Jul 21, 2022
Oh The Games We Play
It comes around to this: Putin has Brittney Griner arrested and detained and put on trial for trivial crap, thinking that he might be able to get Trump to play a role in getting her out - or just arrange it to look like Trump did it - which would give Trump some of the cred he needs to get back to the White House.
The Problem With Jon Stewart
BTW - Dawn Staley For President
Jul 20, 2022
Today's Wingnut
RWW Blog - Tyler Russell filing in on the "Right Dissident"
From the standpoint of real-world practicability, there's no pretense about any of this. Even if we can assume these assholes are just demagoguing the whole thing, and their intent is simply to grift the rubes, there's a widening and deepening audience who take this shit as gospel, and whatever it's grown into at this point, it's taken on a life of its own.
Article 11 of the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, declares, “The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Once ratified by the US Senate (as the Treaty of Tripoli has been done), the terms of that treaty become law in the US.
Lots of argument about the subject, and I have to come down on this:
While the US was founded by people who generally believed in some kind of deity, they stated often that they had every intention of avoiding the mistakes of history, and so were determined not to take any religion's doctrine and turn it into law.
Running Away
CNN - John King and Manu Raju
Republicans run away from their policies and their public statements, denying they ever said anything they actually said.
What you heard me say is not what you heard me say
What you saw me do is not what you saw me do.I didn't say it or do it.If I did, then I didn't mean it,and if I meant it, then it doesn't matter,and if it matters, then it's no big deal,and if it is a big deal, then it didn't hurt anybody,and if it did hurt someone, then they deserved it.
HUNTER BIDEN!!
FENTANYL!!!
CARAVAN!!!!
VOTER FRAUD!!!!!
WOMEN MURDERING BABIES!!!!!!
The Other Malcom
Malcom Nance gets a little shouty sometimes most times, but I have to acknowledge that he's been right about an awful lot of stuff.
MSNBC - Tiffany Cross
Jul 19, 2022
Today's Wingnut
RWW Blog - I'm never going to believe most these guys don't just say whatever weird shit they can think of in order to keep the rubes entertained enough to send in their donations.
Today's Eternal Sadness
A "good guy with a gun" killed a "bad guy with a gun", after the bad guy killed 3 people with his gun at a shopping mall in Indiana, and "conservatives" are cheering because killing somebody with a gun is wrong, and so a guy with a gun had to be killed by a guy with a gun to show how wrong it is to go around killing people with guns - and that's good because of how bad it is.
Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander
A bystander’s decision to shoot a man who opened fire at an Indiana mall was a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive.
Police on Monday praised the quick actions of 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, an armed shopper who killed 20-year-old Jonathan Sapirman after Sapirman killed three people and wounded two others at a mall in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood.
“Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen,” police Chief Jim Ison said Monday, repeatedly calling Dicken a “good Samaritan” and his response “heroic.”
It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. The researchers define the attacks as one or more people targeting multiple people.
It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data, which were recently cited by The New York Times.
In a quarter of the shootings, the attacker stopped by leaving the area, similar to what happened during the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed.
“There’s been this statement: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ That’s factually inaccurate because of the word ‘only,’” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama who has written books and research papers about mass shootings.
Nonetheless, gun-rights advocates, including the National Rifle Association, used that phrase on social media to draw attention to what happened in Indiana.
Since July 1, Indiana has allowed anyone 18 or older to carry a handgun in public, though private property owners can prohibit firearms. The Greenwood mall has a ban on weapons, according to its conduct code.
Gun Owners of America hopes the mall reconsiders, saying gun-free zones create a false sense of security.
The Greenwood Park Mall, which is owned by Simon Property Group, didn’t reply to a request for comment but released a statement commending first responders and the “heroic actions of the good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”
Lankford believes it would be a mistake to think armed civilians can be relied upon to regularly stop mass shootings.
“While it’s certainly a good thing in this mall shooting that someone was able to stop it before it went any further, let’s not think we can substitute that outcome in all past and future incidents,” Lankford said. “If everyone’s carrying a firearm, the risk that something bad happens just gets much larger.”
There have been other examples of armed people defending large groups. In May, a woman fatally shot a man in Charleston, West Virginia, after he fired an AR-15-style rifle into a crowd at an outdoor party. She was praised by police, not charged.
In 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley crashed his car and killed himself after bystanders, including one who was armed, chased him after he massacred 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
I guess there could be some kind of fucked up karmic pseudo-logic to it, but in the end, another 4 Americans are dead because of our stoopid Culture Of Gun Violence, and some of these fuckin' idiots are calling it a win.
WaPo: (pay wall)
Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander
A bystander’s decision to shoot a man who opened fire at an Indiana mall was a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive.
Police on Monday praised the quick actions of 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, an armed shopper who killed 20-year-old Jonathan Sapirman after Sapirman killed three people and wounded two others at a mall in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood.
“Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen,” police Chief Jim Ison said Monday, repeatedly calling Dicken a “good Samaritan” and his response “heroic.”
It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. The researchers define the attacks as one or more people targeting multiple people.
It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data, which were recently cited by The New York Times.
In a quarter of the shootings, the attacker stopped by leaving the area, similar to what happened during the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed.
“There’s been this statement: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ That’s factually inaccurate because of the word ‘only,’” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama who has written books and research papers about mass shootings.
Nonetheless, gun-rights advocates, including the National Rifle Association, used that phrase on social media to draw attention to what happened in Indiana.
Since July 1, Indiana has allowed anyone 18 or older to carry a handgun in public, though private property owners can prohibit firearms. The Greenwood mall has a ban on weapons, according to its conduct code.
Gun Owners of America hopes the mall reconsiders, saying gun-free zones create a false sense of security.
The Greenwood Park Mall, which is owned by Simon Property Group, didn’t reply to a request for comment but released a statement commending first responders and the “heroic actions of the good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”
Lankford believes it would be a mistake to think armed civilians can be relied upon to regularly stop mass shootings.
“While it’s certainly a good thing in this mall shooting that someone was able to stop it before it went any further, let’s not think we can substitute that outcome in all past and future incidents,” Lankford said. “If everyone’s carrying a firearm, the risk that something bad happens just gets much larger.”
There have been other examples of armed people defending large groups. In May, a woman fatally shot a man in Charleston, West Virginia, after he fired an AR-15-style rifle into a crowd at an outdoor party. She was praised by police, not charged.
In 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley crashed his car and killed himself after bystanders, including one who was armed, chased him after he massacred 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
Today's Brian
Brian Tyler Cohen - getting our panties all knotted up because of Merrick Garland's memo.
Or maybe Garland is inoculating DOJ from charges of "political motivation" by reiterating the department's commitment to being apolitical - so when they finally get down to it (and the memo may actually portend to something imminent), they can point back to the memo and countervail those accusations.
Not that any of this is going to cut any ice with "conservatives", but process does matter.
And believe me, I get frustrated as fuck with what seems like a really slow pace. But while I wish Mr Garland would pick it up a little, I have to believe he's the guy who can do what we need done.
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