Scratchings

According to the Chicago Tribune, Justice Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech in Georgia in which he stated that those who criticize the Supreme Court are either illiterate or lazy and that

… the downward spiral of public discourse from people who are “drunk on their own opinions” must come to an end.

Great, a Supreme Court justice says we need to put an end to all this unrestrained freedom of public discourse. Why did we ever bother fighting the Cold War anyway?

According to Talking Points Memo, Joseph Farah, founder/editor of World Net Daily and a prominent birther, says that the release of President Obama’s long-form birth certificate “raises as many questions as it answers”.

I couldn’t agree with him more.

Science expert Ann Coulter weighing in on the crisis in Japan:

Anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear
power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer.

From yesterday’s Spiegel Online, topping a story about resignation of German defense minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg over revelations that his doctoral dissertation was heavily plagiarized:

Copy, Paste, and Delete

This has been a huge scandal in Europe, but it’s hard to imagine there being a ripple of outrage in the United States over something like this. Who would care?

Looks to me like when Chris Lee told his craigslist correspondent that he was a divorced lobbyist, we wasn’t really lying, just thinking ahead a few months.

So the Tea Party types are all bent out of shape over the new airport scanners. The government shouldn’t have the right to do this to them, just because they want to exercise their constitutional right to fly. The scans are a horrible, intrusive invasion of their precious privacy, or so I read, over and over and over. My heart breaks for them, really. These are mostly the same types, mind you, who think they naturally have the right to tell me what I can and can’t do in my bedroom, and who I can and can’t marry. But that’s completely different.

So now we’re going to cut Social Security and Medicare while extending tax cuts for millionaires. And worse, we’re not going to go after anybody for engaging in waterboarding nor for destroying evidence of waterboarding, which by the way we Americans used to consider an act of torture and a war crime punishable by death until it was we Americans instead of them Nazis who were doing the torturing. This is just a nauseatingly ugly choice we’re making here.

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

If people around the world didn’t understand what we were doing then, they surely do now. And if Americans didn’t accept what we were doing then, evidently they do now. Doing nothing about torture is, at this point, pretty much the same as voting for it. We are all water-boarders now.

Been watching clips from the Rally for Sanity yesterday. Oh, man. Thank you, Mr. Stewart, for using your spotlight to say what usually gets drowned out by the narcissistic fearmongers these days.

So Dave was listening in the next room to somebody interviewing Dan Savage about the “It Gets Better” videos, and this guy actually was clueless enough to ask Mr. Savage whether President Obama’s recent speech “helped you in your campaign” or words much like that. Amazing. I mean, his tone of voice conveyed that he actually thought this was a sympathetic question, that he just took it for granted that there was a campaign behind the videos and thought he was tossing Mr. Savage an easy softball of a question.

Sigh. One more indication — like we needed any more, dear God — that the news biz has gotten to the point where the people who work in it day in and day out can look at even a project as obviously done out of concern for others and devoid of personal gain as the making of these videos and putting them out there for free, and it doesn’t even occur to them that there is not some kind of campaign behind it, some desire to take advantage of the situation for profit or political gain or attention or ego gratification. They’ve gotten so used to doing nothing else in their own line of work, and so used to covering politicians who do nothing else in theirs, that they can’t talk with a commoner without bringing along the same assumption.

To his great credit, Mr. Savage politely deflected the question, saying that it’s not about helping any kind of campaign, but about helping gay teens who are thinking about suicide. Me, I think I might have smiled and replied, “Oh, yes, absolutely. But probably not as much as the suicides themselves have helped you maximize the profits you make from the business of packaging human tragedy as a commodity and turning it into advertising revenue, you smug bloodless vampire you.”