It's ironic, isn't it? The modern conservative movement was found in the reaction of the 1960s, which supposedly was all about law-and-order (remember 1968 and the streets of Chicago?). Now it's 40 years since the arrival of "Nixonland," and right-wingers have moved so far off the reservation -- with a little help from their friends on your AM dial -- that it's the cops that are the fuzzy-headed liberals, at least compared to them. It's 2009, and we have some of the best and the brightest law enforcement minds in the country trying to use common sense to bring down crime. Common sense, as in the complete opposite of the modern conservative agenda.

Take illegal immigration, the cause celebre of modern right-wing talk radio. This is from a story in today's New York Times that should have received more attention than it did:

MIAMI — Seeking to inject their views into the revived debate over immigration overhaul, several big-city police chiefs urged Congress on Wednesday to draft a new policy that improves public safety by bringing illegal immigrants out of the shadows.

The chiefs — updating recommendations made in 2006 by the leaders of more than 50 urban police departments — called for an overhaul that would integrate immigrants into the legal system, possibly with driver’s licenses, and separate the local police from immigration enforcement.

“We’re in the business of delivering a police service whether the person has had a car accident, been a victim of a crime, or been a witness to a crime,” said Chief John Timoney of the Miami Police Department.

He added that immigrants needed to come forward without fearing “that they are going to wind up being reported to federal authorities and deported.”

Yes, that John Timoney, the one who was universally hailed -- especially by the WPHT crowd, though -- for bringing down crime rates during his tenure in Philadelphia in the late 1990s through the 2000 GOP convention. Of course, people will always disagree on a thing or two, but when it comes to the issue of guns -- the cause that conservative politicians and pundits have been using to whip the rank-and-file into a frenzy since the dawn of the Obama presidency -- conservatives and police chiefs have also parted ways.

Here's what those bleeding hearted police chiefs think:

Miami-Dade Officer Jose Somohano was shot and killed with a Mak-90 assault rifle three years to the day after the federal law prohibiting the sale of such weapons expired.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police issued a report at noon Wednesday calling for, among other things, a renewal of the ban, arguing that it helps keep police officers safe by reducing the ``firepower available to criminals.''

The report hits home for South Florida law enforcement officers, who have been facing an increasing number of these guns on the street since the ban expired. Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez, a former police officer and police director, can't hide his anger when he talks about the fact that lawmakers let the ban expire.

''While I feel very strongly about the Second Amendment, I don't think that our founding fathers had AK-47s in mind,'' he said. ``There's absolutely no reason I can see having these weapons out on the street.''

Note that I posted this Miami Herald story as it appeared on conservative Web site Free Republic, so you can read all the supportive comments.But then, who are you going to believe on important issues like immigration or assault weapons, experienced law-enforcement officers, or your friendly local Freeper?

I saw this late last night and was debating whether to post it as part of my ongoing "No blood in ants" series -- a brutally honest account of one of the recent flurry of journalism summits where the sound and fury signifies nothing. The headline was "Save journalism: Beats us, panel says."

The cosmic quote was from the publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth:

“We will look at anything and are taking a wait-and-see approach,” said Weymouth. “We think about a ton of things. Everything is open.” When asked whether print papers will always be around, Weymouth said, “I don’t know. I don’t predict. Nobody knows.”

Anyone detect a whiff of desperation there? Today, we learned that one of her "ton of things" in the works was this:

Michael Jackson thrived when Ronald Reagan was president. Six months into the Obama administration, he was dead! What are we to conclude?

Thank God Rush Limbaugh is here to answer the question:

Michael Jackson's biggest successes, and as it turns out his final successes, real successes took place in the eighties. That was Billie Jean, Thriller and all this. I mean he was as weird as he could be but he was profoundly, because of his weirdness, an individual. He wasn't a group member. He reached a level of success that may never be equaled. He flourished under Reagan; he languished under Clinton-Bush; and died under Obama. Let's hope the parallel does not continue.

Really! Where exactly was President Obama on the afternoon of June 25 -- can he account for his whereabouts for the entire day?

As for the Reagan's administration's role in MJ's musical burst of creativity during the 1980s, there was none. But it is worth noting that Reagan's steep cut in marginal tax rate for the upper bracket meant that Jackson kept a lot more of that surging income -- which he then squandered on a bad real estate investment while racking up millions of dollars in credit card debt before he died from lousy healthcare. So maybe in a perverse way, Limbaugh is right: Michael Jackson was a parable for the Age of Reagan.

Well, I guess when it comes to nation building there's nothing like a few thouand troops, after all:

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military's new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

It looks like the nut of the operation is this:

The U.S. strategy here is predicated on the belief that a majority of people in Helmand do not favor the Taliban, which enforces a strict brand of Islam that includes an eye-for-an-eye justice and strict limits on personal behavior. Instead, U.S. officials believe, residents would rather have the Afghan government in control, but they have been cowed into supporting the Taliban because there was nobody to protect them.

Obviously time will tell whether or not that "belief" is a valid one. The one thing that's clear tonight is this: The operation in Afghanistan is exactly what the Washington Post calls it: Obama's War.

I've heard former CIA man Michael Scheuer before on the Michael Smerconish Show and elsewhere, and I recall that he seemed at first to hail from the Sensible Party in our national security community. But like a lot of folks these days he's now swimming in the deep end of the pool:

Yesterday, Glenn Beck guest and former CIA official Michael Scheuer openly hoped for a terrorist attack on the United States, saying, "the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States...It's an absurd situation again, only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary." Beck nodded solemnly.

This is the same Michael Scheuer who, a few months ago, played patriotism police arguing that anyone who didn't support the United States using torture to interrogate terrorist suspects was anti-American...now he's begging for a terrorist attack on the United States. This is a pretty awesome example of how the right conflates their political interests with the interests of the country as a whole. If there's no terrorist attack, then Americans are safe. But Scheuer can't be right if there's no terrorist attack. And Scheuer being right is actually more important than Americans staying alive.

Exactly. There are so many off-base assumptions here -- that things that people don't like about our government right now are worse than the slaughter of 3,000 innocent Americans, that only "as much violence as necessary" prevents more terrorism (see how this is being re-thought in Afghanistan). That Glenn Beck didn't jump up and object to Scheuer's remarks is telling, yet also not surprising. Sadly, this kind of thinking found its way into my own newspaper a couple of years ago. It was horribly wrong then, and it's horrible wrong now.

Just don't ask how they make back bacon.

Journalist Dan Froomkin, fired by the Washington Post for reasons that many still find hard to fathom, nails the state of modern journalism in an interview with NYU media guru Jay Rosen:

And yet “the sense that, if you have a belief that you publicly espouse, you can no longer be fair about reporting a subject is problematic,” Froomkin continued. “Reporters have beliefs, they have values—the key is for them not to let those beliefs affect their reporting. Downie wanted people to disenfranchise themselves.” Besides, Froomkin continued, there are principles that journalists do, and more to the point should, stand for—accountability, transparency, fair play, human rights—and “there’s nothing wrong with journalists wearing those values on their sleeves.”

...isn't the start of the Al Franken 6/10 Decade, but this highly sensible pronouncement about future policy in Afghanistan:

National Security Adviser James L. Jones told U.S. military commanders here last week that the Obama administration wants to hold troop levels here flat for now, and focus instead on carrying out the previously approved strategy of increased economic development, improved governance and participation by the Afghan military and civilians in the conflict.

Notes Jones:

"This will not be won by the military alone," Jones said in an interview during his trip. "We tried that for six years." He also said: "The piece of the strategy that has to work in the next year is economic development. If that is not done right, there are not enough troops in the world to succeed."

More common-sense foreign policy. As regular readers know, there was a time when I was supportive of suggestions of sending more troops into Afghanistan; because I felt there was a clear reason for going there in the first place (as a matter of self-defense, given Afghanistan's role in 9/11 and as a staging area for possible future attacks), there has seemed hope at times of a positive outcome (i.e., a stable democracy). Also, a military strategy that relied too much on air power was causing way too many innocent civilian deaths. But it's become increasingly clear that a military-oriented strategy isn't working there because...it's a military strategy. If we've decided for the reasons noted above that Afghanistan is where we wanted to engage in nation building, then maybe it's time to do more building and less blowing up.

One footnote: The scoop on this comes from the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, so here's one of those cases where access actually is worth something.

The gamblers thought it was an empty threat. Politicians talked about the casinos, of course, as sure as they talked about corruption and alcoholism. It didn't mean that vice was going anywhere.

But on Tuesday night, finally and anticlimactically, the games drew to an end -- a last spin of the roulette; the final blackjack hand; one more jangle at the slots.

Dang, too bad this is not Pennsylvania, but Russia. And I'll bet their casinos aren't even ugly like ours.