I’ve been out all day and am just now catching up to today’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The spinning seems to be way ahead of actual news.

Among other things, someone has dug up this “target” graphic published last year on Sarah Palin’s facebook page. Rep. Giffords was one of the Democrats in the crosshairs.

Map Published Last Year on Palin's Facebook Page

See Robert Naiman for more about Palin’s map.
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There’s all kinds of stuff coming out about the shooter’s myspace page that makes him out to be an anti-government whackjob, but at least some commenters are claiming that the page was erected after the shooting. So I’m not going to draw any conclusions about him until there is more information.

However, I predict that by tomorrow morning the Right Blogosphere will be stuffed with blog posts explaining why the shooter is a leftist-liberal-Obama supporter.

The congresswoman is stil alive as of this writing, but reports are she was shot in the head. Six other people, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, are dead.

Earlier this week, Joseph Stiglitz wrote a column about the sluggish response to the economic crisis. “The response to the private sector failures and profligacy that had caused the crisis was to demand public sector austerity,” Stiglitz said. “The consequence will almost surely be a slower recovery and an even longer delay before unemployment falls to acceptable levels.”

Yeah, pretty much. And of course, since the real perps are “too big to be responsible,” scapegoats must be found.

For example, it quickly became conservative orthodoxy that the financial crisis was caused by lowlife deadbeats who irresponsibly took subprime mortgages they couldn’t pay back. And this was made possible by government “do-gooders” who promoted these loans. The real perps who cooked up mortgage selling schemes and who made out like, well, bandits, are not blamed.

One goal this skapegoating serves is getting government completely out of the mortgage market, of course, which would probably mean the end of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage. But first, the Powers That Be have to convince the public to clamor to get the government out of the mortgage market.

Unions have been scapegoated for all manner of financial ills lo these many years, and they are still being scapegoated, even though only 12.3 percent of American wage and salary workers belong to Unions.

And lately public employees have been in the scapegoat spotlight. Obviously, we’re all being set up to cut public employees’ salaries to help pay for the tax cuts for rich people.

Earlier this week, Michael Powell wrote in the New York Times,

Ever since Marie Corfield’s confrontation with Gov. Chris Christie this fall over the state’s education cuts became a YouTube classic, she has received a stream of vituperative e-mails and Facebook postings.

“People I don’t even know are calling me horrible names,” said Ms. Corfield, an art teacher who had pleaded the case of struggling teachers. “The mantra is that the problem is the unions, the unions, the unions.”

Paul Harris writes for The Guardian,

Across the US, politicians are railing against the terrible abuses of powerful union bosses, especially in state government. … What is perverse about this trend is just how vastly it misunderstands what went wrong with the American economy. No one is denying that this is a time for belt-tightening. Or that some unions have problems. Or that some union contracts look over-generous in austerity America. But the fundamental truth remains: powerful and reckless unions did not cause the Great Recession by rampant speculation. Nor did an out-of-control labour movement cause or burst the housing bubble. It was not union bosses who packaged up complex derivatives to sell in their millions and thus wrecked the economy and put millions out of work. Nor was it union bosses who awarded (and continue to award) themselves salaries worth hundreds of millions of dollars for doing nothing of social value. Neither was it the union movement that was bailed out by the taxpayer and then refused to change its habits.

All that was the work of the finance industry.

Yet, as America continues to search for solutions to its economic problems, it is the labour movement, and not the banking sector, that is getting it in the neck. This is despite the fact that many unions, especially in such cases as the bailout of Detroit’s automakers, have proved themselves highly flexible in sacrificing wages and long-held workers’ rights in order to preserve jobs. Meanwhile, the finance industry, where true and meaningful reform has failed to happen, still squeals as if President Obama were a raving socialist. Or, in the helpful and moderate words of Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

You see where this is going, right? Good-paying jobs are an evil thing. People who work for a paycheck had better learn to make do with less. Unions and public employees are just the first targets.

All kinds of lies about public employees are being mouthed by political leaders and repeated in media with complete impunity. For example, a big talking point from last summer was that there had been a huge increase in public employees — proof that Obama was growing a “big government.” But the increase was just the temp employees hired to conduct the census.

The recent stories about the New York sanitation workers who sabotaged snow removal is part of the problem. The source of the story was one Republican councilman, and I’m sure everyone in the country heard it.

Recent stories claiming that public employees make outrageously high salaries is based on bogus manipulation of statistics. Robert Reich wrote,

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That’s untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

The Republican trick is to compare apples with oranges — the average wage of public employees with the average wage of all private-sector employees. But only 23 percent of private-sector employees have college degrees; 48 percent of government workers do. Teachers, social workers, public lawyers who bring companies to justice, government accountants who try to make sure money is spent as it should be – all need at least four years of college.

Compare apples to apples and and you’d see that over the last fifteen years the pay of public sector workers has dropped relative to private-sector employees with the same level of education. Public sector workers now earn 11 percent less than comparable workers in the private sector, and local workers 12 percent less. (Even if you include health and retirement benefits, government employees still earn less than their private-sector counterparts with similar educations.)

The talking points are also going after public employee pensions, claiming they are crippling the nation financially. But most of these pensions are mostly funded from pension funds public employees pay into through their careers. Pensions already are quickly becoming as extinct as dodos in the private sector.

The American public is being manipulated into accepting less — less money, less security, less upward mobility. And they’re being distracted away from the real thieves, the real bandits draining us dry.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Some of you probably saw Dahlia Lithwick on Rachel Maddow’s show last night, but if you didn’t, here it is.

Lithwick points out that the Constitution fetishists so dearly want to believe the Constitution is clear and simple and absolute in every way, when it’s actually vague and very open-ended on many points, not to mention infused with 18th-century legalisms that one can’t possibly understand correctly without some knowledge of English common law of the time. As I said in the earlier post, I sincerely believe that most teabaggers and their leaders — Palin, Beck et al. — would flunk a quiz on basic constitutional facts.

BTW, please suggest questions for a quiz — I may create one.

Anyway, it strikes me that this is so much in keeping with authoritarian personality types, who famously have a low tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity. As Bob Altemeyer points out (page 122), this is one of the reasons they don’t “get” science. Science never declares any understanding of anything to be the absolute and final truth, and authoritarians can’t deal with that. Once science has been shown to be mistaken about something, then it’s all invalid, in their minds.

This also means that authoritarians/conservatives/teabaggers are forever and always at odds with human civilization unless they can control it and stamp out all the parts that confuse them. They do this in the name of liberty, of course.

Update: Big, honking, neon-lit proof of the authoritarian nature of conservatism — some blogger thinks my remarks about constitutional fetishism are treason.

Believe me, if teabaggers ever get unchecked power, the U.S. will become a totalitarian nightmare even Orwell could not have imagined.

So Justice Scalia thinks the Constitution offers women no protection from gender discrimination. The 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to women, then, Justice Scalia? Weird. But then this is the same guy who couldn’t understand why Jewish war veterans might object to being memorialized by a Christian cross.

Anyway — there’s a good article by Michael Lind discussing how the U.S. Constitution became a sacred totem rather than a charter of government, which nicely follows a blog post I wrote last week. “The U.S. Constitution is not the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments,” he says. Ah HAH!

Lind says that the Constitution cult has its roots in 18th-century neoclassicism and was further nurtured in Christian fundamentalism, which makes sense. And I would take some of his points even further. He writes,

English-speaking democracies tend to be stable and free even when, like Britain, they lack a written constitution. But Latin American republics have been afflicted by dictatorship and civil war for generations in spite of having formal constitutions modeled on that of the United States. The contrast demonstrates that the true security for freedom is a culture of constitutionalism, not a particular constitution, or any written constitution at all. The details of a particular democratic political system — presidential or parliamentary, bicameral or unicameral, unitary or federal — are ultimately less important than the unwillingness of the citizens to resort to violence when they lose an election, unlike the Confederate ancestors of so many of today’s white Southern Republicans, who tried to destroy the country upon losing an election.

One of the interesting parallels between today’s teabaggers and yesterday’s Confederates is that both groups believe(d) themselves to be the true heirs of the Founding Fathers and the true faithful stewards of the Founding Scripture, the Constitution. Many secessionists justified secession by claiming the damnyankees were unfaithful to the Founding Vision and Principles; therefore, true patriots were obligated to make a break with the unfaithful North and retreat into an enclave of political purity in the South. The fact that they had to destroy the nation to do that didn’t seem to factor into their thinking.

Further, I continue to be struck by the degree to which the symbols and scripture of Christianity and the Constitution have all become something like totems — “An animal, plant, or natural object serving among certain tribal or traditional peoples as the emblem of a clan or family and sometimes revered as its founder, ancestor, or guardian.”

Thus there are people who want to erect the Ten Commandments in schools and courthouses who cannot, when put on the spot, recite them all. Likewise, I am convinced that your average Bible thumper would draw a blank if asked to list the major points made in the Sermon on the Mount or explain the parable of the unleavened bread. The Bible has become a totem; merely invoking or displaying it provides some kind of mystical protection for the tribe.

Likewise the Constitution. Every time I hear some teabagger rave on about how liberals are destroying the Constitution I so want to give him a pop quiz to demonstrate the guy has no clue what is actually in the Constitution, and wouldn’t recognize it if it rose up out of the sidewalk and bit his ass.

I just found this on another blog, from last year before the mid-terms –

The Founders’ masterpiece, O’Donnell said, isn’t just a legal document; it’s a “covenant” based on “divine principles.” For decades, she continued, the agents of “anti-Americanism” who dominate “the D.C. cocktail crowd” have disrespected the hallowed document. But now, finally, in the “darker days” of the Obama administration, “the Constitution is making a comeback.” Like the “chosen people of Israel,” who “cycle[d] through periods of blessing and suffering,” the Tea Party has rediscovered America’s version of “the Hebrew Scriptures” and led the country into “a season of constitutional repentance.” Going forward, O’Donnell declared, Republicans must champion the “American values” enshrined in our sacred text. “There are more of us than there are of them,” she concluded.

By now, O’Donnell’s rhetoric should sound familiar. In part that’s because her fellow Tea Party patriots—Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, the guy at the rally in the tricorn hat—also refer to the Constitution as if it were a holy instruction manual that was lost, but now, thanks to them, is found. And yet the reverberations go further back than Beck. The last time America elected a new Democratic president, in 1992, the Republican Party’s then-dominant insurgent group used identical language to describe the altogether different document that defined their cause and divided them from the heretics in charge: the Bible. The echoes of the religious right in O’Donnell’s speech—the Christian framework, the resurrection narrative, the “us vs. them” motif, the fixation on “values”—aren’t coincidental.

You’ll remember that Christine O’Donnell didn’t understand what “separation of church and state” means and how it relates to the 1st Amendment. See also “All Patriots ‘Know’ That Moses Wrote the Constitution.”

The Constitution is the Fifth Gospel for these people, I tell you. Of course, they don’t know what the traditional Four Gospels say, either. And, as the Dead Peasant points out, just as fundamentalists are certain only they understand the Bible, teabaggers are certain only they understand the Constitution. Even if they don’t know what’s in it.

Ross Douthat, Megan McArdle, and some other conservative writers today are sorrowing that all those selfish women are getting abortions, resulting in fewer babies available for adoption.

A number of non-troglodyte bloggers already have agreed with Tbogg, who wrote,

… there is no more repellent reason for opposing abortion than the notion that poor women who choose to not bring a baby to term are somehow obligated to do so because it is a sellers market. That is some seriously fucked up shit.

Yes. But if people want to complain about the dearth of healthy American-born babies available for adoption, don’t complain about abortion. Complain that these days unmarried women who give birth are far less likely to put the baby up for adoption than was true years ago.

Douthat even points this out in his column before he goes back to whining about abortion:

Prior to 1973, 20 percent of births to white, unmarried women (and 9 percent of unwed births over all) led to an adoption. Today, just 1 percent of babies born to unwed mothers are adopted, and would-be adoptive parents face a waiting list that has lengthened beyond reason.

Yes. However, Douthat continues,

Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.

The Fetus People refuse to believe this, but social historians and statisticians who study abortion in American think the rate of abortion in America today could be about what it was before Roe v. Wade. Since there were no records kept for illegal abortions there is no way to know for sure, but it is well documented that the rate of abortion in countries around the world is not impacted by criminalizing abortion. There is no reason why the U.S. would be an exception.

So, if alleged libertarian McArdle got her second-dearest wish (the first would be, I believe, an exemption from paying taxes) and American women lost access to legal abortion, it would likely make no difference in the supply of health white babies. If the trends in other nations are any guide, in very little time an underground and notoriously unsafe abortion industry would be thriving, the rate of abortion would remain about what it is now, and all but 1 percent of unmarried woman who give birth will still keep their babies. Because in the absence of very strong social and family pressure to do otherwise, mothers will keep their babies. This is human nature. It’s also mammal nature and bird nature.

It is very sad that some people who want children are infertile. It’s very sad that some people who want health care can’t get insurance. It’s very sad that some people who want to earn a living can’t get work that pays a living wage. It’s very sad that families lose their homes. It’s very sad that there are children who don’t get enough to eat. I’m personally sad that lamebrains like Douthat and McArdle actually make livings as pundits. The world is full of injustice.

Cope, people.

Is there a rule in newspaper stylebooks that says reporters cannot write about Baby Boomers without calling us “self-absorbed”? Because that’s the only way this headline makes sense –

Boomers Hit New Self-Absorption Milestone: Age 65

Is the headline writer saying that we’re getting older only because we’re selfish?

The article writer, Dan Barry, continues,

Though other generations, from the Greatest to the Millennial, may mutter that it’s time to get over yourselves, this birthday actually matters. According to the Pew Research Center, for the next 19 years, about 10,000 people “will cross that threshold” every day — and many of them, whether through exercise or Botox, have no intention of ceding to others what they consider rightfully theirs: youth.

Mr. Barry is a 1980 graduate of St. Bonaventure University, Wikipedia says, which suggests he was born at the tail end of the Boom, in the group that was too young to have watched Elvis on the Ed Sullivan Show or appreciate Woodstock and the Summer of Love. Jealous, are we?

This means that the 79 million baby boomers, about 26 percent of this country’s population, will be redefining what it means to be older, and placing greater demands on the social safety net. They are living longer, working longer and, researchers say, nursing some disappointment about how their lives have turned out. The self-aware, or self-absorbed, feel less self-fulfilled, and thus are racked with self-pity.

So, then, to those who once never trusted anyone over 30: Raise that bowl of high-fiber granola, antioxidant-rich blueberries and skim milk and give yourself a Happy Birthday toast.

Yeah, and you can stuff your high-fiber granola where the sun don’t shine, Barry.

The real reason we Boomers are being made out to be selfish, of course, is that the oldest among us are eligible for Medicare this year. There have been an epidemic of stories about how us selfish, self-absorbed Boomers are about to drain Medicare, which is awfully self-absorbed of us.

We were socked with big increases in FICA taxes, in particular during the Reagan years when most of us were still early in our careers, and now we’re being told we’re selfish for expecting to receive benefits. The Beltway Bobbleheads are telling us to suck it up and do with less, for the good of the country.

The real issue is not just that there’s so damn many of us, but that on the whole we are getting older without all the pension benefits most of our parents had. Some of us are quite well off, of course, but many of us are not, and the safety net already has shrunk an awful lot from what it was when our Greatest Generation folks retired.

So if you want to see real social problems, just kick the rest of the props out from under us and watch several million older people sink into poverty. I guess then we’ll be told we’re selfish if we don’t voluntarily strand ourselves on ice floes — if there still are ice floes — or march off to the Soylent Green factory.

I had heard something about Gov. Haley Barbour releasing a woman from prison on condition that she donate her kidney. Wow, what will small-government conservatism come up with next, I thought.

But today I read the details in Bob Herbert’s column. Two sisters named Jamie and Gladys Scott have been serving double consecutive life sentences for taking part in a robbery in which $11 was stolen. That’s right, $11. No one was harmed during the robbery, Herbert says, and the sisters had no prior criminal record. The Scott sisters have been in prison for 16 years.

This is from Human Rights:

The Scotts, who were 19 and 21 when the robbery occurred, have been incarcerated for 16 years. Meanwhile, three male acquaintances also convicted in the robbery are free after serving just a couple of years in prison. The men reportedly received lighter sentences in exchange for providing the prosecution with incriminating information against the Scotts.

“The authorities did not even argue that the Scott sisters had committed the robbery,” writes Bob Herbert of the New York Times. “They were accused of luring two men into a trap, in which the men had their wallets taken by acquaintances of the sisters, one of whom had a shotgun.”

Jamie Scott now has a life-threatening kidney disease. In his announcement of the suspension of the sentence, Gov. Barbour expressed no concern for Jamie Scott’s health. Instead, he said, “Their incarceration is no longer necessary for public safety or rehabilitation, and Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi.”

So, the only reason the outrageous sentence was suspended — not commuted — is that Jamie Scott’s health care was costing the state too much money.

(But I assume the sisters have no insurance, and Mississippi is notoriously chintzy with Medicaid. So I suspect they may have to rely on charity to pay for a transplant. We’ll see.)

Bob Herbert wrote today that the sisters were not informed of the suspension, but learned about it on television. Nor was Gladys Scott consulted about donating her kidney, although she said it was something she wanted to do, anyway.

Herbert continues,

I was happy for the Scott sisters and deeply moved as Gladys spoke of how desperately she wanted to “just hold” her two children and her mother, who live in Florida. But I couldn’t help thinking that right up until the present moment she and Jamie have been treated coldly and disrespectfully by the governor and other state officials. It’s as if the authorities have found it impossible to hide their disdain, their contempt, for the two women.

The prison terms were suspended — not commuted — on the condition that Gladys donate a kidney to Jamie, who is seriously ill with diabetes and high blood pressure and receives dialysis at least three times a week. Gladys had long expressed a desire to donate a kidney to her sister, but to make that a condition of her release was unnecessary, mean-spirited, inhumane and potentially coercive. It was a low thing to do.

I posted a photo of the sisters just so we’re all clear about where this contempt is coming from. You might recall Gov. Barbour’s recent bout of amnesia regarding the civil rights movement? And this guy is considered by some to be one of the GOP’s more respectable potential presidential candidates in 2012.

And then there’s the gender issue. In 2009, Randy Radley Balko reported in Slate that Gov. Balko Barbour had “pardoned, granted clemency to, or suspended the sentences of at least five convicted murderers, four of whom killed their wives or girlfriends.” (emphasis added).

Well, you know, killing a wife or girlfriend is not like real murder. They probably had it coming. (/sarcasm) Note that all five of these men had been in a prison program that assigned them to do odd jobs around the governor’s mansion.

See also: Scott Sisters Kidney Donation Threatens Organ Transplant Laws

Update: See E.R. Shipp in The Root:

The judge who essentially sentenced the Scott sisters, Jamie and Gladys, to life in prison was downright lenient in 2005 when it came to sentencing one of the ringleaders of the lynching of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 — Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. That despicable human being was given 60 years — 20 years for each murder? — but left free while appealing his conviction.

Jeebus, people, you might as well go back to wearing sheets and burning crosses and stop pretending. You aren’t fooling most folks.