No Slight Is Too Insignificant for the Victimhood Party

An actual headline at the Tucker Carlson’s vanity project:

I’m dying over here.

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Play it as it lays

Generally speaking I could give a fuck about which rich assholes are allowed to join other rich assholes’ clubs, but this is pretty ridiculous:

Augusta has maintained an all-male membership policy during its 80-year history, and Chairman Billy Payne declined to answer a question about the policy during a news conference Wednesday.

The issue flared up again after Ginni Rometty was named Chief Executive Officer of IBM, a longtime sponsor of the tournament whose previous chief executives have been admitted to Augusta National.

It’s a good issue for Democrats (Obama is coming out in support of having Augusta admit women), especially if they can bait Republicans into mounting an over-the-top impassioned defense of sexism (again) here.

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The President’s remarks were fully consistent with the principles described herein.

Complying with the letter mandate:

As promised, Attorney General Eric Holder today filed a 3-page, single-spaced letter with the Fifth Circuit outlining the department’s views on the concept of judicial review. Actually, the letter is two and a half pages, but let’s hope Judge Jerry Smith rounds up.

During arguments in a health-care case on Tuesday, Judge Smith demanded the Justice Department produce the letter, in light of President Barack Obama’s commenting that the Supreme Court would be taking an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” if it struck down the Affordable Care Act.

It’s basically a short summary of the broadest argument to uphold the law, so they used the demand as an opportunity to get it out there again.

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If you look in my direction, and we don’t see eye to eye

The environment doesn’t need protection, it needs to learn some Hayekian humility:

After 16 years of trying to marry their party’s support for drilling and climate change denial with environmental protection, Republicans for Environmental Protection is dropping the word “Republican” from its name.

The group’s new name, ConservAmerica, is designed to “explain the connection between conservatism and conservation” and underscore the group’s ethic of stewardship.

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Open(ing Day) Thread

April baseball, where hope springs eternal and a Royals/Nationals World Series is still plausible.  Reds open against the Miami Sound Machine at 4 this afternoon.  For once, it’s not 45 and rainy for Opening Day here in Cincy, but expected 60-ish by first pitch with the sun breaking through.  Thanks global climate change!

Allons-y, people.  Make with the chatter.

[UPDATE]  Miami Pound Machine seems to be the actual preferred nickname for the slightly relocated Miami Marlins these days.  Also, Royals/Nats is merely mathematically plausible at this point, where each team hasn’t, you know, lost 100 games yet.

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Well Now Here’s Your Problem, Doc

President Obama gave a speech this week to assembled Associated Press editors (among other news professionals) and cited obnoxious Both Sides Do It™ false equivalence in political media narratives as a contributing factor to the problems in fixing our broken government.  As Tim Murphy of MoJo points out, the inevitable AP fact check of President Obama’s speech is rife with…yeah, you see where this is going, right?

President Obama delivered a fiery (as we journalists like to call such things) speech to a gathering of newspapers editors in Washington on Tuesday, chiding Mitt Romney for using words like “marvelous” and knocking GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan as “social darwinism.” It was, by most accounts, a sign of what’s to come from the campaign over the next seven months. Let’s hope this fact-check of the speech from the Associated Press isn’t also a harbinger of the future. (“It’s not even 10 A.M. and we already have a ‘worst of the day’ winner,” tweets Pema Levy.) The problem with the piece, by the normally solid Calvin Woodward, is that it doesn’t really check any facts (inflated jobs figures, spending increases, that kind of thing). Instead, it suffers from a massive glut of false equivalence.

It’s like the AP did this on purpose or something.  I give it Five Pinocchios On Fire.

As a candidate, Obama campaigned on a public option. Progressives were devastated when it was nixed from the Affordable Care Act—to the extent that some refused to support the final bill. Instead, Obama went with the market-driven approach favored by the Republican governor of Massachusetts. Why? Well, in part because Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley suggested there would be “broad bi-partisan support” for such a solution. Can you really knock someone for moving to the left when they started off on the left and ended up where the center used to be?

The fact-check goes on to rebuke Obama for accusing Republicans of wanting to toss out lots of economic regulations (something Republicans want to do) by pointing out that Romney himself doesn’t want to literally eliminate every federal regulation—only a lot of them, including the Dodd–Frank Wall Street reform package, which was designed to prevent a repeat of the practices that led to the 2008 crash. But Obama didn’t actually say Romney wanted to eliminate all federal regulations—only a lot of them.

A sense of nuance is helpful when writing about Washington politics—and nuance, incidentally, is something campaign speeches generally lack. But fact-checks are for objective facts, not subjective arguments about what does and doesn’t constitute excessive deregulation. Pieces like this sort of defeat the point.

No, pieces like this have always been the point of “fact-checking”.  PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler do it all the time.  The entire point of stuff like this is to conflate objective fact checking and subjective refereeing and leveraging the credibility of the former to justify making calls on the latter.  Hence, we get “Even PolitiFact says X is wrong about Y!” when X is a subjective judgement call and not an objective fact check.  That is a cottage industry in DC, if not your raison d’être of being a Villager.  PolitiFact and Kessler are far from alone in this respect.

It’s how we end up with “Lie of the Year!” and such.  There’s danger in conflation like that, as anyone who might, say, want to ever see the tax dollars they paid into the Medicare system again would tell you.

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At The Chart Of The Matter

Steve Benen kindly presents compelling evidence to squish “the stimulus failed, this President failed” nonsense on jobs and unemployment:

Despite last week’s annual revisions, the same metrics still apply: when jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it’s considered evidence of an improving jobs landscape, and when the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are actually being created rather quickly.

And with that, here’s the chart—which reflects the revised, seasonably-adjusted data—showing weekly, initial unemployment claims going back to the beginning of 2007. (Remember, unlike the monthly jobs chart, a lower number is good news.) For context, I’ve added an arrow to show the point at which President Obama’s Recovery Act began spending money.

 

Stimulus happens, unemployment claims go down, and they’ve been decreasing steadily now for 3 years.  The problem is it took Bush roughly one year to cause the damage, and the expectation that President Obama could fix it by any means in that short of a time frame was ridiculous.  But even by November 2010 things were remarkably better by comparison.  Would have been nice if he and the Democrats in Congress who passed the stimulus had gotten a little credit then from the voters.

Would be even better if the voters gave them credit this November, yes?

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Mid-morning open thread

I’ve got this Pretenders song in my head where the chorus goes “every day, every day”, then some other stuff, kind of midtempo and cheerful. What’s it called? Last night, the google let me down.

Update. Thanks to Boots Day …now I try to be amused, it is this song.

Unrelated update. Does anyone know anything about the War on Women marches?

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Pelosi: Healthcare “A Right for All, Not A Privilege for A Few”

Dan Amira at NYMag’s Daily Intel spots Madame Pelosi talking about SCOTUS and the ACA:

Nancy Pelosi’s political predictions seem at times to be based more on wishful thinking than on an objective assessment of reality. “One thing I know for sure is that Democrats will retain their majority in the House of Representatives,” she said in May of 2010, a few months before the Democrats lost their majority in the House of Representatives. Yesterday, at the Paley Center for Media, she predicted that the Supreme Court would rule in favor of Obamacare in a 6-3 vote.

As some of the commentors there point out, Pelosi is a damned smart & effective leader, and not given to throwing around numbers just to hear her own voice. The hour-long “PALEY100: Private Luncheon in Conversation with Nancy Pelosi” video starts slow—no teleprompters!—but it’s a fun listen when you’ve got the time. The healthcare portion starts around the 26.00 mark, and Pelosi’s prediction falls at 33.36… followed by a couple of rude, thoughtless, unserious cracks about the family-planning choices of those individuals most invested in the GOP War AGaint Women, which made me LOL-for-true.

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You’re Free to Go, Of Course, But You Don’t Mind Me Searching Your Car, Do You? I Didn’t Think So.

Here’s an excellent Radley Balko piece that shows just exactly how our shitty war on drugs has managed to create a cottage industry of asset forfeiture and created a culture of shitty, deceitful, double-dealing cops. Check out this video:

One of the worst things about the drug war, aside from what you just saw above and what Radley describes regarding asset forfeiture, is that we’ve cultivated a mentality in the police that it’s “Us v. them.” That’s why they need ever and bigger arsenals, that’s why our SWAT teams are out of control, etc. And at the same time, these very same cops with that mentality have failed to realize that the citizenry is starting to take the the very same attitude with the Police. Cops look at every black person in the inner city as a potential threat. Guess what? I look at every cop as a potential threat. I don’t know which one I am going to run across that is a liar, which one is a threat to my health and well-being, which is willing to plant evidence, or which will taze me or mace me for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. AND I’M FUCKING WHITE.

In other words, every time I see a cop I don’t see someone who is there to preserve public order. I see a potential threat and I just steer clear of them. They all wear the same uniform, and I have no way of knowing which one will be a scumbag like the guy in the video above, which one is having a shitty day or had a fight with his wife and wants to get rid of some frustration with a baton, which one will be like the guys who pumped fifty bullets into an unarmed NYC man, which one is going to shoot my dogs while breaking down the wrong door, or which one will be someone I can trust. So I just steer clear of them. I want nothing to do with them.

I have absolutely zero faith in any uniformed officer anywhere in the country. As far as I am concerned, these days I’m just caught in the crossfire between the gang-bangers and crooks with colored bandanas and the gang-bangers and serial perjurers with badges. And both have itchy trigger fingers, a broken moral compass, and a penchant for violence. The only real difference is the cops have better weapons training and a better code of silence.

Best to stay the fuck away from the whole lot of them. I wish I didn’t feel that way, but it is what it is. When I see a cop, I just clear a wide berth, because they just can’t be trusted to be rational actors. And now, thanks to our glorious Supreme Court (and the Obama admin- thanks B!), they can strip search me for a parking ticket. Awesome.

Because an out of control, violent, over-armed police force who feels like they are at war with the public they are supposed to protect needs more power.

*** Update ***

And I hope you truly understand the coercive manner with which this unlimited right to strip search will be used. Yes, you legal eagles who love to jump on knaves like me will say “It only applies to those going into general population.” Bullshit. We’ve just given police intimidation another weapon. In the Florence case, the man was arrested for no reason for a traffic ticket that was paid. And they threw him in jail for a week and strip-searched him twice anyway, and SCOTUS found that legit. Now think about that ruling in the context of the video above. Now, you are going to be “given” the choice of having your car searched without cause or being strip-searched in jail when the cop lies and arrests you on bullshit. It won’t be long before it is just understood by the public that you do what the cop says, however unjustified or unwarranted, or they will be hauled off to jail and fucked with via invasive searches. Mark my words.

But then again, some of you are the same idiots who don’t think police will be using drones illegally, or won’t be arming them, etc. Because history has proven over and over again that when given the choice, authorities always err on the side of individual rights. They never, ever, ever lie or overreach.

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