Today's Pix

Today's Gun Nut

This is just too sweet not to copy-n-paste the whole thing - from digby at Hullabaloo:

I'd think twice about taking an NRA course in gun safety ...
by digby

It just doesn't get any better than this:

NRA instructor Eugene Kenny would have joined his fellow gun-rights supporters at the state Capitol Wednesday—if he hadn’t accidentally shot himself in the foot.

He was there in spirit. And on the internet.

“I’ve been watching this like a hawk,” Kenny said about the debate in Hartford over what may be the toughest proposed state gun-control laws in the country, including expanded background checks on buyers as well as a ban on the sale of most assault weapons and all high-capacity magazines. (The legislation passed Wednesday evening; the governor was expected to sign it mid-day Thursday.) Kenny was rooting for the package of laws to fail; he said they would cut into gun-owners’ rights without protecting the public any more than current laws already do. “You can count on one hand the number of assaults with an automatic weapon” that take place in New Haven, he said. “When you have sick minds out there—it’ll be a bullet, a gun, a bomb—they’re going to do evil” no matter what laws are on the books.

Kenny, a 49-year-old licensed National Rifle Association instructor who leads training classes in pistol and rifle use, delivered his arguments in the front foyer of the two-family Edgewood Avenue house where he rents an upstairs apartment in the Edgewood neighborhood.

Wearing an NRA hooded sweatshirt, he had his left foot in a cast because he accidentally shot a bullet last week while cleaning his Glock handgun.

This is why I'm in favor of gun regulation: way too many of the people who own them are meatheads. It's just not safe for anyone when yahoos like this are waving around deadly weapons, especially in public. He's lucky he didn't kill someone --- or himself.

Keep in mind: this guy's an NRA instructor.

I usually always cock it back and it usually ejects a shell that’s in the chamber,” he recalled. “You pull the trigger to release the slide ... This time there was a cartridge in there. And BANG! Hit my ankle.”

A self-described “stickler about safety,” Kenny said he has never had a student injured over 10 years of leading firearms classes. He said he’ll draw two lessons for his students about this recent accident: How he did the wrong thing by not checking the chamber. And how he did the right thing—saving his life—by pointing the gun toward the ground, not at his head or chest, as he cleaned it.

Kenny went to the hospital for treatment. The police interviewed him there about the incident.

They’re still investigating the incident, according to Sgt. Al Vazquez, head of the major crimes unit. They have the Glock in custody as part of the investigation. The gun was legally registered.

Vazquez said his detectives are also still investigating the theft of a safe last November from Kenny’s apartment. It contained around 10 guns—mostly handguns, plus a Saiga 12 rifle. “I took a hit, $8,000 worth of firearms” in that theft, Kenny said.

Gosh, I wonder what the thieves did with them? 

Wait - That Means They Lied?

From Center For American Progress:

The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies in Congress frequently claim that gun violence is highest in places with the toughest crime laws. But a new study from the Center for American Progress (CAP) suggests something closer to the opposite is true — the states with laxer gun laws tend to be the ones contributing the highest shares of national gun deaths and injuries.

While many factors contribute to the rates of gun violence in any state, our research clearly demonstrates a significant correlation between the strength of a state’s gun laws and the prevalence of gun violence in the state. Across the key indicators of gun violence that we analyzed, the 10 states with the weakest gun laws collectively have a level of gun violence that is more than twice as high—104 percent higher—than the 10 states with the strongest gun laws.

Color me un-fucking-surprised.

hat tip = Democratic Underground 

Meet Jane Crow

A while back, I did a post walking myself towards the logical extremes we can expect by re-criminalizing abortion.

I imagined the scenario of a chance encounter with a female acquaintance, noticing she was pregnant, hearing a certain negativity in her conversation about the prospects of having her 4th child, and then wondering what my responsibilities would be if I met her again much later, and it turned out she'd "miscarried", tho' she didn't seem awfully upset about it, which would then make me wonder if she'd taken some kind of illegal action to terminate her pregnancy.

As a loyal subject of The American Empire, am I expected to report my suspicions to the police?

Well well well.  Turns out my little imaginings weren't nearly as goofy as I tho't.



Politics and Salesmanship are practically the same - they're both about getting somebody to go along with your idea; or to do something voluntarily that they're not actually obliged to do.

If you wanna get anywhere in Sales, you have to learn a technique called the Turnaround.  It's where you take a perceived negative and turn it into a positive.  In the video above, Lynn Paltrow nails a great Turnaround by saying (paraphrasing here) that when you Person-ize the fetus, the effect is that you've de-Person-ized the mother.  You can't raise the fetus to Full-Fledged Citizen unless you downgrade the woman.

(paraphrasing again): We hear lotsa noise about the point when a blob of cells becomes a person, but we never hear anything about the point in her pregnancy that a woman can be legally required to stop being a person.

Fucking brilliant is all that is.

So we have the very powerful argument that you can't possibly support Criminalized Abortion from the position of Small Limited-Power Government.

We also have the 1st Amendment argument that says you may have strong feelings about the "sanctity of life", or about the "moment of conception", but here in this country we don't take anybody's spiritual teachings and turn them into law

And now we have a couple of points from an Equal Protection angle - in order to confer rights on the Unborn, you have to take them away from the mother.  And you don't get to enact laws that apply only to women but not to men.

It's Like This

OK - I'll go thru it one more time for ya.

Philosophy is like being in a dark room, looking for a black cat.

Metaphysics is like being in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn't there.

Religion is like being in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn't there, and yelling, "I found it!".

Science is like being in a dark room, looking for a black cat - with a fucking flash light.

Everybody got it now?

Today's WTF

Sometimes, politicians and their PR guys and the PACs and the Lobbyists just make shit up, say it on TV, and it passes into what the Press Poodles are selling us as "the truth".

"There's a growing number of scientists who dispute AGW."

"Brand new fresh lava from certain active volcanoes tests out at 3.5 billion years old, so we have to throw out all forms of Radiographic Dating."

"The American people are with us on this."  (Whatever "this" happens to be at the time - and also happens to be conveniently unverifiable)

Some of the greatest bullshit ever spewed at us has come from the NRA, which has enjoyed a truly amazing 40-year run as the best of the best of the best - all in service of imposing a minority view on society.  There has been no marketing idea more brilliant than using the 2nd Amendment to bring the entire weight of the federal government to bear on all of us just to ensure the continued wellbeing of a narrow commercial interest.

Don't ever forget that the NRA does not represent your rights as a citizen.  The NRA is in the business of keeping Gun Manufacturers profitable.  And btw - your "rights" are whatever the fuck they feel like telling you they are.

But anyway, just saying something over and over is a tried-and-true method for making your shit stick, but if you really wanna do it right, you'll also need to take steps to keep "the other side of the story" from popping up at inopportune moments.

From McClatchey:

Each year, lawmakers quietly tuck language into spending bills that restricts the ability of the federal government to regulate the firearms industry and combat gun crime.

It’s the reason the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can’t research gun violence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation can’t use data to detect firearms traffickers and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can’t require background checks on older guns.

Since the late 1970s, more than a dozen provisions have been added to must-pass spending bills with no hearings, no debate and no vote in a way that’s designed to circumvent the usual legislative process.

Coin-Operated Politicians are the rule, not the exception.  We have to figure out how to break down this system of corruption before it gets so bad that the only thing left to do is to burn it down.

Today's Wingnut

That should prob'ly be "today's best blog post headline" - from Wonkette:

LOUIE GOHMERT: IF YOU LIMIT THE NUMBER OF BULLETS IN A CLIP, POLYGAMISTS WILL GAY-MARRY YOUR DOG

Mr Gohmert, if you please:

In fact, I had this discussion with some wonderful, caring Democrats earlier this week on the issue of, well, they said “surely you could agree to limit the number of rounds in a magazine, couldn’t you? How would that be problematic?”

And I pointed out, well, once you make it ten, then why would you draw the line at ten? What’s wrong with nine? Or eleven? And the problem is once you draw that limit; it’s kind of like marriage when you say it’s not a man and a woman any more, then why not have three men and one woman, or four women and one man, or why not somebody has a love for an animal?

There is no clear place to draw the line once you eliminate the traditional marriage and it’s the same once you start putting limits on what guns can be used, then it’s just really easy to have laws that make them all illegal.

Wonkette's summary (as usual) is just too too - y'know - too.

So we should never limit how many bullets can be in a murder-death-kill machine, because freedom, but we SHOULD limit how many people you marry to exactly one opposite sex person, because freedom. Is that right? We have no idea. Let’s try it another way. If you limit the amount of bullets people can cram into a magazine, then you can’t limit people from marrying friends, neighbors, the dog, and some birch trees en masse? Wonket is in favor of this tradeoff! Less bullets, more group marriages! (Though not with dogs because setting aside the ewwww factor, sexytime with the unable to consent is not cool. We’re sort of neutral on if you want to sex up a tree though.)

Today's Pic

Welcome to America - this is where Freedom lives.  And when taken to it's logical extreme (which is what we've been demanding for a good long time now), it ends up meaning you get to do whatever the fuck you want - which in turn translates to:

don't drink the water, don't breathe the air, and don't eat the food.

Enjoy your stay.

Death And Taxes

What does the federal budget actually look like?

Andrea Seabrook explains:


I'm having some trouble finding a good zoomable image of the poster, so you'll have to buy the thing if ya want it.  (it's just the way of the world, sport - get used to it)

Here's an OK version from 2007-08 tho' - just to give you a taste. (from Information2Share)

Order from Amazon for less than 20 bucks:

Today's WTF, Part 2

Almost forgot - I guess I got so carried way yesterday with my righteous indignation over veterans having to jump thru flaming hoops to get their bennies that I overlooked one of the truly shittier aspects of the story of American Veterans having to jump thru those flaming hoops just to get the help they've already earned.

So here it is:

Something like 4,000 US Veterans use a gun to commit suicide every year.

About a dozen per day.

That's almost one every couple of hours every day.  They kill themselves with guns.

They have to stand in line for 6 months or 9 months or a year or more trying to get treatment for the kind of disorders that lead people to take their own lives, but they can all buy a gun with no problem at all.

That's pretty fucked up right there.