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.”

Another reference, this one at Salon.com who you’d think might know better, to “the rising number of gay suicides”. After all, if the media hasn’t been covering it, it must not have been happening.

The suicides of gay teens being reported in the media are a drop in the bucket. They are a tiny fraction of the hundreds of gay teens who commit suicide every month. I have yet to see this simple, easily researchable fact mentioned in any of the stories.

Tom Toles today in the Washington Post:

If things keep up at this rate, it may only be a matter of time before I am forced to the conclusion that some Americans are giving less thought than they should to avoiding the appearance that racism has played some role in forming their opinions.

Headline on Talking Points Memo today:

Number Who Believe Obama Is Muslim Doubles

According to a poll, the percentage has gone up from 11% to 18%.

Follow the link and you find the full story, which is headlined:

Poll: Number of Americans Who Think Obama Is a Muslim Nearly Doubles

A rise of 82% is “nearly” 100%. Just a matter of rounding, really.

Look. Words are artificial constructions of our minds. They don’t exist in nature; if humans didn’t exist, neither would words. So they mean whatever we agree they mean and communicate whatever we think they communicate.

So if I know with certainty that if I say the word nigger to a particular person, she will take it as derogatory, then the word is derogatory in that context. On the other hand, if I know for a fact that if I say it to someone else, it will be taken as a sign of close kinship and shared heritage, then that is exactly what the word means in that situation.

Context is everything. The dictionary is filled with words that mean different things in different contexts, and everybody knows this. Everybody knows this so well that it never even occurs to us to complain about how it ought to be otherwise. That’s just how words work.

Nobody complains how unfair it is that you can’t go into a garden supply store and say “I’d like to buy a couple of stakes” and have the clerk wrap up a couple of T-bones for you, like what would happen at the butcher. And why don’t we complain about this? Because none of us is nursing any kind of secret yearning to get our steaks from a garden supply store. We’re all doing just fine getting them from a butcher and we know it. Nor is there any satisfaction to be had for us in saying this sentence to the clerk at the garden supply store. What would we get out of it? So we’re just fine with the fact that the word stake/steak has several different meanings depending on who is saying it and whom they’re saying it to and what the situation is.

So if you’re going to whine childishly on the air about how you can’t use the word nigger without getting nailed for it while other people get to use it all! the! time! and they never get the same treatment and it’s just! not! FAIR!, what you’re actually doing is letting on that you’ve been nursing the itch to use that word, that there’s some desire you’ve been bottling up inside yourself that is building up pressure to be let out.

Now, let us think. Let us think hard. Why might it be that Dr. Laura is so resentful of the fact that this particular word has multiple meanings based on context, when the same is true of any number of other words that it has never occurred to her to be resentful about?

What unexpressed idea, laden with long-suppressed emotion, burns within the heart of Dr. Laura, yearning to be released with the use of the word nigger? That cannot, in fact, be adequately expressed in any other way?

Is it, perhaps, the desire to show her black sisters and brothers that she thinks of herself as one of them, shares their culture and their emotions and their dreams?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

Come on, there are a lot of otherwise secular buildings in which one room is used as a chapel, and nobody thinks the whole building counts as a “church”.