AUSTIN - Gov. Rick Perry today issued the following statement regarding the vote to admit openly gay Boy Scouts:

The Boys Scouts of America has been built upon the values of faith and family for more than 100 years and today’s decision contradicts generations of tradition in the name of political correctness. While I will always cherish my time as a scout and the life lessons I learned, I am greatly disappointed with this decision.

That’s right, friends.

Rick Perry issued a press release to express his disappointment that the Boy Scouts of America have decided that anyone can be a Boy Scout. Clearly, he wouldn’t have been able to learn valuable life lessons if gay kids were around back when he was Scout.

It’s a shame the guy wasn’t an elected official when all Boy Scout councils finally decided to allow African-American boys to join the organization back in the 1940s; then he could have expressed his disappointment with that political correct decision too.

This is a pretty short press release, but it definitely could have been made shorter; here’s my first attempt at editing:

AUSTIN - Gov. Rick Perry today issued the following statement: “I’m a monumental horse’s ass.”

The general sentiment is pretty close, I’d say.

Almost 900 people are RSVPed for a July 4th march on Washington, D.C. where protesters plan to carry loaded rifles. In D.C., openly carrying guns is against the law. But the organizer of the event, libertarian radio host Adam Kokesh, says the march is an act of “civil disobedience” that attempts to prove gun advocates’ point in the “SUBTLEST way possible.”

The event’s Facebook invitation describes the march as a nonviolent demonstration, “unless the government chooses to make it violent”:

This is an act of civil disobedience, not a permitted event. We will march with rifles loaded & slung across our backs to put the government on notice that we will not be intimidated & cower in submission to tyranny. We are marching to mark the high water mark of government & to turn the tide. This will be a non-violent event, unless the government chooses to make it violent. Should we meet physical resistance, we will peacefully turn back, having shown that free people are not welcome in Washington, & returning with the resolve that the politicians, bureaucrats, & enforcers of the federal government will not be welcome in the land of the free.

There’s a remote chance that there will be violence as there has been from government before, and I think it should be clear that if anyone involved in this event is approached respectfully by agents of the state, they will submit to arrest without resisting. We are truly saying in the SUBTLEST way possible that we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.

There’s nothing I can write that would make this sound more ridiculous than what the wingnuts have already written, so I present it without further comment.

HT: Matt Langdon.

Here’s another awful case where the prospect of the death penalty doesn’t prevent murder:

A convicted rapist accused of strangling a corrections officer to death with an amplifier cord in the prison chapel is standing trial on charges that could carry the death penalty if he’s convicted.

[…]

Scherf wrote detectives and prosecutors, saying he wanted to plead guilty. He urged authorities to seek the death penalty. He wrote that Biendl’s family deserved swift justice. After being advised of his rights, he agreed to video interviews with investigators. He spoke against the advice of his lawyer.

You read that correctly: A man serving a life sentence killed a corrections officer in order to get the death penalty.

The amazing thing, of course, is that commenters on the Huffington Post article I cite here are all calling for the death penalty. Why exactly? Well, because they are outraged and they have no other idea about how they can express their justifiable outrage.

Of course, these misguided proponents of the death penalty write things like this:

Glad it’s in a state with the death penalty

This rabid dog was already serving a life sentence, it’s not like he had anything to lose. Hang him. Before he kills anyone else.

This is why we have the death penality. To protect society and corrections officers from animals like this. Call the electric company, we’re going to need more amps soon.

What they’re apparently not recognizing, amazingly, is how an offender who had not previously committed murder decided to commit murder because he wanted to get out of his life sentence. Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in miserable prison conditions, and knowing that his state kills people who kill other people, he hoped he could get the state to put an early end to his life sentence.

In other words, this murder almost certainly happened because Washington has the death penalty. In this case, the death penalty didn’t just fail to deter a homicide; it seems pretty likely that it caused one.

HT: Drew Jacob.

The geniuses at Breitbart.com are proud of Ben Shapiro for defending his lack of understanding of the undercurrent of fear and hatred of the Other in America in an interview with Piers Morgan the other day. They’re so proud they put it on their website with a transcript. Here’s the quote that really sums up the whole interview:

SHAPIRO: I understand, I wear a yarmulke on TV, right? There’s a lot of anti-Semitism, there are people who are killed and anti-Semitic attacks. You know, per capita, as many hate crimes against Jews as as against gays in this country. America is not an anti-Semitic country and I’m not a hero for wearing a yarmulke. Being who you are in 2013 America is what America is about. It is not heroic to be who you are publicly. I’m glad for Jason Collins if it makes him feel like he’s going to have a happier life now. But, it does not make him a hero to be who you are because America is not a homophobic country.

A shorter version of this quote looks like this: ”There’s a ton of dangerous anti-Semitism in America but that doesn’t make America an anti-Semitic country; there’s also a ton of dangerous homophobia in America but that doesn’t make America a homophobic country. So Jews and gays shouldn’t worry about anything. Why? Because I say so.”

An even shorter version looks like this: “I feel comfortable being myself in public; this means that everyone else feels the same way about themselves.”

It apparently doesn’t occur to Shapiro at any point during this interview that he wrote an entire book about how conservatives can’t freely express themselves in public; the subtitle of that book is “How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans.”

I wonder if Shapiro thinks conservatives who express their beliefs in public are heroes. Wait, we know he does.

And why does he think so? Probably because they aren’t afraid of being themselves in public despite the “Culture of Fear and Intimidation [that] Silences Americans.”

I wonder if hypocrisy is heroic for Shapiro?

There is one specific circumstance in which it makes sense to hold off on Miranda. It’s exactly what the name of the exception suggests. The police can interrogate a suspect without offering him the benefit of Miranda if he could have information that’s of urgent concern for public safety. That may or may not be the case with Tsarnaev. The problem is that Attorney General Eric Holder has stretched the law beyond that scenario. And that should trouble anyone who worries about the police railroading suspects, which can end in false confessions. No matter how unsympathetic accused terrorists are, the precedents the government sets for them matter outside the easy context of questioning them. When the law gets bent out of shape for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us.