Time to rethink the implicit secrecy bargain. Pat Buchanan really is racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic, but he's a member of the right tribe, so it's OK. The shrink-ray theft scene in Despicable Me was racist , but the minions seemed to me to be unionized, genetically altered corn pops and not really racialized. What does it say that supervillains allow their employees to bargain collectively but Republicans won't? The Obama administration is appealing al Kidd v. Ashcroft .

When the Umar Abdulmutallab incident happened, I was among those ( Sanchez , Greenwald , Ackerman ) pointing out that "we need to consider that part of the problem is the sheer volume of information being gathered almost indiscriminately, making it difficult to divine real threats from false ones." The broad conclusion of Dana Priest and William Arkin 's first article in a series on the sprawling American national-security complex is that having a hybrid public/private "Top Secret America" about the size of Detroit drinking from the fire hose means that it's "impossible to determine" whether what the government is doing is actually making us any safer. I don't have much to say at the moment, but my immediate reaction is that the immediate aftermath of this series may lead to some changes, but my concern is that bureaucracy has incredible inertia. That's without the very strong bipartisan political incentives to avoid trimming national-security spending, lest the other side point to...

Pivoting off a 2000 speech in which Pat Buchanan accused Ivy League schools of discriminating against "white Christians," Ross Douthat writes that "it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right." Douthat isn't too specific on what Buchanan got right, and he never actually makes the claim that Ivy League schools aren't mostly made up of white Christians, but he does conclude that "lower class whites" are being harmed by affirmative action. I suppose this is Douthat's way of justifying the weird conservative oppositional culture that has sprung up in the aftermath of Barack Obama 's election, which I think Glenn Beck summed up best when he said America has turned "into the 1950s overnight, except the races are reversed." This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white...

So there's a game Rush Limbaugh likes to play, where he'll express a sentiment he actually holds in the form of a joke, and when called out on it he'll remind everyone that it was intended as "satire." He calls it "illustrating absurdity by being absurd." Often the idea is that you're accusing liberals of holding the abhorrent belief in question. In practice both Limbaugh and his audience understand that this is actually a way for him to express something offensive without taking responsibility for it. More than one conservative hasn't gotten the implicit "don't try this at home if you're not a multimillionaire talk show host" message and has tried to pull the same thing, only to have it blow up in their face. They don't get that Limbaugh isn't actually fooling anyone, and that he's really just someone who makes too much money for too many people to ever actually be fired. This is what happened to Tea Party Express Chairman Mark Williams , who wrote a nasty piece of "satire" last week...

It's really astonishing that David Vitter is still a senator. Tim Geithner vs. Elizabeth Warren ? Just read this . Ann Friedman explains that the way to make friends of other races is not to treat them as anthropology projects. Ben Smith destroys the NBPP story.

Jay Bybee on the torture memos he helped write: He said he was “proud of our opinions” at the Office of Legal Counsel, too, calling them “well researched” and “very carefully written.” Still, he said the controversy surrounding his tenure there had been difficult. “I have regrets because of the notoriety that this has brought me,” he said. “It has imposed enormous pressures on me both professionally and personally. It has had an impact on my family. And I regret that, as a result of my government service, that that kind of attention has been visited on me and on my family.” Glenn Greenwald on Jay Bybee: Just think about that. The so-called "government service" Jay Bybee did caused countless detainees to be subjected to systematized, medieval torture techniques designed to permanently break their mind and spirit. Innocent men spent years wasting away in a cage, with no due process of any kind, subjected to horrific and life-destroying abuse because of what Bybee authorized. For that...

The decision to drop two defendants from the New Black Panther case and focus solely against the individual who held the baton has been presented as proof positive that the Obama administration is racist. Rush Limbaugh claims that Eric Holder and Barack Obama "continue to protect and represent" the New Black Panther Party and that the narrowing of the case was "the natural course of events" with a black president and attorney general. Glenn Beck has claimed that the NBPP "have ties to the White House." Conservative bloggers have decried "Eric Holder's racist enforcement policies." At the heart of this narrative is the presumption that the Obama administration is racially selective in enforcing the law as a result of the president's personal hatred for white people, that he or Eric Holder directly interfered with the case, out of affinity or solidarity with the anti-white NBPP. But it's worth noting that J. Christian Adams , the voting-rights attorney with a conservative background who...