Mitch McConnell, this morning:

“By preventing the accumulation of excessive power, the Constitution is designed to reduce the risk of tyranny or abuse at either the Federal or state levels,” McConnell told the audience of conservative legal scholars. “The health care bill would remove an important bulwark of this protection.”

Mitch McConnell, 2007:

Indeed, alarmist concerns notwithstanding, the Patriot Act is one of the most important and overdue pieces of legislation in a generation.

Yes, well, Alarmist Concerns about the Fourth Amendment sure are silly, aren’t they? Unlike Alarmist Concerns about the Individual Mandate, which surely will lead to Tyranny.

“Bristol Palin has been featured on ABC’s ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ but Sarah Palin has a few words for Fox’s ‘American Idol.’ She refers to ‘talent-deprived’ contestants who suffer from ‘the cult of self-esteem… No one they have encountered in their lives — from their parents to their teachers to their president — wanted them to feel bad by hearing the truth,’ she writes. ‘So they grew up convinced that they could become big pop stars like Michael Jackson.'” [AP, via Political Wire]

This is the homepage of the Obama campaign’s Fight the Smears website. It was launched to great fanfare as a one-stop shop to counter the scurrilous slurs circulating among opponents and your misguided relatives.

We don’t know how effective it was in practice, but we liked the symbolism: A candidate who wasn’t going to sit back and let smear merchants define the terms of debate. A campaign that would aggressively rebut the wild charges against it.

The website hasn’t been updated since November 2008. Because, as everybody knows, smears against Obama, Democrats, and their policies completely stopped the moment he was elected.

Speaking of pandering to the right wing and medals:  “President Obama will present the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to former president George H. W. Bush and 14 others.”

At least it isn’t going to W.

Yet.

[NYT Caucus]

Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association can’t let a good deed go unpunished:

We have feminized the Medal of Honor.

According to Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, every Medal of Honor awarded during these two conflicts has been awarded for saving life. Not one has been awarded for inflicting casualties on the enemy. Not one…

So the question is this: when are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night?

If only our soldiers behaved more like — well, more like Jesus:

Read more »

While we remain freakishly unmoved by the plight of the Don’t Touch My Junk dude, there’s a fresh angle to the story that catches our attention:

Amid recent controversy over airport pat-downs, Americans For Truth About Homosexuality is calling for the Transportation Security Administration to institute some “common-sense, healthy ‘discrimination'” by banning “self-acknowledged homosexuals” from doing security screenings, “so as to avoid [passengers] being put in sexually compromising situations.”

We’d like to congratulate the previously unknown AFTAH for getting some pixels by piggybacking on the outrage over a thwarted pheasant hunter, as well as moving the story to a more absurd point where we’re more comfortable addressing it.

Anti-gay group targets gay TSA workers [Salon, via Lux Mentis]

“Hehe ya grabbin your ass huh? I just puked! Eww and I thought you exiting this conversation. And good idea Jon! You’ll be as successful as my baby daddy. And actually, I do work my ass off. I’ve been a single mom for the last two years…”

–Bristol Palin, arguing on Facebook with critics of her mother’s new reality TV show and referring to Levi Johnston, without any apparent irony, as her “baby daddy.”