Today I got into a little back and forth with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald (what’s new?) on Twitter.

My basic, ongoing complaint with Greenwald is that he takes what is often a valid concern, goes to the worst possible scenario, then caricatures everyone who disagrees with him as a hopeless apologist for the figure (usually Obama) he has decided is responsible for the outrage in question.

Today it was about the use of drone aircraft by domestic law enforcement. Here’s what I think: I believe in law enforcement having the tools they need to do what they can do combat crime. Now, do I think this means law enforcement can simply do as they please, liberties be damned? Of course not.

Every advance in law enforcement must be balanced against civil liberties. We’ve seen it before, with advances like DNA, wiretapping, etc.

At the same time, we must advance. When we get new technology, we integrate it into our routines and our society. In this instance, we have a technology that can do wonders — if used properly.

We just have to be smart about it, but we can’t stick our heads in the sands and hope the criminal element will do the same.

The recent controversy about the role of companies like Bain Capital is giving Democrats an opportunity to discuss just what, exactly, is the party’s posture on economic issues. It’s an important discussion.

In order to get the party out of the post-Carter wilderness, a decision was made in the ’80s and ’90s to hand the economic reigns of the party to the economically conservative wing. Buoyed by the bull market and generally good economic conditions during the Clinton presidency, the idea took hold that if you combined more traditional Democratic positions with a hands-off approach to the market you had something.

The problem is, this mentality helped get the ball rolling on the lax oversight and deregulation that became accelerated in the Bush years.

Trust me, I know, I used to be a big believer in a lof that Third Way stuff.

Except it doesn’t work. The invisible hand will not magically regulate the market. Left to its own designs, big business will collude and extract profits at the expense of social good. It isn’t (in all cases at least) a matter of evil triumphant, but rather that for big business the incentive from doing harm is better than doing good.

Now you have some Democrats who have learned the wrong lessons of this era. They have so internalized the GOP message that Democrats are bad for business (I’d gladly compare the Dow during Clinton/Obama to the Bush presidency) that they bend over backwards in two directions for big business.

We’ve seen that this week with Ed Rendell and to a lesser extent Cory Booker whining about attacks on Bain, stupidly equating them to race-baiting Jeremiah Wright ads.

Democrats really need to have this conversation. Are they going to be just another rubber stamp for big business like the Republican party is? Or are they going to champion entrepreneurship while also emphasizing the social obligations of business, and at the same time being an aggressive watchdog of big business.

I favor the second choice. To insist that there should be rules of the road that are enforced is not even close to “an attack” on capitalism, or socialism. Big business is great and it provides jobs and is often a driver of our economic growth and stability, but that doesn’t mean you should genuflect in the direction of their corporate headquarters, either.

I think Gov. Rendell and Mayor Booker have been dead wrong in their defenses of Bain business. But you can forgive them if the party has been giving off all manner of mixed signals on a key issue. What do Democrats stand for on economics?

Let’s talk about it and have an answer before November.

The Obama campaign has released a new video detailing what Mitt Romney did at Ampad, another company unlucky enough to get in the way of the “vulture capitalists”* at Bain Capital.

* Rick Perry, R-TX

Conservatives are looking very hard for actual evidence to back up the storyline they’ve concocted that Barack Obama’s support for same-sex marriage will hurt him in some statistically significant way with black voters.

As National Review’s Noah Glyn writes here, they’ve already lost one example with Rev. Emmett Burns, a Maryland pastor who first said he would stay home in 2012 after Obama’s decision. Already Burns has changed his mind, noting that while he disagrees with Obama’s position, he will support his re-election.

So what does Glyn do? Find another black clergyman! He cites the example of Reverend Dwight McKissic of Cornerstrone Baptist Church who tells National Review just the kind of claptrap they want to hear: “The moral impact of this decision is equal to the military impact of al-Qaeda when they attacked the Twin Towers on 9/11.”

The article goes on to cite McKissic as if he were just a man of the cloth upset with Obama.

Except he sounds a little crazy if you dig in just a little. In 2005 McKissic blamed New Orleans’ sin for the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, claiming that “New Orleans flaunts sin in a way that no other places do” and that “There are 10 abortion clinics in Louisiana; five of those are in New Orleans. They have a Southern Decadence parade every year and they call it gay pride.”

As a result, McKissic claimed, “When you study Scripture, it’s not out of the boundaries of God to punish a nation for sin and because of sin. When I look at our country, at what’s happening, and what’s happening in New Orleans in particular, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”

Just the kind of crazy talk you might expect from someone offering up a juicy anti-Obama quote to National Review.

I don’t doubt that a majority of black voters probably disagree with President Obama on same-sex marriage. I think historically the black community in America has had problems accepting homosexuality. But while they are culturally conservative on this issue (as they are with others), they tend not to vote on these issues in presidential contests. If so, Republicans who have campaigned against gay rights would have done better with black voters in the last few elections.

In the worst case scenario I expect Obama will do as well with black voters as he did in 2008, no matter how many obscure, off-the-wall clergymen the National Review decides to interview.

So Michelle Malkin’s latest online venture is a website called Twitchy, which provides a service nobody in the world asked for by aggregating right-wing themed stories using tweets. Literally, nobody wanted this to exist but there it is on the Internet.

It will probably last for a maximum of three years, but yesterday the site went after me. Low hanging fruit, indeed.

The site is newish but its an old conservative trick: Attack the liberal for a position he doesn’t have, act superior as a result.

The back story: Buzzfeed made a big to-do about how the Obama campaign was requiring people attending fundraising events to surrender their cellphones. I said this made sense, especially after Romney’s open-mic gaffe a few weeks ago and the infamous “cling to their guns” statement from Obama.

According to the anonymous Tweet-aggregator at Twitchy, “Most transparent campaign evah confiscates cell phones, gets Media Matters stamp of approval.”

This is pretty rich coming from the movement that effectively created the Super PAC and is attacking the usage of publicly accessible campaign finance data. Even worse, I’d be the first to attack the Obama administration if I felt they were doing this in an official capacity where national security wasn’t at stake.

I think open events should be open events, especially when a high ranking official like the President is in attendance. That’s why I detested it when Bush pre-screened people who attended his town halls in order to purge the crowd of anyone who wasn’t a mindless Karl Rove automaton. When Obama was selling health care reform he had town hall meetings open to all, and he took on dissenters — that’s the point.

But a private campaign fundraiser isn’t an official event. And those fundraisers are — unlike the shell corporations and one man bands we’ve seen funding pro-Romney super PACs — private events where the rules are up to the organizers.

But nice try.

I can’t stand Ron Paul. Why? I should have some sort of warm sentiment towards him, right? He is, after all, an anti-war conservative riding against the tide of brainless militarism that still rules the GOP, right? But like almost everything else with Paul, it is wrapped up in the type of brain-dead simpleton talk that renders it effectively useless.

Besides bring back some pork for his district like any other congressman, what the hell has Paul actually done in his tenure in the House? He hasn’t seriously affected the mainstream thinking of the GOP and his Simple Simon view of the federal government’s role in America isn’t ever happening.

Thank God. (The invisible hand of the market was never going to desegregate the Jim Crow south)

As much as people despise the sort of dippy-hippie views espoused by some people on the left, they are often equaled by the late night dorm room bong hit logic of the libertarian movement. Only they’ve been even less effective politically. The hippies at least had some effect on public sentiment on the Vietnam War and even nominated a “peace” candidate within one of the two major parties (he went down in flames to one of the worst presidents ever, but still).

By comparison, Ron Paul couldn’t win a single real contest in the 2012 Republican nomination process. This is a nominating contest where tired retreads like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum actually won states!

Newt. Gingrich.

What’s the point of Ron Paul then? He has cultists online who don’t actually show up to vote for him and he doesn’t seriously influence the debate within his party like past, fringe candidates have.

What’s the point?

At the Republican Convention, there’s this idea going around that Paul and his supporters are going to cause a ruckus. Not going to happen. The parties have both become experts at stage managing their national conventions. This isn’t the smoke-filled room of yore or the chaos of 1968. Do people really think that Reince Priebus is dumb enough to let Paul’s trickling of supporters disrupt the coronation of Mitt Romney as the party’s nominee?

Give me a break.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve learned that the media narrative rarely has any relation to reality. In 2002-3, the media marched along with the Bush administration’s flimsy case for war in Iraq. In 2004, they echoed his message that he was a competent commander-in-chief despite the death toll in Iraq and the refusal to modify the failed strategy there.

In 2007-8 we were told that Hillary Clinton’s nomination was inevitable, and after Obama was elected the media kept telling us health care reform was dead as it moved through congress to become a law.

Now in 2012, there have been three early media narratives about President Obama’s re-election campaign that have already been proven wrong.

Narrative: The Obama campaign is going to be negative.

Reality: While the Obama campaign is, of course, going to make very clear definitions about the choice between Obama and Romney, the first major ad buy by the Obama campaign is this effort.

This is a decidedly positive ad, compared by some to Reagan’s “Morning In America” campaign. You could say the same for the overall theme of The Road We’ve Traveled, the Obama campaign’s mini-documentary. Both the ad and the film go along similar narratives: Obama inherited a crisis, and though there remains considerable ground to cover, he and his allies have made positive reforms for the country. This is not a “negative” message at all.

Narrative: Obama is trying to distract from the economy.

Reality: At every turn, the Obama campaign has made a contrast of his record on jobs to the jobs disaster he inherited. The so-called “bikini graph” has been a part of the re-election campaign’s arsenal. It communicates a complicated topic in a simple fashion: red down, blue up, up good.

The first state-targeted ads from Obama also explicitly reference his record on the economy. All three ads reference economic issues, from the jobs picture to the auto industry rescue. This is a very bad way of not addressing the economy, isn’t it?

Narrative: Obama won’t address Obamacare.

Reality: The campaign just released this video of nurses touting the Affordable Care Act, while other videos released by the campaign highlight the stories of people benefiting from its provisions. If Obama was avoiding Obamacare, wouldn’t it be easier to just said “I ordered Bin Laden killed” rather than go into the weeds about what effects the reform law he passed had?

The media likes to make everything into a storyline, often without concern for reality. That is no different in their coverage of something as important as a presidential campaign. The problem is the narrative is often false.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberly Strassel is up in arms. Ms. Strassel is just OUTRAGED that the Obama campaign is pointing out the monied interests bankrolling Romney’s presidential campaign and others are looking into their odd behavior. I mean, the nerve of them! Using publicly available campaign finance reports to … wait, what is the concern again?

We are seeing some mighty unique things this campaign. Republican/mainstream media outrage at the President advocating an agenda, conservatives suddenly concerned that a Democrat just might not roll over and play dead in response to their actions. I mean, Obama is acting like he might want to win this thing. The bastard.

Ever since campaign finance data was rightly put into the public sphere, campaigns and outside groups have regularly used this data to attack their opponents. That’s why a search for “George Soros” on Fox News’ website yields 1,560 results.

The right seriously doesn’t like it when liberals play the game they created. They hate it even more when liberals are actually good at it.

The predictable knuckle-dragging conservative response to President Obama’s support for same-sex marriage was to immediately declare that marriage was under attack. Fox News was, as usual, the first idiot brigade on the battlefield.

But with his evolution on the issue, President Obama now ranks as the most pro-marriage President the United States has ever had. He’s thrown away the stale idea of limiting marriage only to heterosexual couples in the same fashion that the notion that black and white couples should not mix. Let’s not forget that the President is the result of a union of two races that was once against the law in America.

Things change, minds change, civilizations advance and progress marches on. It’s not easy getting there and there are often setbacks along the way, but if your goal is equality and liberty and modernity it is well worth the fight.

We’re one step closer.

Here, via National Review, is conservative blogger Stephen Green deliberately mangling recent history.

Obama, unlike Bush ’04, has enjoyed a mostly friendly press. He — and his Chicago/Axelrod Machine — still hasn’t really been tested.

For those of us who lived through the 2004 election, this is a giant pile of excrement on top of a pile of vomit. In 2004 George W. Bush was lauded to the skies by the national press, continuing the honeymoon of post-9/11 worshipful press that extended on to the “popular wartime leader” mantra the media adopted after Bush invaded Iraq.

The overall feel from most of the media about Democrats in 2004 was “why are you even trying?” It was a POV that continued for years and years, with some elements of the press still caught flatfooted in November of 2006. Even then it was a surprise to the media that Bush was beginning an epic and world record slide into unpopularity.

Here is Chris Matthews, considered now by the right to be one of the top Obama cheerleaders around, waxing rhapsodic about Bush and his flight suit:

MATTHEWS: We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits. We don’t want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

Yeah, poor Bush, the press was all allied against him, with their noses planted firmly in his backside.