California, failed liberal hellhole.

Or, put another way, the largest state in the country -- with a budget surplus.

Scandalmania! is a big bust.

Keep right on screaming Benghazi, Republicans.

Obama’s job-approval ratings are pretty much where they have been for the past few months, before the controversies over Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Associated Press began dominating the news two weeks ago. The May 17-18 CNN/ORC poll pegs Obama’s job approval at 53 percent, up 2 points from early April. The Gallup Organization’s polling for the week of May 6-12 showed that 49 percent approve and 44 percent disapprove of the president. For the following week, May 13-19, the numbers were precisely the same. The three-night average ratings for May 20-22 were 50 approve, 44 disapprove. Obama’s numbers have been within the same range for months. His job-approval rating, according to the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, released May 21, is still hovering around the same place, at 51 percent.  

More troubling for the GOP should be the CNN poll in which only 35 percent of respondents said they view the Republican Party favorably and an incredible 59 percent said they view the party unfavorably. In CNN polling, dating back to 1992, neither party has had an unfavorable rating higher than 59 percent (the GOP hit 59 percent one other time). Democrats are hardly riding high—recording 52 percent favorable/43 percent unfavorable ratings—but they’re doing a heck of a lot better than Republicans in the public’s eyes.

Glibertarianism strikes again.

I'd love to see some serious environmental writer do a post on what good things might come from global warming. Surely there must be some.
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) May 21, 2013

Pwned.

I know that term has been stale for over a decade, but it really applies to this.

Blue Texan is now Blue New Yorker.

Blog went quiet again -- apologies -- because we moved. Or actually, I moved, and the family is coming up in a bit. So, as you might expect, it's been pretty crazy. Trying to figure out how to incorporate blogging into my new routine, and whether or not I'll continue writing under a pseudonym, since it no longer applies. Stay tuned.

Also, I have to say, the news cycle is just impossible to follow these days with the Benghazi! and IRS! craziness. And I think Tomasky is exactly right -- there's a good chance the GOP will fire up the impeachment machine again. Hell, I thought they'd do it over the debt ceiling.

Printed guns.

What freaks me out about the 3D-printed gun -- aside from the obvious people-amassing-arsenals-without-restrictions aspect -- is that the film In the Line of Fire saw this coming over two decades ago.

The invisible hand gives El Rushbo the finger.

Man, the free market's a bitch, ain't it?

Way of life.

Yes, as Pierce notes, some of them are better than others.

If your "way of life" involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, "learning to use and respect a gun" means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it's sitting in the corner of the parlor like it's a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way "normal" to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too. I do not have to understand these people any more, and it is way too early in the day to be drinking this much.

He was KIDDING.

Don't you people get it? It's a JOKE.

Man, everyone's so politically correct these days.

Comedy gold from Breitbart.

This sentence is awesome.

For whatever reason, after the Sandy Hook massacre, Scarborough decided to go all-in to advocate for  stronger gun control laws. 

Man, these people are stupid.

War crimes.

Might be best to avoid overseas travel, W. If you want to stay out of prison.

Black helicopters around every corner.

Mr. Nonpartisan Libertarian is impossible to distinguish from Glenn Beck or Alex Jones these days.

SO WHEN DEMOCRATS ARE PUSHING TO BAN PEOPLE ON THE “TERROR WATCH LIST” FROM BUYING GUNS, they’re really pushing to have a constitutional right blocked by your placement on a secret list put together by unaccountable bureaucrats with no due process. Just to be clear what they’re really talking about.

Meanwhile, let's hear again from Tony Scalia.

Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. 

Pretty clear, isn't it?

Republicans were the real champions of civil rights.

Kilgore, on Kevin Williamson's latest absurdity.

Williamson accuses Democrats of duping African-American voters in 1964 and afterwards into voting for them, presumably via all those federal benefits (including the right to eat in a restaurant alongside white folks) that Democrats used to imprison black folks on a new “plantation” of dependency. It’s an insulting argument, but hardly uncommon among conservatives (see Rand Paul’s recent “outreach” speeches at black colleges). But what Williamson doesn’t deal with is why all those southern racists who voted Democratic up to and in most cases beyond the New Deal moved en masse into the Republican column, for the first time ever, in 1964. At a time (prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965) when black voters were rare in Mississippi, Goldwater won 87% of the vote in that state. He won 69% in Alabama, where Johnson (the hero of segregationists according to Williamson) was not even allowed on the ballot. In general, Goldwater’s vote was directly correlated to the size and intensity of southern segregationist sentiment (and to black disenfranchisement), and within each state directly tracked the old Dixiecrat enclaves of 1948. 

So to buy Williamson’s hypothesis, you have to believe that not only were African-American voters universally duped (94% voted for Johnson), but so, too, were southern white racists. In other words, the vast majority of the voters most focused on civil rights fundamentally misunderstood what the two parties and their presidential candidates stood for on this issue—but Kevin Williamson sees through it all!

Voting against really popular stuff might actually hurt you.

Well, well, well.

Who knew there were so many bigots around?

Also.

Bigotry.

A helpful reminder that a great deal of what was driving the right on the Boston attack.

Swedish army.

I've read a lot about W.'s intellectual shortcomings, but somehow missed this anecdote.

One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall. 

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.'' 

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to
protect the country in the event of invasion. 

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

The ignorance on display is pretty amazing here -- but it's the blustery self-confidence despite his wrongness that's galling.

Rage-blinded misfits.

Pierce:

Look, I lived through this. I'm not minimizing what these murderous idiots did up here and, as far as I'm concerned, the surviving brother can celebrate Arbor Day in Pelican Bay for the rest of his life. But every little detail that's emerging about the brothers goes a long way toward defusing the OMIGOD MOOOOOSSSSLLIIIIIMMMMMM CALIPHATE JIHAD!!!! hysteria in certain precincts of the media. The history of this country, alas, is replete with bloodshed inflicted on the innocent by rage-blinded misfits. Some huge acts of mass murder inflicted by the angry and the lost have vanished from history almost entirely. (Google "Andrew Kehoe Bath Michigan" some time.) The fact that we now have a frame made largely of unreasoning fear and reflexive xenophobia doesn't change that. Losers can kill people as easily as winners can, and ennobling the actions of a couple of bloodthirsty square pegs by draping those actions with vast, geopolitical significance is a bigger disservice to their victims than laughing at the two of them is. Let them be ridiculed. Let them be tried. Let them be convicted. Let us then not hear of them again. But let them be ridiculed first. It's healthy.

Favoring gun legislation is the new bigotry.

That's Putz, in USA TODAY.

Welfare.

I don't know about you, but I'm much, much more interested as to where they got their firearms and ammunition as opposed to their welfare checks.

The Lamb, errrr, Sniper of God.

So, the US Army decided that sniper scopes probably aren't the best medium for biblical inscriptions -- and ordered them removed.  Aaaaaand....cue the predictable wingnut response!

And what was the passage on the scope the Army wanted removed?

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Oh right, Jesus--that name sounds familiar. I seem to remember the Nuns in Catholic school teaching me something else that guy said.