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1. Avedon Carol, as usual, has the best links.  I'm stealing her link to the Conceptual Guerilla piece, "Defeat the Right in Three Minutes,"and quoting a different section because she's right:  some people will not click through on links, and this is illuminating to read, even if familiar.
   
   Long excerpt from Conceptual Guerilla:
   

   But the cheap-labor conservative isn’t really interested in “freedom”. What the he wants is the “privatized tyranny” of industrial serfdom, the main characteristic of which is – you guessed it – “cheap labor”. For proof, you need only look at exactly what constitutes “big government tyranny” and what doesn’t. It turns out that cheap-labor conservatives are BIG supporters of the most oppressive and heavy handed actions the government takes.
   

   • Cheap-labor conservatives are consistent supporters of the generous use of capital punishment. They say that “government can’t do anything right” – except apparently, kill people. Indeed, they exhibit classic conservative unconcern for the very possibility that the government might make a mistake and execute the wrong man.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives complain about the “Warren Court” “handcuffing the police” and giving “rights to criminals”. It never occurs to them, that our criminal justice system is set up to protect innocent citizens from abuses or just plain mistakes by government officials – you know, the one’s who can’t do anything right.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support the “get tough” and “lock ‘em up” approach to virtually every social problem in the spectrum. In fact, it’s the only approach they support. As for the 2,000,000 people we have in jail today – a higher percentage of our population than any other nation on earth – they say our justice system is “too lenient”.
   • Cheap-labor conservative – you know, the ones who believe in “freedom” – say our crime problem is because – get this – we’re too “permissive”. How exactly do you set up a “free” society that isn’t “permissive”?
   • Cheap-labor conservatives want all the military force we can stand to pay for and never saw a weapons system they didn’t like.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support every right-wing authoritarian hoodlum in the third world.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support foreign assassinations, covert intervention in foreign countries, and every other “black bag” operation the CIA can dream up, even against constitutional governments, elected by the people of those countries.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support “domestic surveillance” against “subversives” – where “subversive” means “everybody but them”.
   • Cheap-labor believers in “freedom” think it’s the government’s business if you smoke a joint or sleep with somebody of your own gender.
   • Cheap-labor conservatives support our new concentration camp down at Guantanamo Bay. They also support these “secret tribunals” with “secret evidence” and virtually no judicial review of the trials and sentences. Then they say that liberals are “Stalinists”.
   • And let’s not forget this perennial item on the agenda. Cheap-labor conservatives want to “protect our national symbol” from “desecration”. They also support legislation to make the Pledge of Allegiance required by law. Of course, it is they who desecrate the flag every time they wave it to support their cheap-labor agenda. [Ouch! That was one of those “hits” you can hear up in the “nosebleed” seats.]

   Read the rest; it's all good.
   
2. Problem Chylde: Poor people aren't supposed to want nice things.
   

   Your goal, Poor Person, should you choose to accept it, is to forget about any presumption of haves and have-nots. Your job, Poor Person, is to get as far away from the have-nots as possible in thought and deed and investment. Otherwise, you will tip people off to the fact you are or have been poor. They are only supposed to suspect that you have been poor when you approach the dais to give a motivating speech, or when you are filling out an application to fund more education for yourself, or when you have fallen upon dire straits but grow accustomed to those circumstances with aplomb. Then, dear Poor Person, and then only may you say, “I did not always blithely accept the presence of Nice Things in my life; I lived a joyless existence under the poverty line.” After that statement, you counterbalance those tales with your jaunts to an expensive school among Those Who Have a Lot, the blatantly poor, and the secret poor. You omit the mental gymnastics you played to hide how much you wished that Those Who Have a Lot knew you when, so they’d understand how much it hurt when they’d pipe up in class about how poverty is a birthright of the irresponsible and the deranged, the deviant and the demented. Instead, you speak of overcoming the Blue Bloods, the Jacks and Jills, the Nouveau Riche as a general learning experience that the only time you can say, “I wasn’t that upset or deprived or needy when I was poor” is to yourself or to your progeny, as a whispered admonishment when they laugh at a homeless man on the street or when they sneer at a story of a single mother with four kids and a 58″ flat screen television in her home.

3. I am quoting from Anthony McCarthy entirely too much lately, but he's been on a roll, so here's his take on the Founding Fathers fetish the "cheap-labor conservatives" (yeah it's easy.  Too easy) are trying to push:
   

   Racism and other forms of bigotry are inseparable from the Founders Fetish, the contemporary assertion of “states rights” and a host of other Federalist bromides having gained their most ardent advocates among the neo-confederates. Another line feeding into it is the opposition to the Income Tax and regulatory agencies. As seen in a large number of instances, such as DOMA, when it is in their interest for the federal government to usurp powers granted to states, they’ve, mostly, not had any problem with violating the sacred writ of the Founders. It’s telling that the instances in which they are opposed to this have included the federal protection of individual liberties and their endorsement of federal encroachment has usually been in favor of quashing state protection of rights and liberties.* And it’s the rarest of right wingers who opposes taxes when it’s for the military or other things they support.

   (Footnote concerns his distrust of Ted Olson.)
   
4. Mark Kleiman proposes legal but non-commercial marijuana.

And so off to church.