It's okay, Mehlman, even before you overshared your "journey," it was a Shatner / Common People / Animated Trek kind of night. h/t Dangerous Minds.

Open thread below.

Massive Attack's Mezzanine is one of my favorite albums of the 90's and this song is my favorite on the record. The track features vocals by Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins and is said to be written about her good friend Jeff Buckley. Let's get ethereal!

In 1956 the big question was, after 165 since it's adoption, was the 4th Amendment being abused? In light of the era in which that question was brought up, the answers were many and varied. And in this particular panel discussion, it got a little prickly, even down to the wording of People versus Criminals.
On the panel, part of the American Forum Series of April 15, 1956 were Judges Musmanno and Plaskow. Congressman Harold Velde, member of the HUAC Committee and F. Joseph Donohue, associate of Estes Kefauver, who was Investigating Organized Crime in the early 1950's. The panel was moderated by Robert McCormick of NBC News.

Judge Mussmano: “Mister McCormick – both you and Judge Plaskow begin with a premise that is not admitted, that criminals are escaping, that evil individuals are walking the streets, untrammeled by the punishment they deserved. And I come back to the proposition that it is the court that determines whether a person is innocent or guilty. And by your changing the question by using the word people instead of criminals, you haven’t improved it one bit.”

I don't think anyone walked away with a changed mind as a result of the half hour exchange, but it makes for interesting listening and realizing aspects of our Bill of Rights have always been up for argument.

1956 was no different.

As our own Jon Perr recently noted, the Republicans have been doing a lot of lying about the Bush tax cuts and how much they contributed to the deficit while pretending to care about deficit reduction -- Boehner Lies About Bush Tax Cuts and Deficits. Looks like former New York Gov. George Pataki decided to take his turn following in John Boehner's shoes with some revisionist history on MSNBC this morning.

Former Gov. Pataki Absurdly Claims That Heath Care Reform Is ‘One Of The Reasons We Have This Deficit’:

Republicans have been trying very hard to blame President Obama for the nation’s deficit (which he largely inherited from his predecessor), but former Gov. George Pataki (R-NY) today may have gone to the most absurd lengths yet. On MSNBC, Pataki said that the health care reform bill that became law this year is “one of the reasons we have this deficit”:

You just said that Boehner indicated Obamacare as one of the reasons we have this deficit, one of the reasons we have failed to create private sector jobs and he’s absolutely right.

Pataki made no attempt to explain how a law that was passed this year and has yet to be implemented could have possibly caused this year’s deficit. [...]

The Affordable Care Act not only adds nothing to the deficit this year, but is entirely deficit neutral. As Igor Volsky pointed out earlier, the Congressional Budget Office released a letter this week stating that the Affordable Care Act “will produce $143 billion in net budgetary savings over the 2010-2019 period.” Repealing the parts of the law that Republicans love to gripe about would cause an increase in deficits of $455 billion. Let’s repeat: repealing health care reform would increase, not decrease, the deficit.

Of course we got no push back from MSNBC's Chris Jansing. Can we get Cenk hired for her spot please?

One Fox News host may be in denial about the effects of rampant Islamophobia over the so-called "Ground Zero mosque."

While reporting on the stabbing of a Muslim New York City cab driver, Alisyn Camerota maintained anti-Islamic rhetoric had nothing to do with the crime.

Michael Enright was charged Wednesday with attempted murder as hate crime for allegedly stabbing Ahmed Sharif in his cab Tuesday night. The attack allegedly began with Enright asking Sharif if he was a Muslim. When the cab driver answered yes, the attacker yelled, "As-salaam alaikum. This is a checkpoint, this is checkpoint, motherf**ker, I have to put you down." Sharif claims that Enright then took out a knife and slashed his throat, face and arm.

Enright reportedly volunteered for Intersections International, a pro-Islam global initiative. He had recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan where he filmed military exercises.

Fox News' Steve Doocy explained that liberals were placing the blame on anti-Muslim rhetoric. "Suddenly everybody is going look, that guy went berserk because clearly, this Islamaphobia that is brewing in Lower Manhattan because of the mosque, that's the reason that guy slit his throat!"

Camerota quickly offered a more benign explanation. "It turns out that this kid was just very drunk," she said. "It appears that he flew into this drunken rage."

"Now, why he asked if the driver was Muslim, why they had that exchange in Arabic, only he knows," Camerota continued.

"It seems like this kid has struggled with alcoholism. He's had a history dust-ups with the NYPD. Minor but all alcoholism related and that that's what is probably behind this."

"Nothing to do with anti-Muslim sentiment," she concluded.

But the New York Daily News reports that there is even more evidence that says Enright was harboring anti-Muslim feelings.

When he was arrested Tuesday in midtown, Enright had a personal diary filled with pages of "pretty strong anti-Muslim comments," a police source said.

The source said Enright's journal equated Muslims with "killers, ungrateful for the help they were being offered, filthy murderers without a conscience."

But The Associated Press was told that the notebooks did not contain any anti-Muslim rants.

While Fox News anchor Brian Kilmeade said he was aware of the diary, he seemed to dismiss that it could be related to opposition to the Park51 cultural center, an Islamic center and mosque planned near Ground Zero.

"He has kept a diary with some anti-Muslim phrases and beliefs but let's not everyone jump to conclusions and immediately tie his actions to the mosque," said Kilmeade.

I was willing to give this whole Deficit Commission a fair hearing, but now that Alan Simpson has shown his ass to anyone paying attention, he just needs to go. It wasn't that it was sexist so much as it was stupid, selfish and mean, and an incredibly poor attempt to channel HL Mencken.

Howie Klein says get rid of the whole thing now (Right after the spelling police visit, anyway).

RJ Eskow has written such a great piece, I can't imagine saying much that would add anything, so I'll just say "what he said."

digby's question:

Of course the real question is why on earth did the administration pull this cadaverous joker out of his own cushy, federally funded retirement to head up the ill-conceived deficit commission in the first place?

If it was with the hope of intentional sabotage, that's been done. There's plenty of political fire to send this "old geezer" home. Get on it, White House.

What makes me saddest of all things in the world is this: the vast majority of the time the right thing to do morally is the right thing to do in terms of broad self-interest, and yet we don’t believe that and we do the wrong thing, thinking we must, thinking that we’re making the “hard decisions”.

This spans the spectrum of issues. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about foreign affairs, where the money used on Iraq and Afghanistan could have rebuilt America and made it more prosperous. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about health care, where everyone knew that the right thing to do was single payer or some other form of comprehensive healthcare, which would have reduced bankruptcies massively, saved 6% of GDP and massive numbers of lives. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the financial crisis, where criminally prosecuting those who engaged in fraud (the entire executive class of virtually ever major financial firm) and nationalizing the major banks, wiping out the shareholders and making the bondholders eat their losses was the right thing to do, and didn’t happen. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about drug policy, where the “war on drugs” has accomplished nothing except destabilizing multiple countries and giving the US the largest prison population proportional to population in the entire world and where legalizing marijuana, soft opiates and coca leaves would save billions of dollars, reduce violence, help stabilize Mexico and would help tax receipts. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about food, where we subsidize the most unhealthy foods possible and engage in practices which have reduced the nutritional content of food by 40% in the last half century. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about environmental pollutants, which have contributed to a massive rise in chronic diseases so great it amounts to an epidemic.

And on, and on, and on.

Now the fact is that there is no free lunch. When you spend money on war, you can’t spend it on education or health or crumbling infrasture or civilian technology. When you allow oligopolies to control the marketplace and buy up politicians, the cost of that is a decreased standard of living. When you refuse to deal effective with externalized health pollution, whether from soda pop or carcinogens, you pay for that with the death of people you care for from heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.

The response is “we have to do this to protect ourselves/to make a profit”.

No, you don’t.

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After Tuesday's primaries, Beltway pundits are feeling pretty free to continue promoting Sarah Palin as the Tea Party's secret weapon against Democrats. They are all sure that Palin's endorsement is what threw Joe Miller over the top (for now, anyway) against incumbent Lisa Murkowski. Witness the Washington Post's breathless admiration of Palin's amazing political skills:

Palin may have withdrawn from official life in Alaska, but the surprisingly strong showing in Tuesday's GOP Senate primary by Joe Miller, the long-shot candidate she backed over Lisa Murkowski, made it clear to the entire country that she still exercises great influence in her home state.

They don't stop there:

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With Democrats proposing to set the top two income tax rates at 36% and 39.6% respectively, Republican leaders waged a ferocious battle on behalf of the wealthiest American taxpayers. Former House Majority Leader and current Tea Party moneyman Dick Armey warned, "This program will not give you deficit reduction." Ohio's John Kasich cautioned, "It's our bet that this is a job killer." And for his part, 2012 White House hopeful Newt Gingrich promised, "This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable."

As it turns out, the year was 1993, not 2010. At issue was President Bill Clinton's $496 billion program of stimulus and upper income tax increases. And what Republicans then decried as disaster ushered in the longest economic expansion in modern American history, a period which produced 23 million new jobs and a balanced budget.

But that hasn't stopped the GOP brain trust from resurrecting their 1993 predictions of gloom and doom, forecasts which were spectacularly wrong.

Launching his campaign for House Speaker, Minority Leader John Boehner on Tuesday decried President Obama's "job-killing tax hikes" and called the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich "a recipe for disaster - both for our economy and for the deficit." His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell told Fox News, "It would be a disaster." On Meet the Press last week, Dick Armey rejected the notion of returning the tax rates for the top 2% of earners back to their Clinton-era levels, mocking Obama's "new cockamamy ideas" and insisting the President "not raise taxes and take away the return on an investment" And as Newt Gingrich predicted in July:

"This economy will sink deeper into recession. There will be higher unemployment. The recovery will be longer."

If this all sounds familiar, it should. After all, as ThinkProgress, Congress Matters and Andrew Tobias all documented, pretty much the same people said pretty much the same thing back in 1993.

If Barack Obama's experience with Republican obstructionism has been painful, Bill Clinton's was unprecedented. When Clinton's 1993 economic program scraped by without capturing the support of even one GOP lawmaker, the New York Times remarked:

Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party.

Inheriting massive budget deficits and unemployment topping 7% from Bush the Elder, Clinton's $496 billion program was nonetheless opposed by every single member of the GOP, as well as defectors from his own party. As the Times recounted, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Al Gore to earn victory:

An identical version of the $496 billion deficit-cutting measure was approved Thursday night by the House, 218 to 216. The Senate was divided 50 to 50 before Mr. Gore voted. Since tie votes in the House mean defeat, the bill would have failed if even one representative or one senator who voted with the President had switched sides.

(It's worth noting that while Bill Clinton met with total opposition from Republicans over his economic program, neither Ronald Reagan before him nor George W. Bush after was similarly subjected to scorched-earth politics from Democrats.)

Throughout 1993, President Clinton faced venomous - if completely baseless - charges from his Republican opponents. Newt Gingrich announced that February, "I believe that that will in fact kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession," while also warning the day before the budget vote, "This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable." Bob Dole, Clinton's future reelection opponent, complained, "People out there in the real world just don't understand how record-setting tax increases and a taxpayer-financed spending spree by Congress will solve the deficit or put Americans back to work." While John Kasich (R-OH) told Clinton and the Democrats, "your economic program is a job killer," Dick Armey looked into his crystal ball to claim:

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No one is really surprised that former GOP chairman Ken Mehlman has finally admitted to the world that he's gay.

Bill Maher discussed it in 2006, and Mehlman was Miss June in Watertiger/Attaturk's 2007 "GOP Character Counts" calendar.

A number of gay activists are less than enthused by Mehlman's "journey" which led him to admit his homosexuality. I recommend readers to Pam's House Blend and Gabriel Arana at The American Prospect. Blog Active's post is linked by many this morning:

So, how can Ken Mehlman redeem himself? I want to hear from Ken that he is sorry for being the architect of the 2004 Bush reelection campaign. I want to hear from Ken that he is sorry for his role in developing strategy that resulted in George W. Bush threatening to veto ENDA or any bill containing hate crimes laws. I want to hear from Ken that he is sorry for the pressing of two Federal Marriage Amendments as political tools. I want to hear from Ken that he is sorry for developing the 72-hour strategy, using homophobic churches to become political arms of the GOP before Election Day.

And those state marriage amendments. I want to hear him apologize for every one of those, too.

For anti-gay Republicans, this represents a huge ruh-roh.

Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, told The Advocate that Mehlman was “abdicating core Republican beliefs” in his support for AFER’s legal effort in challenging Prop. 8. “But it’s never been about the leaders. It’s always been about the people, based on an overwhelming majority of Republican voters -- 85, 86 percent -- who support marriage as a union between a man and a woman,” he said. “That a few folks within the Republican Party are questioning a party platform and have personal positions on same-sex marriage is a reality of political parties. [Mehlman] is no longer a major party leader, so I don’t know how influential he is, to be honest with you.”

If the former chairman can come out as gay, what next? Mehlman's obviously going to get a book deal and that tome will be on every nightstand of the reportedly huge number of GOP congressional staff who are closeted. If Mehlman becomes a "leader" once again, perhaps the GOP is better off burying its homophobia before the deluge of self-outed "Republicans on a personal journey."