...take a look at the comments section in this article. Notice how just about every commenter is convinced that they are in possession of the truth, and anybody who disagrees (including, in many cases, the author of the article) is a deluded idiot, a drinker of Kool-Aid etc. There is no dialogue going on here, merely the bloviations of the defiantly certain, seeking only back-slapping validation, or the opportunity to be rude immature and obnoxious to people holding different viewpoints.
The majority of these commenters neatly summarize the fundamental dysfunction in the nation concerning any form of political debate. It is like being in a theater watching a pantomime or a Punch and Judy show. This is not insightful debate. It's bloviating, bullying bullcrap. A plague on all of their houses.

1. Political Hubris #4587
Note to Sen. Scott Brown. When you are the junior Senator from Massachusetts, you probably should not be bloviating about how you secretly meet with royalty. It makes you look like a desperate boasting little twerp. It also leads to you being satirized. And if you or your campaign lies about it, it makes you look, well, like a liar.
2. The Real Reason why censorious religious asshats hate Teh Gay
Short answer: Follow the money Slightly Longer Answer: Scare-mongering opens wallets.
Certainly, the rather unpleasant little dipshit Eugene Delgaudio, who causes me monthly mirth with his email screeds, does very well out of fear-mongering (short Delgaudio email summary: "Help! The Gays Are Destroying Civilization! Donate To Me!"). Delgaudio is a very small fish; his revenues from fear-mongering are chump change compared to other organizations, yet according to public documents, he has raised over $1m a year in the recent past. Clearly, bigoted fear-mongering sells.
3. Viral Internet Power #897 - Scottish school dinner picture censorship
Update to an earlier story - Martha Payne, the schoolgirl whose school district attempted to prevent her from taking and posting pictures of her school meals, has now raised a LOT of money for charity online as a result of interest in her story.
4. Infrastructure in the modern USA
I found a posting from a FB friend at lunchtime:

Power is off, Energy said over 500 without power, estimated time to have it back on is 4 pm, I may go postal.

This got me thinking (dangerous I know). In the UK, from where I moved in 1998, power cuts were very infrequent. It would take some catastrophic weather event such as a major freeze to cause generation companies to have to cut cupplies to certain areas. In all of the time that I lived in the UK, the only power cuts I can remember were rolling blackouts in 1979 due to power station staff strikes.
It did not take me long from arriving in the USA to notice that there are power cuts all the time. Most of them are only 15-30 minutes in duration, but they are very common compared to the UK. Quite often we get up in the morning and find that our timing devices have reset themselves, and my home server is dead and ready for a reboot.
When I drive around, I often look at power delivery infrastructure. It is easy to see that the standard of delivery infrastructure engineering here is lower than in Europe. Part of this is to do with the lower voltages in the distribution chain than in Europe. However, that is a problem in itself. Power losses due to the length of the supply chain are less if the voltage is higher. The power supply companies here are losing proportionately more power in the distribution system than Europe, partly because voltages are lower, but also because power transmission distances are greater. This is actually an argument in favor of local micropower systems, but those do not seem to be taking off. Based on what has happened in the UK since privatization, I am of the opinion that this kind of infrastructure cannot be left to private enterprise to totally control, if that policy continues, then the infrastructure will become progressively more creaky, as power supply companies try simply to avoid pissing off too many consumers while at the same time spending as little money as possible.
In the meantime, consumers here can look forward to more outages, especially as it heats up here in Texas.
5. The Dynamic, proactive California Bar (not)
As you may or may not know, dentist-turned-lawyer Orly Taitz has been flying all over the country, along with other lawyers and associated pro se litigants, filing lawsuits to try and get Barack Obama removed from State Democratic primary elections. So far, the score in those lawsuits is 0-134, and another 2 were dismissed this week.
Orly Taitz does not take rejection well, as this blog posting summarizes. She is basically engaging in threats against members of the judiciary. This begs the question: where is the California Bar in all of this? I would have thought that a Bar association would be anxious to sanction somebody engaging in this kind of blustering bloviation and threat-mongering. However, the CA bar is stunningly silent, despite numerous emails sent to them pointing out that Orly Taitz is behaving like a complete horse's ass (she has already been sanctioned by the court system for frivolous filings in a lawsuit also related to the eligibility of President Obama).

1. Public Figure v. Photographers
Note to Alex Baldwin - you cannot win if you go after photographers in public. Your fans may be on your side, but the law is not on your side. You have no expectation of privacy in public, that's what "public" means. If you don't want to be a celebrity then retire from acting and do something else. You get paid a lot of money for being an actor, and with that comes the downside - being a public figure; dealing with intrusions comes with the territory.
2. Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean That You Should #2
Ronan Farrow, the son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, felt it necessary to slam his estranged father on Twitter on Father's Day. This seems to me to be a classic example of the old saying "it is better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool". Ronan Farrow's public profile has instantly morphed from "earnest young man" into "bitter immature twerp". Washing your family's dirty linen in public is never a good idea, and as for doing it on Twitter...holy smokes Batman! The guy was either not thinking, or his thought processes are scrambled.

An interesting post with some interesting comments on how libertarianism tends to make itself unattractive to women. One of the points made is that reactions by some self-identified libertarians to the dispute (if I can be so polite as to to call it that) between Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke seemed to be highly censorious of female viewpoints. My take on the fallout from that incident is that a lot of self-identified libertarians are really authoritarians sailing under a flag of convenience, wolves in sheep's clothing.
One comment I would make is that this tendency of minority movements to be unattractive to women is not unique to the libertarian movement. The atheist/freethinker movement has suffered similar issues recently. A lot of new political or socio-economic movements have philosophies developed by men, and most of the early evangelists tend to be men also. I am not sure if it is a result of male DNA (the controlling part thereof) but male intolerance of female thoughts and views is never attractive.

Like most people in my age group (I suspect) I find the sagging pants fashion trend to be utterly incomprehensible. Not only does it look bizarre (and, no matter how charitable I try to be, I cannot find a semi-exposed butt crack to be pretty), but it is derived from prison wear. Quite why people should want to emulate jailbirds is puzzling.
However...it seems that some folks in positions of power or influence in various parts of the USA have decided that saggy pants are an affront to civilization, and There Oughtta Be A Law Against That. So...we have yet more precious legislative time being used up in all sorts of places to pass legislation designed to Stamp Out This Evil Thing. It would not surprise me if "it's for the children" is in there somewhere in speeches and justifications.
A quick search reveals that the following locations are actively working on this tremendously important issue (caveat, there may be other locales also trying to stamp out this practice):

Tennessee
Philadephia
Hinds County, Mississippi
Florida
Merrillville, Indiana

Flint, Michigan
In addition, a judge in Autauga County, Alabama is apparently cracking down on sagging pants in his courtroom. He went so far as to have a defendant jailed for showing up in court wearing pants showing his butt crack.

As the article about the Florida ban on sagging pants points out, at least one sagging pants ordinance in Riviera Beach, FL, has already been ruled unconstitutional by a higher court, although it is not clear if the case was totally dismissed. However, I cracked up when reading the bit where the judge uses the word "buttocks" (with an exclamation mark, no less). I just find that word funny, for reasons that I cannot fathom (probably due to watching too many episodes of Monty Python in my formative years).

As the last article makes clear, the constitutionality of these laws is debatable, because they are seeking to regulate what clothing people may wear in public. While buttcracks may be less than exciting to see, there is no plausible case that I can think of that they are obscene, hence the need for yet another pile of legal cack.
Copycat legislation and legislation passed quickly in response to public outrage is seldom good legislation. It effectively functions as a dysfunctional application of mob opinion. This is a total waste of precious legislative bandwidth, and another way in which the law is gradually regarded as an ass by a significant portion of the general public, especially anybody under 21.

1. The Birther Show
Following yet another dismissal of a lawsuit choreographed by Orly Taitz this week, here is the current Birther case scorecard. The score is currently 0-134, and the number of defeats keeps rising steadily...one question that Birthers always seem to have no answer for is why the only lawyers prepared to take on these cases are either grifters or lawyers moonlighting as dentists (or is it dentists moonlighting as lawyers? I have trouble deciding sometimes...). A more serious issue is the sheer volume of filings that the Birthers are engaging in, including appeals of appeals of appeals...this fits the definition of Paper Terrorism as practised at various times by the Sovereign Citizen movement and many of its emulators and offshoots.
2. Ideological Businesses
I have some fundamental criteria when deciding what businesses will get my time and money. One criterion is that if the business is clearly operating under an ideological or religious agenda, they will not get a cent of my money if their stated ideology conflicts with mine. After 9/11, I considered buying some parts for my plane from a small business located near to me in Texas. That lasted until I went to the business's website, and found it full of incoherent, ranting screeds about "Old Europe", "kill Saddam", "love America or STFU and leave it" and a pile of other exclusionary, unpleasant bullshit. I kept my hand out of my wallet pocket, and they never did get a cent of my money.
All of this is a long way of saying that being ideological in how you present your business is, as a general rule, not a good idea. It cuts down your appeal to customers dramatically. If all you want to do is sell to your own tribal grouping, then it may be an OK strategy, but as a general approach to maximising your customer base it is very, very dumb.
Enter, stage right, Voss Lighting. They operate in Oklahoma, as if I could not have guessed, which is a state that I am trying to avoid spending money or time in, mainly because the political process is currently dominated by bigotted religious chickenshits. This company is likely to be the defendant in a lawsuit filed by the EEOC on behalf of a man who claims that he was turned down for a job because he was asked pointed questions about his religious affiliation, and apparently gave answers that did not please the interviewer.
In my opinion, the interviewee in question might have made a tactical error in even answering the questions, since that line of questioning is clearly illegal under Federal law. I would probably have first tried some light-hearted variant of "I never mix business and religion" as a first response, and then, if that failed to deter questioning, I would have reminded the interviewer of the Federal law.
The court case will hopefully determine the facts of what happened at the interview. However, Voss Lighting will have a perception problem at the outset, because their mission statement specifically says that one of their business objectives is to spread the word of God. I can only assume that they are (a) only selling to their own religious grouping, and (b) that they are woefully ignorant of the law, since any mission statement like this is exclusionary and IMHO dangerously close to legally actionable in its own right, never mind whether they actually follow it. Of course the cynic in me has seen many mission statements that corporations never actually follow, especially any part of them dealing with valuing employees, but I digress...Whichever way you look at this, I fear that the outcome for Voss Lighting is not going to be a good one. Even if they do not lose the lawsuit, the Streisand Effect may be triggered.
3. "There Oughtta Be A Law Against THAT!" - Episode 34,576
Small town in Massachusetts decides to pass law making profanity an offense with a $20 fine. What a pile of idiotic fucking bullcrap. See spot-on satire courtesy of Ken at Popehat. Additionally, Marc Randazza at Legal Satyricon has written a blog posting explaining at length why the entire ordinance in Middleborough MA may well, in addition to being an absofuckinglutely asinine waste of time, also be unconstitutional.
4. Story of Censorious Asshattery from the UK
Argyle and Bute Council throws hissy fit and initially bans photography in school by a schoolgirl for her blog (which is helping to raise money for charity) after she criticises school dinner choices at her school. Note how the council ties itself in knots by first imposing the ban, then lifting it after being deluged with complaints pointing out, quite rightly, that they were being a bunch of whiny censorious asshats. You know you have a PR problem when you make it onto Popehat...
5. The "My Taxes should not be used to fund abortions" argument
One of the recurring whines from people opposed to abortions of any kind is something along the lines of "I don't want my taxes going to fund abortions". Most of these people appear to be highly religiously motivated, since it is fairly clear that the leading members of organizations seeking to eliminate abortions (an objective which on an acheivability level is about on a par with Prohibition, but we'll discuss that issue another time) are in most cases operating from monotheistic religious motives.
There is something uniquely and hypocritically pathetic about members of organizations that are themselves tax-exempt whining about a miniscule fraction of their tax dollars being used to fund abortions. But I'll do them a deal. I'll support their right to not pay their $0.02 for abortion funding when they (a) agree to their churches paying taxes, and (b) I also get to strike the amount of taxes that I currently pay to fund the USA's foreign military misadventures. How's that for a bargain?
Alternatively they could just STFU and stop attempting to impose their value system on others that do not share it...
6. LATE ADDITION - Idiot asshat at work
Markos from DailyKos has for some time been fending off weird emails and even weirder threats from a person named George Rockwell. In a recent change of tack, George now labors under the impression that he has the right to file a FOIA request to obtain personal information about Markos. (This does rather overlook the reality that the FOIA was written to apply to Federal Government agencies).
Anyway, George decided to engage Markos in a dialogue about his alleged "refusal" to answer George's extremely important requests. This is the result. There is something almost sad about a pompous, misinformed idiot being played like a fish on a line...I ended up almost feeling sorry for George.

Link: http://bit.ly/LfLNsH

In which Charles Carreon attempts to sue literally everybody for libel and defamation over perceived slights. As Ken at Popehat has already tried to explain, these lawsuits are going nowhere, and it is likely that at some point ant-SLAPP motions will be filed which will end up costing Mr. Carreon a lot of money. In the meantime he gets to try lawfare against anybody he deems to have defamed him. I call this out for what it is, bullying bullshit.

Some people in the media and politics are describing Arizona as "in play" for Democratic Party gains in 2012. That is certainly not true, if you go by the content of the Maricopa County Democratic Party site. The site still has a "Pledge To Win 2010" button, the last posting is from 6 months ago, the list of officials includes people who are no longer officials...the list goes on. This is rank amateurism in the most populous county in AZ, the county, I have to remind readers, that is the seat and power base of Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Although the Democrats held on to Gabby Giffords' old seat this week in the special election, which is a good outcome, I remain pessimistic of any further Democratic party gains in the upcoming election cycle. Having talked at length with a resident of Maricopa County, the conclusion he reached a long time ago is that the AZ Democratic Party is beyond saving in its current form as an electorally significant force. He also believes that Sheruff Joe will be re-elected comfortably, since his Democratic Party opponent is an uncharismatic retired police officer with no track record of law enforcement leadership or management (both experiences which Sheruff Joe possesses, although you may want to debate how effective he is at either).

On the way back to Dallas from our honeymoon, we were stopped at a police sobriety checkpoint on Highway 44 south of Farmington. The checkpoint, in the middle of nowhere on the high mesa, comprised (based on my quick count as we rolled into the checkpoint area) 20+ police vehicles and literally dozens of law enforcement personnel stopping traffic in both directions, or just standing around watching. This was clearly a major operation for the police forces involved.
Sadly for them, we could not supplement their DUI stats. Neither of us had drunk anything for close to 48 hours.

I posted about the experience to Facebook, and a flying friend of ours responded:

Lovely having your 4th amendment rights violated, huh.

This sent me off on a journey to discover the exact status and legitimacy of DUI checkpoints. What I found is that the Supreme Court ruled over 20 years ago that they are constitutional (although the logic appears to be tortuous, based on an admission that while they do violate the Fourth Amendment, it is a "small violation", which makes me wonder whether any of the Supreme Court justices of the time had ever heard of the concept of the "slippery slope"). However, because of the narrow scope of the ruling, and the way that it has been interpreted, law enforcement has to stop every vehicle, otherwise they run the risk of the checkpoint being accused of selective profiling, which in the absence of probable cause, is not legal.
Returning to the New Mexico stop...in addition to answering several standard questions, and Mary being asked to follow an officer's finger with her eyes (which I guess is the staying-in-the-car version of the "walk the white line" test) we were given an educational pack that I have yet to review. It was interesting that when Mary told them that her license was in the back seat, they did not ask her to produce it, probably because you are not required to show an ID if you are not under any suspicion.
My main source of amazement is the sheer number of police vehicles and personnel manning the checkpoint - I counted at least 20 marked police vehicles from two police forces, plus other support vehicles. There were dozens of what I assumed to be law enforcement personnel milling about, some wearing high-vis jackets. The police forces had also parked 2 marked vehicles about half a mile outside the checkpoint in both directions, presumably to apprehend any drivers who tried to blow through the checkpoint.

Here is some more insight into the verbal gymnastics of the Supreme Court decision, and how the state of Michigan sidestepped the Supreme Court ruling.

And here is the handy-dandy article to answer the obvious question: What about Your State?

An interesting incident at a restaurant in Houston, where a party of people declined to pay what was billed as an automatic 17% gratuity added to parties of six or more, because of what they considered to be bad service. The restaurant's response was to lock them inside the restaurant and call the police, threatening them with the presence of the police until they paid the 17%.
The comments on the article are fascinating and worrying in about equal measure. There is clearly a stereotype that African-Americans are poor tippers and demanding. Some of the opinions expressed by some commenters are more than a little stridently racist. There was also a vigorous debate over the whole system of tipping vs. restaurant wages, which is a bigger issue that I have no clue about how to solve.
Here, for what little it may be worth, are my thoughts on the situation.

1. (most obviously). An automatic 17% added to any bill is not a gratuity. A gratuity is something that you can pay if you feel that somebody deserves it. This was advertised as mandatory, therefore it should have been described as a cover charge.
2. Just because you can do something does not mean that you should. Locking an entire party inside your restaurant over a cover charge dispute may be legal (although I could see a creative lawyer spinning it as unlawful imprisonment), but it is most definitely not smart. For a start, it tells everybody else dining at the restaurant that there is a dispute going on, and they are potentially impacted by it. As a rule, diners do not go out to witness incidents at a restaurant, unless they are Mafia dons spectating on a hit. They go somewhere for a relaxing time. The restaurant escalated what should be have been a dispute between one party and the management into a restaurant-wide incident. That was dumb.
3. Calling the police is of debatable usefulness. As a commenter pointed out, this is essentially a commercial i.e. civil dispute. Any legal actions arising would be purely civil, therefore the police should really have refused to get involved unless there was a risk of other behaviors such as threats or assault. The fact that they hung around outside and prevaricated when questioned by members of the party as to whether they would get involved does worry me. They should have told the restaurant owner "call us if you have a problem".
4. There is a thing called the Streisand Effect that the restaurant is now going to find out about, also describable under the old saying "not all publicity is good publicity". As a general rule, The Streisand Effect does not work in your favor.

My view is that the restaurant made a major mistake, both by refusing to negotiate on the cover charge, and by locking the party inside the restaurant. They managed to obtain a lot of bad publicity for what? $50? Certainly, I will not be dining there, since the restaurant management showed that they were prepared to be horse's asses instead of being smart.