Monday Olio: Up Yours Edition

• Amanda Marcotte notes the latest funny business with Ladytown now moving through the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™, because reproductive rights are the one bit of madness they can't bring themselves to put a cork in, you should pardon the metaphor. And because it's the one Christianist thingy they know Mike "Missing" Pence can't veto, or shelve for next year.

And we'd be remiss here if we didn't add that last week Karen Celestino-Horseman (via Doug Masson ) noted that the Double Ultrasound bill was sponsored by Senator Travis Holdman, who also sponsored SB 0373, which, and I quote, "Makes it unlawful recording of [sic] agricultural or industrial operations," with "intent to harass, defame, annoy, or harm".

Don't take my legal advice, but it was these same jokers who, a couple decades back (okay, not the identical jokers) who decided to rid the state of adult bookstores and wound up, instead, making them all change their names to “Museum of Adult Literature”. So look into getting your lady parts declared an agricultural or industrial operation, just in case.

• Every so often I open a Weigel piece, not because I think he's going to write an unequivocal declarative sentence about the Republican party, but just to see if I can figure out what position he wants the reader to fill in for him. "Why Sen. Ted Cruz gets rewarded for saying a lot of things that no one would take seriously anywhere else," is what the subhead promises to suss out, but--near as I could figure--what we get, fourteen hundred words later, is "But once he entered politics,Cruz’s fireworks and dazzle simply worked." Which to my mind wouldn't be much of an explanation even if you could demonstrate his supposed incandescence did anything beyond "winning him a crackpot seat in Texas".

That sort of thing is what I expected; what caught me short was this:

Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, viewed by the right as an accidental senator who rigged the Republican primary to make sure she’d face Todd Akin, compared Cruz to Joe McCarthy.

That took only 80 words to get to, and can anyone explain what Claire McCaskill's reelection campaign, as seen through the eyes of "the right", has anything to do with anything?

It's like there's an entire generation of Facile Libertarians out there permanently pissed-off they didn't get to make Clinton blow-job jokes.

• Both sides do it:

That reality also underscores what Republicans, and some Democrats, say was a major miscalculation on the part of President Obama. He agreed to set up the automatic cuts 18 months ago because he believed the threat of sharp reductions in military spending would be enough to force Republicans to agree to a deficit reduction plan that included the tax increases he favored

All right, looky: I'll go to my grave, perhaps this afternoon, insisting that Barack Obama's First Hundred Days was the great Flushed Down the Crapper Opportunity of the hapless post-Reagan era. We do not have political men who think this way anymore; we have consultants, who thought, in November 2008, about positioning themselves for 2012. The great dream of the Civil Rights Movement made flesh, and instead of furthering the Cause its first inclination was to reach across the aisle to the party built on opposing it ever since. That might'a been a good play--it wasn't the best--but when that hand was smacked down in response it was time to start playing rough.

Is there any question that the President knows who he's dealing with now? I'm not buying his conversion to Liberal. He made a deal last year he thought he needed as breathing space for the campaign; now he's using the Pulpit to force the House Republicans' hand. And they've decided they'll stand pat, and take the hit when things really do turn to shit. Not to mention the fact that these are only "minuscule" cuts, laughable fractions, not a "solution" to the Deficit. Republicans used to understand that the American public was equally determined to get all the services it did as it was not to pay for them. That argument turns shortly.

Meanwhile, doesn't this remind anyone of 2009? The Republican party seems to imagine that once it has distilled the latest issue to a bumpersticker ("Hysteria!") it has won the day.