Midday open thread

• Conservatives don't deserve Daniel Larison, the most gifted conservative writer no one has ever heard of. His big failing, of course, is that he's reality-based -- a rarity on his side of the aisle.

  During this entire [Sotomayor] debate, we are hearing endlessly about the importance of merit and why merit must never be outweighed by identity considerations. All right. We are reminded again and again of the hope that everyone will be judged by character and not by race. That sounds reasonable. So why is it that Sotomayor’s critics seem to be going out of their way to ignore her merits and her achievements and have been fixating on questions of identity and identity politics to the exclusion of almost everything else? Perhaps deep within the cocoon, articles that earnestly claim that Limbaugh and Martin Luther King are fighting the same fight seem credible, but what everyone else sees is little more than a collective panic that an Hispanic has been appointed to the Supreme Court. Her critics have been railing against her allegedly faulty judgment, but they have managed to make their arguments so poorly that it is the soundness of their judgment that most people are bound to question.

  No less remarkable are the descriptions her critics offer about her. According to Shelby Steele, who writes on almost nothing except for subjects related to race, she is “race-obsessed.” Andrew chimes in and refers, apparently without any irony, to the “constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity” and goes on to say that “the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation.” What evidence do we have that her consciousness of her identity is either constant or oppressive, or for that matter where is the evidence that she “harps on it” aggressively or otherwise? She talks about it, she refers to it, she takes pride in it, she thinks that it matters–this is not obsession or aggression.

• Possible Dodd challenger, businessman Peter Schiff, is sure off to an interesting start ($):

  In an interview with Roll Call, Schiff said he was new to politics and only recently registered as a Republican in Weston.

  “I don’t know when the last time I voted was,” Schiff said. “You can’t blame me for any of the politicians. I didn’t vote for them.”

  Figures that the guy who doesn't know squat about politics or government would want to run as a Republican. The Republican primary already features former Rep. Rob Simmons, some state senator, and a former ambassador

• The latest wingnut logic is that since the Holocaust Museum shooter was an anti-Obama, anti-government neo-Nazi, that he was a liberal! It's that hilariously deranged Jonah Goldberg logic that since Hitler's party was the National Socialists, therefore they were socialists, which is just like liberals! Weird that Jewish voters voted Democratic by a 78-21 margin in 2008, huh?

  While it's fun to mock them their crazy logic, it's epic stupidity like this that's the reason they're losing mainstream America.

• Speaking of crazy logic, Bill O'Reilly doesn't think the Holocaust Museum shooting was "newsworthy".
• Still speaking of crazy logic, Rush Limbaugh dishes the crazy about the Holocaust Museum shooter being a "leftist". As Atrios says:

  We've spent several years having fundamentalist anti-women anti-gay Muslim extremists being somehow aligned with liberals, and now anti-government anti-Semitic white supremacists are as well.

  That's been the whole irony of this past decade, of course. Other than calling their gods by a different name, the Islamic fundamentalist agenda is little different than the Christian fundamentalist one -- perpetual war, subjugation of women, hatred of gays, demand for theocracy and the legislation of morality, and so on. The reason we don't like conservatives are the same reasons we hate Islamic fundamentalists. For them -- the big difference is that they worship the same, but differently-named god.

• Rejoice! The GOP's energy plan has been unveiled.

  The Republican plan promises to bring 100 new nuclear reactors online by 2029, permit oil exploration in offshore and Arctic areas and speed up the development of alternative fuels, including controversial carbon-capture and sequestration technology.

  Note, also, that the "impact" of global warming "shall not be considered for any purpose in the implementation" of this plan. I'm glad they put that caveat in there, just in case anyone had any doubts about the GOP's continued opposition to science and the health of our planet.

• Watch our conservative friends try to justify their hysterical reaction to the prescient DHS report that predicted right-wing loons would start engaging in acts of domestic terrorism.
• Carry Prejean joins the trash heap of failed GOP spokespeople. Which reminds me, whatever happened to Joe the Plumber?