Month: March 2011

It’s safe to go outside again. They found the Bronx Zoo cobra. Of course, it makes me feel a little inadequate to learn that I have a couple hundred thousand fewer Twitter followers than a snake.

Now, I ask you, is it inappropriate to use the word ‘uterus’ around young pages and messengers? Do Republicans even know what a uterus is? It’s not an erogenous zone. On the other hand, maybe women should incorporate their uteruses (uteri) so that the Republicans won’t regulate them. Also, too, Vagina!

It’s a rare man who notices your shoes before your breasts. Did we need a scientific study to prove this?

How desperate to get out of the house do you have to be to go to an exhibit on dirt?

When impersonating a massage parlor inspector, never ask for the ‘frontal massage.’

What is with fish jumping on boats? A dolphin even got into the game, and they are not fish.

Got any weird news?

Two very senior members of the Libyan government defected today, but Muammar remains defiant:

Colonel Qaddafi, who has not been seen in public recently, was quoted on state television as saying that the leaders of the allied countries were “affected by power madness,” The Associated Press reported.

“The solution for this problem is that they resign immediately and their peoples find alternatives to them,” he said in remarks that ran on the “scrawl” at the bottom of the screen.

It’s quite amazing how he has this almost infinite capacity for Freudian Projection.

Meanwhile, I continue to be pleased with the performance of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He told Congress today that we wouldn’t be putting any uniformed boots on the ground in Libya while he is serving in this administration and then he told them that we shouldn’t arm the rebels.

“What the opposition needs as much as anything right now is some training, some command and control and some organization,” Mr. Gates said. “It’s pretty much a pick-up ballgame at this point.” But, he said, providing training and weapons is “not a unique capability for the United States, and as far as I’m concerned, somebody else can do that.”

As far as I am concerned, somebody else could have done the whole thing. I wish they had. I am somewhat more hopeful today, though. Things look bad on the battlefield, but maybe Gaddafi’s team is starting to break up. Obama took a big gamble, but it could still pay off.

They called us conspiracy theorists when we said there was no WMD in Iraq and that Bush administration was the most corrupt in history or that we used White Phosphorus munitions against civilians in Fallujah (all regrettably proven true).

But when it comes to conspiracy theorists no one, but no one beats the Republicans/Tea Party Whack jobs in our House of Representatives. The latest comes from Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) who manages to conflate the military intervention in Libya as a red flag operation by Obama to take over the country by declaring martial law and occupying all those true red states with his private health care reform army.

No really. That’s essentially what he said on the floor of the House:

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) offered a bizarre new theory about President Obama’s decision to intervene in the Libyan crisis. In the midst of a rant about health care reform, Gohmert nonsensically suggested that Obama might be trying to “deplete the military” in Libya, so he can call up the Commission Corps established in the Affordable Care Act…

Let’s roll the tape shall we?

Here’s the transcript of his remarks courtesy Media Matters:

GOHMERT: It’s a bad bill. And then when you find out that the prior Congress not only passed that 2,800 page bill with all kinds of things in it, including a new president’s commissioned officer corps and non-commissioned officer corps. Do we really need that? I wondered when I read that in the bill. But then when you find out we’re being sent to Libya to use our treasure and American lives there, maybe there’s intention to so deplete the military that we’re going to need that presidential reserve officer commissioned corps and non-commissioned corps that the president can call up on a moment’s notice involuntarily, according to the Obamacare bill.

I gotta hand to Rep. Gohmert. Not many people have the insight to connect military operations in Libya with the Health Care Reform Act as part of sinister plan to deplete our military and allow Obama to employ his “private health care” goon militia here in America to do — well unspeakable things too nefarious to go into detail in this diary. After all I don’t want any black helicopters circling my home.

But seriously, don’t these people know how stupid they sound? This is something that Glenn Beck might imagine, but we all know he’s a clown (and so do his many departing advertisers). Congressman Gohmert on the other hand holds elected office. That he is able to get elected is more proof of the looming Apocalypse in 2012 to me than any natural disaster.

Remember when Gohmert claimed Muslim immigrants were coming to America to bear “terrorist babies”?

In June, PoliticalCorrection.org first flagged comments Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) made on the House floor suggesting that terrorist groups were sneaking pregnant women into the United States as part of a nefarious scheme to launch terrorist attacks. According to Gohmert, these babies would be born here, sent back and “raised and coddled as future terrorists. And then one day, twenty…thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life.”

I’m not sure which conspiracy theory he promotes is more outlandish. I can’t wait for him to join Gingrich, Palin, Bachmann, et alia, as a candidate for the Republican Presidential nominee. That has to be his next step in my opinion. I mean Gohmert is clearly a guy who sees the Big Picture. Just like a former President you may recall name of W.

I guess Ari Berman is not interested in having a future political career in Montana because his profile of Jim Messina is brutal. If Messina is as controlling and vindictive as Berman claims then he might run into other problems trying to cover Obama’s 2012 campaign for The Nation. It’s an interesting and informative piece with a good amount of actual reporting and an impressive amount of on-the-record griping. It’s hardly balanced, however. I think there are a host of areas where progressives have a right to be disappointed in the Obama administration, and Messina has his fingerprints on some of them, but Berman seems to have no awareness that the 111th Congress was the most productive Congress in nearly a half-century. And I mean that from a progressive point of view. Messina has his fingerprints on that, too.

I know that a lot of progressives have convinced themselves that our policies would be more popular if they were presented with less dilution, but I have never seen any evidence that that is true. The backlash against Obama’s policies was remarkably strong and cost us a shit-ton of seats in Congress. I think it’s remarkable that the Democrats lined up to vote for Cap & Trade (in the House) and health care reform despite looking at polling numbers that told them that they were arousing a ferocious opposition that would most likely wash away their political careers. Somebody has to get the credit for getting them to walk the plank.

Having said that, I’m not exactly a fan of Max Baucus or his style of politics, and if that is what Messina is going to bring to Obama’s reelection effort then we’ll probably be pretty uninspired. A lot depends on the opponent, of course, but I don’t expect the Obama campaign to take a lot of chances. If they’re lucky, they won’t need to. It could easily play out a lot like the 1996 campaign, which never really materialized as a contest. If it’s a close thing, however, I hope Messina finds the inner child who cut his teeth as an organizer for Montana People’s Action. We’ll need that kind of spirit and attitude, not the transactional crap we’re used to seeing from Baucus and his army of lobbyists.

The strange material advertised as economic “criticism from the left” since the start of 2009  has damaged public perception of the Obama administration and the Democratic party in a way that favors Republicans and has also displaced actual liberal  economic proposals from public debate. The obvious example is the fate of the TARP funds which were originally a revolving fund that the Bush administration planned to distribute to Wall Street cronies. Under Obama and Geithner, TARP became a great success story of how  Democratic administration deftly stopped a panic, made Wall Street pay, and performed emergency life-saving on the industrial economy. And TARP should have provided the Obama administration with funds to continue to invest in industrial development projects, environmental remediation, renewable energy plant construction and so on. But instead of pushing a competent centrist government to be more active in freeing the economy from the grip of finance and petro oligarchs, the “progressives”, even those who were loudly decrying the inadequate funding for stimulus assisted the Republicans in shutting down TARP in a wave of faux-populism supposedly directed against banks.

Of the $245billion TARP gave to banks, Treasury has recovered about $244billion. Treasury is selling the $140 billion in “toxic assets” it acquired during the financial crisis and expecting a $10billion to $15billion profit. AIG has offered to buy back Maiden Lane II assets AIG transferred to the Fed during the crisis for a $1.5billion profit to the government. Other parties want to bid more. The Federal Reserve reports $80billion profit in investments ranging from the other assets the NYFed took over as Bear Stearns and AIG collapsed to the agency mortgage backed bonds purchased for quantitative easing. GM continues to reopen closed factories. Compared the the Reagan era Resolution Trust Find, TARP is stunning success for the public. We should have been advocating for TARP to be used as a revolving development bank, but instead we got stuff like this:

“Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary’s fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he’s a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day.

The things to notice about this passage is that it is entirely without any liberal economic content and is fully compatible with core Republican messaging.
Let’s dig up the points Taibbi is making:

1. “mop-headed weenie ” – Democrats are effeminate and weak. Classic!
2. ” gross giveaways in the new reform legislation” – reform is a fraud, how’s that hopey changey thing working out for you.
3. “living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration” – Bill Clinton is responsible for the economic collapse. Also note that, for example, Geithner presided over the auto rescue where the largest unionized industry was saved and bondholders were forced to take a back seat to union health/pension benefits. Hardly Rubinite, so ignored.
4. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being” – violent and literally dehumanizing rhetoric.
5. “replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank”Geithner actually has never worked for a “Wall Street megabank”, he’s a  career civil servant, but that’s the least of it.
6. ” would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day.” – out of touch Democrats don’t listen to the public

Right out of the Frank Luntz playbook – and Republican marketing has been so pervasive that Taibbi didn’t even need to be aware of what he was doing. Just add out of control rhetoric to anger, mix in indifference to facts, and the Republican narrative takes control. Also as noted above, there is no progressive economics at all in this passage: it’s barely a step up from  “New York Jew bankers!”. A realistic appraisal of Geithner’s policies combined with some liberal economics would have been more compatible with a paragraph extolling the auto rescue and demanding that TARP funds be made available as funding for mass transport projects, school buildings, housing, green energy, or environmental remediation. Maybe  a call for union management of GM would have been appropriate or a pitch for investing in the United Steel Workers/Mondragon experiment or in employee owned firms.  But you won’t find economics as far out of the right wing mainstream as even J K Galbraith in “progressive criticism from the left”. What you’ll find is reheated Republican propaganda, fragments of Chicago School economics tossed in randomly with demands that somebody be punished plus sloppy accounts of finance.
And here’s Taibbi again, from a diary on DKOS:

The losses from the Fed’s purchase of distressed/crap Bear Stearns assets (Maiden Lane I) and AIG assets (MaidenLanes II and III) alone were as recently as late July calculated in the $8.6 billion range, and even that number is very conservative. Then there’s the trillion or so dollars that the Fed used on buying up mortgage-backed securities and Treasuries; we don’t know what their market value is now. And there are untold trillions more the …

All of that was crap but shows the technique: a false claim that the Democratic administration has screwed up which can then be used to show that the explanations offered by the Democratic administration must be lies. The same technique can also see in the following snippet of wisdom from Duncan Black (Atrios).  Here’s a typical sample of his inspirational and suave approach:

Ponies In The Shitpile
Aside from setting up an overly complicated plan to try to disguise what they’re really doing, the utility of the Geithner plan rests (or pretends to rest, not sure) on one fundamental premise: that Big Shitpile is greatly undervalued by “the market” and that these mortgage securities really have expected revenues which justify higher prices. One could have reasonably believed this months ago, I have no idea why anyone would believe this now. The housing bubble burst, and now recession is here. There’s a lot of shit to be eaten, the question is who will eat it? Timmeh wants to make sure it’s not the banksters.

Points:

1. “Aside from setting up an overly complicated plan to try to disguise what they’re really doing” – the Democratic Administration is lying (note the absence of factual material introduced to support this claim)
2. “Geithner plan rests (or pretends to rest, not sure)” – Obama’s administration is dishonest  
3. “one fundamental premise: that Big Shitpile is greatly undervalued by “the market” ” – The premise of this criticism is that in the middle of a panic “market value” means something about “actual value”. Not only have events shown Geithner’s analysis to be correct, but this theory would have made J K Galbraith and Keynes laugh hysterically. While followers of the “efficient market hypothesis” have insisted that financial markets have Godlike powers, the liberal idea has always been that financial markets are made up of people who are often motivated by errors, delusions, ideology, confusion, and bad data. Especially in the middle of a bubble or a panic, pricing has no relationship to any rational “value”. In a panic, the irrational fears of investors are amplified as falling values for assets trigger demands of creditors for cash which must be met by selling assets which puts even more pressure on the market. Here we see an idea of the far right being used to belittle the programs of an essentially Keynsian centrist.
4. “here’s a lot of shit to be eaten, the question is who will eat it? Timmeh wants to make sure it’s not the banksters.” – another plug for the the banker conspiracy theory so fundamental to right wing populism plus that demeaning approach so characteristic of right wing PR.

Clearly, events have shown that the “shitpile” actually contained a lot of valuable assets that generate a lot of revenue. The “mop headed weenie” turns out to have been a highly competent and clear thinking public servant and the “progressive” critics were confused hysterics. The critics have fallen back on an argument that prices for this stuff have only gone up because the government has flooded the economy with cheap money and there is a desperate search for anything that can produce higher returns. This reflects two errors: the first is a profound failure to understand why these particular types of assets are so sought after in the first place, and the second more fundamental error is to believe that financial markets are ever independent of government action.

The reason CDOs were so popular is that they attach a reasonably high interest rate to a pool of assets that spread risk and that generate income. “The market” stupidly believed that the pools eliminated all risk and that was wrong, but a little arithmetic shows why these things are great investments even during a recession. Suppose we purchase $100 of pooled mortgage bonds at “face value” and the pool is a set of mortgages that pay 5% year and, for simplicity, pay off principle at the end of 10 years. In theory at the end of ten years we will have received $150 – $50 of interest and $100 of our principal. Even if 20% of the mortgagees default, we still make money. Suppose they default on day 1, leaving $80 in the pool. 10x $4 = $40 of interest plus the $80 of principal and we still made $20. So if you bought it for $100 that you had borrowed from someone, then a market panic is trouble – the market price for your asset might collapse entirely and your lender wants more collateral, oops. But the Fed and Treasury were not in that position. And that’s why AIG wants this stuff back now- because it cannot find similarly profitable assets on the market.

Liberal economists recognize that money is a social construct – a person on a desert island will find that gold, diamonds, credit cards, and so on cannot purchase anything. Capital is a social construct and a functioning government can make it either cheap or expensive. Our government has made money cheap in order to stop the panic and reverse the recession just as Abraham Lincoln’s government printed “greenbacks” to pay Union armies instead of asking for loans.  When the government prints money, it reduces the ability of investors/banks/etc to demand a high price for loans or investments. Amazingly, some of our “progressives” have joined with the Ron Paulists and goldbug nutbars to attack the Treasury and Federal Reserve bank for making money cheaper. Cheap money is the traditional demand of liberals. Cheap labor and expensive money is what the right wants. So, of course prices for high interest rate mortgage bonds have gone up when other sources of income from money have become scarcer – why is that bad?

Since Mop Headed Weenie wasn’t as stupid as Cool Matt or Cool Duncan, he didn’t lose his head and panic too. And that helped us avoid a complete economic collapse. What it didn’t do was create a significant initiative to build a fairer and more environmentally sustainable economy. For that you need popular pressure for reform. A popular campaign demanding for example that the public owned AIG offer low cost health insurance might get somewhere. A campaign for an end to the oil depletion allowance and tax credits for companies that move jobs abroad accompanied by demands for making capital available to manufacturers who pay decent wages has some chance of producing good results. On the other hand, a campaign demanding that “Banksters” go to jail and that the Democratic administration fire competent employees based on fake scandals and Republican themes has a good chance of producing good results for the far right.  And that’s what we got.

Crossposted http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2011/03/criticism-from-left-or-republican-spin.html

The following is from a book entitled Hell and the High Schools that was published in 1922.

“Reader, if you are not a parent, do you not yearn intensely to turn my child, your neighbor’s child, your enemy’s child, from spending Eternity in hell? Were even your enemy’s house on fire, would you stand by in indifference and let his child be burned alive? Yet that child’s being burned alive is as nothing when compared to that child’s spending eternity in hell. You would go to the limit in helping to rescue the child from the burning building. Isn’t saving a soul from spending eternity in hell ten million times more important than saving a human body from a burning building?”

I know we all wake up each morning intensely yearning to save little souls from the licks of eternal flame, and that is why we should all heartily get behind a new bill in Tennessee that would prevent children from being exposed to the theory of evolution. I know you probably think that this controversy was resolved in the Volunteer State back in 1925 when Clarence Darrow made a fool out of William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was so humiliated that he gave up and died five days after the trial. But, fortunately, that is not the case. John Scopes was convicted. It took the jury just nine minutes to deliberate. Clarence Darrow lost the case, and the controversy is alive and well.

Teachers are still teaching evolution in biology classes in Tennessee, and this has to stop or a lot of people are going to be paying a lengthy visit to the Lake of Fire. We can get busy saving these vulnerable souls by showing our support for HB 0368 which “protects a teacher from discipline for teaching [pseudo] scientific subjects in an objective manner.”

Bill Summary

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming. This bill also requires such persons and entities to endeavor to:

(1) Create an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that encourages students to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills, and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues; and
(2) Assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.

I know what you’re thinking. That bill won’t ban the teaching of evolution. That just goes to show you how far the liberals have gone to undermine our faith in God. But the bill is worth supporting anyway because it allows us to undermine belief in the theory of evolution without any fear of reprisal. And, for good measure, we can cast doubt on global warming, too. Ask yourself, “What would Jesus do?” I think it’s obvious.

Jesus would support this bill.

I found this item in the New York Times to day and had to laugh (better than crying, right?):

The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.

What’s funny about that? Well the rest of the article is all about the Tea Party’s support for big business, and its funding by (drum roll please) Big Business. In this case the NYT article focuses on an Indonesian Paper company with an environmentally unsound track record that – surprise – a Tea Party organization is supporting against the interests of American companies and workers.

[A] Tea Party group in the United States, the Institute for Liberty, has vigorously defended the freedom of a giant Indonesian paper company to sell its wares to Americans without paying tariffs. The institute set up Web sites, published reports and organized a petition drive attacking American businesses, unions and environmentalists critical of the company, Asia Pulp & Paper.

Last fall, the institute’s president, Andrew Langer, had himself videotaped on Long Wharf in Boston holding a copy of the Declaration of Independence as he compared Washington’s proposed tariff on paper from Indonesia and China to Britain’s colonial trade policies in 1776.

Tariff-free Asian paper may seem an unlikely cause for a nonprofit Tea Party group. But it is in keeping with a succession of pro-business campaigns — promoting commercial space flight, palm oil imports and genetically modified alfalfa — that have occupied the Institute for Liberty’s recent agenda.

In a quietly arranged marriage of seemingly disparate interests, the institute and kindred groups are increasingly the bearers of corporate messages wrapped in populist Tea Party themes.

In a few instances, their corporate partners are known — as with the billionaire Koch brothers’ support of Americans for Prosperity, one of the most visible advocacy groups. More often, though, their nonprofit tax status means they do not have to reveal who pays the bills.

Mr. Langer would not say who financed his Indonesian paper initiative. But his sudden interest in the issue coincided with a public relations push by Asia Pulp & Paper. And the institute’s work is remarkably similar to that produced by one of the company’s consultants, a former Australian diplomat named Alan Oxley who works closely with a Washington public affairs firm known for creating corporate campaigns presented as grass-roots efforts.

The tea Party is a creature much like Frankenstein’s monster, if Doctor Victor Frankenstein’s creation had been a financed by some of the wealthiest people in the world and then let loose on the peasantry for the benefit of Dr. Frankenstein’s finacial backers. The public face of the Tea Party has rarely been anti-business except in the immediate wake of TARP and the Too Big to Fail Bank Bailout. It has, however been, anti-health care reform, anti-taxes for the wealthy, anti-regulation for big business (including – surprise – Wall Street), anti-freedom for women to decide whether to have an abortion, anti-union, anti-teachers, and anti-Obama. <p.

Mr. Langer can seem disarmingly candid when discussing his work. In a recent interview, he explained how the institute pitched its services to opponents of the Obama health care plan, resulting in a $1 million advertising blitz.

“A donor gave us some money, and we went out on the ground in five states in the space of like six weeks,” he said.

It is also anti-any Democrat, anti-human rights, pro-torture, anti-jobs, anti-social security, anti-unemployment insurance, anti-environment and generally anti-Science (especially climate science and evolution). It is anti-poor people and pro-rich people. It’s pro-war if a Republican president started two of them unilaterally, but anti-war if a Democratic President is part of a coalition legitimized by the United Nations and backed by NATO.

The Tea Party groups are also very much pro-Big Agribusiness, including Monsanto:<p.

Last year, the two groups also supported the effort by the agribusiness giant Monsanto to ease federal restrictions on its pesticide-resistant alfalfa. (In February, regulators agreed to do so.) Mr. Langer said he decided “to try out our grass-roots method on that, and frame it as a dairy issue and access to affordable food.”

He got a column published in July in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, talking up Monsanto’s product and asking readers to consider the value of bioengineered foods as they “stroll down the aisle of the supermarket.” The institute’s Web site urged members to speak up, and Mr. Langer filed a petition with the Department of Agriculture.

Tea Partiers are also most definitely and defiantly pro-racist.

And anti-gay:

And anti-Muslim:

The Tea Party Groups are not, however, at least as far as I can see, anti-Big Business, even if that business is a foreign corporation and resides in a Muslim country. I guess its okay to hate Muslims as long as they pay the the Tea Party groups’ and Tea Party politicians’ bills.

Domestic paper companies and their employee unions, complaining that China and Indonesia were subsidizing exported paper products, petitioned federal trade officials several years ago to slap tariffs on them. The main target, Asia Pulp & Paper, is also under attack for its logging practices; several big retailers have stopped selling its paper.

Last year, with a tariff decision looming, Asia Pulp & Paper went on the offensive. It deployed lobbyists and retained Mr. Oxley, the Australian who runs a Washington-based policy group, World Growth International, which has long defended commercial forestry and palm oil interests in Southeast Asia.

I know that the Tea Party is a movement created and funded by Big Business, its lobbyists and Republican activists to protect their interests and get people to vote against their economic best interests by electing Republicans to office. You understand that, too. So why does the New York Times still feel obligated to put in this disclaimer in a story about the Tea Party’s deep connections to Big Business?

The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.

Beat’s me. Maybe you have an answer for me.

I’d like to extend an invitation to all Hoosier women. If you want to come live here in Pennsylvania, you’re welcome. Our laws (at least, for now) on reproductive choice are not as insane as what you’re about to experience and we won’t automatically assume you’re making it up if you claim to have been raped or a victim of incest. Pennsylvania has been losing population, so we have plenty of available housing. Of course, you’ll have to give up Peyton Manning for your choice of a date rapist or a dog killer, but I’m a Giants fan anyway. And they’ve got Peyton’s little brother. He’s cuter.

I know it’s shocking that two black guys were allowed to don Black Panther costumes and stand around in front of a polling station in Philadelphia on election day in 2008, but it didn’t constitute a violation of anybody’s rights, let alone signal a systematic imposition on white people’s inherent right to vote. It was just two neighborhood knuckleheads pretending to belong to the Black Panthers. They didn’t even do anything except stand there looking ridiculous. The video, which went viral on Fox News shows voters, including a defenseless white women and an elderly man, walking right past them into the polling station without even taken any special notice. You know why? Because it’s a big city with a lot of goofy people in it who do goofy things, wear strange outfits, and stand around doing nothing and bothering nobody. When the Department of Justice dismissed the case against these two buffoons, suddenly the right started accusing the negro in charge of the DOJ of not giving a crap about the voting rights of white people. To no one sane’s surprise, the Justice Department’s Office of Personnel Responsibility (OPR) has concluded that it was perfectly reasonable to treat the case with the contempt which it deserved. But who will save the white women?

The OPR’s findings were released in a letter Tuesday to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) that was signed by department attorney Robin Ashton…

…In a statement, Smith, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and is expected to hold hearings on whether the department is politicized, said the review — which was limited to the actions of attorneys in the case — “did not address the Civil Rights Division’s misguided policy of using racial considerations when determining whether to enforce voting rights laws. The Division should protect the voting rights of all Americans, regardless of race, gender, religion or political affiliation.”

Let me translate this for you. Someone at the DOJ made the mistake of saying something along the lines of “why are we trying to protect the voting rights of white people? This case is so stupid,” when they should have just said, “This case is so stupid.” What happened is that two knuckleheads played dress-up on election day and the right tried to turn into something on the level of the Germans invading Poland.

Here’s some plain English that maybe even wingnuts can understand.

After reviewing thousands of pages of internal e-mails and notes and conducting 44 interviews with department staff members, the OPR reported that “department attorneys did not commit professional misconduct or exercise poor judgment” and that the voter-intimidation case against the Panthers was dismissed on “a good faith assessment of the law” and “not influenced by the race of the defendant.

I can’t wait for Lamar Smith’s hearings. He should call the two dipshit faux-Panthers to the witness table so they can explain how they happened to wake up that day without anything better to do than pretend to belong to the Black Panther party.

Just reading through this New York Times article, I found validation for pretty much every concern I expressed about getting involved in Libya. But one thing leapt out at me.

The French government, which has led the international charge against Colonel Qaddafi, has placed mounting pressure on the United States to provide greater assistance to the rebels. The question of how best to support the opposition dominated an international conference about Libya on Tuesday in London.

This is not the way to go. What the French should do is disregard the restrictions placed on them by the UN resolutions and go roust Gaddafi out of Tripoli. It really shouldn’t be that hard, and it will certainly have many benefits when compared to the prospect of arming the rebels. Not only do the rebels have ties to extremist groups like al-Qaeda, but they would need trainers for any equipment they’re given, which would, in itself, violate the prohibition on ground troops of any kind. Most of all, however, a prolonged civil war will do tremendous damage to Libya’s infrastructure and economy, lead to hard-to-resolve bad feelings, and cause a major loss of life and many injuries. Is it really worth all that just to pretend that foreign powers haven’t put any boots on the ground?

It will much easier for Libya to move forward if they can avoid a civil war that rips their country apart and leaves it awash with weapons and thousands of battle-weary young veterans trained in little but killing their fellow countrymen.

I said as emphatically as I could that it was a bad idea to get involved in Libya, but I believe the best outcome now that a commitment has been made is to get Gaddafi out of there as soon as possible. In won’t be with American troops, nor should it be, but someone ought to do it because it is actually the humanitarian thing to do at this point.