The Inside Story of the NSA's Violation of the Constitution -- and Our Privacy

I recorded this a while back -- Frontline's "The United States of Secrets" -- but only got around to watching it last night. It's absolutely spellbinding. I only had Part One, so I hooked up my laptop to my TV via HDMI cable and watched Part Two via the Internet. More totally chilling stuff.

Here's the link to a PBS page with links to both parts. Watch them on your device of choice. But do watch them. They may or may not shake you to the core, depending on you depth of cynicism. Either way, this shit's gotta stop. How, I don't know, but Edward Snowden's courage was a start.

Paul Krugman: New Policy Ideas Are Overrated.

Paul Krugman: We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We just need to get rolling.

Paul Krugman notices that the GOP has a reform movement. I read the same article he did, but his take is directly to a larger point:

But then, the whole notion that new ideas are what politics is about is greatly overrated. Governing isn’t like selling smartphones; the underlying shape of the problems you have to confront changes quite slowly, and the basics of policy debate are quite stable.

In particular, the central policy debate in US politics hasn’t changed in decades, nor should it. Liberals want a strong social safety net, financed with relatively high taxes, especially on high incomes. Conservatives want much less of a safety net, and much lower taxes on the affluent.

When you check with the American people, which pollsters do constantly, you find that they're almost always largely in favor of liberal policies. That the Republican Party recycles old, worn-out policies -- and in the case of gun control, outright dangerous -- shouldn't be a mystery to anyone.

The point is the Democratic Party shouldn't be afraid to run loudly and openly on its usual policy prescriptions. They're popular, and, in the long run, winners.

Gun Nuts Just Love Showing Off Their External Death Penises

My fallback gun-nut picture. If I could talk to this picture,
I would say, "I wish I could quit you!" (But it's too perfect.)

The best way to deal with the gun nuts is call them out at every turn for what they are. Atrios does all the time, for which he should be commended, if only for coming up with yet another triumphant term, external death penis.

Waving them around is all gun nuts do. Except for shooting family members and, on occasion, shooting their own actual penises. I suppose once you've shot your own penis, your external death penis is all you've got.

How Republicans Lose for Winning

Boehner and Cantor, the Do-Nothing Engineers.
How's that working out for you?

Jonathan Chait has a relevant column in New York Magazine about how the GOP are engineering their own irrelevancy and have been doing so for some time. All-out opposition to all things Obama leaves the Republican Party with no accomplishments and little influence on policy except for the continuing echoes of "just say no."

Obviously, a significant and vocal segment of the Republican base opposes the merits of any liberalization of immigration policy. But Obama has significant power to liberalize immigration policy on his own. So the substantive question for restrictionists is not whether they could use their leverage over the House to pass an immigration bill that’s better than current policy. The question is whether they could use their leverage to pass a bill that’s better than the policy that will exist after Obama unilaterally rewrites it.

What's worse is that the Do-Nothings have done nothing to help themselves in the long run. Lindsey Graham, who rarely says anything relevant beyond something similar to "our feckless president should bomb the crap out of [insert country] even if just to make sure the world knows all options are on the table, except if you ask me we really shouldn't bomb [insert country] because it would have little to no effect except make me look good on Meet the Press," has once in the last few years actually said something profoundly relevant. Graham intoned about his party, "We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

He said a mouthful.

2014 may -- or may not -- be a final triumph for gerrymandering and last-gasp "stupid party" shenanigans, but there's no denying, even among inveterate denialists, that GOP messaging had shaped itself as a big fuck you to blacks, Latinos, and women.That might feel good right now, but in 2016 they're poised to reap the whirlwind.

Here's Fox News, the TV wing of the Republican Party, showing how to win women over to their side:

Good luck, GOP. You're going to need it.

Hobby Lobby Decision Points to the Importance of Women's Rights

Hockey moms love the Hobby Lobby decision!

Without question, women's rights is the central challenge of Earth in the 21st century. All of the other centuries are over. There's nothing we can do about the pain and misery that we've inflicted on women across the globe through the ages. Yes, we're marginally better in the U.S., but with the new Hobby Lobby kerfuffle, we see yet again the reactionary strains that push and pull our citizenry. We, America, aren't Nigeria, Somalia, or Iran, but we are not leading the world in women's rights. And because of the Religious Right, we are seriously backsliding.

I've joked in the past few days about hot women and sex and the Five Dicks on the Supreme Court, but I've done it with serious purpose. Conservatives, let's face it, are hellbent on maintaining women as second-class citizens. There are all kinds of irony at work here, and it's well worth a look at the absurdity on display.

A key absurdity is that the Supreme Court's conservative 5 -- as in 5-4 -- are all Catholics. These Catholics have ruled against birth control, all forms of birth control, which, under Catholic canon law, is forbidden. But what we shouldn't forget is that 98 percent of Catholic women, during their reproductive years, use birth control anyway.

So, what's the point?

The steps of the Supreme Court on the morning the Hobby Lobby decision was scheduled to be released were festooned with fresh, well-dressed, exuberant evangelical women celebrating the notion that ruling against birth control was the highest form of religious liberty. And yet the reality is that evangelical Christian women use birth control at virtually the same rate as Catholic women, 98%. All reproductive-age women use birth control at a 99% rate.

So, what's the point?

It's that what's going on with the Supremes and the religious right amounts to a reflexive spasm. Women are not supposed to be free to make sexual choices. Men want to have sex, and men don't want the women they're having sex with to have babies (unless of course they do), but what's really going on here is a hypothetical woman with a purse full of birth control having sex with whomever she wants to! Whenever she wants to! Anybody she wants to! And she's free to not have that sex with you! She's free, entirely free.

To the Religious Right, to conservatives in general, this is wildly unacceptable.

To be fair, a good number of liberals are uneasy about unbridled sex, as well. Sure, liberals are much more likely to support birth control, women's and gay rights, etc. across the board. But even among liberals, there's a longstanding heritage, firmly entrenched, that women are more responsible for the "home." Old habits die hard. After all, I'm old enough to have watched "Leave it to Beaver" and "Ozzie and Harriet." Regularly, for years!

Erick Erickson, a hard-right ideologue -- one emblematic enough to have been chosen by CNN as its resident hard-right ideologue -- let the cat out of the bag when he referred to "employer subsidized consequence free sex."

You're taking away my WHAT?

To conservatives, sex is supposed to have consequences. Why? And remember, this particular view is being expressed in light of a decision that takes government-approved, government-mandated birth control away from the smorgasbord of preventive-health services provided by the ACA. This is being taken away from women, by men.

What's the problem with consequence-free sex? The answer is simple. Women are supposed to pay a price for doing the nasty, or just don't do it at all.

It's all about maintaining the double standard. Men get to have unbridled sex. It's what we do. It's our God-given mandate: Be fruitful and multiply. Women are supposed to live by a different standard, something like have sex when the men say you can. Then, suffer consequences, bear children, run the home.

It's just so obsolete. Men, the dream is over. Maybe not today, but eventually. Let the women be equal, in all areas. Why not start with sex? Maybe they'll have some of it with us! Birth control for the win!

What we've been going through since Barack Obama has been president is one spasm after another, mostly about power, sometimes about policy, and certainly about sweeping social changes, like gay rights, voter rights, women's rights and such. The conservatives have been leading, causing, these spasms. Hobby Lobby is just another one.

Unfortunately, there are consequences that follow. It'll will be over someday, but until then it'll be a bumpy ride.

Consequence-free sex? What's that?

Hobby Lobby Is Not About Abortifacients. It's About ALL Birth Control. Whaa?

The Supreme Court clarified its ruling today. The decision is "narrow" in the sense that it's only -- so they say -- about birth control. Hobby Lobby objected only to two emergency contraceptives and two intrauterine devices.

Since some Catholic-owned companies object to ALL birth control, SCOTUS clarified that its decision includes all twenty forms that were covered in the ACA. Need I remind you that all five votes in the majority come from Catholics.

So it's not strictly about abortion. It is definitely also about sex. I'm not crazy for stressing that.

Swell. Read about it in TPM. Also, might as well throw in this legal opinion from Jeffrey Toobin about how potentially broad all these "narrow" SCOTUS decisions are.

Shoot me now. And I'm not even a woman.

Just threw in this random picture of Antonin Scalia so I can call him a dick again.

Dick.

OMG It IS About Sex!

Atrios is a liberal blogger I've been reading for over a decade. Personally, I think he is right about everything. This, of course, is why I read him. He's in my bubble.

Wait. I'm not a bubble person. I read other people, like David Brooks, so I can ridicule him for being a lazy, facile sophist that uses phrases like "most Americans believe that..." Another not-my-bubble person that I've read a lot is Erick Erickson of RedState.com and late of CNN. I don't read him as much as I used to because he's visible enough on cable and Twitter and such that we generally know where he's coming from.

So here's Atrios showing us what Hobby Lobby is about, including Erick Erickson's take on it. Yep, it's about women having too much sex, and we hates it, yes we do, we hates it!

For fun, read this featured member post at Red State this morning called "Hysteria, Thy name is Woman." Of course, the poster is a woman who claims that nothing changed yesterday. She, for some reason, left out the part where the Supreme Court said it was okay for owners of companies to decide what birth control is okay for their women employees and what isn't okay. That's sort of a change, right? And maybe some of the women find it weird that their doctors don't make that decision but instead it's their employers, based on their religious beliefs. That might upset a rational woman, mightn't it?

Also, what's this really about, Erick Erickson of RedState?

I'm pretty sure that what Erick Erickson is trying to say is "Slut, Thy name is Woman."