I'm not even mad

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/co...reedom-n332901

"How often do you look at a man's domain registry?"

I'm not a big fan of the "walk it back" meme, but here is some serious walking back going down in Indiana. There's just no other way to describe it.

This guy deserves to be let off purely for the brilliance of this scheme

Proof that the best hackers are just social engineers

Or maybe the most effective hacking technique is social engineering

David Brooks, who you can always count on to be a total piece of ****, is doubling down:

Why can't we just wait for the evangelicals to come around? You know, like we did on interracial marriage.

Richard Cohen isn't even concealing licking his chops over authoritarianism

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...f9d_story.html

[I can't believe how much time I've spent over the last couple of days reading about gay people, bakeries, wedding photographers, and wedding cakes.]

In any event, I disagree with Brooks's point about the Oregon bakery, but only at the margin. Based on my reading of the judge's order (and the facts described in the order), I think it could easily go either way and I'd be ok with either outcome.

My view would be that if the bakery declined to make any kind of cake for the wedding, it's unlawful discrimination. But if the bakery declined to make the particular cake requested by the couple, and instead offered a generic cake, I think the bakery is within their rights to do that. The judge in this case came to the conclusion that the baker told the couple that "Respondents do not make wedding cakes for same-sex ceremonies". If that's the conclusion, I think the outcome was correct, but some very small changes in circumstances would lead to a different outcome.

In a related case, a Denver bakery was recently accused of discrimination:
In this case, I think the baker is clearly in the right in having the choice to decorate the cake that way. And that story refers to yet another bakery controversy, where the ruling said:
My initial view of the Indiana law was that it would simply protect these issues of expression, and I support those protections. But so many people (including Dale Carpenter at the Volokh Conspiracy, whom I respect) have stated that the law would allow things like a hotel denying a room to a same sex couple, that I'm assuming my understanding of the law is incorrect, and that it's much worse than I originally thought.

hahaha it's always adorable when bigots think they're a protected class

Brooks can afford to double since he's a pundit who doesn't have to actually be accountable or actually manage anything. Gov. Pence has to deal with the fallout when companies and the NCAA decide to take their business elsewhere.

I will never be able to wrap my head around the fact that David Brooks has a regular gig at the Times. How could that have ever come to be?

I mean, has anyone, anywhere, in the history of time ever thought to themselves "What is David Brooks's take on all this, I wonder?" Just bewildering to me.

Occupy the Final Four with tons of people gunking up everything around the stadium would be awesome.

Walk it backkkkk

Meh. Brooks was way ahead of the curve on gay marriage, IIRC.

But the whole idea that photographers are being "forced" or "compelled" to shoot same sex weddings is ludicrous. It is trivially easy for a photographer to avoid such a wedding--just take your vacation on that day or etc. What these people want is the right to say, publicly and without repercussions "I'm not serving you because you are gay." I doubt these people even sincerely care whether they serve gay people or not. It's just a form of protest that the power of government is no longer used to keep people from getting married.

Vox going to town on Obama's Middle East policy

Yeah that's pretty brutal.

what? Just lie bro, we're not forcing you?!?!!?!? Own up man, it's clearly forcing people to do something.

https://twitter.com/localist29/statu...79440898138113
(twitpic)

I think "these people" are really more the legislators than the shopkeepers. "these people" want to pass legislation that they can use to signal their bonafides to the base. It doesn't matter if the legislation actually will pass any constitutional muster or if any gay people get their cake messed up, that's just collateral damage.

Yeah, this is a really critical part. How often do you even know whether a customer is gay? How many gay people are going to anti-gay photographers?

One reason why the PR response to this from the right has been so confused(the bill does nothing but is also a vital defense of religious rights and anyway Clinton did the same thing so please stop being mean!!!1!!) is because it's politics as theater to them. This was about striking a blow against the oppression of Christians by those meddling multicultural secular courts, it's a fundraising email generator.

The idea that this is an actual bill that will effect actual people in real life is an 11th hour development.

if you're a wedding photographer and your clients are gay you're going to figure it out pretty quickly.

See, and this is really telling about how difficult it for for "pro-gay rights" Republicans to exist. ikes is totally for gay marriage and whatever. Seattlelou had a Michael Sam avatar for a while!

But when that mainstream media started picking on those nice God-fearing Real 'Mericans in Indiana, well, you see how that cookie crumbles. Christians deserve rights, homosexuals can go straight to hell.

Anyway Trevor Noah made a handful of mildly offensive and deeply unfunny jokes on Twitter, so now the right wing is trying to get him fired from the Daily Show before he ever got hired. LOL they are so bad at this stuff.

I want John Stewart forever. Losing Colbert and Stewart in a year is too much to bear.

Conservatives should be thrilled. College kids will go back to not caring about politics anymore.