I would add that ‘no one thinks welfare money should be spent at strip clubs’ but if we don’t care how bankers spend bonus money received following billions in direct bailouts and loans from the discount window, I don’t give a rat’s ass if poor people spend some portion of their meager benefits at the package store.
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4 February 2012
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16 November 2011
They seem totally uninterested in the NYPD’s excessively violent tactics, including the harassment, abuse and arrest of various reporters, which doesn’t get a mention in the editorial. Then a Daily News reporter was arrested, along with at least two other reporters. Now, according to the Daily News Twitter feed, at least, the NYPD’s behavior is “alarming.” The newspaper has alerted its attorney.
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9 November 2011
What possible need does your average American police department have for a tank? I mean, besides giving it to Steven Seagal so that he can kill a puppy during a raid on a suspected cock-fighter that’s being filmed for a reality show.
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3 November 2011
FBI entraps old white guys in terror sting, just like it does to young Muslim men
The “good news,” I guess, is that now the Justice Department is carrying out the same ridiculous stings on old Christian guys that it regularly carries out on young Muslim guys. Because let’s be honest, we have no way of knowing whether these four guys would’ve actually acted on their anti-government beliefs if they hadn’t been led to action by the “informants.” They met at a Waffle House and called themselves “the covert group.” They range in age from 65 to 73. How much of a real threat could they possibly have been? How much of a role did the “informant” play in pushing the men toward formulating an actual terror plot instead of just grumbling fantasies of revolution over omelets?
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1 November 2011
When those principles come into opposition, regular people usually lose, because they are not cool stealth fighter planes.
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29 October 2011
Mid-air blackouts in stealth fighters seems pretty serious! It’s a good thing we don’t actually need these planes, because billion-dollar fighters are essentially pointless unless we seriously expect a full-on old-fashioned World War to break out between us and China and Russia and maybe Australia.
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1 June 2011
Do you know what makes an ‘urban melee’ different from a regular ‘melee’? It’s not that it takes place within the city limits of a major metropolitan area. It’s that it involves the world’s most obvious code term for ‘scary black people.’
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26 May 2011
Joe Lieberman's "strong," "serious" legacy
Strong! Serious! Realistic! Those words have such fungible meanings, apparently! A completely unsustainable and expensive foreign policy based around open-ended occupations of nations full of people learning new reasons to hate us every day is a “realistic” foreign policy, because it involves bombs and troops and stuff. A vision of American power backed up by belligerent threats to preemptively begin shooting wars is “serious.”
Lieberman’s legacy is principle-free centrism, with a gun. Not that there is any other kind of centrism. It is a condition defined by the median babble one’s political surroundings; it proudly rejects any internal logical consistency (“ideology”). Lieberman doesn’t represent everything that it disastrous about our politics—consider how differently he operates from Obama, and yet so often for the same ends—but he’s certainly the last decade’s slimiest national political figure.
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25 May 2011
Why Herman Cain and the GOP keep misquoting the Constitution
But the Constitution is a work in progress, despite the wishes of the conservative movement that it specifically prescribes a perfect, right-wing America, unchanging and timeless. It contains essential (and oft-ignored) checks on legitimate tyranny — the tyranny of a police state, not the tyranny of “a welfare program I dislike” — and the First Amendment is one of the craziest, best ideas a government ever came up with, but if you go to it searching for “the ideals … your parents believed in,” you’ll come back disappointed. Unless your parents had a lot of opinions on who has jurisdiction over criminal cases involving ambassadors.
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24 May 2011
Focus on the Family will still do everything in its power to force women to carry pregnancies to term against their wishes, but they have largely given up on forbidding loving couples from making legal commitments to one another for no reason other than an icky feeling supported by the bit of the book of Leviticus that also calls for people who insult their parents to be stoned to death. Progress!
