.  And finally, white male conservatives will know the freedom they've always been entitled to.