This is just part of the new fun GOP: amusing, no? You missed the warmup act, mostly a bunch of those hilarious rape jokes.

I think there were two moderates, one of whom got about 17% of the vote. So the total vote runs to moderates. I don’t think any of the candidates wants to give up on nuclear enrichment. So the question becomes whether the nuclear program involves bombs, or whether that part can be turned off safely, not whether we can get them to drop enrichment.

I’d like to ask the House no votes whether Obama should continue with the forced feeding or let these people die on their own terms.

I will miss you, both for your writing and your activism. Be well.

I love that the response is to attack the personality of the truthtellers while honoring the service of the scumball liars.

I want to know more about the toilet training and the narcissism of a man who would tell us his sworn answer was too cute by half. There’ll have to be a new category for the DSM: Truth Indifferent, maybe?

I’d be happier if ads didn’t follow me around for months. Once you buy a house or a pair of shoes, how long do I have to keep seeing ads for mortgages, realtors and even houses, not to mention adidas?

Its a nice observation. Unfortunately, the problem is to find competitors for seats that are occupied by Team Blue. Most potential candidates are unwilling to get out of line.

Identity politics at the expense of economic justice. A lousy trade.

I agree that there is no left. Democrats began the destruction of the organized left by getting rid of old communists, leftist labor leaders and socialists beginning right after WWII, and continuing well into the 50s. The anti-war efforts of the 60s included a lot of former commies and socialists, and some elements of a new left, but it collapsed as the war dragged on and killed more and more people, and at the end, that new left went to work and raised families. The demise of the organized left was shielded by the growth of left-appearing groups, but mostly it was replaced by interest group politics organized around individual rights and social justice, carefully excluding economic justice from the latter category.

I note that killing Martin Luther King was a great help to the right, because he, along with the murdered Robert Kennedy, recognized that there is no social justice without economic justice. After them, there were no major politicians or leaders who made that connection.

Well, the Democrats don’t often talk like blithering idiots, as the rank and file Republicans do. The Crazy Party is at war with the Enlightenment. See this post and the comments, especially deleteme and shoto.

I agree. That’s what makes Barro’s post so interesting. He also agrees. He says he is a utilitarian, so he favors policies that benefit the average person. The current policies of the Republicans don’t, so they should change, he says.

I’m more of a Rawlsian, so I think we should have more fundamental changes. But at least I have some common ground with Barro on some issues, so our discourse wouldn’t be stupid.

I’m not inclined to trust the government on this. The long term project of construction of a national security state has been underway for decades. I think there are a lot of useful idiots in Congress who support that project, regardless of any sane notion of privacy or private lives.

Much of my distrust is based on the fact that the government didn’t prosecute Wall Street and its rich and powerful denizens for the crimes that to the Great Crash and the current economic malaise. They are too busy looking for something in the terrorist vein to focus on the evil bastards who wrecked the economy and forced to work an extra two years. They need to justify all this money and effort. What limits are there, given the twisted way they interpret the law, as Marcy Wheeler explains in several posts at Emptywheel.net?

The scandal made discussion of the low research funding rate more acceptable and more public, so it was a good thing.

Anybody got a bitcoin? Mt. Gox?

That film was extraordinary.