Miserable tatter of background checks

The shooting death of Charles Albert Poland Jr. and the kidnapping of a young boy named Ethan were completely preventable. There is no way Jimmy Lee Dykes should have been permitted to possess firearms:

Mr. Dykes, who has lived in a travel trailer here for about two years, has a troubled past, including arrests on charges connected to drugs, drunken driving and, in Florida in 1995, unlawful display of a firearm. On Wednesday he was due in court in this county, accused of shooting at a neighbor in a dispute over driving on his property.

Everyone who knew Dykes knew he was bad news.

Neighbors of Mr. Dykes generally kept their distance, which he made easy. He frequently made violent threats to anyone who wandered onto his property, once even beating a neighbors’ dog to death with a lead pipe. He would sometimes sit watching and holding a rifle when young children played in a nearby yard. Late into the night he would dig in the backyard of his travel trailer or patrol his property with a flashlight and a long gun.

Now Poland is heroically dead, Dykes has been justifiably killed by the FBI, and Ethan has been rescued.

But Alabama won't rethink its gun laws, and the NRA won't rethink its crazy, extremist position against closing the gun show and private sale loopholes in the miserable tatter of current background check law.

Click image for full Garry Trudeau/Doonesbury cartoon.

Why liberals think Republicans harbor racists

Because they do:

Even presidential pets were viewed through the same lens. Tesler showed 1,000 YouGov respondents a picture of a Portuguese water dog and asked how favorably they felt toward it. Half saw the dog introduced as Bo Obama, and half as Ted Kennedy’s dog, Splash. (Both political dogs are the same breed, but the picture was of Obama’s.) Those with negative feelings toward blacks thought less of Obama’s dog.

The bigots can't even keep their racial animus from infecting their view of a pet.

Thanks, liberals

Since it shows their bullshit for what it is, wingnuts will curse this:

Gov. Romney’s candidacy is an opportunity to take a closer look at the state that dare not speak its name. Through all the red mist and flying blue fur this election year, it’s worth reminding voters of a truth Romney probably won’t be emphasizing: The nation’s favorite punching bag is an exceptionally successful state. ...

[I]f America wants to be a healthy, smart, rich, globalized, high-tech powerhouse, we arguably have no better model than Massachusetts.

For many, a steady drizzle of mockery for the state and its “moderates” is the only response to that uncomfortable truth. Still, it’s hard not to dream of a presidential campaign in which a former governor would run on, not from, his associations with Massachusetts. Dukakis, of course, ran on a “Massachusetts Miracle.” But Gov. Romney is already too far from home for that, and probably knows better than to try.

I've hit all these themes, mostly in my obsessive commenting at the MetroWest Daily News (recently here), to the point that I'm sorry I didn't write the Slate piece.

A good paragraph

Some writing deserves to be blogged just because of what it does:

Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to do with the joy but wrap it up and hold it, reverberating, inside the ribcage. Len Bias beat Carolina. It was true, and if you were lucky enough to know it, you would know it forever.

Vain to ask, What if?  But also compelling, as with the Kennedys and King and Joplin and Hendrix and Challenger and Columbia and Grissom and the girl I loved but never spoke of it to.  And...

If you want a friend in Washington

... get a Facebook page. Be sure to take a look at the link Darth Cheney sent to Barack Obama.

Read this. It's worth twenty points off your systolic.

(h/t my friend Melissa and Pete Cashmore on Mashable)

Flip the bird at your radio

That's what I do when Cokie Roberts comes out with her well-compensated pabulum on NPR or one of the TV talk shows. I'm glad other people notice, too:

If Roberts' vacuous segments seem phoned-in, it's probably because they are.

...

Roberts doesn't just voice the conventional wisdom; she is the conventional wisdom.

Roberts grew up in a powerful, famous political household. I even met her mother Lindy Boggs long ago after Lindy succeeded her lost husband Hale in the House of Representatives. There's a certain class of politicians who cultivate the ability to talk and talk and talk without ever saying anything. The Boggses were that sort of politician, and it served them well as conservative pseudo-populist Democrats from Louisiana, where you needed (and often still need) both racist votes and black votes to win.

But it doesn't serve well for a news analyst, quite the contrary in fact.

Venngeance

Slate paints a few of the scofflaw scandals of the Bushists:


Getting them all onto one page might send us looking for Hume's missing shade of blue.

Click thumbnail image for interactive graphic.

(h/t LGM)

Stress positions

Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen much written about stress positions. If the New York Times won't call waterboarding torture, you know they probably would liken stress positions to having a hangnail. (I just found Slate.)

So, how do you think our interrogators get their victims into those stress positions? You think they use sweet reason?