More stupid shit

Apparently, I provide tag lines to the White House.

Apparently, Hillary Clinton believes in magic, at least for electoral purposes.

This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

No, it's not an organizing principle.  It's a minimum standard.  One we've been regularly fucking up for the better part of three and a half decades.

Syrian Second Amendment

Click image for full Mark Fiore/Mother Jones animation.

Lazy blogging

Yeah, it's been a slow year around here. Y'know, work, personal life, blah, blah, blah...

I've missed several opportunities to go on record before some controversy was resolved. I haven't given timely opinions on hot topics. The NSA knows what I'm thinking; isn't that enough?

My lazy blogging is probably not going to change soon.

But I can do this.

• It's blatantly unconstitutional that our government is spying on us at great expense (and we're paying for it). It's bad when Obama does it, just as it was when Duhbya did it.
• Intervening in Syria is a terrible, no good, stupid idea. You can tell because most of the neocons are for it. It's a dick-measuring contest, and those don't lead to good outcomes.
• Besides, we couldn't have been any clearer about how to manipulate us if we'd said, "Psst. We'll blow up shit if you convince us the other Islamist dickheads with inconsequential differences from you that you're fighting actually used chemical weapons." (Oops, that's not very clear.)
• Tell me again why the wingnuts hate Obama. Republican universal healthcare (from before that was an oxymoron, granted). Republican Middle East policy, right down to the UN inspectors and the weak, secret evidence oversold by a Secretary of State. Republican economic "recovery," where Wall St. is bullish and the ordinary middle class is losing ground.
• Oh, but Obama is black.
• Larry Summers would be an awful pick for Fed Chair, maybe the worst pick possible. That guy may be brilliant in some bloviating sense of the word, but I don't think he has a nanogram of sound judgement, and he's fucked up almost everything he's touched.
• And I think David Marsters must be a commenter on this blog. Or else wingnut teabaggers are universally angry, ignorant bigots. (OK, that's more likely.)
• But it's really fiiine that a white supremacist can't manage to take over a town when it only has at most two dozen residents and a house there costs $8600 - Detroit, North Dakota.
• Too bad civil rights has been relegated to the nostalgia circuit.
• Joseph Stiglitz rocks.

No, I'll never be as terse as Atrios. Even when I try to go short, I wind up long. Must be the gin.

Wingnuts correct the Bill of Rights, freedom of religion

The Founders cared so much about the free exercise of religion that they put it first in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

The wingnut's imagined text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any particular Christian denomination, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Oh sure, they'll let the Jews practice their religion freely too. They haven't killed Christ in like 2000 years, and besides, the fundies need them to help the End Times arrive.

But Muslims? No way. Cal Thomas tells his wingnut audience at Townhall:

We won't win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques.

Then he says that we need to be more like Syria, that well-known beacon of religious liberty. I kid you not!

[T]he Syrian government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and has begun closely monitoring what is taught in religious schools. ...

What does Syria know that we refuse to acknowledge out of fear of offending "sensibilities"?

We must purge the evil from among us, or else.

Could we please start that purge with Cal? (Kidding of course.)

(h/t Mediamatters)

Boo!

In the same day, nine days before a Presidential election, the U.S. made cross-border raids into both Pakistan and Syria, nations with whom we are not at war. Karl Rove would be proud.

Any administration that was scrupulous about not injecting military action into politics would have refrained from this for a couple more weeks. But 'scrupulous' is not a word that should ever be applied to the Bushists.

By now we know that the initial reticence about the Syria raid and promises to investigate by the military were bullshit. The Bushists now defend what they previously would not admit doing.

No doubt there were bad people across each border. There were probably innocents as well.

There is even justification in crossing borders into anarchic zones such as these. But to do it in a way that appears to be for political benefit abuses the American consensus for partisan ends.