THE TEA PARTY'S DEVOTION TO WOMEN AND DEMOCRACY, AS REVEALED BY DAN RIEHL'S REACTION TO THE NEWS THAT LISA MURKOWSKI WILL RUN AS AN INDEPENDENT:

Bitch: Murkowski Will Run As Write-In.

I await the wingnut's traditional response that Riehl is the real feminist.

THE TEA PARTIES EXPLAINED SO CLEARLY THAT NO NORMAL PERSON WILL WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THEM. Sigh. Young James Poulos is again shaking fists against his corrupt, sex-having elders.

Having previously done his part for the groovy Puritan revolution by denouncing nude yoga, the whorishness of Miley Cyrus, sexual harassment litigation, and softcore pornography, he now explains that the tea parties will succeed because they, like Poulos, are anti-sex:

Indeed, anti-tea-party voices are already congealing around the narrative that the Tea Party is powered by these people -- that a vote for Tea is a vote for Crazy, and that any decent American freak or rube had better throw in with the liberal sex vote in the first case and follow union orders in the second.

There you have it, America: Poulos says you must choose! On the one hand, "The liberal sex vote" (and organized labor!) and on the other, Tea Party blueballs. The choice is clear!  If you ain't done havin' fun, you might pursue young Poulous' extra points:

Only a fool can deny the deep resonances between [Hunter S.] Thompson's Southwestern libertarianism and the Nick-Gillespie-chronicled Tea Party longing to restore America's honor while keeping America weird.

Holy shit: Hunter S. Thompson = the Tea Parties? Try to imagine the Good Doctor going among the living Ralph Steadman drawings that are the Tea People and finding anything in them but bad craziness, or hearing Gillespie's PR on their behalf and taking it seriously. I suppose Poulos has, and expects that with his prodding zombie Thompson would eventually clasp hands with Richard Nixon and join him in a celibate Valhalla. I won't say it's out of the question, but I have to ask: Where, in this day and age, would you get drugs good enough to convince him?

LET'S DO IT AGAIN. Remember last year's savior of conservatism in New York's 23rd Congressional District, Doug Hoffman? How he was going to upend that RINO Dede Scozzafava by running on the Conservative Party line in a special election, and restore dignity etc? And how conservatives were so sure of victory that they nationalized the election, only to see Hoffman destroy both Scozzafava's and his own chances and elect the Democrat to a seat the Republicans had held since the 3rd Century B.C.?

Well, the regular election is upon us, and guess what:

With 93% of precincts reporting, businessman Matt Doheny has 53% to Hoffman's 47% and the Associated Press has projected Doheny as the winner. Doheney will now face Democratic Rep. Bill Owens, who narrowly defeated Hoffman in last year's special election...

However, Hoffman is still the nominee of the Conservative Party...

If I wasn't very well aware that they didn't work that way, I'd start to think Hoffman is a Democratic mole.

ONE THING YOU GOTTA SAY about Reason's Matt Welch and Steve Chapman -- not for them the hand-wringing of moderate Republicans over the loony new tea party candidates. As libertarians they understand the vital necessity of electing Republicans, no matter how crazy.

Chapman gets extra points (and maybe a nice bonus check from the Koch Brothers) for reminding us yet again that George W. Bush started it all, which is why the tea party movement dates back to 2004, or will as soon as they get that time machine built.

Wouldn't it be nice for Democrats if they could count on that kind of support from Ralph Nader?

SERVICE ADVISORY. This is just to notify you that I'm still doing the Tumblr thing. Tonight the Times gave me an opportunity to harsh on the Yankees and their douchebag fans, which some of you know is kind of a hobby with me.

That Yankees gear has become popular among crooks does not surprise me: as I observed on the occasion of the Bombers' most recent World Series victory, "as in the old days, the favored leisurewear of the city's mouth-breathers, subways gropers, and bump-and-runners will become a Yankees jersey." I'm not clairvoyant. I just used to live with these people.

UPDATE. Actually, when Kander and Ebb do the song themselves, I kinda dig it.

A GOOD EXAMPLE OF THE TEA PARTY'S LIBERTARIAN, POPULIST IDEALS. Last night's other nut, GOP New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, isn't getting as much coverage as Christine O'Donnell, which is unfair -- he's at least as crazy as she is, as his recent interview with Rick Sanchez at CNN shows:

SANCHEZ: How do you feel -- what is your position on abortion?

PALADINO: No.

SANCHEZ: Should a woman have a right to have an abortion if she's -- if she's been raped?

PALADINO: No.

SANCHEZ: She should not? She should have to have the baby?

PALADINO: And the baby can be adopted, yes.

SANCHEZ: What if it's -- what if it's a case of incest?

PALADINO: The baby can be adopted, yes.

Also, Mr. Limited Government wants to use eminent domain to stop the Burlington Coat Factory mosque. And he made this extraordinary statement:

I'm not -- I'm not a person looking for money. I have no political ambitions whatsoever. I don't seek power.

This is pretty much the polar opposite of the truth -- first, because he's fucking running for Governor. Also, his whole life has been a hunt for money and power -- as Joshua Holland points out, he's what the Buffalo News calls "the state government’s biggest landlord in Western New York, holding half of the 52 leases the state has taken out on offices in Erie and Niagara counties," with yearly rent receipts over $5 million-- swollen by humongous tax breaks he has received from the tyrannical, business-strangling state.

Holland also points out that Paladino uses the same pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric favored by the rest of the Tea Party guys, and specifically mentions the "ruling class" that was a big talking point among rightwingers a short while ago -- even though if anyone in America qualifies as ruling-class, it's Paladino.

Maybe he's not getting the media play because he's expected to lose badly in November. Or maybe he's been kept out of the spotlight because the insanely racist emails he got caught sending around don't make him the best poster boy for the tea people. In any case it's too bad, because the wealthy landlord who portrays himself as a tribune of the people -- whose interests he says he will support against those of the folks who've been making him rich for years -- is as perfect a symbol of the whole bullshit tea party movement as you'll ever see.

He puts me in mind of Tom Golisano, the perennial self-financed gubernatorial candidate who tried to manipulate New York's 2008 elections the old-fashioned way, with massive contributions -- and, when they didn't work out to his liking, backed Pedro Espada's coup in the state senate. He also announced he was leaving the state. Poor Golisano -- absurd as he is, he might have had a chance if he'd only hung in long enough to get with the tea party and let them portray him to the punters as Tom Joad.

THE NEW NORMAL. You'd think that as a connoisseur of right-wing comedy I'd be delighted with last night's GOP primary results. And in a way I am. Christine O'Donnell could be the most fun Republican quote machine since Michele Bachmann. And the racist lunacy of Carl Paladino should make for an entertaining six weeks in New York, especially with sad sack Rick Lazio contending on the Conservative Party line.

However, I'm not just a comedian; I'm also a citizen. And so I have an auspicious and a drooping eye because, along with the promise of lulz, I get an unpleasant feeling of deja vu.

Atrios says that with the ascent of the nutbags, the new Party leadership is Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh. That's true as far as it goes, but leaves out that at least one of these worthies has already held the Chair. National Review was calling Limbaugh "The Leader of the Opposition" back in 1993. They meant that the talk radio phenom was supposed to provide the propaganda fodder for the GOP comeback. (Talk radio, for all you kids out there, filled in the 90s the what's-happening role now filled by the internet.)

Limbaugh riled the troops, and the benefit went to that other revolutionary leader, Newt Gingrich, with his Alvin Toffler and his blessed Contract with America. When Gingrich and his Now People took over the House, there was much mooing over the new era in conservative politics this allegedly presaged.

At Reason Virginia Postrel gushed over the new Philosopher-Speaker. The sheeple resented him, said Postrel, for his "fascination with big ideas," his Progress & Freedom Foundation that "attempted to expand Washington's mind" (i.e., provide yet another make-work project for wingnuts funded by corporations) and other such innovations. Why did they disdain this groovy revolution? Because

it threatens the controllers of convention because it says they, and even Gingrich, aren't especially important. It declares that the most significant people, events, ideas, and innovations are outside Washington, outside government, outside convention. It dares to suggest that society changes first and government (and media) must adapt...

In other words, Rush and Newt were leading the Tea Party of 20 years ago, the New Thing that was going to change politics.

We all saw (and students of human nature foresaw) how that worked out: Gingrich led a pack of con men who fattened their districts and themselves at the expense of their allegedly sacred public trust -- even copping out on the self-imposed term limits that were the big come-on in their Contact with the voters. The whole thing was a fraud top to bottom.

Now we have another New Thing, also said to be revolutionary, also right-wing. Only instead of being driven by the Power of Talk Radio it is driven by the magic of the internet. It's also supposed to be leaderless and "crowd-sourced," as is asserted in the latest guff on the subject, disappointingly written by Jonathan Rauch.

Rauch tells us that the tea party is "a coordinated network, not a hierarchy" -- which he knows because organizers from the Tea Party Patriots ("a 501(c)(4) nonprofit group") told him. (Rauch doesn't even mention Dick Armey's TP front, FreedomWorks, in the article; maybe he promised TPP an exclusive.)

The real oddity, though, is Rauch's refusal to acknowledge that the tea parties are a conservative movement. For the most part, he swallows the organizers' line that "the real point is to change the country's political culture, bending it back toward the self-reliant, liberty-guarding instincts of the Founders' era," and only gets around to mentioning near the end that the tea parties have a "right-wing, or at least libertarian, ideology."

This comports with the tea partiers' own propaganda: Our new futurist patriots now don't even admit they're conservative, even though their platforms are without exception extremely conservative, and they are backed almost exclusively by conservative activists and media outlets.

You can see the strategy here: Just a few years ago, the Republicans self-evidently destroyed the economy, which loosened their grip on the electorate. The smarter conservatives knew their best hope was to portray the Democratic rescue remedy as dangerously alien -- black socialist fascist etc. But to complete the trick, they also had to pretend that they were not who they had been back when America fell out of love with them.

Thus their candidates' advance men tell the world that they are beyond left and right, and stand merely for Freedom, which as Thomas Jefferson knew means no capital gains tax or teaching evolution.

Maybe in future iterations these candidates will refuse to even acknowledge they're actually running for office. They'll ask reporters why they're following them around; do their speaking engagements with their backs to the audience and, when people applaud, look around as if confused; finally, they'll walk into their election-night victory celebrations as if they're surprise parties, and announce, "Well, as long as I'm 'elected,' as everyone keeps telling me, I guess I'll do away with Social Security and Roe v. Wade."

But here we are onto science fiction: It won't be proper satire for another year or two. And by then it will be too late.

A CHILDLIKE FAITH. Apparently orders for new, improved Obama insults have gone out to the talkshops of the right. In the blog mills, where they churn out the rough stuff, they call the President insane. In the journalism plants, where they water the stuff down a bit for mass consumption, they promote softer-sounding diagnoses of Obama's alleged dysfunction, such as Dinesh D'Souza's and Newt Gingrich's contention that Obama is playing out the anti-colonialism of the father he barely knew, Dorothy Rabinowitz's that Obama is an "alien," etc.

In the fudge factory known as National Review, Kathryn J. Lopez churns out the pablum version. It begins with the sort of belly-flop that first made her NR bosses say, "Make her an editor if it'll just keep her from writing":

If Carly Simon were a conservative, she might be writing “You’re so vain, you probably think this White House is beneath you,” to accompany the next big tea-party rally.

Thereafter she tells us that everything Obama has done has been a failure and all the Democrats hate him for it. Example:

He made a lot of Democrats fall on their swords for a health-care plan that could conceivably be dismantled before it’s even remotely fully implemented.

Similarly, he keeps showing up at work and signing bills even though God could strike him dead at any moment.

Stop there, K-Lo, someone should have told her -- it's not too late to be merely rather than spectacularly incoherent. But no, she had to come up with philosophi-mological explanations like the former Speaker and all the other cool kids did. Here's her first:

Some of what Barack Obama does can be attributed to a fondness for socialism.

Well, here at least she's using understatement, because all conservatives know Obama isn't just fond of socialism, he likes to kiss and hug it. Maybe Jonah Goldberg saw this over her shoulder and laughed, thus fatally encouraging her, and after she brushed the Cheeto crumbs from her jacket K-Lo wrote this:

The answer for all the analysts may be just a bad old-fashioned vainglory, one that the man just can’t keep in check. Thus the snippy Slurpee comments, about Republicans standing on the sidelines (drinking them). Besides the issues of truth — House GOP leader John Boehner has been making concrete bipartisan proposals, so he can’t legitimately be attacked for standing on the sidelines — more Americans today could probably relate to 7-Eleven than to Martha’s Vineyard.

Obama's snotty comments (making them) about Slurpees (disdaining them) shows reg'lar Americans he'd rather be in Foofytown drinking fancy drinks (umbrellas in them) than chowing down on an Arby's Chicken Cordon Bleu Sandwich by a dirty overpass and telling Mooslims to go to hell.

In addition to his godless attacks on sugared slush, Obama proves his hubris by acting as if his Presidential victory means something -- "It’s as if he won American Idol fair and square and he’s going to do with the win what he will, make of his title what he will." Whereas K-Lo knows he only won it because he's pretty and has a nice voice, not like George W. Bush, who earned his victory on Jeopardy! after long nights of hard study.

In short, Lopez' entry is less like the baroque conspiracy theories now fashionable, and more like the first injured wingnut peeps heard after it sunk in that the hated blackamoor had won: That he's snobby and he isn't all that. It's a time trip back to when they were all snarling about "The One" and the Obama Dear Leader Song, and dreaming about how he'll get his comeuppance after the Prom.

Well, I'll say this for it -- it has the advantage of simplicity. If I am sometimes moved to pity for K-Lo because even he own colleagues look down on her, I can also see a benefit to being so incurious and Jesus-addled -- she doesn't need fancy theology to know that her redeemer (John Boehner) liveth.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightbloggers' 9/11 observances. The emphasis this year seemed to be on how Muslims, when they are not erecting Victory Mosques, are trying to kill us all. Don't worry, non-Muslim Americans who didn't spend the weekend watching footage of people jumping out of the World Trade Center also came in for abuse. But the main culprit was "Islam" -- by which they perhaps meant all Muslims except the ones they knew personally and Muhammed Ali, though they didn't say so. Maybe by this point they're so accustomed to using coded language, they think everyone understands it.

HONKY CHATEAU. No idea why, but #racialdraft -- a reference to a great bit from the Chapelle Show -- is trending on Twitter. And it's bringing some nice gags, of the sort made by people who are comfortable with one another:

Naceesha #racialdraft whitney houston fer amy winehouse < #cokeheads

coachdorian #racialdraft Churchs for Chickfila<< those Moormen's damn near have a chicken monopoly

AyoShaNielle #RacialDraft, we'd gladly give up 50 Tyson for a klondike bar.

E_zDoesit #RacialDraft Black people just traded the head of BET for Lindsey Lohan's dad & a shot of Hennessy

I'm loving it, but I ask you: Don't tell our conservative friends. 'Cause all we need to spoil the joke for everyone is for the How-Come-They-Can-Say-Nigger-And-We-Can't types like Ann Althouse to start telling us who the real racists are -- or even worse, trying to joke along. (Try to imagine, say, Rich Lowry [pictured] going, "Yes, heh, the black community trades in Barack Obama and Al Sharpton for a real leader like Sarah Palin, and the punchline is democracy! Do you people of color not see the irony?")

WILL 9/11 NEVER END? Even here (clap clap clap clap) deep in the heart of Texas:

Texas Engineering Extension Services Urban Search and Rescue employees Joe Easterling (left) and Matthew Winn unload a beam of the World Trade Center Friday at Kyle Field. The beam will be positioned in the Zone before the Texas A&M football game against Louisiana Tech at 6:05 p.m. Saturday.

Well, the Aggies won, so I guess God still blesses America.

How weird, to be down here for 9/11 instead of back home telling the rubes to lay off. But then, who's a rube anymore? I understand the folks back home have caught a touch of stupid since I left. I may have to go back and regulate.

Oh well, happy waning moments of 9/11. Now, on to 9/12. Look, people, as driven as I am to talk sense to you by my catecholamine surges and the Voice of God, there may come a time when I'm forced to decide that it's just not worth the bother.

THE BARREL HAS NO BOTTOM, PART 9/11. Oh Jesus. Newt Gingrich (via National Review, condensed by Soup:

What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predicative model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.

I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true. In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve. He was authentically dishonest.

[Obama] is in the great tradition of Edison, Ford, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates — he saw his opportunity and he took it. The American people may take it back, in which case I may or may not be the recipient of that, but I have zero doubt that the American people will take it back. Unlike Ford, the Wright Brothers, et cetera, this guy’s invention did not work.

I think Obama gets up every morning with a worldview that is fundamentally wrong about reality. If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane.

There are two possible explanations:

1.) Gingrich was drunk, or on some drug.

2.) Gingrich is very well aware that he is widely despised by the extremists who have taken over the GOP, and has been waiting for the right moment to redeem himself in their eyes by saying a bunch of crazy shit about Obama of the sort that they say every day. He knows they're stupid enough to go for it, particularly if he sticks in a signifier like "Alinsky," to which these nuts respond like Cleveland audiences respond to a rock star yelling "Cleveland."

Maybe both of these explanations are right; though I doubt his gorge rises easily, even a hardened player like Gingrich may not be completely at ease with with the Gathering of the Juggalos that is the current GOP, and his use of "factually insane" may indicate that he was, with the aid of spirituous beverages or weed, reaching for whatever concert metaphor he could remember that might be appropriate to such a crowd, and finally settled on Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Membrane."

(Also, his "I may or may not be the recipient of that" suggests that he had to be high.)

Unquestionably Gingrich has upped the ante for all the squares at the top. Now Mitt Romney must appear at some state fair on a makeshift stage, holding two cylinders, one marked FASCISM and one marked COMMUNISM, and ram them suddenly together, whereupon in a puff of smoke an effigy of Obama will appear and be set upon by local yahoos bearing sticks who will break him open to get at the candy and prizes inside. (It'll be much easier for Tom Tancredo, who will just have to tell his crew that Obama is a goldurn Messican.)

UPDATE. Commenters remind me that Gingrich was riffing off an impenetrably awful article by incomprehensibly employed Dinesh D'Souza, who blames Obama's social-ma-listic policies on the old Ooga Booga ("Luo tribesman" and all that). "It's really a great innovation in birtherism," says one Guest; "we can't claim the son of a bitch is Kenyan anymore . . . so we'll just say the dead father he never knew is actually running the country. It's so much crazier than birtherism I'm proud of D'Souza for having that kind of imagination." Well, I wouldn't go so far as to call it "imagination," though since de Quincey at least there has been argument as to whether hallucinations qualify.

WORST AMONG EQUALS. That Koran-burning guy seems to be pissing everybody off. Sane people of course have always found such provocations absurd. (If you are the sort to bring up Piss Christ as if it relates, I can only say that explaining the difference between art and propaganda is something your high-school English teachers should have done for you, but if you'll send me $200 I'll send you a study guide.)

But as you may have heard, even the rightwing nuts are not completely on board with it. Even the Sarah Palin Word Factory squeezed out some toleration talk for the occasion -- then, perhaps noticing that a lot of the commenters were mad because the SPWF was being nice to Mooslims, added this:

Update: Book burning is bad. But the Muslim cleric who is running for parliament in Afghanistan is calling for the murder of American children in response to scorched Korans, which is worse. Where is the media's focus?

The many fans of the Sarah Palin Word Factory can be distracted from anything -- Mooslim-hate, sexual climax, even the latest episode of "Wipeout" -- by the red flag that is the Lame Stream Media.

Most other conservative vendors are just as transparently insincere in their denunciation of Pastor Jones' stunt. Allahpundit is so confused by his own twisting logic trail that among the evil media he claims are trying to "buttress their pre-midterm 'Islamophobia' narrative" with the burning he includes... Fox News.

Many of these folks denounce the coverage itself as some sort of liberal plot -- never mind that it does the liberal cause no good; that just means it's a plot that didn't work! "Some crackpot dreamed up a stunt that the liberal media loved, and now they don't know how to get off the tiger," says Tom Maguire. NewsBusters even asked, "Did Media Negligently Create Koran Burning Controversy?" and wondered why said media would follow such a transparent put-up job, an "unknown Pastor - with a following smaller than what's normally in line at an In-n-Out restaurant drive-thru..."

To which I can only: I dunno. Why did the media follow the every garbled word of a highly unsuccessful Vice-Presidential candidate and resigned Governor who, were she not so heavily promoted by them, would have been laughed off the public stage, and help build her into the head of Goober Nation? (Especially considering that an actual former VPOTUS, who served both of his terms without resigning and then won most of the votes in a Presidential election, was treated by the same media as a buffoon?) Why did the media treat a handful of bumper stickers and T-shirt logos, and one billboard, as a groundswell of support for former President Bush, and an even smaller number of actual "Obama Joker" signs as evidence of an populist uprising? Why does the media promote rightwing non-entities with no record of accomplishment, and rightwing bloggers of no discernible talents, in the New York Times?

So how would the media know not to pay attention to the Koran-burning clown? He's every bit as deserving of the public's attention as most of our bigtime conservatives.

IT DOES DISTURB ME, BUT I RISE ABOVE IT -- I'M A PROFESSIONAL! The New York Times shows what an evil liberal propaganda machine it is by doing a feature on a heretofore unheralded rightwing documentarian, Ray Griggs. I can't fault the reporter too much, especially as his account includes this deathless example of the Hollywood conservative persecution complex:

Mr. Griggs suspects that a politically motivated makeup artist even tried to sabotage the movie by giving him a distinctly unflattering look.

The brethren agree that Griggs is persecuted ("As in the 'Dark Days of McCarthy', anyone even slightly right of center in Tinsel Town," etc). Maybe a spread in Vanity Fair will appease them!

What makes these people such godawful whiners?

TALKIN' 'BOUT THE YOUNG STYLE. I've lost touch with that nice young man James Poulos, so I went to see what he was up to with his snazzy new Ricochet thing. Answer: Complaining that gay marriage leads to polygamy. The proof: "TLC's new polygamy-loving show" Sister Wives.

You know, he's got a point. Have you ever seen Wife Swap? You've got a lot to answer for, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich!

Bonus points for the commenter who makes a case for arranged marriages and, when he gets high-fived for it, says, "Honestly, I'm surprised anyone agrees with me."

Elsewhere Poulos divines the real meaning of the "The Suitcase" episode of Mad Men:

In today's corporate world -- a world dominated by the emo-bureaucracy of Human Resources departments -- the relationship that Don and Peggy have forged would be repulsive, cruel, unprofessional, and impossible. Nothing about that intimate relationship, which the show has patiently shown since the outset to be deeply natural, could be officially recognized or even comprehended by the HR culture that has done its best to conquer corporate life. For HR officialdom, the human resources Don and Peggy found in one another -- and, I think, in themselves -- must not exist in the workplace.

Poulos is very accomplished for his age, but I wonder if he's ever had an actual job where he has to go to an office and be around people. Does he not know that salaried employees often work overtime, as Peggy did, because they feel they have to if they want to get ahead, and there's not a lot Human Resources can do about it?

And trust me, son: Co-workers go to bars together, yell at each other, and even snuggle on the couch (at the very least) to this day. What they don't do so much is get away with actually harassing co-workers, like so. For instance, if Harry told Danny "You're such a Jew" in the modern world, and they didn't have the kind of relationship where those things can slide, Harry might get in trouble for it. Yes, that's the horrible emo-bureacracy in which we're trapped -- a guy can't even be anti-Semitic anymore! No wonder America no longer makes great Glo-Coat commercials.

The difference is consent, a concept with which conservatives traditionally have some difficulty.

(I liked the episode okay, but I'm not overfond of Draper's new tendency to blubber.)

THE TRUE BELIEVERS. Libertarians are still fighting the Battle of Rand Paul. Over at Reason, Damon W. Root waves an article by Forbes' Richard Epstein, telling us that Jim Crow was too the fault of Big Gummint, as racism could not possibly exist in a truly free market. Epstein reads in a new book that even as late as the early 20th Century black folk had to be smuggled into the North from the South, and asserts:

Why the clandestine activities? Answer: because helping African-Americans leave the Old South was an illegal activity under state law.

No citation given -- which is weird, because this is big news to me. For one thing, how could any state prevent blacks from leaving "the Old South"? Would they let them relocate from Mississippi to Louisiana, but not to Missouri, or to parts of the South that were insufficiently Old?

Maybe Epstein is saving the explanation for a follow-up. Or maybe he means that many Southern African-Americans couldn't leave home because they owed their souls to the company store, via the widespread debt peonage system that kept many blacks shackled post-slavery -- in which case, no wonder he didn't explain it better. (Though maybe Nick Gillespie would have proposed that the poor sharecroppers could have been liberated by the opening of a Starbucks in their neighborhood.)

Maybe I'm so mistrustful of Epstein because of the way he also suggests that blacks may have been discouraged from moving by the machinations of local utility companies. This theory also exempts the free market from any racist activities, Epstein says, because "in 1915, all services were monopolistically supplied," so "the politics of exclusion thus dominates the economics of open competition." Again, no citations nor evidence of any kind are offered, but Epstein just knows that "it is likely that the full history of Jim Crow will show that control of public utilities fostered racial and economic discrimination in the Old South." This fellow I've never met sure asks me to take a lot on faith!

You really want to tell them, get over it -- Rand Paul finally decided to just pretend he didn't believe this horseshit, why can't you? No one will ever call you on it except liberals, and no one cares what they think. But they can't let it go -- they're obsessed. In their labs they diligently reconstruct the history of the civil rights movement as libertarian fanfic, so that future generations will know that segregation, lynching, and second-class citizenship were finally defeated by deregulation and the Austrian School, despite the meddling interference of Martin Luther King and other statists.

UPDATE. In comments, Fats Durston explains Epstein's confusion: "It wasn't a true Scotsm--er, market!"

CONSERVATIVES CRY: GENERAL BETRAY-US! General Petraeus, generally thought by conservatives to have superhuman powers and be buddies with Jesus, has disappointed his fans by suggesting that the planned burning of Korans by American nuts may be bad for our troops and the war effort over in Arabia; heart and minds and all that. To witless:

Shut the Fuck Up Pussypants Petraeus!... If we want to help our troops, we need to remove Obama and Petraeus from the battlefield and let our troops do their job—eliminate the enemy—the ragheads. Not fucking coddle and community organize them...

General Petraeus treasonous to freedom... Let it be known that in the name of freedom others may burn the Bible, build mosques on our sore spots but they cannot stomp on our freedoms... To imagine that we should give up freedoms in order to help an Islamic nation is beyond absurd. It is treason to the cause of freedom...

Etc. If you remember the "General Betray-us" ad, and the general rightwing hollering that only treasonous lie-berals would dare sully the reputation of America's warrior-prince, this is pretty goddamn funny.

A subtler kind of humor may be had from the agonies of the more bigtime rightbloggers, who are forced by Petraeus' attention to the subject to wrestle with their traditional logical fallacies. Power Line's John Hinderaker argues that because Petraeus is "probably the most respected person in the federal government" -- certainly compared to that Kenyan pretender who "leads" us! -- his comments might lead other General-worshipping Americans to believe that Koran-burning "would be regarded as giving aid and comfort to the enemy," and that would be awful. Hinderaker pretends that his concern is related to the First Amendment, but surely the numbskulls who read him know that only Liberal Fascists are capable of thus endangering the Constitution. (It doesn't help when, in his distress, he whips out one of the usual rightwing 1A talking points -- "the First Amendment only prohibits the establishment of a religion by government" -- leaving the rubes to wonder if he means that Petraeus has gone Mooslim.)

Clearly the real source of Hinderaker's disturbance is that someone he thought was on his team is throwing cold water on the Islamophobic hoopla Hinderaker and his comrades have been whooping up over the Almost Ground Zero Mosque. How can get they keep getting traction out of that when their own honkey heroes are putting on the kibosh?

In fact, at the end Hinderaker finds himself face to face with this dilemma, and not only blinks but squeezes his eyes shut, plugs his ears and goes la la la:

Finally, an interesting question: how is this controversy similar to, and different from, that over the Ground Zero Mosque? Both involve actions that private citizens have a right to take, but arguably shouldn't. It is a worthwhile comparison, but that is a post for another day.

I think the day Hinderaker actually explains why the mosque-builders' can-but-shouldn't calls for screaming outrage, and the Koran-burners' can-but-shouldn't calls for silence, is a long, long way off.

UPDATE. It's even worse for Uncle Jimbo of Blackfive, who also suddenly caught the tolerance bug.

In the same way that Mr. Bridge Builder has the right to build at Ground Zero these clowns have the right to burn Korans. They just shouldn't. Neither one of them. But the bottom line is we should recognize and uphold the right to the most offensive kinds of speech.

So when the yahoos were bellowing at that mosque, was Jimbo saying, no, let's recognize and uphold the Muslims' right to be offensive?

Just left the Ground Zero Mosque rally and it kicked ass. Several thousand patriots not about to stand idly by while a trophy to a terrorist act is built on sacred ground.

Also, he apparently thinks Live Bait is a "dive bar."

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP for Labor Day. Title says it all: "On Labor Day, Rightbloggers Denounce Labor Day, Unions, Minimum Wage, Etc."

No outtakes -- as with the hot dogs many of you will eat at today's picnics, everything went in but the squeal. No, wait -- it was mostly squeal. Or skree, as we say.

Try not to let the collapse of everything we hold dear spoil your day off. I myself will be on the job. This here's a right-to-work state.

ANNALS OF LIBERTARIANISM, CONT. Libertarian Nick Gillespie, who saw wonderful signs and portents in the Beck event last weekend ("[it's] about restoring a lost sense of America. The people here are somewhat inarticulate on what was lost, but they know they want to gain something back"), comes back for more. "While I think Beck is often massively confused in terms of basic facts," he tells us, "he is channeling a very strong tradition in American with regards to religion and the public square." As I said previously, that combo's gotta work out well.

To be fair, Gillespie isn't completely certain that the TeaBeckers (whom he also observed had a "huge amount of free-floating anxiety about everything" and "were pissed off that their individual actions did not seem to mean much," another winning combination) will be attracted to his free minds 'n' free markets philosophy. But just in case they come a-knockin', he's getting his populist cred in order.

The crowd reminded me of Wal-Mart (not being snarky!). I live part-time in small-town Ohio where the local Wal-Mart Super Center is a major third space.

I'll just let you savor that bit before we get to Gillespie's notes on his proletarian part-time neighbors' third space. Now, look out Tocqueville!

Over the past few years and contrary to its image as wholesome, the chain has gone serously goth. Check out the T-shirts you can buy there and virtually every other one has skulls and crosses on it. And if something doesn't have stylized chains and blood on it, then it's in Day-Glo colors. The crowd reflected that, with more piercings than I've seen at some rock shows, ZZ Top beards galore, a biker look on many men and women. A noticeable number of the crowd were even wearing inexpensive Faded Glory (Wal-Mart's housebrand) American flag T-shirts. Any number of commentators may have been appalled by the crowd, but check it and see: This is America.

Also, did you know that many of the rustics have taken up the radical couture of Ed Hardy? That's a sure sign freedom is in the house!

This country is going to shit, but at least it promises to be a fun ride.

UPDATE. In comments, yournamehere: "Next Gillespie will tell us of the right wing revival promised by the Gathering of the Juggalos."

SHORTER JONAH GOLDBERG. Barack Obama's socialism becomes clear as soon as you accept that liberalism is socialism. Also fascism! Fart.

[Goldberg gets extra fart points for asserting that liberals exhibit "a loud and growing antagonism to democracy per se," and offers in evidence... Thomas Friedman, whom we are told "speaks for many." Goldberg also asserts that during the health care debate, liberals "rallied around the notion that the American political system 'sucks,'" and offers in evidence... nothing. As we never tire of saying, this article is the stupidest thing ever written, and will remain so until Goldberg writes something else.]