COMBAT!

Sleep forever, bear.

As I write this I am enjoying a cup of Celestial Seasonings antioxidant green tea, possibly to the detriment of my health. Last night I ran across this article on Facebook, warning me that 90% of Celestial Seasonings teas tested showed unacceptably high levels of pesticides. You will notice that the article is on a site called Honey Colony, “where the hive decides what’s healthy.” I would rather doctors and scientists decide what’s healthy—precisely, it turns out, to avoid such problems of bias as presented by Glaucus Research, the investment group that authored the study and also happens to have shorted Celestial Seasonings stock.

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Pictures into which dicks must be Photoshopped immediately

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned that his party was entering a “demographic death spiral” by opposing immigration reform. He was likely referring to the conflict between the GOP’s leadership and its base, which two groups are divided between large employers and nativists, i.e. taskmasters v. crackers. Maybe that’s a little strong. You can get into trouble when you commit to a metaphor, as Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) demonstrated in his own remarks:

I would tell my Republican colleagues, both in the House and the Senate, that the road to the White House comes through a road with a pathway to legalization. Without it, there’ll never be a road to the White House for the Republican Party.

Assiduous unpacking after the jump.

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I think it’s fair to say I went a little craze-balls regarding the NSA thing. I maintain that’s because secretly collecting millions of Americans’ phone records is a historically craze-balls thing for the US government to do, but there are good arguments on the other side. Probably, the NSA doesn’t care about anything besides preventing the President from coming down into their spy basement and personally blaming them for another terrorist attack, and most of our metadata is collected by the waste basket. Almost certainly, the hypothetical Fourth Amendment value of our Facebook friends is not so ethically compelling as an explosion-free Boston marathon. Today is Friday, and the week recedes behind us in forced perspective. Won’t you take a step back with me?

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My grandfather once said that you know you’re doing something wrong when you don’t want to tell anyone about it. Unless the NSA is using our phone records and social media data to plan an awesome surprise party, there is something suspect in the claim that domestic surveillance was kept secret for our own good. Secrecy is antithetical to democracy. Tim Weiner argues as much at Bloomberg, where he points out that presidents from LBJ to GWB have demonstrated that you can’t trust the executive. At Esquire, Charles Pierce puts a simultaneously finer and more vulgar point on it when he asks that the federal government please tell him what it is doing in his name.

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A baffling chart, courtesy of peacemaker.net

Over at the Times, Thomas Friedman has invoked his own slippery slope to argue that if we don’t allow the NSA to log our calls and finger our metadata, another 9/11 might encourage us to cede our civil liberties even worse. It is a pretty convoluted slope—call it the slippery water slide. Friedman’s essential claim is that, while this recently-revealed infringement on our privacy is bad, it does not have so significant an impact on our civil liberties as the theoretical laws a frightened populace might accept in the aftermath of another theoretical 9/11. Then we’d really be in trouble.

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