No More Mister Nice Blog: Are right-wingers even the same species as the rest of us?

Godless Liberal Homo: Banksters Gone Wild

DownWithTyranny!: Now can we expect the screeching birthers and other right-wing doody heads to demand the heads of the Bush regimistas?

Zaius Nation: Junior Woodchucks are working overtime in South Dakota

Balloon Juice: Wallace not Goldwater

d r i f t g l a s s: Send This Boy To Camp

Bob Herbert of the NY Times jumps into the Reagan argument between Krugman and Brooks:

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nix .

Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew.

He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about “states’ rights” to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you...read on

The Group News Blog:  Why 50,000 pissed-off New Yorkers are dying to stick a shiv in Rudy Giuliani's presidential hopes.

Orcinus:  Be very afraid.  Bill O'Reilly has uncovered a "national underground network" of "pistol-packing pink lesbian" gangs.

David Bacon of TAP on Benchmark #1:  "In Iraq, however, Maliki faces a fact that U.S. policymakers refuse to recognize: The oil industry is a symbol of Iraqi sovereignty and nationalism. Handing control to foreign companies is an extremely unpopular idea."

Truth 2 Power Journal:  Après Scooter, le Déluge!  Criminal defendants, including an alleged Hamas operative, are already demanding "the Libby Treatment."  (Also: will Bush get the Clinton Treatment?)

Rick Perlstein:  "Principled Goldwater conservatism" is just as bad as the cheesy Bush kind.

The ACLU files suit over a "Presidential Advance Manual" explaining how to restrict dissent at taxpayer-funded Presidential events, which leads Drinking Liberally in New Milford to wonder where the White House get its ideas.

Guest blogger Simbaud bids a fond adieu to the C&L community, and to our congenial hosts John, Nicole, and Mike, whose generosity and goodwill we hope to repay when next they visit a distant Northern land.  Meanwhile, we are pleased to leave you in the extremely capable hands of our good friend The Heretik, who will be entertaining you in this space for the next week.  Send your very finest links to: joe.ivory.mattingly AT gmail DOT com.

DownWithTyranny:

(Y)ou probably read about Matthew Dowd's duplicitous and self-serving mea culpa in yesterday's NY Times. Dowd is a repulsive character but his turnaround on Bush must be even all the more painful because he really and truly has been one of them, heart and soul. Today's rat jumping off the sinking ship is Vic Gold, a personal pal of Lynne Cheney's who spills the beans to the Washington Post. Actually all the beans are coming in his soon-to-be-published (this month) book, Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP.

Until then we'll just have to be satisfied with what Gold, a close associate of Bush's father and a true believer from the Barry Goldwater days of conservatism, had to say to the Post:

"For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times," Gold writes. "Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots."

Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. "A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control."

For Gold, Cheney brings to mind the adage of Swiss writer Madame de Stael, who wrote, "Men do not change, they unmask themselves." Cheney has a deep streak of paranoia and megalomania, Gold suggests -- but he says he did not see it at first.

He was hiding who he really was," Gold says. "He was waiting for an opportunity."

In many ways, Gold's tale of disillusionment is a familiar one. There are plenty of veterans of Reagan and Bush 41 around town who believe Bush and Cheney trashed the institutions and party they helped build from the wreckage of the Goldwater campaign.

According to USNews, we're just one month from the next spiller of the beans: George Tenet.

This story was on June 23 on CBS:

A Republican gubernatorial candidate's call for creation of a forced labor camp for illegal immigrants drew rebukes Friday from two GOP lawmakers, who labeled it a low point in the immigration debate.
Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting." The article described Goldwater's plan as a "concentration camp" for migrants....read on

Update:

The Spanish news agency EFE apologized to Republican gubernatorial candidate Don Goldwater, saying a story distributed by the agency on June 21 mischaracterized Goldwater as wanting to use "concentration camps" as part of efforts to combat illegal immigration. Goldwater has called for a work program for illegal immigrants convicted of nonviolent crimes to help construct a border wall and clean up desert areas where illegal border-crossers have left trash and damaged the environment.

If you hear a weird noise tonight, it could be the sound of conservative icons Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan turning over in their graves.

Senator Rick Santorium basically now suggests the judge wasted his time ruling on the Terri Schiavo case since unless he had ruled the way Congress wanted, he was "defying" Congress.

Sanatorium's new argument is that if Congress passes a law, it is automatically correct even if it is a law involving a highly controversial issue seeped in all kinds of ethical, political and legal issues. Read this item for yourself:

"You have judicial tyranny here," Sanatorium told WABC Radio in New York. "Congress passed a law that said that you had to look at this case. He simply thumbed his nose at Congress."

And we all know that Congress and its members who are elected don't tend to pander to get votes while judges always pander to win over constituencies to perpetuate themselves in office. Or, wait...do I have that backwards?...read on

TMV is well, a moderate...