In the end, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron probably didn't need to go hat-in-hand to Ed Miliband, but the dead-enders in his own party forced him to. Regardless, marriage equality has passed the House of Commons tonight 375-70, will probably pass the House of Lords easily:

But the prime minister, who attempted to reach out to his party by emailing a "personal note" to all members saying that he would never work with anyone who "sneered" at them, suffered the humiliation of having to plead with the Labour party for support. He also saw more than 100 Tory MPs, including the cabinet ministers Iain Duncan Smith and Owen Paterson, vote against him on the first amendment of the day.

The prime minister will understand the dangers of relying on opposition support for a flagship measure after he personally ensured that Tony Blair's schools reforms survived with Tory support in 2006 three months after he became leader. Within months, supporters of Gordon Brown forced Blair to name the date of his departure the following year.

But who could become Tory leader next? William Hague? And how likely would that make an election before 2015?

I'm glad the U.S. isn't the only English-speaking country with swivel-eyed loonies, but still, can you imagine the U.S. House passing marriage equality by the same margin? (366 to 68, for those keeping score at home.) Hell, marriage equality has overwhelming support in Illinois but somehow it can't get to the house floor in Springfield. It's disappointing that the U.K. could have marriage equality before Illinois—but that's fine. The U.K. can teach the U.S. something about conservative values in the meantime.

Via Sullivan, American Public Media's Kai Ryssdal yesterday committed an act of journalism against the former defense secretary:

I don’t know if y’all had a chance to listen to Donald Rumsfeld being torn a new one on Marketplace yesterday, but it was glorious to hear. Rummy was no doubt expecting softball questions about his new book Rumsfeld’s Rules and instead was grilled about how the wisdom in his book is in stark contrast to his work with Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve never felt a man squirm through airwaves like that.

I had to rewind a couple of times during the interview. As Sullivan said, "this guy is dangerously out of touch with reality, even as he insists he alone grasps reality."

Via Sullivan, Max Fischer at WaPo found an interesting proxy for racial tolerance:

Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society.

Here’s what the data show:

Anglo and Latin countries most tolerant. People in the survey were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor in the United Kingdom and its Anglo former colonies (the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and in Latin America. The only real exceptions were oil-rich Venezuela, where income inequality sometimes breaks along racial lines, and the Dominican Republic, perhaps because of its adjacency to troubled Haiti. Scandinavian countries also scored high.

Here's the map:

I'd love to see this data mapped at the U.S. county level...

Noam Scheiber shakes his head about the origins of the IRS-Tea Party scandal:

Fine—there’s no law against neurosis. But, to borrow a thought experiment from my colleague Alec MacGillis, consider all this from the perspective of the IRS’s Cincinnati office, which handles tax-exempt groups. You’re minding your own business in 2009 when you start to receive dozens of applications from right-leaning groups, applications you didn’t solicit and don’t require. You peruse a few of the applications and it looks like many of the groups, while claiming to be “social welfare” organizations, have an overtly political purpose, like backing candidates with specific ideological agendas. Suffice it to say, you don’t need an inquisitorial mind to decide the applications deserve careful vetting. One Tea Party activist from Waco, Texas, has complained that an IRS official told her he was “sitting on a stack of tea party applications and they were awaiting word from higher-ups as to how to process them.” The quote is intended to sound nefarious—an outtake from some vast left-wing conspiracy—but it’s actually perfectly straight-forward: The IRS was unexpectedly flooded by dodgy 501c4 applications and was at a loss over how to manage them.

So the crime here had nothing to do with “targeting” conservatives. The targeting was effectively done by the conservative groups themselves, when they filed their gratuitous applications. The crime, such as it is, was twofold. First, in the course of legitimately vetting questionable applications, the IRS appears to have been more intrusive than justified, asking for information about donors whose privacy it should have respected. This is unfortunate and intolerable, but not quite a threat to democracy.

Second, the IRS was tone deaf to how its scrutiny would look to the people being scrutinized, given that they all subscribed to the same worldview, and that they were already nursing a healthy persecution complex.

Meanwhile, the Tin Foil Hat crowd now has something that appears, at first glance, to be real government overreach for ideological reasons, and now the IRS will be even less likely to go after Astroturf groups.

This is what most people in the world call an "own goal."

Yesterday, the Minnesota Senate passed, and Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton signed, legislation making Minnesota the 12th state with marriage equality:

Minnesota becomes the first Midwestern state to legalize same-sex marriage by legislative vote, and the latest victory for those working to extend marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples across the nation. Monday’s action technically repeals a state statute that had prohibited such unions.

Gov. Mark Dayton [signed] the bill at 5 p.m. Tuesday, on the Capitol steps, kicking off a parade that [took] supporters to a massive downtown St. Paul celebration. The law will take effect Aug. 1.

[Sen. Branden] Petersen, the only Republican in the body to support same-sex marriage, found himself a national villain with those who thought he betrayed his party.

Petersen acknowledged the vote could cost him his seat, but closed with parting advice to his young children: “Be bold, be courageous, and you will never regret it a day in your life.”

This victory comes just two years after Republicans floated a referendum to make marriage equality unconstitutional in the state.

Support for marriage equality was more popular in the Twin Cities, around Albert Lea, and in the far northeast and far west sections of the state. Legislators from the rural middle and southwest parts of Minnesota generally voted against the measure.

Update: I just did the math. Adding Minnesota's 5.4 million people to those who live in U.S. marriage equality jurisdictions makes the total 56.9 million, or 18.1% of the U.S. Illinois would push the total to 22.2%.

Illinois Republican Party chair Pat Brady has quit:

With same-sex marriage legislation pending in the Illinois legislature, Brady this year voiced his support for the proposal despite a plank in the state GOP platform that said marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman. Brady said he made the endorsement personally, not as Republican chairman, but conservatives in the top echelon of the GOP party quickly complained.

Though Brady survived immediate attempts to dump him, a meeting of the Republican State Central Committee in Tinley Park last month made clear his fate. GOP leaders agreed to put together a succession plan, allowing Brady, of St. Charles, an exit strategy that made clear his days were numbered as they began a search for a new chairman.

Meanwhile, Minnesota today passed marriage equality in the State Senate, clearing the way for the state to become the 11th to enact such a law, possibly as early as Friday. Illinois will almost certainly pass the legislation this term as well.

The Illinois GOP is on the wrong side of this, as Brady well knows. I'm sorry they're following Jim Oberweis into legislative irrelevance. A healthy democracy needs a healthy opposition, to keep the majority from over-reaching. We don't have that in Illinois right now, largely because the state GOP has become a rigid, ideologically-hidebound caricature of itself. And we're all suffering for it.

OK, Papa John's, you're out of the doghouse. Sort of.

About six months ago, Papa John's CEO John Schnatter speculated about cutting worker hours to avoid some of the Affordable Care Act's requirements. As a direct result of this, I joined the millions of other Americans in a quiet boycott of the chain.

It's unfortunate. They make the best pizza in their category (cheap and delivered). I mean, of course I'd rather have a thin, wide, gooey slice from some nameless deli on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at 2am. But for the last six months, on those rare occasions when I've had a craving, I've ordered from Domino's, who really aren't much better on the political side. I suppose I could order from Ranalli's, which used to be right around the corner (and allowed dogs on the patio).

Anyway, I actually like Papa John's pizza. I think six months may be long enough for this round. Schnatter seems to have learned his lesson. And he still makes decent, cheap, fast pizza.

When the U.S. Supreme Court issues a 5-4 decision, it means, for practical purposes, they haven't actually decided anything to help lawyers figure out how similar cases will proceed in the future. Sandra Day O'Connor put the "5" in "5-4" so many times during her 23 years on the Court that for a time it seemed she was single-handily causing an explosion of litigation, re-litigation, and rogue appellate court decisions.

None of her 5-4 votes had a worse outcome than her vote in 2000 on Bush v Gore. Now, after watching her judicial legacy (such as it is) get destroyed by Republican-partisan Sam Alito, she admits maybe she made the wrong call in putting W. in the White House:

Looking back, O'Connor said, she isn't sure the high court should have taken the case.

"It took the case and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue," O'Connor said during a talk Friday with the Tribune editorial board. "Maybe the court should have said, 'We're not going to take it, goodbye.'"

The case, she said, "stirred up the public" and "gave the court a less-than-perfect reputation."

"Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision," she said. "It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day."

No kidding. One can only wish that somewhere, someone in the U.S. might have said this back in December 2000. Oh, wait.

I don't remember reading about this in Article II, but it sure is funny:

Krugman summarizes why we still have massive unemployment even though all the Serious People say we should be in a recovery:

Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences. We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong, that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this problem can and should be solved. No matter; many people have a visceral sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble years makes much of a dent.

The austerity agenda looks a lot like a simple expression of upper-class preferences, wrapped in a facade of academic rigor. What the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.

Meanwhile, we in the U.S. are making sure the planes run on time even while Head Start and food stamps are crunched. It makes me proud to be a 'Murcan.

Two seemingly-unrelated stories this morning outline how Republican-led spending cuts have reached diminishing returns. First, from New Republic, it turns out that when you cut the FAA's budget by 6% suddenly, you get airline delays:

As you probably have heard, the FAA has responded to the automatic cuts by furloughing air traffic controllers—that is, ordering them to take extra days off, without pay. With fewer controllers watching over the skies, fewer airplanes can travel at one time. The FAA says staffing shortages from the furloughs led to the delay of about 1,200 flights on Monday and another 1,000 on Tuesday. The first day of delays appear to have affected the Northeast and Southern California. Since then, delays have spread to other cities, including Tampa and Las Vegas. Overall, the interruptions actually seem less severe than some experts had predicted. But the waits are expected to get worse over the summer, once travel increases.

In an ideal world, this would shake Republican faith in sequestration as an acceptable budget policy. They’d start discussions about replacing it with some other deficit reduction plan—ideally, one that didn’t rely so exclusively on immediate and arbitrary spending cuts. This, of course, is not the way Republicans are reacting. Instead, they and their allies keep insisting that the delays are the result of Obama Administration deception and opportunism. Under the headline, “The Manufactured Sequester Crisis,” National Review’s Veronique de Rugy writes that her recent flight from Washington to New York was on time—and wonders whether, like last month’s predictions of longer security lines, the delays will turn out to be illusory. Over at the Wall Street Journal opinion page, the editors aren’t questioning whether the delays are real. Instead, they write, President Barack Obama could spare air travelers the delay by ordering the FAA to shuffle funds differently and make necessary cuts. On Capitol Hill, Republicans are making the very same argument: If air traffic is slowing down, they say, it’s because the Obama Administration wants it that way, in order to make a political point.

It's Obama's fault for spending too much money, Obama's fault for not spending enough, Obama's fault for following the law, Obama's fault for not following the law...isn't everyone tired of GOP blamestorming yet?

Then this load of crap from the Washington Post:

This year, the government will spend at least $890,000 on service fees for bank accounts that are empty. At last count, Uncle Sam has 13,712 such accounts with a balance of zero.

Right now, about 7 percent of the 202,000 government grant accounts are devoid of money. These sit on the books, costing about $5.42 per month. The service fees are the same, whether an account is full or empty.

Oh my god! Five dollars a month!

But still, one might ask, why haven't the affected agencies closed these empty accounts? Maybe because they can't afford the staff time to do it. So, yes, let's immediately suspend every other program and direct thousands of staff hours (and therefore hundreds of thousands of dollars) at this horrible problem of empty grant accounts.

Then, buried in the two pages of indignant squawking about government waste, writer David A. Fahrenthold mentions in passing that all those account fees go back to the government. That's right, the grant accounts are government accounts. So this $890,000 in "wasted" money is actually an inter-department transfer—an accounting item.

Want to cut government waste? How about starting with the $2 trillion we spent on our wars since 2001. Want to have an effective government? That's not a question Republicans, or the Washington Post, really want to answer.

...you know it's going to be bad. And it really is:

Passed in 2012 after a 60 Minutes report on insider trading practices in Congress, the STOCK Act banned members of Congress and senior executive and legislative branch officials from trading based on government knowledge. To give the ban teeth, the law directed that many of these officials' financial disclosure forms be posted online and their contents placed into public databases. However, in March, a report ordered by Congress found that airing this information on the Internet could put public servants and national security at risk. The report urged that the database, and the public disclosure for everyone but members of Congress and the highest-ranking executive branch officials -- measures that had never been implemented -- be thrown out.

The government sprang into action: last week, both chambers of Congress unanimously agreed to adopt the report's recommendations. Days later, Obama signed the changes into law.

Bluntest of all was Bruce Schneier, a leading security technologist and cryptographer. "They put them personally at risk by holding them accountable," Schneier said of the impact of disclosure rules on Congress members and DC staffers. "That's why they repealed it. The national security bit is bullshit you're supposed to repeat." (Three of the four experts we consulted opted for the same term of choice.)

As Schneier said, "There was a security risk, but it was not a national security risk. It was a personal Congressperson risk." And that was enough to stymie transparency.

One commenter on the original CRJ article points out, "Right, they're concerned about people getting their personal info online...as they pass CISPA."

This was a bipartisan effort, by the way.

Via Schneier, a good argument against this week's lockdown in Boston:

[K]eeping citizens off the street meant that 99% of the eyes and brains that might solve a crime were being wasted. Eric S Raymond famously said that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". It was thousands of citizen photographs that helped break this case, and it was a citizen who found the second bomber. Yes, that's right – it wasn't until the stupid lock-down was ended that a citizen found the second murderer:

boston.com

The boat’s owners, a couple, spent Friday hunkered down under the stay-at-home order. When it was lifted early in the evening, they ventured outside for some fresh air and the man noticed the tarp on his boat blowing in the wind, according to their his son, Robert Duffy.

The cords securing it had been cut and there was blood near the straps.

We had thousands of police going door-to-door, searching houses…and yet not one of them saw the evidence that a citizen did just minutes after the lock-down ended.

Schneier himself disagrees, to some extent. But then there's this: "Law enforcement asked Dunkin' Donuts to keep restaurants open in locked-down communities to provide...food to police...including in Watertown, the focus of the search for the bombing suspect."

When will we have the conversation about whether all of this is worthwhile?

This great speech by New Zealand MP Maurice Williamson may help explain why:

Via Sullivan:

The Chicago Tribune reported this morning that, 8 years into the O'Hare Modernization Project, some nearby residents are horrified to learn they might get more noise:

Residents of Edgebrook, Sauganash, Forest Glen, North Park and other Northwest Side Chicago communities are up in arms over the impending increases in noise pollution, which were forecast in Chicago Department of Aviation environmental impact documents in 2005, the same year the Federal Aviation Administration approved the city's O'Hare runway expansion plan.

In addition to the impact on city residents, some suburban neighborhoods that have been spared from low-altitude jet noise are in store for louder environs.

A major shift in airplane noise patterns, known as noise contours, will take place beginning Oct. 17 when the next new runway — 10 Center/28 Center, located south of the passenger terminals — opens as part of the O'Hare Modernization Program. The addition of the runway will trigger a shift to a mostly eastbound and westbound flow of planes approaching and departing O'Hare, accompanied by reduced use of three diagonally aligned crosswind runways, the FAA said.

Uh, yeah. Airplanes will fly over houses 3 km from O'Hare, just as they have for, oh, 70 years. However, airplanes today are much quieter than even 10 years ago, so the noise footprints have gotten a lot smaller since the environmental study came out in 2005.

Still, airport noise complaints baffle me. No one living under the runway 28 departure path at O'Hare suffers more noise pollution now than in 2003, when the O'Hare Modernization Program kicked off. Why are they just complaining now?

U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) gave a speech at Howard University yesterday in which he reminded the students that Republicans founded the NAACP. They already knew this, just as they already knew that the GOP before 1960 was a completely different party than the GOP after 1960. Paul seemed to ignore that nuance:

As Rand Paul acknowledged in his speech, he may not be the most obvious choice to spearhead the GOP’s outreach to African Americans. His first foray into national news came in 2010 when he criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for encroaching on property rights and suggested that ending segregation should have been left to the free market. His father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), had an even more tortured history with race that included the publication of a series of inflammatory newsletters under his name, an issue that would follow him throughout his own presidential runs. But the younger Paul backed down soon after making the remarks in 2010 and ended up clarifying that he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act had he been in office at the time, despite his reservations about provisions banning discrimination by business.

What the Howard students knew, and what Paul hoped they didn't, is that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 presented to the Republican Party the opportunity to win southern Democrats to their coalition. President Johnson himself recognized that supporting civil rights would cost the Democrats the next few elections—but it was the right thing to do anyway.

So Paul either has no memory or hopes that other people don't. Republicans capitalized on southern white outrage, if not out-and-out racism, to win elections. Now they're surprised that people are holding them accountable?

Krugman summarizes the GOP's worst, but last remaining, argument against Obamacare:

There is, however, an alternative. From the enthusiastic reception American conservatives gave Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” to Reagan, to the governors now standing in the way of Medicaid expansion, the U.S. right has sought to portray its position not as a matter of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, but as a courageous defense of freedom.

Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.

The more things change...

It's unclear whether Arizona State Representative Bob Thorpe (R) thinks legislators there are in danger, or he just wants to sell body armor. Either way, he seems to have figured out how to realize dystopia:

State Rep. Bob Thorpe (R) sent an email on Thursday to all Arizona House and Senate members, inviting them to attend an event this coming Wednesday at the capitol, where someone from a company called Arizona Tactical is scheduled to educate lawmakers about the protective vests it sells.

In his email, Thorpe said he has been researching body armor in the wake of the Tucson, Ariz. shooting that injured Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and led her to step down from Congress. He suggested the vests could be worn at public events like town halls and parades. “Just like our police and DPS (Department of Public Safety) officers, you typically wear the vest under a shirt or top, which conceals their use,” Thorpe wrote, adding that the company would cut the lawmakers a deal and offer the vests at the same price law enforcement officials pay.

So, arming everyone makes everyone safer—except that for some reason public officials need to wear body armor, because they might get shot. How about arming legislators? Yeah, no problem there:

State Sen. Lori Klein (R), now gone from the legislature, made headlines in July 2011 when she pointed a loaded gun at a journalist during an interview in the Senate lounge. The reporter, The Arizona Republic’s Richard Ruelas, wrote at the time: “She showed off the laser sighting by pointing the red beam at the reporter’s chest. The gun has no safety, she said, but there was no need to worry.”

Maybe we'll get lucky and the presentation really is just a way for Rep. Thorpe to skim something off the top. Petty corruption I can deal with. A heavily-armed society I cannot.

Back in November, Chicagoans voted to buy electricity in the aggregate from Integrys rather than the quasi-public utility Exelon. As predicted, the big savings only lasted a few months:

And Chicago, where residents saw their first electric-bill savings this month under a 5.42-cent-per-kilowatt-hour deal completed in December with Integrys, will see its energy savings shaved to just 2 percent.

ComEd's new price is not yet official. But utility representatives have filed their new energy price of 4.6 cents per kilowatt-hour with the ICC and have told the commission they expect forthcoming transmission charges to be about another 0.95 cents per kilowatt-hour. That will make the ComEd "price to compare" cited by competing suppliers when marketing their offerings about 5.55 cents.

That said, between the new Integrys rate that hit me on my last electricity bill, and moving to the cloud, my March bill was only 54% of my average bill from 2009 to 2012. So ComEd is lowering rates too? Good. It'll still be higher than Integrys.

First, TPM on why the FAA closed contract towers and how this is in fact the fault of the very people complaining about them:

Sequestration is hitting the Department of Transportation like almost every other cabinet-level department. But unlike other departments, most of its employees work for one agency — the Federal Aviation Administration — and most of that agency’s employees are air traffic controllers.

Because of that, sequestration is forcing FAA to furlough employees, institute a hiring freeze and shutter 149 contractor-operated air-traffic control towers around the country.

It’s that last effect that makes members of Congress, particularly Republicans, so nervous. And since, percentage-wise, contractors are facing larger cuts than other other FAA activities and operations, they’re claiming that the cuts are designed to create a political headache for members of Congress — not to comply with sequestration’s spending cut requirements or safety provisions elsewhere in federal law.

The Chicago area had two important closures, at Waukegan and Gary, the two closest lakefront towers. There are now no air traffic control towers observing Lake Michigan south of Racine, Wisconsin. Republicans are whinging about ATC tower closures because it's a visible effect of the sequester, and people might ask embarrassing questions.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Samoa Air has started charging passengers by weight:

IT’S an issue that has often been proposed in the darker corners of the world’s aviation forums. And now Samoa Air has decided to become the world's first airline to charge passengers according to their weight. No matter if you're a skinny 6'8 (203cm), a muscular 6'0 or a chubby 5'3: if you weigh a lot, you pay a lot. Flyers declare their weight (including luggage) when booking their tickets and pay an amount per kilo. The per-kilo price depends on the length of the flight. Scales at check-in should ensure that passengers have not misrepresented their size.

Since airplanes use fuel based on weight and distance, this makes a lot of sense—particularly when you understand that most Samoans have BMIs over 30.

Wrapping up my day, reading irrelevancies and trivia online, I had occasion to Google one of my favorite lines, "Better a witty fool than a foolish wit."

I am horrified and saddened to report that the first site in the search results was "No Fear Shakespeare," to which I refuse to link out of love for the English language. Orwell was right, as always:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Orwell wrote that in 1946, before my own mother was born. He was right about so much it scares me. (So was Huxley*.)

By the way, the second result on the list also made me shake my head sadly. Click through if you must.

* I forgot Brave New World came out in 1932. That, to me, makes it scarier.

Paul Krugman takes a quiet moment to meditate on the economy:

If you think the problem is that wages are too high, your solution is that we need to meaner to workers — cut off their unemployment insurance, make them hungry by cutting off food stamps, so they have no alternative to do whatever it takes to get jobs, and wages fall. If you think the problem is the zero lower bound on interest rates, you think that this kind of solution wouldn’t just be cruel, it would make the economy worse, both because cutting workers’ incomes would reduce demand and because deflation would increase the burden of debt.

If, on the other hand, you believe that the problem lies in a shortfall of demand due to the zero lower bound, you believe that government borrowing needn’t drive up rates, because it puts unemployed resources to work; that monetary expansion won’t be inflationary, because the money will just sit there; and that fiscal austerity will be strongly contractionary.

I leave the adjudication of these competing claims as an exercise for readers.

After four years of a depressed economy, and what appears to be the economic hobbling of the entire Mediterranean, there might be some evidence to support one of these views.

Something about the Seder I went to last night and the marriage equality cases currently before the Supreme Court got me thinking along these lines:

The wise son asks, "What are the statutes, the testimonies, and the laws that the Constitution has commanded you to do?"

To the wise son, you say: The 14th Amendment gives every citizen equal protection under the law. The 10th Amendment reserves powers to the States that aren't specifically granted to the Federal Government. And the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion.

The wicked son asks, "What does this mean to you?"

By saying "you," he separates himself from the rest of the United States, and its rich tradition of liberty and tolerance. You say to him,

JUSTICE SCALIA: When did it become unconstitutional to ban same-sex marriage? Was it 1791? 1868?

TED OLSON: When did it become unconstitutional to ban interracial marriage?

JUSTICE SCALIA: Don’t try to answer my question with your own question.

Or, more succinctly, "Sod off, Tony."

The simple son asks, "What is this?"

Explain to the simple son that the founders of the United States created a system in which things that hurt no one are generally tolerated, so unless there is a rational basis for legislation, and the benefits of the legislation outweigh the harms, it must be overturned.

What about the son who is too stupid to ask a question?

In this case, just ignore him. He's a partisan hack without sufficient intellect, curiosity, or temperament to serve as a justice of the peace in South Podunk, let alone the highest judicial body in the country. And you know how he's going to vote regardless of the facts or law anyway.

Now go learn.

Too much going on:

• Paul Murphy at Financial Times thinks Cyprus will do the right thing
• Microsoft released figures about national security letters the FBI has sent it
• .NET 4 introduced the System.Numerics.Complex type
• Microsoft's Channel 9 posted a video about migrating applications to Azure virtual machines
• Jeff Atwood makes a case for the Ruby language
• BuzzFeed imagines Twitter's 7th anniversary promo video with the Inception theme
• No one really cares about LinkedIn endorsements
• T-Mobile has put up an animated graphic showing cyber attacks in real time

Now, I will go back to drafting documentation while I wait for AT&T to reconfigure my DSL and kill my landline. I've had a POTS ("plain old telephone service") twisted-pair line longer than most people on earth have been alive. After today, no longer. I don't think I'll miss it, either. I only have it because I have a business-class DSL, which I don't need anymore, and the only people who call it want money from me.

It scarcely feels like a decade since we invaded Iraq. Well, to me, sitting here in the middle of North America, it doesn't. I imagine it feels like more than 10 years to the people we invaded.

Among the articles I've read the past week or so, John Judis' post at New Republic stands out. He was one of the few insider journalists who opposed the war at the time; his recollection explains what it cost him:

I opposed the war, and didn’t listen to those who claimed to have “inside information” probably because I had come of age politically during the Vietnam War and had learned then not to trust government justifications for war. I had backed the first Bush administration’s Gulf War, but precisely because of its limited aims. Ditto the Clinton administration intervention in Kosovo. George W. Bush’s aims in Iraq were similar to American aims in South Vietnam. During those months leading up to the war, I kept having déjà vu experiences, which failed to interest my colleagues. Still, I wavered after Colin Powell’s thoroughly deceptive speech at the United Nations in February 2003, where he unveiled what he claimed was evidence of Iraqi nuclear preparations. I had to have an old friend from the anti-war days remind me again of the arguments against an invasion.

My own experience after Powell’s speech bears out the tremendous power that an administration, bent on deception, can have over public opinion, especially when it comes to foreign policy. And when the dissenters in the CIA, military, and State Department are silenced, the public—not to mention, journalists—has little recourse in deciding whether to support what the administration wants to do. Those months before the Iraq war testify to the importance of letting the public have full access to information before making decisions about war and peace. And that lesson should be heeded before we rush into still another war in the Middle East.

I wish I'd been blogging back then, because I would like a record of my own contemporary opposition to the war. At the time, I was working on a project in Richmond, Virginia, with some good ol' boys who really didn't like even the limited things I had to say about it. At least I didn't have to defend myself against the entire Washington press corps.

Ten years on, is our politicians learning have we learned anything? For our sake—and Iran's—I truly hope so.

Via Hanselman, an explanation of straight, white, male privilege in terms a straight, white, male gamer might understand:

Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

Oh, and one other thing. Remember when I said that you could choose your difficulty setting in The Real World? Well, I lied. In fact, the computer chooses the difficulty setting for you. You don’t get a choice; you just get what gets given to you at the start of the game, and then you have to deal with it.

Nicely put.

The Illinois Republican Party will vote tomorrow on whether to kick out chairman Pat Brady after he took public positions contrary to the party platform:

Brady, of St. Charles, could be ousted over his statements supporting same-sex marriage Saturday, with committeemen meeting in Tinley Park to decide his fate.

State Sen. Jim Oberweis of Sugar Grove, 14th District Republican committeeman and a leader in the effort to remove Brady, said Brady's situation is different from committeemen who stray from the party platform.

What position on marriage equality? Well, Brady's for it—as are most of the party's senior leaders—and Oberweis isn't. Funny thing, in the last election Republicans in Illinois took a huge beating, in part because of their policies on marriage equality and other social issues. The party chairman wants to win elections. Oberweis wants ideological purity.

You have to love the Republicans these days. I've never seen a party work so hard to lose. And I'm a Democrat.

Glad we cleared that up:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced during Thursday’s briefing that Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) this morning regarding the administration’s policy on drone strikes targeting Americans on U.S. soil. Holder’s letter stated definitively that the U.S. would not use “weaponized” drones to targets American citizens on domestic soil.

Reading directly from Holder’s letter to Paul, Carney said, “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil? The answer is no.”

Well, that's a relief. I was worried we'd repealed the constitution.

I may have more about Rand Paul's filibuster and John McCain's complete failure to understand its significance later.

That's the problem. People inhale and exhale mentally, and right now, I'm exhaling. This means I get a lot of work done, but not a lot of reading. This, in turn, means more lists like this:

• Scott Adams ruminates on how power works.
• James Fallows examines threat inflation.
• Hugo Chávez is still dead.
• Bill Gates writes book reviews?
• American Airlines and USAirways won't expand O'Hare.
• Elizabeth Kolbert needs more sleep.

Lunchtime!

Netsch was Illinois' first female nominee for governor and the Illinois controller in the 1990s. She died this morning at age 86 from complications from ALS:

She was one of the first female law professors in the United States. A liberal Democrat, she defeated the Machine-backed incumbent state Sen. Danny O’Brien to win a seat in the Illinois Senate in 1972 that she held for 18 years. Elected comptroller in 1990, she was the first woman elected to statewide office in Illinois and, four years later, the first to run with the backing of a major political party for governor, losing to incumbent Gov. Jim Edgar.

Netsch said she “never ran as a woman” but always argued, “More women are needed to make a difference in public policy.”

“She paved the way for others,” President Barack Obama wrote in a letter read at the event by former senior presidential adviser David Axelrod. “The unwavering grace and integrity [Netsch] has shown throughout decades of public service are an inspiration to us all. Dawn’s legacy will live forever in our hearts and the history books.”

I volunteered for her 1994 gubernatorial campaign against Jim Edgar. I remember the campaign, especially how excited we were to work for her. We didn't even come close in the general election—Edgar got re-elected with 34% of the vote—but we thought we made a difference. We might have; Edgar and his successor, George Ryan, were moderate Republicans who resisted the creeping Christianism of their parties.

She will be missed. If Illinois native Hillary Clinton gets nominated for president in 2016, she can, in part, thank Netsch for the example.

James Fallows has a thoughtful piece looking back at the start of the Iraq War, ten years ago this month:

Anyone now age 30 or above should probably reflect on what he or she got right and wrong ten years ago.

I feel I was right in arguing, six months before the war in "The Fifty-First State," that invading Iraq would bring on a slew of complications and ramifications that would take at least a decade to unwind.

I feel not "wrong" but regretful for having resigned myself even by that point to the certainty that war was coming. We know, now, that within a few days of the 9/11 attacks many members of the Bush Administration had resolved to "go to the source," in Iraq. Here at the magazine, it was because of our resigned certainty about the war that Cullen Murphy, then serving as editor, encouraged me in early 2002 to do an examination of what invading and occupying Iraq would mean. The resulting article was in our November, 2002 issue; we put it on line in late August in hopes of influencing the debate.

My article didn't come out and say as bluntly as it could have: we are about to make a terrible mistake we will regret and should avoid. Instead I couched the argument as cautionary advice. We know this is coming, and when it does, the results are going to be costly, damaging, and self-defeating. So we should prepare and try to diminish the worst effects (for Iraq and for us). This form of argument reflected my conclusion that the wheels were turning and that there was no way to stop them. Analytically, that was correct: Tony Blair or Colin Powell might conceivably have slowed the momentum, if either of them had turned anti-war in time, but few other people could have. Still, I'd feel better now if I had pushed the argument harder at the time.

Almost done publishing the first beta of the new Weather Now. If it's successful, I'll post the link tomorrow.

Two guys on vacation, new guys not starting yet, my day began at 7:25 this morning. At least Parker got a taxi to day care, sparing me the need to drive home tonight in a blizzard.

So I'll just add these to Instapaper and hope I have to fly somewhere soon:

• Via Fallows, a long analysis of our complete bollixing of Afghanistan;
• Via Scott Hanselman, a Tumblr of 99 life hacks; and
• Nate Silver on the electoral college and the Democratic Party, partially explaining why Republicans, who have no policies to speak of, are now trying to win elections by abandoning the federalist principle of state representation.

Oh, and don't miss Jennifer Lawrence answering stupid questions after her Oscars win Sunday night.

...or, my thought about the controversy surrounding the torture scenes in Zero Dark Thirty: whether or not agents of the United States could have found (or, indeed, did find) Osama bin Laden without using torture does not matter one bit. Torture is wrong; no outcome that requires torture is worth the moral cost.

But even if one were to accept the clearly false proposition that Osama bin Laden was the most powerful and dangerous criminal in the world, and even if one were to accept the flatly immoral proposition that there are circumstances of such immediacy and lethal potential that justify torture, torture in pursuit of this man still wasn't worth it.

I don't find Zero Dark Thirty morally ambiguous. I don't think Kathryn Bigelow meant to glorify torture; I think she meant to hold up a mirror.

If the events depicted in the film are true, we destroyed lives in the most repugnant way imaginable to get revenge on a madman. We cashed in a century of setting of moral leadership to kill one guy. Forget about whether it was worth it. Is this who we want to be?

After only 147 years, the state of Mississippi has finally ratified the 13th Amendment:

On Dec. 6, 1865, the amendment received the three-fourths' vote it needed when Georgia became the 27th state to ratify it. States that rejected the measure included Delaware, Kentucky, New Jersey and Mississippi.

In the months and years that followed, states continued to ratify the amendment, including those that had initially rejected it. New Jersey ratified the amendment in 1866, Delaware in 1901 and Kentucky in 1976.

But there was an asterisk beside Mississippi. A note read: “Mississippi ratified the amendment in 1995, but because the state never officially notified the US Archivist, the ratification is not official.”

On Jan. 30, [Secretary of State Delbert] Hosemann sent the Office of the Federal Register a copy of the 1995 Senate resolution, adopted by both the Mississippi Senate and House.

On Feb. 7, Charles A. Barth, director of the Federal Register, wrote back that he had received the resolution: “With this action, the State of Mississippi has ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.”

Dr. Ranjan Batra, associate professor of neurobiology and anatomical sciences at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, drove the correction. It's nice to see Mississippi finally correct an oversight like this.

Some links:

• James Fallows annotated SOTU is an annual must-read.
• Crain's sniffs out a letter from the Illinois Congressional Delegation to AMR and USAirways along the lines of, "nice merger you've got there, shame if something were to happen to it."
• I'm way behind on Paul Krugman's blog.
• Wired examines the Battle of Hoth in strategic terms.

Lots to do in the next 19 hours...including a conference call with a data center at 10:30 tonight.

Paul Krugman has a more considered view of Rubio's blame-game:

Look, this is one of the most thoroughly researched topics out there, and every piece of the government-did-it thesis has been refuted; see Mike Konczal for a summary. No, the CRA wasn’t responsible for the epidemic of bad lending; no, Fannie and Freddie didn’t cause the housing bubble; no, the “high-risk” loans of the GSEs weren’t remotely as risky as subprime.

This strikes me as a bigger deal than whether Rubio slurped his water; he and his party are now committed to the belief that their pre-crisis doctrine was perfect, that there are no lessons from the worst financial crisis in three generations except that we should have even less regulation. And given another shot at power, they’ll test that thesis by giving the bankers a chance to do it all over again.

For several practical reasons, not least of which that I needed to finish some work I didn't have time to do in Vancouver, I listened to Sen. Marco Rubio's State of the Union response instead of watching it. Missing, I suppose, a good helping of his personal charisma, and going solely on the content of his speech, I have to conclude he and I live in different countries.

Where do I begin?

How about where Senator Rubio began: his first four sentences. I have no objection to "Good evening" or "I'm Marco Rubio" (though I did hear, in my mind's ear, "Polo"). Sentence three: "I'm blessed to represent Florida in the United States Senate." That, to me, is a curious reading of the first and seventeenth amendments. But I'll overlook it for now.

Sentence four: "Let me begin by congratulating President Obama on the start of his second term."

Oh, wait. That sentence is only in the prepared remarks. He didn't actually read it out loud. Why? one wonders.

Look, I'm tired, I woke up today in a foreign country, and I only have one Loonie in my pocket to spend right now against the 277 loonies in Congress. So let me jump ahead to the part of Rubio's speech that made me shout obscenities:

This idea – that our problems were caused by a government that was too small – it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.

Which policies in particular? Two unfunded wars? The dissipation of a $500 billion budget surplus in four years? The draconian immigration laws—which he, as the child of Cubans, never had to experience because of our anti-Castro policies—that have dissuaded millions of able bodies and minds from coming to the U.S.? Or maybe, more pointedly, the small-government fantasies of a senile Federal Reserve chairman who admitted, two years after the disaster he created had put tens of millions of people out of work, had caused the organization he chaired to fail completely to meet its mandate for managing unemployment?

The three most-likely possibilities why Rubio's speech had no connection with reality are these: first, he believes he has to win over the dead-end, right-wing faction of his party (who constitute a compelling majority of it) in order to run for president; second, because he truly believes what he said, which bodes ill for his understanding of the reality-based community most people inhabit; or third, because his time machine malfunctioned, and he read his party's 1976 convention speech by mistake.

"[A] housing crisis created by reckless government policies." I'm agog. I'm out of analogies. What analogy could possibly encompass the chutzpah—mendacity?—of that line? "Mom, I crashed the car, so I blame you for not getting me to school on time." "Doctor, I shot myself in the liver, so I'll blame you if I die."

And that's just one line, near the beginning.

I'm done for the day, though. Tomorrow, after I've slept on it, I'll comment on the best State of the Union address a Republican has given in my lifetime.

Taking a brief rest from my temporary insanity, I read Sullivan:

Someone in the GOP needs to take Bush-Cheney apart, to show how they created the debt crisis we are in, by throwing away a surplus on unaffordable tax cuts, launching two unfunded wars, and one new unfunded entitlement. They need to take on the war crimes that has deeply undermined the soul of the United States. They need to note the catastrophic negligence that gave us the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor (9/11) despite being warned explicitly in advance, accept weak and false intelligence to launch a war they were too incompetent to fight or win, sat back as one of the worst hurricanes all but took out a major city, and was so negligent in bank regulation that we ended up with Lehman and all that subsequently took place.

These were not minor errors. They were catastrophic misjudgments which took an era of peace, surplus and prosperity and replaced it with a dystopia of massive debt, a lawless executive branch, two unwinnable wars, and a record of war crimes that had their source in the very Oval Office.

That seems about right to me.

This is alarming:

A new and worrisome benchmark has been reached with the announcement Tuesday by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that Lakes Michigan and Huron have dipped to new record lows. It’s been a 14 year journey. That’s how long water levels have been below historic averages--the most extended run of below normal water levels in the 95 year record of Great Lakes dating back to 1918.

The numbers are as stunning as they are disturbing with serious implications to shipping interests, all manner of creatures which populate the lakes, plus the millions who enjoy these natural treasures recreationally and depend on them as a source of water.

Water levels have fallen 1.9 m from the record highs established in October 1986 and currently sit at levels 735 mm below the long term average. Lake Michigan's water level is 430 mm lower than a year ago

We're getting more precipitation than we have in a while, but it hasn't been enough to end the drought. And because of dredging near Detroit, the lakes are emptying faster than ever right now.

The UK's Conservative government has passed a marriage equality bill by 400 to 175:

[UK Prime Minister David] Cameron, who described gay marriage as “an important step forward for our country”, smiled broadly as the result was revealed. [Deputy PM] Nick Clegg called the vote “a landmark for equality in Britain”. [Opposition leader] Ed Miliband said it was “a proud day”.

However, the details of the vote quickly showed that Mr Cameron’s decision to push through the legislation has left him in a minority within his own party over the issue.

The result followed a debate in which several gay MPs made impassioned arguments for the change in the law. Mike Freer, the Conservative MP for Finchley and Golders Green, appealed directly to his party colleagues over the vote, declaring: “I am not asking for special treatment. I am simply asking for equal treatment.”

The United Kingdom has a state church and a right-leaning government. The U.S. has a constitutional prohibition against a state church and has a left-leaning government. Yet the UK passed marriage equality before most legislatures in the U.S.

I remember fondly when the U.S. was a beacon of freedom and tolerance in the world. Maybe it will be again, someday.

I'll be a lot less busy in March, they tell me. Meanwhile, here are some things I want to read:

• The Atlantic Cities blog has an analysis of class in Chicago by census tract.
• Seth Godin doesn't like airports, because they're organizationally horrible. Best bit: "There are plenty of potential bad surprises, but no good ones."
• Liz Keogh advocates Behavior-Driven Development as a new way of looking at Test-Driven Development.

I will get to them...soon...

Ho did the accounting firm CliftonLarsonAllen LLP miss that Dixon, Ill., comptroller Rita Crundwell embezzled $53 million?

CliftonLarson in 2005 resigned as auditor for Dixon in order to keep other city assignments such as ledger-keeping after an influx of federal funds required the town to hire an independent auditor.

In its lawsuit, however, Dixon contends that CliftonLarson continued to do the annual audit and get paid for it, while hiring a sole-practitioner CPA from nearby Sterling to sign off on the work, thereby preventing competitors from grabbing the business. CliftonLarson says it prepared only a bare-bones “compilation” of financials after 2005 to aid the new auditor, Samuel Card, 56, who also is a defendant.

In depositions in late 2012, Power Rogers attorney Devon Bruce produced CliftonLarson emails after 2005 that referred to the firm's “audit” of Dixon. Also entered into the record were invoices submitted by Ms. Crundwell supposedly from the Illinois Department of Transportation that lacked an IDOT heading or logo and, in one instance, carried a nonexistent date—Nov. 31, 2004.

“Had a two-minute phone call been made by a Clifton employee to the Illinois Department of Transportation regarding any of these false invoices, Rita Crundwell's theft would have been identified at that time,” the lawsuit argues.

Oops.

With former governor George Ryan's release from prison this morning, Illinois has finally returned to the situation of having fewer former governors in prison than out of it. In an especially nice touch, former governor Jim Thompson is Ryan's attorney.

I guess Dan Walker and Jim Edgar are both still alive, too, so the current count is: 1 incumbent, non-convicted governor; 2 former, non-convicted governors; 2 former, convicted governors; and 1 former governor still in jail. There's a nice symmetry there, yes?

I've come a across a number of stories over the last few days about the Republican Party's efforts to win elections. GOP chair Reince Preibus wonders where they go from here. Legislators in Mississippi apparently don't understand federalism. Republican legislatures gerrymandered every state they controlled in 2011—nothing new there—but now they want to get more Electoral College votes in swing states by going to proportional voting. Virginia's legislature passed a bill that would have thrown 9 of 13 votes to Romney in the last election, even though Obama won the popular vote state-wide, and did it by voting while the senior Democratic representative—a bona fide civil rights hero—was at the Inaguration on Monday. (They followed the vote by recognizing the contributions of Stonewall Jackson to American democracy.) And finally, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell sent an email to supporters after the watered-down filibuster agreement passed gloating about beating liberals.

Actually, McConnell's email neatly sums up the broader pattern to all these activities: "You see, they had been pushing a plan to end the filibuster, allowing Harry Reid and the Obama Democrats to pass their agenda with a simple majority. Well, Mitch McConnell stood strong and stopped that scheme dead in its tracks."

Yes. That's right. The Republicans have declared war on majority rule, and for good reason. They're no longer a majority.

All of these events, and the shenanigans before the election in which state GOP leaders openly talked of denying the vote to more-urban, more-Democratic voters, point to a party unable to win on the merits, and determined to hold on to whatever power they can by any means at their disposal. What they don't seem to realize is that these tactics alienate people in the center who might vote Republican if they weren't a bunch of nutters.

Look at the UK's Conservatives: faced with declining votes and a strong government, in opposition they changed their policies to win elections. In just one concrete example, the Tories this week published a bill for full marriage equality, something the Republicans over here could not possibly countenance given their current membership.

I think the GOP will hold on to House in 2014, but lose a Senate seat or two. More states are majority-Democratic than majority-Republican, and the Senate represents the states. Long term, though, I think most Americans have had enough. And every day, the old white men who make up the Republican party become a smaller minority.

They won't go quietly. We can be certain of that.

Earlier I brought up yesterday's (tonight's in the U.S.) elections in Israel, which surprised me because (a) they're not taking the country into a right-wing dystopia and (b) it started to look like Binyamin Netanyahu might lose his job. (b) is important because the farther away Netanyahu gets from the button, the less likely the U.S. will get drawn into an unwinnable war against Iran.

Well, some hours later, the reports from Tel Aviv are encouraging, but not definitive:

Hours after polls closed on Tuesday, and after some 95 percent of the votes were tallied, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed a mandate to third term as premier, but the battle between the country's right- and left-wing blocs remained virtually in a dead heat.

As voting ended Tuesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu party garnered only 31 seats − compared to the 42 the two parties won in the last election in 2009 − prompting him to announce that he was already working toward forming “as broad a government as possible."

The final election results will only be submitted next Wednesday, which places some restraints on President Shimon Peres consulting party leaders about whom he should ask to form the next coalition. However, sources in the President’s Residence say he prefers not to wait that long and is likely to ask Netanyahu to form the next government by the end of this week.

However, Labor Party leader Shelly Yacimovich said she had already initiated contacts aimed at forming a center-left bloc to prevent Netanyahu remaining prime minister.

As much as I hope for Netanyahu's defenestration, he will most likely scrape together the votes to congeal a right-wing government. Even though a centrist coalition would have a nearly-unprecedented mandate, and also get the extremes on both sides to shut the hell up, the individual incentives are just too strong for Likud politicians. And sadly for just about everyone, Netanyahu is actually a true right-winger, believing the only way to deal with Arabs is through arms.

I'm not naive about the sincerity of Arab leaders who give speeches about wiping Israel into the sea. I just don't think they're likely to try. Along the same line, I think Israel's biggest mistake under Netanyahu mirrors the United States' biggest mistake under George Bush fils: fighting fire with napalm.

You can't fight terrorists with armies. Armies turn allies into enemies. Rome never learned that, but given two thousand years of experience, one would hope the United States would—if for no other reason than we study Rome in school. When you turn the forces of the empire on small threats, the threats become real.

We in the U.S. have alternated between showing the world a brilliant example of democracy and kicking the crap out of it. We declared independence with the power of liberal Enlightenment thinking behind us and promptly enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts. We spent 600,000 lives declaring all men free and promptly declared them unequal. We're the laboratory testing reason against unreason. But reason wins most of the time.

So observe Israel: a country born of the worst atrocities ever visited upon humans by other humans, a country of the smartest, best-educated, toughest people ever to constitute a free democracy, electing an open bigot as their head of government. It staggers the mind. But tonight, at least, it appears half of Israelis have rejected him. One can hope that's enough.

Netanyahu is typical of the right, warning how "those people" will destroy everything you believe in (though the specifics never seem to be described). Only, "those people" don't exist. To define "those people" requires a suspension of intellect, a cessation of rational thought. Defining an entire group of people as something less than another group requires a willful ignorance that becomes terrifying when backed by nuclear weapons.

Except, Iran doesn't seem likely to attack Israel. In fact, if "those people" were a unified block, we might expect a different sort of invasion, as one of Israel's neighbors is wracked by a civil war at the moment without a flood of refugees into Israel.

No, really: are a hundred thousand unarmed Syrians about to invade Israel? Even though the Syrian civil war would seem to give a hundred thousand Syrians a good reason to emigrate hastily to Israel, if only not to get killed by their own countrymen. So...where are they?

Netanyahu's other bugaboo is Iran. So let's ask: Is the Iranian government nuts? Yes. Are they an existential threat to Israel? No. They're kind of like al-Queda and the U.S.: crazy, destructive, criminal, worth every legal and moral effort to stop, but not an existential threat unless we make them so.

I've said this before: the right thrives on fear. People vote for right-wing politicians because they're afraid, and right-wing politicians win when fear trumps reason. Keep in mind, the greatest wartime president the U.S. ever had was a progressive Democrat in a wheelchair. A team of enlightenment liberals won our independence from Britain. We ended slavery under the leadership of a scrappy, shrewd liberal Republican.

So after all this: I hope Binyamin Netanyahu gets sacked this week, because I think he's a nearsighted, fear-mongering charlatan, and Israel deserves better. It troubles me that half of Israeli voters support him and his coalition. But as an American, I can't do anything. I just hope he doesn't pull us into another war.

On Wednesday's Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed actor Jessica Chastain, star of the film Zero Dark Thirty. There was a moment, at the end of the interview, in which she absolutely horrified me—and, it seems, him (at around 20:30):

Chastain: The cover of ... was about the CIA agent going to prison for talking to a journalist about waterboarding.
Stewart: You can waterboard, but the first rule of waterboard club—
Chastain: Don't talk about it.
Stewart: You should see it, in theaters now, Zero Dark Thirty.

She seems to believe, as far as I can tell, that torture is a fine way to run a government. Watch her, and watch him, during this exchange. She shows no hint of irony, or even awareness of the point of Stewart's joke.

Earlier in the same show, Stewart had this to say about the NRA's propaganda that "armed Jews could have stopped Hitler:"

I wish armed Jews in the ghetto could stop Hitler. My feeling was, France couldn't. And I'm pretty sure they had guns. Russia had kind of a lot of guns, and they couldn't stop Hitler, until you factored in the wind chill. It's an awful lot to put on an oppressed minority when it took the free world five to six years of all-out total war to stop that motherfucker. So let's stop arguing these "what-ifs."

I think he's had enough of the crazies lately.

Yes, this is exactly right:

A big part of gun versus non-gun tribalism or mentality is tied to the difference between city and rural. And a big reason ‘gun control’ in the 70s, 80s and 90s foundered was that in the political arena, the rural areas rebelled against the city culture trying to impose its own ideas about guns on the rural areas. And there’s a reality behind this because on many fronts the logic of pervasive gun ownership makes a lot more sense in sparsely populated rural areas than it does in highly concentrated city areas.

But a huge amount of the current gun debate, the argument for the gun-owning tribe, amounts to the gun culture invading my area, my culture, my part of the country. So we’re upset about massacres so the answer is more guns. Arming everybody.

[There is] a mentality that does seem pervasive among many more determined gun rights advocates — basically that us non-gun people need to be held down as it were and made to learn that it’s okay being around people carrying loaded weapons.

Well, I don’t want to learn. That doesn't work where I live — geographically or literally.

Read the whole post.