Open thread for night owls

Open thread for night owls:

Charlie Pierce:

MSNBC is running this promo in which Andrea Mitchell bemoans the fact that "political parties and interest groups" are working to keep people from voting, which is something that Andrea believes is a very bad thing indeed. I agree. About what a bad thing it is. But I depart from agreement due to what I think is her mistaken use of the plural.
There is only one political party that is actively working to keep people from voting. There is only one political party whose allied interest groups are actively working to keep people from voting. This is not even a close call. I know that faux balance is the way you keep all the dinner reservations coming in, but, lawsamercy, let's not lie to ourselves.

I'm not sure why I've been in such a foul mood, politics-wise, of late. It might be the ongoing presence of people like Allen West and Steve King, people with no more moral integrity than moldy old bathmats, but who still get to be "leaders" of a certain segment of America that has gone, and remains, batshit crazy. It might be the Paul Ryan Plan 2.0, which is if possible even more ridiculous than the old one—and that's not a partisan statement; it should be a perfectly, transparently obvious one. It raises the deficit. It claims massive savings from loophole-closings that Paul Ryan has not been able to elucidate even once. It purports to eventually cut the entire federal budget to a percentage of GDP that is lower than what Republicans are demanding for defense spending alone. That counts as ridiculous. And, yes, insincere. And, yes, as lying through his teeth. But that, too, gets rewarded. What a bold fellow this ridiculous, math-challenged clown is! How brave he is to, like a hundred predecessors and enpodiumed experts before him, make up an implausible, unworkable pile of PowerPoint nothings and pass it off as economic policymaking! Good Lord, make it stop.
It might be the dawning realization that the 2012 campaign is not even close to being over, and yet I'm not sure whether there's any remaining bounds of asininity to be explored—but there must be, because there are always new avenues of asininity to be explored, and that thought should be scaring the bejeebers out of the whole country. It could be the new declaration of war by the Catholic Church and the Republican Party, who are allies on absolutely no issue except the one or two that involve sexytimes, against birth control of all things: Now that counts as regressive. We're not quite back to the dawn of the automobile, policy-wise, but we're getting there. Heaven knows economic policy is now wedged firmly in the 1800s, so we may even be rearguing slavery in the U.S. Congress by the time the year is out.
It may be that Mitt Romney has not even sealed the nomination, yet has already demonstrated a capacity for outright bullshit that far dwarfs any of his competitors. I'm not saying he's good at things like wooing the locals, or defending the corporate, or even appearing human. But he can out-lie every one of his Republican opponents any day of the week, and by a wide spread, and when you consider who some of his opponents are, that is saying something. A man who can lie more readily than Newt Gingrich, or spout more tall tales than Michele Bachmann—damn. So far, however, the national media seems downright determined to not notice this little character trait. Is being a baldfaced liar really so commonplace that it's not even mentionable, these days? Is that just the admission price of politics? Jeebus.
It might also be the current war between the states to see which one can be the most retrograde, or the most cruel, or the most ridiculous, or the most ineffective. There are a great many contenders for the titles. Wisconsin jumped out to an early lead, thanks to their banana republic legislature and tinpot governor. Florida, however, countered well by putting an actual, bonafide crook in the governorship. Arizona bows to nobody, when it comes to bigot-based laws and legislative accomplishments derived seemingly from drunken bets, even beating out Georgia, which is hard to do. And then there's South Carolina, which used to only exist in order to propel very strange and loony people into the national spotlight, and then only to have them pop like little fireworks and drift back to the ground as burnt-out embers. Alas, Florida took their schtick; now they barely even rate in the loony-politician.
It may be the Sandra Fluke thing. Yes, it was only one more very public, very sustained attack on one more person who dared speak up against the Conservative Way of Thinking, but it was the last straw, for many. It may be the Trayvon Martin controversy, which had the very same segment of the nation defending the shooter under the explicitly stated assumption that of course this kid must have done something to deserve killing, because just look at his Twitter feed, and just look at how he was dressed, and was "Skittles" really all that innocent?
Must we? Really, must we? That seems exceedingly low, even by our usual standards.
In the end, a rational person can only approach politics in one of two ways. You can either be disgusted at it, or you can laugh at it. Preferably you do both, because doing only one or the other is probably not the best path to staying sane. I suppose you could treat it all as actually serious, but that would be way too much. Many a journalist has gone down that path; their reward is lots of party invitations, lots of television appearances, and the cold, dead eyes of a fish.
The message of 2012, so far, is that while we may not be a nation made up exclusively of rotten people, we certainly seem to elevate the rotten ones above all others. Provide our citizens with healthcare? Pfft, that's communism. Hold Wall Street to account for all that stuff that happened? Nonsense, we should be honoring them! Give those bastards more tax breaks!
The Republican Party has done a very good job of pretending that the Bush years simply never happened. Those wars? Those deficits? Never happened. Oh, but all that stuff we did back then, we should do that again. More tax cuts, more screwing the poor, even less earning power for workers, and as added bonus there's a country in the Middle East that really needs a good ass-kicking. Hey, why not. What could go wrong?

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

Yet more information is trickling out on the BushCo torture regime. Via Jeralyn, the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research (the watchdogs on the bogus released-prisoners-turned-terrorist numbers) have issued a new report [pdf] on the FBI and DoD role in torture at Guantanamo. [...]
The information [Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research] and his students have used to compile this, and twelve other Guantanmo reports, comes from government documents obtained through FOIA requests. And that doesn't include the remaining torture memos that the Justice Department seems reluctant to release.
It seems that the truth, or at least parts of it, will out. These kinds of revelations will come out in dribs and drabs, from dedicated groups like the Seton Hall students and the ACLU, and from a variety of investigative journalists, perhaps even conscience stricken whistleblowers. It's inevitable that more and more damaging information will come to light.
Which argues again for our Congress and Obama's Justice Department to be proactive rather than reactive in dealing with it. Set aside the fact that we are legally obligated under international treaties to investigate potential war crimes. Forget that an official accounting of crimes committed in all of our names is the moral, ethical thing to do.

Looked at through a purely political prism, every report like this, every news story about a foreign country investigating American torture, makes it increasingly worse for us in the eyes of the remainder of the world for there to be no official American government investigations.

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Tweet of the Day:

.Mitt Romney's call for more media scrutiny of the campiagn is a marvelous idea; how about a press conference, sir? @ThePlumLineGS

— @ElizabethDrewOH via TweetDeck

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