FIGHTING THE LAST WAR.

Jan Brewer said no to Butch Crow and Rich Lowry is sad. After many paragraphs of "Gay? What gay? No mention of gay in this bill," Lowry finally gives it up and gets to the money shot:

The market has a ready solution for these couples: There are other bakers, photographers and florists. The wedding business is not exactly bristling with hostility to gay people. If one baker won’t make a cake for gay weddings, the baker across town can hang a shingle welcoming all couples for all types of weddings.

Which is how it works for other kinds of people, too: If someone says "we don't serve your kind here," you can always go somewhere else. What's the big deal? Look. it's their lunch counter; who are you to say you have a right to be served there?

These guys are often accused of not seeing the connection, but make no mistake, they see it, alright. That's why they're working so hard to convince people that the folks forced to offer equal service to homosexuals are the wronged parties here. This is the best chance they've had since 1964, and they hate to see it slipping away.

UPDATE. In comments -- which are as usual way better than the post -- chuckling points out the relevant statute, in which the U.S. proscribed on the ground of "race, color, religion, or national origin" what conservatives are hell-bent on sticking to gay people.

"It's unfortunate, I think," says chuckling, "that that argument is not front and center in the professional liberal counterattack against this recent spate of 'religious freedom' bills." Then it's up to us amateurs -- just like in the Bowery Boys movies! Actually there's a pretty pro effort at Think Progress by Ian Millhiser, reminding us that in addition to states' rights and freedom of association, the brethren have often cited God in favor of separate-but-oh-who-cares-if-it's-equal. That's why religious-liberties bills are suddenly all the rage throughout the neo-Confederate diaspora.

And in a brief cheeky post I can't get to all the tropes conservatives are using to disguise their efforts here -- that may be work for the weekend. One that comes up in comments is the whole "'but it won't make much practical difference!' card," as Daniel Björkman describes it. It's a common tactic -- just give us this little piece of your rights and we'll go away! -- and Kia is very eloquent on how it works:

It looks stupid until you realize that if you concede the point you have in effect let him decide the value, to you, of what he wants to take from you. He wants to deprive you of the protection of a principle, so he pretends there is no principle at issue. So while you and he are in the living room discussing hypotheticals like two seekers of truth who happen to disagree, his lawyers are throwing your possessions into the street.

FIRST TIME AS FARCE, SECOND TIME AS FARCE.

First Ole Perfesser Instapundit says Americans sitting on their asses is the equivalent of the Ukrainian uprising, and now we have Roger L. Simon:

After Ukraine, We Need an American Spring... 

We need some government, obviously, but at this point in American history, in order to save our nation, we need to get the state as much as possible out of our lives, to cut its functions with a meat cleaver to release our better impulses, to have the renewal of Spring.

I wonder whom Simon hopes to wave into action with his cleaver. Are there enough wingnut preppers to take down Obama and deliver our nation into the hands of the European Union? Probably not, so Simon is ready for outreach:

Those already convinced of our cause — small-government conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians — should put aside their squabbles for now, join together and seek to be as inclusive as possible.

With Nick Gillespie and that guy in the Ben Franklin get-up on board, how can the Boehner Orange Revolution fail?

UPDATE. Comments are very good. To Simon's ""The [American] people aren’t the problem. It’s the state," Chairman Pao responds, "Which is run by who or what? Loki? AD-45 Riot-Bots? Care Bears?" Nyet, comrade, the election was stolen, the people are with us and will rise at the signal of the meat cleaver! At Simon's Strange New Respect for libertarian convert/election loser Joe Trippi, Halloween_Jack muses, "Now if we can only pass Mark Penn off on them..." Shhhh don't tip 'em off!

THEY ALSO TAKE UP ALL THE GOOD SEATS AT THE PIANO BAR.

At National Review Quin Hillyer has a fairly classic "Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock" essay. There's plenty of laughs in it, including Hillyer's suggestion that gay people want only to be left alone "but the activists and media chorus won’t let them," and a climactic lament over the degraded culture as represented by Beyonce and Shirley Jones.  But here's the best part: Hillyer's denunciation of "figure-skating announcer Johnny Weir":

His antics are appalling. The problem is not that he’s homosexual; it’s that he advertises his sexuality to the extent that it makes him (his choice of makeup, jewelry, and extravagant dresses or furs) more of a story than the athletes he is supposed to cover.

Can't Hillyer enjoy his ice dancing without some flamboyant homosexual getting in the way? Next Olympics let's get Terry Bradshaw.

UPDATE: Quin dumbles down!

I think if I were a figure skater, I would want the focus to be on my athleticism.

Yeah, that's what keeps ice dancers up at night -- the thought that audiences will somehow get the impression that their punishing routines don't require athleticism, but are merely the icebound version of mincing, because the booth announcer doesn't resemble Dave Madden.

And if you’ve got somebody– I mean, who cares if he’s homosexual? The question is, by dressing as a woman and bringing that image of femininity to the sport, does that feed the image of it as somehow less than a fete of athleticism?

"Fête of athleticism" is how I'll think of ice dancing from now on. I wonder if he'd have the same problem with Martina Navratilova?

THE BATTLE OF SIT-ON-YOUR-ASS.

Ole Perfesser Instapundit's waving the stars and bars at USA Today under the title, "Americans rising up against government." The column is accompanied by a picture of someone poking a Gadsden flag out of a bunch of umbrellas -- maybe them folks under the umbrellas is all a-decked out like Ben Franklin and the Tea Party is back!

"America's ruling class has been experiencing more pushback than usual lately," the Perfesser commences. "It just might be a harbinger of things to come." How so, Perfesser? Three things:

• "First, in response to widespread protests last week, the Department of Homeland Security canceled plans to build a nationwide license plate database." Funny, I don't remember any such protests -- oh, the Perfesser means widespread  in the press and among "lawmakers and privacy advocates," not Ma and Pa Tricorn marching on Washington.

• The FCC's Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs, which was going to question newsroom personnel, went down because "the blowback was sufficient to stop it for now." Again, this was not achieved by a popular uprising, but by the press, with its paranoid conservative wing and normal-people wing united in defense of its own interests.

"Meanwhile, in Connecticut a massive new gun-registration scheme is also facing civil disobedience." Ah, now we're getting somewhere! Tell us about it, Perfesser:

• "As J.D. Tuccille reports: 'Three years ago, the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as 'assault weapons,' and 2 million plus high-capacity magazines. ... But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for 'assault weapon' registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.' This is more 'Irish Democracy,' passive resistance to government overreach..."

Really? Sounds to me like a bunch of people sitting on their rear ends. In fact, none of this "uprising" involves... anyone doing anything.

And yet here's how the Perfesser characterizes it:

Though people have taken to the streets from Egypt, to Ukraine, to Venezuela to Thailand, many have wondered whether Americans would ever resist the increasing encroachments on their freedom. I think they've begun.

Us and the guys at Tahrir Square and Maidan Nezalezhnosti! We just have different styles: Furriners do uprising by putting their bodies on the line in lethal mass demonstrations, whereas American patriots sit on their asses and wait for the heroism commendations to roll in.

The timeline of conservative derangement is long and complicated, but I think I can trace this particular strain of gibberish back to Human Achievement Hour, in which conservatives portrayed Americans who did not change their normal everyday energy-use patters as implicit supporters of their anti-environmentalist cause, and the Battle of Chick-Fil-A, in which conservatives showed their hatred of homosexuals (or love of freedom, whatever) by gorging on fast food and deputizing everyone they saw at the mall as co-conspirators. It's the perfect form of activism for a movement largely composed of agitated geriatrics, shut-ins, and people who think they're entitled to everything, including revolutionary status, without raising a sweat for it.

UPDATE. From commenter Fats Durston:

The Revolution Will Be Sitting In Front Of The Television
You will be able to stay home, brother.
You will be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will be able to lose yourself on Xanax and
skip out for beer during commercials, if you haven't DVR'd
Because the revolution will be sitting in front of the television.
The revolution will be sitting in front of the television
Brought to you by Xbox...

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the proposed minimum wage hike, and the way rightbloggers reacted to the CBO report on it. They could have kept their mouths shut about this very popular plan, in short, but the bait was too good. They think the possibility of half a million jobs lost is a good talking point against the raise, but they don't understand that they're the last people on earth anyone would trust on the matter; hell, they could be reading straight from the Holy Bible and no one would believe them -- which, come to think of it, is how they got in this predicament in the first place.

I keep hearing that some of the more adventuresome conservatives might go for a guaranteed income, but I'm old and remember when they were saying that about slavery reparations.

FINALLY, A JIM CROW THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH.

Conservatives finally have something to celebrate -- a wave of laws to deny public-accommodation relief to gays who've been discriminated against, so long as offending business remembers to cite the Lord or His equivalent. There's a bunch of it out there but National Review's Kevin D. Williamson will do:

Barry Goldwater, who set the great precedent for Arizonans’ shocking liberal sensibilities, had been an instrumental figure in the Phoenix desegregation effort but opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he believed that by expanding the federal mandate it would lead to cumbrous and byzantine federal micromanagement of social affairs, and about that much he has been proved correct. The concept of “public accommodation” has been so inflated that as a practical matter no private sphere exists outside the home when the question of discrimination arises. That situation does not inculcate mutual toleration and respect, but the opposite.

And that's why there's still racism -- because Big Gummint won't get out of the way and let businesses say, "Keep walking, nigger, we don't serve your kind."  (Or "faggot," whatever.)

It's like they don't want any more votes, isn't it?

THAT'S WHAT THE NEW BREED SAY.

Hey guys it's Nick Gillespie, the fighting libertarian priest who can talk to kids, spreading the good word about libertarian dreamboat Rand Paul:

He’s called for major, across-the-board cuts to federal spending, pushed back against the Great American War Machine, and punked the D.C. establishment’s love of drone attacks and secret surveillance in a kidney-busting, 13-hour filibuster that set Twitter afire like a Miley Cyrus twerkathon.

OK, forget what I said about being able to talk to kids. But Gillespie and his posse think Rand can, because he's down with their values:

“The younger generation is probably the most libertarian and sort of tolerant, and has more libertarian values, I'd say, than any generation in American history," [Joe] Trippi recently told my Reason colleague Todd Krainin. Paul and others like him are engaging issues – drone strikes, drug legalization - that terrify old-line establishmentarians but energize disaffected voters that might include everyone from Glenn Beck to Occupy Wall Streeters.

 Glenn Beck to Occupy Wall Streeters! Consider this about Paul:

• He had to be frog-marched back from asserting that the Civil Rights Act is anti-freedom, and followed up on this outrage with a transparently self-promotional speech at Howard University.
• Not that he's totally insensitive to African-American-related issues: He has compared food stamps to slavery. (Universal health care, too!) 
• He introduced in the Senate a "fetal personhood" bill to ban abortion (but, you know, reproductive rights just aren't a big libertarian issue).
• Currently Paul is shoring up his youth cred by raising an alarm about Bill Clinton's decades-old blowjob. 

So you tell me: Who's more likely to back Paul -- Glenn Beck or "Occupy Wall Streeters"?

For libertarians, selected social issues are the come-on, but what's really important is getting rid of the safety nets to create a neo-feudal future where moochers must sweat or starve.  Just because we occasionally share a platform with Paul doesn't mean we identify with what's currently called libertarianism but remains, like I've been saying all along, merely conservatism for people with status anxieties.

LAW OF THE JUNGLE.

Here's another innovation from conservatives. You know how fond they are of guns. I'm pretty soft on gun rights myself, and wouldn't mind beginning a new round of Second Amendment negotiations with the right of Black Panthers to march on the State Capitol with loaded weapons and seeing where it goes from there. Not far, I expect. Anyway, as it happens the latest big gun news has been the Michael Dunn case (angry nut shoots black kid to death for loud music) which has made some folks nervous about firearms. In response comes National Review's David French to defend shootin' ahrns, but with a twist:

The protected class has a different view. The protected class is a dependent class — not economically dependent of course, but dependent on the state in perhaps a more fundamental way (for their very lives) – and like members of other dependent classes, they are terrified of flaws in the state’s protective apparatus. Walled off from gun culture, they read the occasional, aberrant story of (legal) gun-owner stupidity or recklessness and cower in fear of a nonexistent threat.

That's a new one on me: people who don't go around packing are a "protected class" -- that is, they rely for protection on police and armed forces. Apparently French considers such forces a socialist aberration like welfare, and those who rely on them yet another species of moocher. In his ideal world I suppose such things would be privatized, as they were in the days before that dark statist chapter in world history called Civilization.

These people bitch when some gay people want to make them bake their wedding cake, yet when they win a few gun rights court cases their instinct is to try and turn society into some neo-feudal hellscape.

YOU'RE GONNA TAKE A WALK IN THE RAIN AND YOU'RE GONNA GET WET -- I PREDICT!

Heritage apparatchik Mike Gonzalez has a long yap at The Federalist about how New Media will lead to conservative triumph, hooray. I don't know whether it's the billionth iteration of that story I've seen, or the ka-billionth; but it does distinguish itself by offering what I take as a hint of the next Conservative Victimization Theme:

Gonzalez notes a Brookings paper suggesting "digital firms should be encouraged to add criteria to their search engines that highlight information quality as opposed to mere popularity" -- that is, "high-quality coverage or providing diverse points of view." Dream on, dorks! But though a "Google official" (the one assigned to angry nuts, one imagines) assures Gonzalez they're not planning to do anything like that -- cat videos forever! -- Gonzalez seems unconvinced, and lays out an ominous scenario:

It would be dangerous if Google, Facebook or the other major players were to follow [Brookings'] advice, or if they’re already giving undue weight to liberal opinion... Both Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt are well-known liberals who support President Obama’s key policy initiatives. If they were to let their political proclivities dictate what’s promoted on their platforms we could start slipping back the age of Uncle Walter.

In Soviet Obamaland, cat videos you!

Now, other conservatives have asked similarly paranoid questions before -- for example, "Does Google Filter Out Controversial Conservatives From Search Suggestions?" ("Here's a video put together by my brother Tim Carney demonstrating the Google Suggest anti-Buchanan phenomenon. Full disclosure: I worked for Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign in 1996.") But as The Federalist is full of hungry outcast wingnuts looking to make a big splash, I predict that the next time a story conservatives think should be a big deal fails to become one -- like the 26th or 27th rerun of #Benghazi -- you'll see this idea hauled out. Because the failure of the American People to adopt their current top storylines -- for example, that Barack Obama is a dictator -- needs a better excuse than plain ol' media bias anymore. And "because our ideas are batshit crazy" won't do!

(Title inspiration here.)

UPDATE. "So," says JennOfArk in comments, "what they want is a Fairness Doctrine for internet search engines?" Now, now. I bet these guys would really get pissed if someone tried to tinker with pop-up ads for Goldline.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...sort of a survey of modern trends in rightblogger imputations of tyranny to the Obama Administration, and how it's kind of become a mainstream conservative POV. I don't remember Clinton getting this kind of treatment, but maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention at that time; wasn't "criminal hillbilly" their schtick back then?  I suppose now, with nuts like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz representing the future of the Grand Old Party, it was inevitable that the language as well as the thinking would deteriorate to Bircher-pamphlet levels.

I just hope I haven't done too good a job of familiarizing the public with this stuff -- I'd hate to think I was normalizing it sufficiently that the citizens might no longer gave these guys the Springtime for Hitler look. You know, "seen too oft, familiar with her face" etc. Wouldn't that be a dramatic irony!

UPDATE. In comments, D. Johnson takes a trip down memory lane:

I remember the furor over Bush's executive orders. After reading dozens of blog posts on the topic, I became convinced that it was even worse than I thought. It was the start of a dictatorship, I reckoned; the administration would either declare martial law and suspend elections, or simply refuse to step down after the elections took place... 

I was fifteen years old at the time. What's their excuse?

Yeah, I only called Bush a fascist to be funny, but I was an old man even then. Christopher Hazell skunks the picnic by bringing up the droning: "Obama really gets a bum rap. I mean, you use your illegally massive secret surveillance network to track down and kill your own citizens without trial, and all of the sudden people start calling you a 'tyrant'!" Fair enough, I'm against that too, and will endorse actions against it even by transparently duplicitous conservatives. But I notice we hear fewer accusations of Obamatyranny over that these days than we do over fiddles with Obamacare and such like. Why do you suppose that is? Maybe it's close enough to 2016 that they're imagining their own asses in the CiC's seat.

UPDATE 2. Also in comments, Aimai, regarding Clinton: "Clinton the drug runner? The clinton hit list? Hillary accused of murdering her lover vince foster to cover up the fact she was a lesbian?" Ahhh yess, early innings in the right's attempt to capture the "have you ever really looked at a dollar bill, man?" market. There's a whole generation of wingnuts who think they learned "skepticism" from the Mena airport.

UPDATE 3. As usual, apposite posts turn up after my column is published. Today's Deroy Murdock propaganda job-o-work contains several ObamaHitlerisms such as "Obama now rules by decree," as well as a very Breitbartian complaint against Obama's executive orders: "Obama’s predecessors have signed executive orders and, more or less, left it at that. But Obama pounds his chest as he does so." If only Murdock had footage of this!

My favorite part, though, has nothing to do with ObamaHitler:

Also, Earth’s sole superpower is sagging where it should be No. 1. America has slouched to No. 12 on the 2014 Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom.

That's like saying America has regrettably fallen on the NAMBLA index of Places with Cute, Friendly, Unattended Kids.

LOVELESS.

Ever notice that while nearly every publication in the Western World sees Valentine's Day as a chance to indulge is some harmless romanticism, wingnuts take it as an opportunity to tell you love's just a scam and you should just get down to the miserable business of breeding?  Get a load of the cold open on Susan Patton's V-Day downer at the Wall Street Journal :

Another Valentine's Day. Another night spent ordering in sushi for one and mooning over "Downton Abbey" reruns. Smarten up, ladies. Despite all of the focus on professional advancement, for most of you the cornerstone of your future happiness will be the man you marry...

Apparently Patton is afraid some of her female readers (I know but look, anything's possible) have no mothers to call and tell them if they want ever to get hitched they better forget this "love" horseshit:

An extraordinary education is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But if you are a young woman who has had that blessing, the task of finding a life partner who shares your intellectual curiosity and potential for success is difficult. Those men who are as well-educated as you are often interested in younger, less challenging women.

So does Patton wants schoolly ladiez to date down? That'd be too easy:

Could you marry a man who isn't your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can't keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky, you won't find that glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing...

You're probably beginning to catch on, from this oooh look at you with your stupid "education" you dateless hag schtick that Patton isn't here so much to help as to hector.

So what's a smart girl to do? Start looking early and stop wasting time dating men who aren't good for you: bad boys, crazy guys and married men. College is the best place to look for your mate...

Because by the time he sobers up it'll be too late. Also, Patton nags her lady readers that "men won't buy the cow if the milk is free," which I assume means you shouldn't indulge his lacto-porn urges till he puts a ring on it.

Not all women want marriage or motherhood, but if you do, you have to start listening to your gut and avoid falling for the P.C. feminist line that has misled so many young women for years.

Yeah, happy Valentines to you too, Miss Manners. Next, Matt K. Lewis at The Week --

Valentine's Day somehow manages to turn voluntary acts of kindness and warmth into perfunctory gestures, and romantic candlelight dinners into onerous burdens — all in the name of "love" (read: commercialism).

Lewis must have sensed that his readers might at this point mistake his POV as anti-capitalist and write stern letters to the editor, so he goes for sure-fire conservative signaling devices -- first, whining about Our Degraded Culture:

Just as Valentine's Day seems utterly harmless, much of the "wholesome" music we grew up listening to fostered this pernicious worldview. 

The Righteous Brothers, for example, sang: "Without you baby, what good am I?"

 Then, C.S. Lewis and Jesus! Finally, he tells us,

And if you do marry, forget about all that love at first sight nonsense. Find someone you'd be willing to go into battle with — or, at least, go into business with. That's not romantic, but it's wise.

Celebrate your exclusive rights tender with some coffee and donuts in the break room and then back to work! Does anything about Valentines Day bring joy or at least non-misery to these people? Well...

Obama's Valentine's Day gift to himself; dinner with royalty without Michelle

...no, actually. Nothing does. It's like even the specter of normal positive human feelings either gives them a sad or fills them with rage. I like to think of them as human beings, but I'm beginning to believe with Charlie Pierce that they are in fact the Mole People.

HOW JONAH GOLDBERG FILLS THE IDLE HOURS BETWEEN 9 A.M. AND 5 P.M.

Repeated verbatim:

TMI
By Jonah Goldberg

I have no problem with a gay man playing in the NFL. I have no problem with Michael Sam coming out of the closet. Good for him if that makes him happy. I even understand why it’s considered such a big deal, even if I suspect there’s more public relations spin at work here than an eager media will acknowledge. But I still can’t bring myself to care all that much. I certainly didn’t need to know that Sam told his father he was gay via text message. Nor did I need to know that his father helped one of his other sons lose his virginity in Mexico. Why is this any of our business?

I am tempted to call it a perfect Goldberg post -- it has several classic attributes, including the breathless eight-year-old-explaining-a-broken-cookie-jar tone,  a piss-dance between two contradictory points of view (I guess it's newsworthy, also I guess it's non-news planted by the gayist media), and a lengthy profession of disinterest in which you can almost hear his rising squeal. That it lacks a request that readers do his work for him should not be counted against it, because Goldberg's recent work shows absolutely no need for even second-hand research.

I guess we can just give it the traditional rating.

WE REGRET THE ERROR.

Jonah Goldberg:

I haven’t read the whole New York Times profile of Sarah Palin... in part because I have some more pressing things on my calendar (clean out the drier lint, stare vacantly into space) and in part because I resent the transparent effort to make Sarah Palin into an intriguing or compelling personality. It’s all so manufactured, like they have a checklist she’s got to work through before she can be one of Barbara Walters’ “Most Fascinating People,” despite losing an election. I give it 50-50 she has a daytime syndicated talk show by the end of the decade.

Oops, sorry, I have misquoted Goldberg here -- please substitute "Wendy Davis" for "Sarah Palin" in every instance, and add "farrrrrrt" randomly throughout the passage.

UPDATE. The whole NRO Corner is especially nuts today. There's another Goldberg essay, about some book he hasn't read, that is literally incomprehensible. Can one of you tell me what that rap about "America, or liberals, or Jews — or all three!" is about?  Also, here's increasingly mad torture enthusiast Andrew C. McCarthy's money shot for the day:

So now Obama, like a standard-issue leftist dictator, is complementing lawlessness with socialist irrationality.

For embarrassing-to-conservatives-in-retrospect-and-to-everyone-else-right-now, this is almost at an "Is Shirley Temple a Communist?" level. Also, assuming Obama evades arrest by the Freedom Commandos and continues to serve as President without actually declaring martial law, where can McCarthy go rhetorically from here? "Obama, like his dark lord Satan...." "In emulation of his best friend and spiritual twin Adolph Hitler..." "Commissar Obama... " Whoa, actually the National Review editorial board already got there in 2008. Maybe I only imagined they weren't always this bad.

UPDATE 2. Commenters, commenters, I'm only one man! I can't possibly address all the National Review crazitude (though if someone wants to pay me to do that, I'm all ears) but I do appreciate it being brought to my attention -- for example, Victor Davis Hanson's ode to Vladimir Putin, which coozledad encapsulates as "shirtless Putin is more honest than metrosexual golfer Obama," which is fair though it does miss some of the rhapsodic nuances of Hanson's prose; for example, Hanson finds "value" (Greek for "schwing," I guess) in Putin's "confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means," like how he kills dogs and does other lovable-dictator stuff, and though Hanson tee-hees that Putin is "what we should not be," his eyes say yes, we should! Balloon Juice captures it best: "Victor Davis Hanson channels his inner bottom."

Jack Fowler dishing out the institutional self-pity is also mentioned, and I must say his claim that Politico never "called" National Review for its story on them (Rich Lowry was interviewed by email) establishes new frontiers in hackdom. But I am grateful to him for bestowing on NR the slogan I shall associate with it henceforth: "a magazine that has lost money for 58 years."

UPDATE 3. Speaking of ObamaHitler, Bloomberg reports the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. has reversed a federal law that would have required tax preparers "pass a certification exam, pay annual fees and complete at least 15 hours of education courses annually." Here's how Charles C.W. Cooke plays it:

Court Slaps Down IRS Power Grab  

More often than not, conversations about the Obama administration’s executive overreach end up with apologists asking, petulantly, “well, what are you going to do about it anyway"...

I bet when his parents give him a hard time, Cooke mutters "Whatever you say, Hitler."

GOLDBERG GETS RESULTS! (OR: THE WAR ON POETRY!)

My throwaway statement in the update to yesterday's post seems prescient now. To recap: In 2010 Nancy Pelosi said something about the Affordable Care Act: That citizens who'd been keeping jobs (first, second, or third) just so they could keep health insurance that went with it would, thanks to the ACA, have a chance to drop it and try to become "an artist or a photographer or a writer."

Pelosi also said Obamacare left citizens free to "start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk," but none of the brethren heard that -- their brains were too inflamed by visions of dirty bohemians spending their taxpayer dollars on Gauloises, Moleskins, and beret cleaner. Look up "Nancy Pelosi" and "musicians" on Google and mind the bullshit avalanche that tumbles forth.

But the recent CBO report concerning Obamacare's effect on job-lock brought the Pelosi art attack back -- and Jonah Goldberg offered an improvement. "[Pelosi's] been mocked for years now," claimed Goldberg, "for her repeated claims that Obamacare is an entrepreneurial bill because it would let Americans quit their jobs to, among other things, 'write poetry.'" He then made a bunch of horrible jokes about it ("spending $1.2 trillion just so we could liberate the Job-Locked Poets!") and reiterated the riff in another column ("When Nancy Pelosi says that Obamacare is entrepreneurial because it will let people quit their jobs to become poets, you can see the campus utopianism coming through").

Other wingnut outlets carried the news that Obama fucked Pelosi to make poets, and I imagined David French's otherwise incomprehensible spasm about Wendy Sherman and poetry yesterday was an unconsciously sympathetic response to a gathering meme. Today in The Hill:

Democrats pushing poetry over jobs?

...Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), say that the law allows workers to alleviate themselves from “job-lock”... 

[Republican South Carolina Rep. Trey] Gowdy honed in on the remarks, saying they are part of a larger effort to smooth over flaws with the healthcare reform law and its rollout during an election year. 

“What the liberals and the Democrats want you to believe is, ‘Well, but you’ll have time to write poetry,’ ” Gowdy said. “Well, that’s great until you try and buy your grandkid a birthday present or you try and pay the heating bill.”

Made it up to Congress already! I expect some apparatchik will soon present an argument that poetry itself is anti-American. Some of it don't even rhyme!

UPDATE. AEI scholar Stan Veuger at The National Interest says this "pivot to leisure" is just spin to distract America from the Obamacare sharknado: "You declare employment 'job lock,'" he writes, "and claim that workers faced with massive new work disincentives" -- big, scary disincentives! -- "are 'choosing' to spend more time cooking, composing lyrical poetry, and becoming entrepreneurs, as Professor Jonathan Gruber of MIT, a prominent Obama advisor on these issues, did in the LA Times a few days ago." Hmm, now they're blaming the poetry on Gruber; I'd like to see a source for that.

At Forbes, Kyle Smith sneers that the CBO report proves "The Obama Administration Doesn't Care Whether You Work Or Not," and by caving in to people who would "leave the workforce willingly in order to 'pursue their dreams,'" Obama is abandoning them to this dark future:

...the psychic devastation and desolation that come with losing one’s connection to the economic networks that mean much to us — socially and even spiritually. Work doesn’t just give us a paycheck, it gives us meaning and purpose.

Think of losing the spiritually meaningful moments of chat about Game of Thrones with your cubicle neighbor! And if that doesn't scare you, think of what else you'll lose -- to poetry!

Each person who decides she’d rather translate ancient Babylonian poetry than hold an entry-level office job is foregoing not only the drab cubicle but also the corner office that might have been hers 25 years of diligence later.

Yes, Smith actually brings up job security to Forbes readers -- who know at least as well as everyone else that it hasn't existed for years. He might have offered the more realistic goal of holding a drab cubicle until the company is sold out from under you and you go to work for Walmart -- but at least then you'd be uncontaminated by poetry!

UPDATE 2. Charlie Pierce: "Trey Gowdy, who gets a base salary of $174,000, will work a total of 113 days in formal session this year, in which he will do very little. I happen to know several poets, and I can say with authority that every one of them works harder than does Trey Gowdy, that Philistine meathead, largely because most of them are working two or more jobs, none of which provide benefits."

UPDATE 3. Late in the day, but there is some fine versifying by world-be Obamacare welfare Fairie Queenes in comments. These range from limericks ("There once was a fellow named Gowdy...") to loftier parodies ("My intern goes after what my eyes cannot reach/With the twirl of my tongue I encompass cheetos and volumes of cheetos...").

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the CBO finding that, since Obamacare lets Americans quit jobs they no longer need for insurance, 2.3 million of them might do so, and the outrage this engenders among rightbloggers. Yes, freedom's just another word for -- actually, at this point, who knows?

UPDATE. Related to the brethren's highly negative reaction, noted in my column, to Nancy Pelosi's old quote about Obamacare's effect on musicians and writers -- which they elide to "poets" cuz poets iz faggy  -- National Review's David French, after raving about how liberals win all the Grammys, turns his inchoate rage on Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, in part because she's "a social worker and pro-abortion activist," which naturally leads him to this:

Ah well, if Iran gets a nuke, she can probably win a poetry award lamenting the fears of the children of Tel Aviv. Not that she’s written poetry, but EMILY’s List prepares one for anything.

In French's imagining, the evil of abortion leads naturally to poetry! I think French is mad all the time because, in schools across America, literary magazines and drama clubs are getting the respect he thinks rightfully belongs to bullies.

NEW REALITIES.

Remember when conservatives considered Costco as American as cheeseburgers and credit default swaps? Some, like Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, preferred Sam's Club, but I assume that was for onomatopoetic reasons -- the basic idea was, large stores selling large lots at large discounts was what excited the Common Man and that was what conservatism was all about. (Rick Santorum tried to split the difference in his last Witchfinder General campaign by calling his chosen people "Sam's Club and Costco folks.")

National Review writers certainly knew the metaphoric weight of Costco. Back in the old days, NROniks like Jennifer Graham sneered at a feminist who didn't want to have kids and wind up shopping at Costco; Shannen Coffin piled on, "Costco would have been Bloomingdales to us back" when she was potential abortion fodder. Carrie Lukas defended the chain against claims of gender discrimination by its female employees, Greg Pollowitz cheered its resistance to foofy electric cars, etc.

It was a valuable signifier. In 2004 Larry Kudlow protested John Kerry's NAFTA stance as "trade protectionism" that "undermines the living standards of the near 135 million Americans who shop at Wal-Mart, Kmart, Costco, Target, Home Depot, and Best Buy."

This schtick persisted into the early Obama era. In 2009 NR's Jim Powell added Costco to the honor roll of big companies "in Obama’s crosshairs" for high socialist taxation. Wingnut bottom feeders announced that Americans "are buying physical gold and silver in an attempt to shelter themselves when the U.S. dollar becomes worthless. Now retail giant Costco is getting in on the action by selling survival kits of dehydrated food in preparation for Obamageddon." Mitt and Ann Romney went shopping at Costco and gushed about all the stuff they'd bought and would keep in a shed till the election was over and they could quietly get rid of it.

But this week, National Review's Alec Torres headlines,

Costco: The Arugula of Chain Stores

Arugula -- the most dreaded of conservative curse-words! Their membership fees are apparently elitist: Costco, Torres has discovered, "is largely found in middle-class and affluent communities, where residents can afford to front $55 to $110 before purchasing a single item."

What happened? The answer's in Torres' subhed:

Obama's choice for shopping is great if you don't know any non-rich non-liberals

Since the President and others started pointing out that Costco pays its workers okay and still makes money, and wingnuts have had to devote precious propaganda resources to explaining why we can't let that kind of thing get out of hand, the company has apparently lost its cred with the community.

I look forward to the 2016 speeches when Republicans are instructed to refer to real Americans who only shop at dollar stores, Rent-a-Centers, and payday loan outfits.

UPDATE. Chris Walker from 2nd Vote -- the "revolutionary new app that keeps your spending aligned with your conservative values" -- writes, "2nd Vote classifies Costco as 'Passively Liberal' but, after taking a second look at Costco’s CEO activism, it is safe to say we will be updating their score and moving them into the 'Actively Liberal' category." Gasp! From the boards at Free Republic, though, it appears the brethren are already enlightened to Costco's econotreason; I assume they'll just shop there on the down-low.

LINE OF THE WEEK (SO FAR).

My favorite wingnut line of the week -- and possibly of the month or year, though I'm sure the competition will as always be fierce -- comes from Andrew Klavan, normally one of conservatism's comedy stylists but dead serious in a PJ Media column about, get this, how the right can win over gays and the straights who don't want to see gays boiled alive.

The essay starts with colloquy between two great conservative intellects, Roger L. Simon and Bryan Preston. Simon basically says that liberals use gay marriage "fairly or not, to paint the right as bigots" to the young people, and maybe conservatives should keep their rage over it on the QT and strictly hush-hush. Preston basically says aargh blargh, fags make Christians take pitchers of their so-called weddings, young people are stupid but will learn to hate gays with age, Sharpton has a "hot young thang," under Gay Hitler "the state will feel free to crush what’s left of Christian faith in America under its boot. Go ahead and scoff. It’s coming," etc. (He also calls himself a "libertarian-leaning social conservative," which hilariously conforms with what we know about libertarians.)

Klavan tries to split the difference:

I don’t think Catholic adoption agencies should have to cater to gay couples, and I certainly don’t think a religious photographer should be forced to photograph a gay wedding.

On the other hand:

Either sex is an expression of love that involves the whole person (not just his body parts) or it is a purely mechanical operation. If it is purely mechanical, then you’ll have to explain to me why one robotic sexual action is any more sinful than another. Penises don’t sin, after all; people do.

Believe it or not, the penis line is not my line of the week. It's this one, about how conservatives should talk nice about gays so they can get votes:

So often, the left wins debates by a flagrant and self-serving display of compassion.

There's something  beautiful about this, and applicable to many occasions. Liberals don't want the unemployed to starve? Well, what do you expect -- they're always flaunting  their compassion like a bunch of show-offs. Real Americans find it difficult to show empathy; not to say they don't have it, but they have to save it up for the next time someone makes fun of Sarah Palin.

UPDATE. Comments (a joy as always) contain more than a few references to the Piranha Brothers. "He used compassion," scripts Spaghetti Lee. "He knew all the tricks. Empathy, sympathy, love, brotherhood, caring..." Susan of Texas wonders how far up the chain this compassion racket goes: "let's look at Jesus, the flaming compassionista. Throwing his selfish unselfishness in people's faces..." I look forward to the day when conservatives bitch about The Religious Left like it was the Moral Majority, and start referring to Unitarians as "Yoonies."

STORY APPEAL.

I'm on a few mailing lists, so I got this thing from Eugene Delgaudio, "The Public Advocate of the United States," an office which I'm guessing is even less well-budgeted than New York City's Public Advocate. Delgaudio also has a more official position in Loudon Country, Virginia, but from what I read in the papers it may not last.

Dear Roy, 

President Obama claims you support homosexual "marriage."

Well, I get so many requests for testimonials, I just can't keep up.

He and his ultra-liberal media allies brag that you're demanding special job preferences for homosexuals and teaching so-called "alternative" lifestyles in school.

Is it true? What do you say? 

That is why I've prepared a nation-wide American Morality Survey.

The survey has questions like "Should decisions about morality and sexuality be taken away from parents, in order for radical teachers and counselors to promote the homosexual lifestyle in schools?" And it wants your email, presumably so someone can send you ads for gold and survival foods.

But the beauty part is the narrative portion of the pitch:

One stormy night, I drove to a mailshop hidden deep in a nearly deserted stand of warehouses. I'd heard something was up and wanted to see for myself. 

As I rounded the final turn, my eyes nearly popped. Tractor-trailers pulled up to loading docks, cars and vans everywhere and long-haired, earring-pierced men scurrying around running forklifts, inserters and huge printing presses. 

Trembling with worry, I went inside. It was worse than I ever imagined. 

Row after row of boxes bulging with pro-homosexual petitions lined the walls, stacked to the ceiling. 

(Issue with verisimilitude here -- wouldn't homosexuals pack boxes more neatly?)

My mind reeled as I realized hundreds, maybe thousands, more boxes were already loaded on the tractor-trailers. And still more petitions were flying off the press. 

Suddenly a dark-haired man screeched, “Delgaudio, what are you doing here?” Dozens of men began moving toward me. I'd been recognized.

Well, of course. He's the Public Advocate of the United States.

 As I retreated to my car, the man chortled, “This time, Delgaudio, we can't lose!”

Driving away, my eyes filled with tears as I realized he might be right. This time the Homosexual Lobby could win it all.

There's a lot about this gig that's depressing, but thanks to prose stylists like Delgaudio it is not without its compensations.

UPDATE. My commenters are as usual one up on me: smut clyde informs that Delgaudio's been telling this specific story since 2010 at least. But don't despair, Delgaudio's no one-trick pony -- TGuerrant finds him elsewhere warning that "the Homosexual Lobby hoards vast treasuries" and requesting donations to counteract their power; also, assuring suckers/patriots that the struggle against gays "has driven me on many lonely road trips, spending days and weeks at a time far from my loving family to face the hatred of rabid anti-Family, anti-Christian activists." There's a road movie I'd like to see! Too bad the title The Straight Story has already been taken.

Lots of smart-aleck remarks, too, e.g. Spaghetti Lee: "Oh no, not the gays! NOT THE GAYS! AAAAH! AAAAAGHGGHH! AHHHRRGGH!"

UPDATE 2. More comments: "Ok, that settles it," says JennOfArk. "If this deranged tool is making $150K per year with this kind of fantasy dreck, then there's no reason for me to put off writing my monster porn opus." Don't dream it, be it!

FREEDUMMIES.

In the latest attempt by wingnuts to make more of America as miserable as they are, some folks want to carve California into six separate states so at least a few of them will be Red/impoverished. (One of the new states would be called "Jefferson" because freedom.) This Washington Times puffer doesn't even try to conceal it:

Revenue from sales and property taxes also would be distributed unevenly among the six states. Jefferson and Central California have the lowest personal income taxes and the lowest sales and property tax bases, although Jefferson would become a net exporter of water. 

[Rich guy Tim] Draper said support for the six-state concept is highest in Central California and Jefferson because “the existing state is not working for them.” 

"Of course, we expect all six states to get richer because governments will be more in touch with their citizens,” Mr. Draper said... 

They may be smaller and poorer but they'll have responsive government, unlike those Silicon Valley statists. Folks'll naturally prefer their water-power computers to those powered by communism!

For [secessionist Mark] Baird, that’s the beauty of the six Californias proposal: bringing government closer to the people it represents. 

“When you ask people here about this, they tell you, ‘If I could live in a free state, I’d live with a few more potholes and some used equipment,’” said Mr. Baird. “We need representation. We’ll figure the rest of it out."

I assume Draper's got some land- and power-grab scheme in mind -- his home base, the Sovereign State of Silicon Valley, would become the richest in the country under this plan -- and that Baird, if he's not merely deluded, would try to use the threat of dehydration or deliberate flooding to end gay marriage in neighboring states in the name of the Lord, until a team of assassins financed by the Siliconians took him out and replaced him with a puppet regime. (Maybe by then Gary Sinise will be ready for a governorship.)

It makes sense, if you're of a cynical turn of mind, that as soon as Jerry Brown successfully un-fucked the state's finances after years of calamitous Republican rule -- and Californians decided they liked the change --  conservatives would try to flip the chessboard like this.

I'm put in mind of "Rule or Ruin," except with these guys it's always Rule and Ruin. Get a load of Human Rights Watch's report on the trend toward privatized, "offender-funded" probation services in some states -- the result of which is what anyone with a brain would expect: massive rip-offs and persecution of the poorest and most vulnerable citizens.

In Georgia, Thomas Barrett pled guilty to stealing a can of beer from a convenience store and was fined US$200. He was ultimately jailed for failing to pay over a thousand dollars in fees to his probation company, even though his entire income—money he earned by selling his own blood plasma—was less than what he was being charged in monthly probation fees...

Most courts do not even track and do not know how much their probation companies collect in fees from the probationers they assign to them. Companies treat those figures as a trade secret and refuse to publish them. Human Rights Watch estimates that in Georgia alone, probation companies take in at least $40 million in revenues from fees they charge to probationers

The report is mostly based on "interviews conducted with people in the states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi" -- three states where, you may be sure, the tax bases are low but the "freedom" is high, as evidenced by the innovative ways they've found to sell out their own people.

UPDATE. Good to see Andrew Cohen of The Atlantic is getting in on the privatized probation scam story. "The perils of private probation isn't a bigger national story, I reckon," writes Cohen, "because it does not impact the rich and powerful nearly as much as it impacts the poor and powerless." No shit.

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S NOT KRISTALLNACHT!

Did you know complaining about income disparities is kinda sorta anti-Semitic? Ruth R. Wisse explains at your Rich People Kristallnacht clearing house, the Wall Street Journal:

Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them? In a letter to this newspaper, the noted venture capitalist Tom Perkins called attention to certain parallels, as he saw them, between Nazi Germany's war against the Jews and American progressives' war on the "one percent." For comparing two such historically disparate societies, Mr. Perkins was promptly and heatedly denounced. 

But is there something to be said for his comparison—not of Germany and the United States, of course, but of the politics at work in the two situations? The place to begin is at the starting point: with the rise of anti-Semitism, modernity's most successful and least understood political movement.

Basically: The racist Wilhelm Marr was "originally a man of the left," and Karl Marx once used an unfortunate metaphor. This proves progressives are anti-Semitic, just as the Jamaican bobsled team proves that Caribbeans are natural winter athletes.

Also, today we have an "anti-Israel movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions," not because people (including plenty of Jews) are troubled by the treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, but because they all hate Jews and just needed a more exotic focus for their hatred now that Nazi rallies are unfashionable.

Wisse continues:

The ranks of those harping on "unfairly" high earners include figures in American political life at all levels who have been entrusted with the care of our open society; in channeling blame for today's deep-rooted and seemingly intractable problems toward the beneficiaries of that society's competitive freedoms, they are playing with fire...

...says the lady equating mainstream liberals with Hitler. Would it be anti-Semitic to tell her to go fuck herself?

UPDATE. Commenters catch the anti-Semitic bug! "Tl;dr, alt: If you don't have anything nice to say, you're Hitler," offers whetstone. Jeffrey_Kramer kicks it up a notch:

It turns out that anything can be equated with Hitler if you keep the association abstract enough. Flip through the dictionary and come up with a random word: I got scrum. So, "Is it not at the very heart of Nazism to join arms mindlessly in an attempt to crush the enemy into submission?" Flip again: crayon. "The opposing team's suggestion that children be given crayons is redolent of the Nazi love for gaudy propaganda which dazzled its followers with colorful phrases while bypassing the intellect"....

Etc. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard posits "Cristalnacht," because "now [the rich] can't drink their overpriced champagne in peace." Jay B recognizes that because he wants the 1% "taxed at a reasonable level and maybe several dozen of them in prison," he is "the Gregor Strasser of Liberal Fascism or something. We've already established that Roy is the Ezra Pound." Hmmph! I'll be Celine or nothing.