I think even the ever vigilant Pam is missing the real scandal here. In reality, this has nothing to do with halal. Clearly these turkeys are being forced to undergo Islamic conversion at knife point. Islam has always been spread by violent jihad. The ones who end up on American dinner tables are those who later recanted and were executed as apostates, as Islamic law dictates. The Islamofascist respects the freedom of conscience of neither man nor fowl.

The worst part is if that if he sues you and wins, he’ll demand to be paid in gold doubloons, not dollars that will be worthless once hyperinflation sets in.

They had to look at his bio to know that? Everyone knows that closed captioners are the number one target when they have their recruitment drives.

The scenario was a little different though with Palin. Palin was necessary in order to energize the Republican base. Which ought to tell you a whole lot about the Republican base. McCain wasn’t conservative enough for them. Palin was who got them excited. Enough said.

He wants to impose Huckabeeia law.

He could probably survive all that if the economy was going to improve significantly in the next couple of years. The problem is “Are you better off now than you would have been if McCain had been elected?” is a losing campaign strategy for a candidate who ran on “Hope and Change” and “We can do better” last time.

“Interestingly, I don’t feel Huckabee has been getting the level of media focus one would expect for the individual that polling not only shows is in a strong position to win the primary, but is also the most electable in the general.”

I have a feeling though that his electability numbers are a product of the fact that he doesn’t get a whole lot of media attention (well, not counting friendly right wing media). Once he got some media scrutiny, those numbers would drop.

Actually there is. But the standard is usually that you must have been involuntarily committed or in some way adjudicated incompetent. Simply having a history of mental health treatment or having been expelled from a college for bizarre behavior will not bar you legally from purchasing firearms. I

I have to rant here about one of my favorite issues: the stringency of our involuntarily committment laws. Expanding access to mental health treatment is great for people with mild to moderate mental illness but that by itself is almost completely useless for people with very severe mental problems. These people will almost never voluntarily seek out mental health treatment or would likely lack the capacity to know where to find help even if they wanted. Someone with extreme paranoia who views the world as one big conspiracy is not going to voluntarily check themself into a psychiatric hospital.

At the very least, if we aren’t going to rethink our involuntarily committment laws, we need to raise the bar when it comes to purchasing firearms and not prohibit only the incompetent or previously involuntarily committed but those who have a history of mental illness as well.

Headline should read, “Issa outsources his thinking”.

As I noted at comment # 47, it seems like this is taking bizarro world view to a new level. He’s not just making the usual right wing argument that unemployment compensation and various safety net programs prolong recessions, he’s saying that they actually caused the recession. This just seems to me ludicrous on the face of it even to someone cursed by an extensive education at the Univ. of Chicago. After all, unemployment comp and various other welfare programs have been around for a while, so why did everything just sort of spontaneously combust in 2008? Is he suggesting that it reached some sort of tipping point where all these distortions pushed the economy over the edge?

I’m curious though. If the right is now making the argument that the welfare state caused the recession, and is not merely prolonging it, are they now opening up another revisionist historical front on the New Deal? Not just that the New Deal merely prolonged the Great Depression, but it was American’s generous big govt. welfare state of 1929 that caused the Great Depression? (Ok, I can almost see where this will go next. Sure, America of 1929 was relatively laissez faire. But what could we do, all those socialist countries in Europe were dragging the world economy down.)

Let me put on my profiler hat and enter the dark twisted mind of economic serial killers and try and understand what sort of depraved urges motivate them. Note that it appears in this case that they are not just blaming the big bad welfare state and it’s generous unemployment checks for prolonging the recession but they are blaming it for causing it in the first place. Why would anyone try to absolve the banks and Wall Street for the recession despite the obvious fact that they are guilty as hell? Well, these are the exact same folks who told us that financial markets don’t need to be regulated because behave rationally. Individuals might behave stupidly, but markets don’t behave so collectively. So if Wall Street is guilty, then they are guilty. To absolve Wall Street is to absolve themselves.

And to go even further, if they don’t absolve Wall Street, then they are admitting that their entire academic career has been little more than a wall of BS. This is the same sort of desperate BS weaving that you would expect from phrenologists just as it was going out of style.

My impression is that this decision was purely a political move and was considered only in terms of the politics. I don’t think there was any covert DLC type motivation to try and make financial regulation ineffective by not getting the best people or by any real consideration that govt. workers are overpaid.

This was just intended to be a blatant sop to the right about budget concerns. And the worst thing is, even as a transparent political ploy, it was dumb as hell. No conservative is going to be impressed by this. While a certain number of his political allies are going to be peeved that Obama did this without getting anything at all for it.

If Obama really wanted to make some sort of deficit hawk gesture and do it in a way that would really put Republicans in an awkward defense mode, he should have gone after the greedhead war profiteers in the private sector (uh..how private sector are they really if they make most of their profits working for the government??).

I would like to see the GOP put in the position of trying to defend Blackwater contractors making $200,000 a year for doing the same job that the Special Forces and SEALS do for a heck of a lot less, all the while maintaining their phony pose as deficit hawks.