Or rather, watch Rand Paul spend twenty(!) minutes trying to avoid coming out and saying in as many words that he would re-legalize the ability of business owners to discriminate based on race. Watch him endless repeat that he’s personally opposed to all racism, and try to tie this into the First and Second Amendments. And watch Rachel Maddow refuse to let him dodge the question.

An important Public Service Announcement about the dangers of alcohol.

(Thanks to Kate for the link.)

The best laugh I’ve had all day came at 0:18. The man has comic timing.

I have nothing against people who live in the countryside. Heck, my grandfather is one.

I do have something against the right-wing trope that people in rural areas, or people in the rural “heartland”, are the “real Americans”. By extension, those urban people and coastal people don’t represent America.

The next time I hear that crap, I’m pointing the offender at this URL of census data.

People who live in metropolitan areas? 80% of the country.
People who live in the central cities of those areas? 30% of the country.

If you think those uppity urban types aren’t “real Americans”, then apparently only 1 in 5 citizens in this country are “real”.

Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman’s presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found.

Some conservative political movements such as the “Tea Party” have criticized federal spending as being out of control. While spending is up, taxes have fallen to exceptionally low levels.

Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century.

Read on at that bastion of Communist-progressive journalism, USA Today.

You’d think a Jew would be a little more concerned with legislation that, like the Nuremberg Laws, would allow a government to strip its own citizens of citizenship.

You’d think someone in the “Tea Party” camp would be concerned about legislation that would let an administrative court strip citizenship from someone who hadn’t actually been convicted of an illegal act such as terrorism.

Which is why it’s all the more appalling that Joe Lieberman and Scott Brown are not only backing such a law… they’re the ones sponsoring it. Bostonist puts it best:

Since World War II, citizenship has become a bedrock of international human rights law. Every person has the right to the protection of a sovereign state, to petition that state for redress of grievances, to enjoy due process during criminal proceedings, and, yes, to renounce their affiliation with that state if they choose to. Only the most egregious regimes turn their citizens into stateless refugees. And now, some American legislators want to add the United States to that list.

…Frighteningly, the bill does not require a conviction before the momentous revocation of citizenship. The task of determining a suspected terrorist’s guilt is left to an administrative court, the same sort of folks who collect your taxes or process your permits. Essentially, the DMV of citizenship. For a tea-party hack like Brown, who raises the spectre of tyrannical state power funded by extortionate taxes, this should be terrifying. And for Lieberman, whose wife was born in a refugee camp to Holocaust survivors, the idea should quite simply never come up.

This legislation is so appalling that it even unnerves John Boehner, as the Boston Globe reports:

But a host of scholars and fellow lawmakers, including the House Republican leader, Representative John Boehner of Ohio, immediately questioned the constitutionality of the proposal, saying it was at odds with a half-century of Supreme Court precedents that ruled that citizenship can be relinquished only voluntarily. The legislation would affect US citizens whether they are native-born or naturalized.

Some said the Terrorist Expatriation Act was worded so broadly that those who write checks to groups on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations could be at risk of losing citizenship.

…the Supreme Court has continuously ruled to limit the power to strip citizenship, legal scholars say, ruling time and time again that the government must prove a person’s intent to give it up.

I’d like to again thank my fellow citizens of the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts for electing such a stellar Senator and shining successor to the our great Senatorial legacy. We’ve gone from “the Lion of the Senate” to a Constitutional eviscerator in less than a year.