We will see what the Sunday morning gas bags do with this wildly inappropriate use of his celebrity. If McCain gets to be in front of a lot of cameras to talk about this stunt, look for a lot more of it by the Senator himself and others who want to get in on McCain’s action. If on the other hand, the invitations finally dry up, the number of such stunts will be small.

Like the importance of ethanol in our energy policies being tied to an electoral anomaly that gives extraordinary importance to Iowan’s interests, that Cuban Embargo would evaporate if equal weight were given to voters in Illinois, California, and Florida.

So, did Ghomert’s ploy work, will he have to pay the ticket? Will there be some consequence for his behavior towards those police? Or, will everyone look ahead, not behind, and enable this jerk yet again? The response to this will show how divorced from everyday Americans our political elite are. Sadly, I am very sure I know the answer.

In Washington, almost nothing is ever called what it is.

No effective control this time, well the fact that there will be another horror gives no one any comfort but it should be an organizational principle.

The Republican partisans on the Supreme Court have got to be concerned about the future of their party. Long term demographics aside, the GOP’s civil war will threaten its ability to compete in the next two election cycles. Gay rights is one of those wedge issues, splitting the party elite from the tea party crowd. So my guess is that they will decide these cases in ways that take gay rights off the table – for the good of their party.

What rights addressed in the civil rights struggles were/are not really rights? We call them rights for a reason. Bigots being given as much as four or five decades to perhaps overcome their bigotry, while their targets have to suffer patiently is patently unjust. The idea that courts should not have sought justice, but some sort of political middle ground, ought to be seen as UnAmerican across the board. It is not a big step from this sort of thing to the idea that some people and institutions are “too big to jail.”

Why? Because our sociopathic overlords told them to. As Durbin noted, the financial titans own the place and Peterson et al want to end the New Deal. As to why the New Deal must end, note that this is the last remaining store of significant value left to the American middle and working classes which financial engineering might loot.

It is not enough to see the projection’s lines, it is important to understand the underlying assumptions. Were they constant? I doubt it, but I really don’t know.

I believe that a site owner’s rights extend to banning. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. As to the internet as a whole, censorship is far more problematic, but I can imagine speech that should be banned. Political speech should have very wide boundaries, but commercial speech could well be more limited. I would not put up much of a fuss if the spammers got shut down, for example.

On the theory that someone looking for fire should start where there is smoke, the Goldman Sachs record is so bad that institutional investors still using them should be investigated for some sort of kickback scheme. Why else work with a firm whose record of corruption and exploitation of its clients is as bad as Goldman’s?

Our local newspapers’ financial health and relevance declined in direct proportion to the extent to which they were intertwined into national chains.

Whether or not you think the NRA is winning depends on what you think their strategy is. I think they want to bait opinion leaders and policy makers to what for lack of a better term I will call the gun control side over-reach. If the strategy is to make the debate about guns change from one focused on safety to one focused on tribal identify, then getting their opponents to reach beyond policies clearly related to recent mass shootings to policies that would dramatically affect even users of guns that are totally unrelated to those outrages is probably the first tactical goal. The gun control wish list I am reading online includes a bunch of those sorts of tribal markers. If the NRA can call those out, and use them to define the package of proposed policy changes, their chances of defeating even such common sense proposals as closing the gun show loophole, banning high capacity magazines, and limiting access to guns like the Bushmaster are pretty good. Looking at the current state of public debate, I am not at all sure that the NRA is losing.