Fuck the fucking Yankees. In loving memory of Steve Gilliard.

Sullivan doubles down:

This simply doesn’t make sense. Hate crime laws for most categories, including federal measures, have been around for a long time. The only new thing here – the only thing that has fostered “a decade of opposition and delay” – is the addition of sexual orientation. So the president had a chance to defend gays from being excluded from the usual roster of victims, in front of military leaders, and he had to walk backwards into this strange circumlocution.

He’s lost his damned mind. As several of you have pointed out, nowhere in the bill do the words lesbian or gay appear:

The word “gay” never appears in the bill. Neither does the word “lesbian,” “homosexual,” or “bisexual.”

It protects people from being targeted because of their sexual orientation. Which of course applies to everybody.

So Obama was absolutely correct in describing it as a bill that “protects people based on … who they love.”

And what does it say that Sullivan only seems to give a shit about the gays. What about the lesbians? What about transexuals? Why do you hate them, Andrew?

It really does take big brass balls for Sullivan to complain about the legislation, then to complain about the way the legislation is signed, and then to do so disingenuously, because the line preceding the quote that gives Andrew the vapors so much states that there will be another signing ceremony specifically for the hate crimes legislation.

I seriously am to the point that every time I open memeorandum or check the progressive blogs, I’m beginning to see the same kind of batshit crazy I see on right wing blogs. Has every one just lost their damned minds? Did everyone go insane?

*** Update ***

And no, I am not claiming Sully is a progressive, I was just thinking that everyone has gone nuts.

*** Update #2 ***

From the comments:

I would like to note something from Sullivan’s writeup:

The only new thing here – the only thing that has fostered “a decade of opposition and delay” – is the addition of sexual orientation.

This is false on two levels. First off, the bill adds not just sexual orientation, but gender identity. This may not effect Andrew Sullivan, it sure as hell effects me. It’s also a pretty big deal historically speaking. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality this is the very first transgender rights bill to ever pass at the Federal level.

Second off, even if Sullivan had said “sexual orientation and gender identity”, it would still be simply wrong that adding these new categories is the only thing the bill does. The bill also strengthens the existing hate crimes law in several ways, including expanding the cases in which Federal authorities may step in to investigate a hate crime when local law enforcement falls down, and giving grants to local law enforcement agencies who find they do not have sufficient funds to properly investigate hate crimes. If you will notice the bill’s official title “Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act”, James Byrd Jr. being a heterosexual black man who was tortured and killed by white supremacists in 1998.

Sullivan opposes this bill, but apparently never bothered to learn a single thing about it.

But he didn’t say “gay.”

I knew that not many people read the Washington Times, but I didn’t know its numbers were this bad (via GOS):

down 17 percent to 67,148

That’s amazing pathetic. Pick a random second-tier city and google their newspaper. You’ll generally find the circulation to be around 100K or higher (I just did this with Syracuse and Tacoma).

By 2002, Moonies had spent $1.7 billion subsidizing the paper. And that was when papers were doing well. So God only knows how much money it is losing today.

I don’t see how Sun Myung Moon is getting his money’s worth from this ridiculous little venture, even granting that its “reporters” show up on the tube a lot more than reporters from any other paper with such shitty circulation numbers.

Update. Yes, I know it is a propaganda front. But, to put it in perspective, the paper was losing $85 million a year for 20 years and certainly much more than that now. The operating expenses of the Heritage Foundation—also a propaganda front, of course—is about $49 million. And that’s 2007 dollars. It’s a good bet that the Moonie Times loses three to four times the operating budget of the Heritage Foundation now.

That’s just not a good way to spend your propaganda dollars.

Oh no. The American Taliban is all upset about… a tv show:

HBO’s hit series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” has pushed the comedic envelope for many years, but what happened in Sunday’s episode was so disgraceful it’s already received comment from the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue.

The set-up is the show’s star and producer Larry David is taking some medication that is making him urinate quite forcefully.

It’s so powerful that while urinating in his assistant’s bathroom, he accidentally splashed some of it on a picture of Jesus Christ hanging on a nearby wall.

Stone him!

Shorter Andrew Sullivan- “Fuck you, Barack Obama, for signing the hate crimes legislation. How dare you? Just words. Asshole.”

And no, I am not kidding.

I also love that the GOLD STANDARD for some bloggers is the speed with which POTUS has remarks up on the website. Remember a couple weeks ago when that idiot freaked out because the HRC speech was not up fast enough on a Saturday night, and that was perceived as a grievous insult and demonstrated Obama’s “true feelings” about gay people.

*** Update ***

Some people might want to know- Has Barack Obama ever played basketball with a gay person? Can anyone get in touch with Savannah Guthrie?

Remember how the Clintons used to rent the Lincoln Bedroom out to fat cat donors? And then how Bush came in and cleaned the place up and kicked out all the lobbyists and made us all proud again? Well, Obama’s turning out to be even worse than Clinton.

I can’t wait til Tim Pawlenty gets in and restores some dignity to the place.

This is just asinine:

Jesse Taylor deals with this nonsense, but I think it is important to single out Savannah Guthrie for starting all this crap:

NBC White House correspondent Savannah Guthrie asked him that earlier this week. She asked him if his preference for all-male hoops sends the wrong signal. Or as she put it, “Some people might look at it and say, ‘Gosh, there’s the old boys club again.’”

Well done, Savannah. Next to the #dickwhisper’s question about Obama’s bathing suit, this is the biggest waste of time by a reporter with access that I’ve seen. And, with an assist from the insiders like Tapper who want to stir things up even when there is no there there, all of a sudden we have PUMA’s and wingnuts running around screaming that Obama is a sexist. Because he plays basketball with Reggie Love instead of Anita Dunn.

The endgame of this is so obvious. This isn’t about sexism. This isn’t about Barack Obama. This is another beltway game where the press sees how much they can make the administration jump. Are they really proposing that Janet Napolitano come out and do some half court with Obama, the UNC guys, and secret service agents? Do they want Lisa Leslie on retainer?

No. This is about power and control, and this is about driving traffic to their respective website/network. They want to make the WH squirm and if they get really lucky over-react, and what better way to do it than pointless allegations of sexism? They’re just asking questions that matter, you see. “Some say it’s an all boys club,” or “Some say this looks bad” or “some say you have a problem with women.” And then what they want is for Obama to stage an all women’s game or a mixed game for the cameras, and they can say “See, there was a problem, and our focus on this issue corrected it!” Who says investigative journalism is dead! And they will pretend they have accomplished something, while ignoring the Republicans blocking everything on health care and the robber barons on Wall Street continue to rape main street and the taxpayers and so on.

There’s your liberal media. Assholes, all of them. Seriously- go read David Brock’s books. Go read Joe Conason’s The Hunting of the President. It is clear what is going on here.

*** Update ***

I should probably add that what makes Guthrie’s effort so awesome is that she took Candy Crowley’s “some people say” to a whole new level. She didn’t just use the hoary old “some people say,” she kicked it up a notch and used “Some people might look at it and say.” I mean, how f-ing awesome is that? Some people might say just about anything, so if you want to stir shit up as a reporter, you can just make up any old bullshit, because SOME PEOPLE MIGHT SAY IT! Somewhere, Savannah Guthrie’s j-school professors just hanged themselves.

This month’s Atlantic feature on “25 Brave Thinkers” illustrates, to me, the same kind of thing that is wrong with our health care debate. Their list is mostly a mix of millionaires, billionaires, miscellaneous big shots, and people with permanent positions at academic institutions.

I’m sure a lot of them do great work. But how can what you’re doing be so brave when there are no possible serious repercussions? Why is it so gutsy for Freeman Dyson to spin his global warming denial nonsense when he’s a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study? What could possibly happen to him as a result?

I love my iPhone and I give Steve Jobs (who is on the list) credit for that. But how on earth is it braver for a billionaire businessman to unveil a new line of consumer electronics than it is for Joe Shmo middle-class person to take out a loan to open up a new business?

We live in a society where the well off have everything and the poor have nothing. Do we have to laud the rich as brave heroes, to top it all off?

Update. I didn’t articulate this well, but what bothers me most is juxtapositions like this:

Morgan Tsvangirai, Prime Minister of Zimbabwe

Why he’s brave: He stood his ground against Robert Mugabe and is now bringing some normalcy back to the country.

Jeff Zucker, President of NBC Universal

Why he’s brave: He retained Jay Leno and moved late-night TV to prime time.

Sardine on health care reform:

Forget all the talk about the public option for a second and ignore your political consultants who are cautioning you about the imaginary negative repercussions of a “government takeover.” The reality is this debate really isn’t about politics, it’s about health care. It’s not left or right, it’s about all of us.

People need help. They can’t afford their health care bills. People are dying. The crazy health care expenses are hurting businesses. Please don’t turn your back on these people. If you join with the Republicans and block health care reform, you’re basically saying to the American people – go fuck yourselves.

The discussion of health care reform has been endless: we’ve heard about Blue Dogs worried about being tagged as liberal, we’ve heard about CBO scores, we’ve heard about how all of this will affect the career trajectories of various powerful, well-off people. We haven’t heard much about the millions of people who have been bankrupted by health care costs under our current system. We haven’t heard much about the millions of people who have little or no access to health care.

I agree that CBO scores are important and should be discussed. And I understand why politicians’ futures are always a subject of discussion in DC. But can there be any discussion of regular human beings’ lives here? I know that everyone who appears on tv or writes for a national paper has a good health care plan already. But don’t they ever wonder what it’s like for other people they pass on the street, for the people who serve them coffee or wait their tables?

I realize that if you’re poor in this country, then everything is your fault. If you take out a loan you shouldn’t have taken out, it’s proof that you’re too much of an idiot to handle money, whereas when rich people are fleeced by Bernie Madoff it’s proof that Madoff is a super-genius monster. If you’re hit by a stray bullet, you were probably in a gang. If you’re sick, it’s because you smoke and you’re overweight. And whatever trouble you have getting a job, it’s all because of your genetically determined low IQ. And if you weren’t poor, overweight, genetically deficient and so on you wouldn’t have trouble getting disqualified because of preconditions and you’d never get scammed by bogus insurance outfits.

But still, even in a society that accepts these myths, shouldn’t there be some concern about 45 million Americans without health insurance?

And I guess I’d ask you this: the politicians and pundits who stand by and watch millions of lives destroyed by our health care system—are they any better than the people who watched that horrible crime in Richmond? I think you know the answer.

What the hell is wrong with people:

Investigators say as many as 20 people were involved in or stood and watched the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside a California high school homecoming dance Saturday night.

Police posted a $20,000 reward Tuesday for anyone who comes to them with information that helps arrest and convict those involved in what authorities describe as a 2½-hour assault on the Richmond High School campus in suburban San Francisco.

Two teenage suspects have been jailed, but more arrests, as many as 20 total, are expected, according to a police detective.

Seriously. What the hell is wrong with people that up to twenty people stood around or participated in the gang rape of a woman for TWO AND A HALF HOURS and they never once thought “Hey, this is wrong” or “Hey, this is a person” or “Hey, I should call the police.” I know it is unrealistic, but I wouldn’t mind putting everyone of these people in jail for life. They are sociopaths, and that poor girl’s life is ruined. I’m not sure how she will ever recover from something like this.

I’m kind of otherwise occupied with stuff, so an open thread seems appropriate.

I know it is only 9 am, but I think it is late enough in the day to reflect on the many ways Barack Obama has let you down today. As an additional thought, why does Rahm Emmanuel hate you?

I have finished polishing the latest round of edits, corrections, and additions—even a stolen cool epigraph!—to the first section of the new tripartite Balloon Juice Lexicon (A – H). Your revisions, suggestions, and links are hereby solicited.

Specifically: I could use some good links for ACORN that would give a better flavor of the whole mishagaus than Wikipedia’s blandly correct entry. I’ve been told there is such a thing as a Cavuto Mark, but its meaning is not clear to me. I know people had some wonderful snarky links to explicate the Doughy Pantload, but the list has been lost and my google-fu is not strong enough. If there is to be an entry for Freeping, and there probably should be, someone is going to have to explain its history.

And finally, perhaps there should be some explanation of why accusations of goat molestation are so popular, but I’m not even gonna try googling that meme!

Just chucking this out there:

I’m looking for a god hearted woman who loves me in spite of my ways she don’t understand.

Also, yes, I have called five times and Lily is ok and my brother has said to stop calling because “she is ok, damnit.”

She can sing this to John.

Little dogs are experts at the oooooo choruses!

Well, there’s a pretty good chance now that the Republicans will have tebagged away what should have been an easy win in NY-23. There’s talk about the tea party candidate, Doug Hoffman, winning, but I think that’s quite unlikely. I doubt his base of support is much higher than the percentage of the district that consists of single issue pro-life voters (probably around 20% in the district—thrown in a more oddballs and you might get to 30% but not much higher). If you read between the lines of this NYT piece, that’s what is going on in the race:

“The No. 1 victory will be to defeat Dede,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect candidates who oppose abortion.

Ms. Dannenfelser, along with members of the National Organization for Marriage, which opposes efforts to legalize same-sex marriage, are helping to coordinate efforts on the ground in support of Mr. Hoffman.

At the Days Inn on Sunday, Ms. Dannenfelser, 43, of Arlington, Va., and three other organizers from the Washington area who have temporarily relocated to Watertown joined a conference call with conservatives from across the country. A small picture of Jesus and the Virgin Mary rested on top of the television, while the Pittsburgh Steelers game played with the volume muted.

Now, Scozzafava may be a bit of an outlier with her support for reproductive rights and same sex marriage, but Republicans in NYS are not, in general, that conservative. In much of the state, union support is crucial, so Republicans generally suck up to unions. Moreover, they tend to support spending on health care, education, etc. This is why the Republican party remains relevant in a state that Obama won by 26 points.

There are also lots of third parties in NYS —a Conservative party, a Libertarian party, etc., and they all have some amount of infrastructure. So it should be pretty easy to teabag Republican office-holders—specifically state legislators—all over the state. My two local State Senators are Republicans—one is a former Democrat who is in the pocket of unions (for better or worse), the other is best known for supporting local arts with earmark money. Neither is as left as Scozzafava on reproductive rights, but both would probably lose if there were a Conservative party candidate pulling even 10-15% of the district vote. They both should be teabaggable.

I’ll be curious to see if the teabagagers teabaggers are emboldened to wage a scorched earth campaign against moderate Republicans statewide. It would accomplish nothing in terms of winning races, but it might radically change the state Republican party and energize the state’s Conservative party.