Maybe some state senators from Arizona would like to come to New York and throw themselves over Niagara Falls to protest our lack of a budget.

But of course, it’s the Tea Party and those on the right whose incendiary rhetoric — “targeting” Democrats who voted for the health-care bill; putting bulls-eyes over their districts on websites — should be taken literally. Yes, the oft-used word “targeting” (not to be confused with Targeting, which I do sometimes with my wife and, while unrelated entirely to murder, is still somewhat affiliated with death — by boredom), which political folks use when they mean they’ll focus more money and efforts on upsetting elected officials, really means, you know, murder. Palin wants to murder the Dems who voted for the health-care bill — or, at least, is insinuating as much, or tacitly endorsing those who might be kooky enough to read between the lines. Right.

But when Gail Collins gets rhetorical — in this instance, by recommending that legislators she disagrees with throw themselves off the largest water fall in North America — of course she’s only kidding, silly!

And really, she is. I know that; the right knows that; her faithful and like-minded readers know that (some of whom are possibly disappointed that she’s not serious). But when our folks use such nasty words like “target”? Well, suddenly we lose our sense of irony and sarcasm and forget that most words have multiple meanings and twists that depend on context. And then we forget that when people suggest targeting (i.e., murdering) elected officials, we probably ought to ignore them. So we go out and murder people, which you all have seen in the news lately — you know, all the people who voted for the health-care bill, they’re dead. Because conservatives are that dumb.

First and foremost, it’s remarkably insulting. The implication of Taranto’s theory is that African-Americans aren’t sophisticated or observant or intelligent enough to know real racism when they see it, and are thus continuously duped en masse into voting for Democrats. It couldn’t be the case that black voters actually care about issues and have real reasons for voting Democratic, they’re just puppets who are motivated by racial sentiments that Democrats prey upon. Taranto and his pals at Fox & Friends might think they’re attacking the Democrats, but they’re actually demeaning black voters.

This is precisely what conservatives have been saying about affirmative action and the assumptions that underscore it and every other policies like it: that Democrats who say blacks can’t get ahead in this world without lowering standards are “remarkably insulting.” We’ve said over and over, essentially, that — and I’ll borrow Media Matters’ language here — affirmative action’s principle “implication … is that African-Americans aren’t sophisticated … or intelligent enough” to get into good schools or better-paying jobs without the benevolent white man’s help.

So, what is more “demeaning”: to (a) be a Republican and observe that people (in this case, African-Americans) who’ve put their trust in their self-proclaimed leaders (in this case, Democratic politicians) assume, naturally, that their leaders aren’t lying or exaggerating about race in America in order to keep them in the fold, or (b) to be a Democrat and observe that blacks are fundamentally incapable of achieving their full potential unless the government arbitrarily lowers the bar for them?

At least, if we Republicans are, in fact, guilty of “demeaning” blacks, all we’re saying is that they’ve fallen victim to something all humans are susceptible to: the bias that authority, or perceived authority, gives to whatever that authority says. In other words, it makes perfect sense that blacks believe the lies and distortions their Democratic leaders perpetuate about race in America, because blacks trust their leaders.  This is a fundamental truth about human nature, not the nature of blacks per se: we humans tend to believe most the people we trust most. So Taranto’s indictment is not of African-Americans, but of the Democratic leaders who mislead them on race issues — a point clearly lost on Media Matters.

A friend’s email response to me about this nonsense was nice ‘n’ poignant: “While we’re at it, let’s require all submariners to have two hours of sunlight per day. I mean, it’s totally unhealthy to be cooped up like that for so long. And what about more windows? Television? You know what’s also integral to the military? Letting it be run by the military with limited policy and pundit interference.”

I sometimes wonder where these people, my neighbors, think they live. Either they think they live in Potomac, Maryland (the DC area’s Beverly Hills), where letting kids be kids would be oh-so low-class, or they think they live in Anacostia (one of the DC area’s scariest ghettos), where letting toddlers chalk the sidewalks would be seen as a precursor to tagging and indiscriminate drug-related murder.

It’s at neither end of those extremes. It’s just outright snobbish anti-kiddism, part and parcel of living on the East Coast, and yet another reason I can’t wait to move back west.

We’ve all seen the kind of TSA agent I’m about to describe. Self-important. Officious. But at least polite, even if patronizingly and perfunctorily so. And obviously the biggest geek in his high school. You know exactly who I’m talking about (at least 6o% of TSA agents).

This guy — let’s call him Neil, as in Neil Diamond, the King of Cool, ya ask me — was standing alongside the security line, blankly staring at the ground as he twirled his hand-test swabber-thingamajig (it looked like a mini toilet-bowl cleaner) for at least a good minute.

I admit, it was fun to watch — it felt for a moment like I was enjoying one of those Cirque de Soleil fruitballs that dance as they twirl a colorful ribbon (for the record, I’ve never been to one but have seen the commercials — oh, and there’s an Olympic event that incorporates these fine ribbon routines too), the only minor difference being it was only a frumpy tool in a blue uniform who I guess wasn’t in the mood to dance. I was sucked in; it was rather fun and mezmerizing the way the toiletbowl cleaner twirled. But I came out of it and was starting to wonder why this guy didn’t make himself useful by opening another security line to speed things up when he, too, snapped out of his trance quickly, as if he heard me thinking, clearly remembering he had a job to do: act like an officious tool protecting us from terrorists.

He surveyed the line and picked a gum-smacking young lady in front of me and said, “Ma’am, please hold out your palms so I can test them,” and then wiped her hands with the toiletbowl cleaner and walked back a few yards to his little machine. When he left it, chuckling about something or other with his TSA compadre, I breathed a sigh of relief that likely the only thing on the college kid’s palms was residue from her Bubble Yum. I said to her, “Well, I’m relieved: the friendly skies are safe; you’re not a terrorist.” Her boyfriend replied, “Oh, that’s, not it: it’s psychological,” meaning, I assumed, that the agent wasn’t looking for terrorists at all but was instead intimidating them by testing people we can all be safely sure in surmising are decidedly not terrorists.

Spoken like a good, dutiful liberal, right? But anyway.

Then our fearless public servant Neil surveyed the line again and picked a white, 30-something mother of at least three children, who were with her and her husband, and asked her to hold out her palms for the toiletbowl cleaner.

I’m on my flight, and it goes almost without saying that I feel completely safe from those who might have plotted to take the plane down, but who likely left the security line as a result of the “psychological” defenses this great nation has erected to thwart their dastardly plans.

Totalitarians.

Because apparently it’s too much effort for a person to have to pick up a box and turn it around to read the nutrition information.

Of course, the irony is totally lost on Sebelius (who, in her defense, is a rather dull woman): she’s worried about people’s health so — get this — let’s require less calorie expenditure to get to the nutritional information. Great idea, genius.

Furthermore, it doesn’t occur to Sebelius that people who don’t care enough about a food item’s nutrition content to turn it around to find it aren’t going to be any more interested in that information if it’s on the front of the box.

So what’s next? How do we make people care as much about what they eat as the bureaucratic totalitarians in Washington apparently do?

Easy. We hire nutrition-content readers at all grocery stores who would stand as health sentinels in every food aisle. When someone leaves the aisle with groceries in their carts, the reader would inspect the carts and read off each item’s nutrition information to the buyer. Then the reader, of course, would have to get verbal — perhaps even written? — confirmation from the buyer that he understood what was read to him.

As it turns out, I may have contradicted this post’s original premise by successfully satirizing Sebelius’s pathetic idea. But while my idea certainly is absurd, I can’t help but think if I shared it with Sebelius, she’d probably be intrigued.

Maybe it kills sociopathically dishonest scum like Ed and Dylan when conservatives come on their shows and don’t perform the way Ed and Dylan expect them to: by throwing bricks and lighting things on fire? I don’t know, but what ever is behind it, it’s fun to watch.

Here’s the thing. A major columnist (probably better put: party hack) has boiled down opposition to this bill as nothing more/less than racism/bigotry, which you’ve seen some on the left do lately, sure, but which is going to get a lot worse as the media and Democrat politicians talk about this over the next year. This is the narrative they’ve been building since long before they passed the bill. And that makes it gut-check time for conservatives. Soon enough, all people will have to ask us, in order to determine whether or not we’re white supremacists, is whether we opposed Obamacare. How disgusting.

I can’t help but think this won’t work out for Dems in the long run, though. David Paul Kuhn wrote recently about how Obama’s biggest loss, demographically, since the election is white men. They’re tired of being vilified, held responsible for problems faced by people they’ve never met — and, keep in mind, these are liberal, or at least not conservative, white men who actually voted once for Obama and thus aren’t subject to charges of racism, according to the left’s definition of it (a racist, according to the left, is anyone who opposes any policy offered by the president, specifically, and policies offered by Democrats, generally).

At some point, even white folks on the left will likely soon wake up and decide, finally, that they’re tired of being held responsible for every ill that befalls minorities and being told that their opposition to a bad policy fix must mean they’re big fans of Nascar and a good country lynching. The problem is, regardless of whether whites flee en masse from the Democratic Party, Rich’s final point — about the shift of America’s demographics — might mean it won’t much matter, since very soon whites will be outnumbered by a coalition of minorities who’ve been told by the party they support that everything that’s wrong with society is the white man’s fault.

It’ll be interesting to see how, if it can be done at all, Dems will try to spin themselves out of their racism narrative once whites are eventually, technically, the minorities in this country.

Anyway, all three lines turned hard right toward the TSA agents, the third one much sooner than the first and second, both of which went along for another 30 feet or so before turning toward their respective TSA agents. Well, between the middle line and mine — I was in the third — the rope-tape that separated the lines — you know the kind that rolls up into the poles — all of a sudden opened up right at the point where the our line turned toward its TSA agent.

I listened to a female passenger discuss, loud enough for me to hear a good ten feet behind her, this oh-so-fortuitous opening. It must have been by design! she’d decided aloud to her flying companion. So, whereas the people in front of her in Line #2 were all filing along in their own line for the rest of the stretch, likely assuming, like everyone else with either a brain or a conscience or both, that the missing rope was not, in fact, an invitation to cut the people in Line #3. She figured this single opening in a 50-foot-long line must have been an invitation to merge — literally merge, she said, she used that word — into the third, shorter line.

A few others started to follow suit, and while I’d remained somewhat stunned by the first woman’s rationalization of cutting dozens of people, I finally snapped to and told the people that, no, sorry, but a broken link in the ropes that divide the lines doesn’t signal a merge, that the woman who got this all started was just looking for an excuse to cut in line.

It’s quite incredible, the human mind — the capacity we have to rationalize evil behavior … oh, and minor, harmless, but very telling, rationalization and self-justification like the lady who cut us in line yesterday at Reagan engaged in.

The administration’s new push also seeks to more aggressively help borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, offering financial incentives for the first time to lenders to cut the loan balances of such distressed homeowners. Those who are still current on their mortgages could get the chance to refinance on better terms into loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration.

The problem of “underwater” borrowers has bedeviled earlier administration efforts to address the mortgage crisis as home prices plunged.

Officials said the new initiatives will take effect over the next six months and be funded out of $50 billion previously allocated for foreclosure relief in the emergency bailout program for the financial system. No new taxpayer funds will be needed, the officials said.

“Cut the balances,” huh? This really is a wonderful, revolutionary concept. I can get just about everything I own for free, after the fact, retroactively, if I’m as smart about it as Obama.

I’ll start with the 4Runner we bought two years ago for $22,000. We owe $13-14,000 on that, but according to Edmunds.com, I’m “underwater” because its current market value is about $12,700. Don’t you think I deserve that difference back from Toyota? Because if no one in America should owe more for their homes than they’re worth, shouldn’t no one in America owe more than their cars are worth? Perhaps I can rinse and repeat and get away with this every six months until I get it most of my money back from those usurious capitalist bastards who sold it to me — knowing full well it was going to decrease in value, too! Oh, the humanity!

Why should I owe them what the car used to be worth when I signed that contract — “contract”: just another nefarious, rightwinger concept! — two years ago, if the Kelly Blue Book value today is far lower?

All this seems perfectly fair to me — which, according to the left, is what this life is all about: fairness defined down to mean never having to experience so much as a modicum of discomfort or stress from either (1) the consequences of your own poor decision-making or (2) the fact that sometimes things work out nicely and sometimes they simply don’t.