Today's Gun Nuts - With A Side Of Stoopid

A quick look at some of the real-America law-abiding responsible gun owners who generally don't show up in the commercials or the NRA's brochures.

And an all-time favorite:



One last thing - these people vote.

The KrugMan Speaks

If you read just one post today, let it be this one by Paul Krugman at NYT:

So the story isn’t “irresponsible politicians will always squander the good years”; it is “conservative Republican politicians run up debt even in good years, because they want to force cuts in social programs.” Kind of a different story, isn’t it?

The point, then, is that the seemingly worldly-wise cynicism that seems to be the last defense against the economically obvious is in fact based on an imaginary history that looks nothing like what actually happened.

Ezra Gets One Right

Not that he's wrong all that often, but sometimes Ezra Klein has a truly annoying tendency to shade towards Centrism.

Anyway, his main point here is that it's important to remember:

If you’re around policy research enough you’ll end up reading a lot of studies that violate your intuitions, your theories, your hopes, and even your values. You’ll have the instinct to brush them away or come up with some reason they’re wrong. In those moments, I was told, it’s worth remembering that the world isn’t here to please you.

Politics isn’t here to please you either. And this, I think, is the core of the debate over whether “presidential leadership,” whatever that actually means, can fix Washington.

It's a pretty good post from his blog at WaPo.

Today's Carlin

George Carlin addressing the language of politics.

"...how much soft money can I expect to collect in exchange for my core values?"



Fuckin' genius is all he ever was.

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Joining The Chorus

I just want to add my own bit to the crowing of "The Left" in the last few days.

Unemployment is kinda down - but down.

The Dow is way up - closing Friday at just under a new record high.

So let me say it along with everybody else who still has a couple of living brain cells rubbing together - if this Obama guy is actually a Commie Fascist hell-bent on destroying the foundations of capitalism and ending the glories of our American traditions, then he really really really sucks at it.  Get the fuck over yourselves.

Can you imagine what we could make happen around this joint if we weren't constantly fighting a political headwind manufactured by an obstructing Congress?

"Conservatives" are always going on about "burdensome regulations".  Well, guess what - the Regulators are the ones who won't let anything good happen; the ones who "stand athwart history and say, Stop!".  They're the people who deny reality by saying there's nothing to this AGW thing;  the Regulators are the ones who keep us forever chained to Saudi kings by blocking every effort to move toward renewables;  they tell us that the 2nd Amendment means ensuring Smith & Wesson's profit margin is more important than the lives of our kids. and on and on and on.

Regulators tell us that if we just cut down on spending, then spending will go up.  Honest - that's what "austerity" comes down to.  And it's no different than the bullshit they tried to peddle about how Bush's monster tax cuts would actually increase tax revenues and make everything so much better.

It's the Big Bamboozle and it has to end.  These pud-knockers are takin' a giant shit on our heads and expect us to go on saying, "Thanks for the hat."  Enough already.

Today's Wingnut

Our returning champion - Glenn Beck, everybody!



Why does it always come down to the Reichstag fire, and why does it never occur to these guys that - oh, I dunno - maybe we could consider Occam's Razor or something?  I'm not sayin' ya gotta be perfectly reasonable like normal people, but couldn't you gimme one clear moment every 4th or 5th time out?  I'm also not saying we should just automatically eliminate all possibility that the guy was set up and/or egged on by somebody who's deeply embedded in Obama's nefarious plot to destroy America (or whatever the fuck these boneheads like to jack off to late at night on a random Friday), but c'mon - at least gimme somethin' new once in a while.

Words To Live By

Don't be the Crack Spider's bitch.

Today's Phobia

Hey, you kids...you're makin' a mess - go outside and play.

Think you got problems?

Yes, Virginia

...there is corruption in Richmond.  A lot of it.



hat tip = Blue Virginia

Today's Eternal Sadness

Charlie Pierce gets it.

So, tout le monde — as we say around the still in the holler — is talking about the very tragic events down in old Kaintuck', where you can kilt you a b'ar when you is only three.

A five-year-old boy in the southern US state of Kentucky has accidentally shot dead his two-year-old sister at the family home. He had received the rifle, specially made for children, as a gift last year.

A rifle, specially made for children. Think about it. Some sales rep at a gun manufacturer pipes up at a sales meeting, "Hey, maybe there's a market for kiddie guns! No, I mean real guns. With bullets!" Everybody cheers and the guy gets a raise, and nobody stops for a second and says, "You know, we don't trust our five-year olds with matches. Maybe guns should wait until, I dunno, middle school." Anyway, roll that one around in your head for a second as we continue into our regular feature, This Week In Responsible Gun Ownership:

Reports say the weapon had been kept in a corner and the family had not realised it still contained a bullet.

And from a commenter:

Yeah, well, we don’t know the whole story, do we? Maybe his sister was threatening him with her gun. In that case, then the gun may well have saved his life. You know what they say, the only thing that stops a bad three year old with a gun is a good three year old with a gun.

And BTW - when is it not a good time to talk about what we can do together about trying some small thing to make things just the tiniest bit better for ourselves?  I can't be the only one who sees "let's not politicize this tragedy; it's too soon to talk about gun control; we should respect the family's grief" as the perfect dodge.  Cuz guess what - we can absolutely count on the simple fact that another kid will be killed with a gun before somebody decides it's OK to start talking about gun control, and so the clock is constantly being reset to zero, and nothing will ever get done.

If you think it's OK for little kids to have guns; if your ideology or your party loyalty requires you to close yourself off and "stand firm with your 2nd Amendment Rights" in spite of knowing that tens of thousands of American families are forever broken every year because you're just too fucking stoopid to learn anything new about the US Constitution in particular or the world in general - then please raise your hand and I'll be happy to come over and slap Wayne LaPierre's dick outa your mouth for you.

Today's Pix

Music

From way out there.  1972 - Emerson Lake & Palmer's From The Beginning.

I'll let it slide this time as far as the acid's concerned, but headphones are still mandatory for this one.

Believe What You Wanna Believe

(extracted from a video I posted this past Sunday)

What if a friend told you they're totally into Zalmoxis; an ancient demigod who is of course invisible, but he's really really there; and they'll never die because Zalmoxis has cleansed their soul with his sacred magical blood, which grants them the privilege of immortality, living forever in a place that nobody can see.

The cult of Zalmoxis

I always come back to a really great point that Dawkins makes:  We're all atheists in one way or another, because we all refuse to believe in one god or another.

Gods come and go.  They're born of whatever fervor (or fever) you care to document or imagine; they grow (if a group of suckers followers can be mustered in sufficient numbers); they flourish - sometimes dominate for a while; and then in time, when people stop worshipping them, and stop making sacrifices to them - they die.  As it should be.  As god intended.

Bullshit

I love Penn's explanation of their use of the language and the "terminology" on the show.

If you call them scamsters liars and frauds, they can sue your ass - so ya just call 'em assholes and bullshit artists instead, and that's OK.  America and Americans never fail to amaze me.



"Skits for money cannot replace loving memory.  How low do you have to be to exploit someone's true grief to sell some bullshit book?"

Some Good News

...for a change.  I'm always a little leery of these fluffy feel-good stories when they run on network news.  It just seems like somebody's trying to "buck me up"; telling me "it's not all as bad as we make it look every goddamned day".

hat tip = Democratic Underground

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So it occurs to me that maybe the Press Poodles could try a little harder to make more of these connections; taking a story of something really shitty that happened, and connecting it with something that somebody across town - or even half a world away - is trying to do that might help solve whatever problem is causing these shitty things to happen in the first fuckin' place.

(Gee - if only we had some kind of really cool technology that helps us find out what's going on in the world; so you could just sit at your desk and browse the entire planet if you wanted...silly me; dreamin' again. Just a tho't.)

Anyway, did you hear it?  It pops up at about the 1:10 mark, and then again near the end of the clip: "...futures made a lot brighter by a crazy idea...".  And what was the new principal's "crazy idea"?  To make the school feel more like a school and less like a fucking prison.

Treating people like people - that's what passes for a "bold new idea" now.

And Jesus wept.