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- I stopped reading Daily Kos years ago, but it's sad to see that founder Markos Moulitsas' newest book is not only superficially similar to Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism but substantively similar: "In American Taliban, Markos Moulitsas pulls no punches as he compares how the Republican Party and Islamic radicals maintain similar worldviews and tactics. Moutlitsas also challenges the media, fellow progressives, and our elected officials to call the radical right on their jihadist tactics more forcefully for the good of our nation and safety of all citizens." Look, the Dinesh D'souza "they hate us because we're liberal" argument has its followers, but on the whole Republicans are simply opportunists looking to rally the conservative base for the elections.
- Via Megan Carpentier, the latest glimpse into the alternate universe known as conservapedia: "The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world." It then uses a biblical passage to further prove relativity's falsity. Of all the subsets of American conservatism, the "Jesus founded America, capitalism" crowd is by far the creepiest and most far gone.
- In this video, Rep. John Shadegg introduces legislation that would require Congress to include a statement of every law's constitutionality, apparently because much of Congress' spending is not constitutional. I don't know where Shadegg thinks this test appears in Article I, but in his haste he seems to have entirely skipped section 8, which goes into some detail about the taxing, spending, and borrowing powers of Congress. And don't Republicans believe the Supreme Court should be the branch that determines what is constitutional or not?
- Remainders: Assessing where the Laffer Curve bends; Patrick Leahy ponders substitute Supreme Court judges; nobody could have predicted a half-term governor turned media personality would be unpopular with her former constituents; Senate candidate Dan Maes, last seen warning about the U.N.-bike-sharing conspiracy theory, is also concerned about the constitutionality of said bike-sharing; and Robert Gates gets real on the defense budget.
--Mori Dinauer
