Deval Patrick is right that a gas tax would be a good way to raise additional revenue against budget shortfalls. Demand is pretty strong, but even so, a reduction in demand for gasoline has other positive public policy outcomes. A reduction in pollution is the biggest.
But, not to worry all you frothing anti-tax teabaggers: He doesn't have the votes, not even close, at least not in the House. It takes 81. Fifty would be a miracle.
This doesn't happen by accident. Someone in a management position at CNN decided that this bullshit story quoting Dick Cheney as liking Republicans (how novel!) deserves to float to the top of the ticker for the second day in a row. Also, as someone in the now-deleted comments observed, why would anyone quote from the Washington Times, which is even more a wingnut propaganda outfit than Fox?
Darth does get off one unforgettable line:
"I think that it's just a matter of time before the party begins to sort of firm up around a few key individuals, and we'll hear big things from them in the future," Cheney said.And here I thought firming up around key individuals was the problem that Ensign and Sanford had.
No, 'C' doesn't stand for Christ. What would communists do?
"This is President Obama saying 'Well, we have to cover this up, because there's such terrible torture things we did, people will get angry about it.'Disbarment is a negligible consequence, but at least it's some small punishment for torture.
That's why we prosecute it, you don't conceal that. That's what the Soviet Union would do, that's what China would do, not the United States of America," [Bruce Fein, a former senior Justice Department official in the Reagan administration,] said.
When I read that Obama was warning against carbon tariffs, I had a couple of thoughts:
[I]n this case the non-economic objective is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, never mind their source. If you only impose restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from domestic sources, you give consumers no incentive to avoid purchasing products that cause emissions in other countries; as a result, you have an inefficient outcome even from a world point of view. So border adjustments here are entirely legitimate in terms of basic economics.So, I've thought about this again, and I now see that the first two points outweigh the last two.
When the death of Billy Mays can lead CNN.com, you have to know that our culture has lost its way into inconsequential worship of D-grade celebrity. Mays may have been a great guy, but his cultural value as a penny-ante, grating, shouting cable TV pitchman for crappy overrated products was a net negative.
I only wanted Mays off my television, not dead, but god, is this what we've come to? At least Michael Jackson had real, honest-to-god talent to accompany his transcendent weirdness.
The response of conservatives to sexual misconduct in their leaders is objectively pro-hypocrisy:
[W]hile Vitter, Ensign, Gingrich and perhaps Sanford have been able to retain their positions and political viability, the same cannot be said for the most recent offenders on the progressive side. Neither Eliot Spitzer nor John Edwards, each among the most promising figures in the Democratic Party, will ever be a candidate for public office again, although their misbehavior was no worse than what their Republican counterparts did.Not to mention, pro-adultery.
Many of my relatives, friends, and acquaintances would like to have this response in their arsenals.
Click image for full Randy Bish/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review cartoon.
Simplicity is often good, but simple-minded free market economists bury their heads in a sand of simplistic cases because they can't reconcile the economic systems with their easy cases.
Krugman fails to call bullshit on his friends and colleagues quite as vehemently (shrilly?) as he does on politicians. That's understandable, though fortunately his commenters feel no such compunction to politesse.
Indefinite detention on the unchecked say-so of the executive is just as wrong when the executive is Obama as it was when the executive was Darth Cheney, uh, Duhbya.
Schools, universities, national parks, restaurants, bars - why not church!
Personally, I can feel manly with only my penis holstered up by my underwear. (No, I don't consider it a concealed weapon.) I don't need a .38 under the front seat of my car or a semiautomatic next to the bed to keep me feeling adequate if someone gives me the finger on the highway or says something about my equipment or skills in bed. These theoretical situations are why I have a brain.
Bottom line: A lot of these people are so far around the bend that they ought not be permitted out on the grounds alone, much less armed. Eventually, one of them will miss when reaching for the toilet paper after squeezing off a round, absentmindedly pick up the bathroom gun, and shoot himself in the ass. I guess that's one way to get ripped a new asshole.
"Hey, baby, how about a little hanky-panky, followed by a traditional marriage?"
Click image for full Mike Keefe/Denver Post cartoon.
Mark Sanford, politically, has made news for some truly great silliness. All his posturing about whether he would accept federal stimulus funding cravenly played to all that's most misanthropic and uneducable in the Republican base. It did get him a lot of national attention from a media that is dying to anoint the next conservative saint.
Now, of course, Sanford is making tremendous gobbets of tabloid news for his disappearance into a love affair. The only reason any of that matters should be the disappearance, not the affair. He did fail to discharge his duties for a week, but lots of people cheat, and we really cannot afford to have all of them resign their positions of responsibility, even if they've been exposed as arrant hypocrites. (Hey, they're Republicans. Hey, they're politicians.)
Fred Thompson, with his own checkered romantic past, belabors Sanford in the great mosh pit of American sexual politics:
I don’t have any sympathy in a situation where you’ve got a wife and four fairly young kids . . . don’t play it out in public.Lots of others are shocked, shocked that Sanford would betray his wife. More than anything, they're shocked that he would betray them - or, if Democrats, shocked and delighted at the opportunity to kill off a rival. For the Republicans, it still mostly seems to be about the sex:
One county GOP leader said the governor “talked about how our leaders have stepped away from our core values, and said one thing on the campaign trail or out in the public and did something different in the background.’’As time passes, we will again find out that some of those calling loudest for Sanford's resignation are even now conducting their own affairs. We could do without this hypocrisy by letting even politicians have a private life with - or, in this case, possibly without - their families.
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that ibuprofen is not sufficient motivation for a strip search. Well, duh!
Only Clarence Thomas disagreed. He had the following impeachment-worthy comment:
“Preservation of order, discipline and safety in public schools is simply not the domain of the Constitution.”The Court didn't rule on the policy that led to the strip search, since that policy was not at issue. But I'm not bound to the case; I can say that zero-tolerance policies such as this are stupid, stupid, stupid. They are tools for overzealous martinets to lord their precious authority over children.
Krugman, as usual, nails the great nexus of stupid between our national political press and the lunatic leaders of the conservative movement:
These people were always crazy. It’s just that for the time being they’re sufficiently weak that it’s considered acceptable to notice.
Has any other failed VP candidate's travel schedule ever received as much attention as vacuous Sarah's?
Update: If the media needs a picture of a pretty woman, how about Elizabeth Banks? She's quite a bit more beautiful than Palin.
I suppose it's too much to ask that we might pick news - and women - on some other criteria.
Click image for source, credit David Shankbone.
