45* is a shitty salesman. Today, he met with "kids" who're demanding to know what he intends to do to keep them from being slaughtered when they go back to school.
Every good salesman knows, eventually, he'll be called in so the clients can spend an hour or so yelling at him. They yell about how the thing doesn't work the way they expected it to work. They yell about how they weren't trained properly to use the thing. They yell about how the price wasn't anywhere near what they thought it would be. They yell about how you're too hard to get on the phone. They yell about how they can't negotiate the phone menu when they call the help line. They yell. And they yell. And they yell. Well tough shit, cupcake. That's part of the gig. You're gettin' paid, so suck it up and be a man about it. 45* has no fucking clue what he's supposed to do in this perfectly understandable and predictable situation because 45* is a shitty salesman. And it showed today - again. Try as he might, he was uncomfortable; he was dancing too hard; and it showed. Here's the thing - ya gotta shut up and listen. You shit-can the usual script, you shut your flap, and you fucking listen. This is what you don't do:
You don't have your staff jot down a few notes to help you act like you have any clue about what people are going thru, and to pretend you give one empty fuck about what's happened to them. Fuck this guy. Federal prison and hard labor is an extended vacation at Sandals compared with what should happen to this ass hat.
Ten lies about guns that are intended to fog up the debate. Forbes, Chris Ladd: Lie #1: There is no connection between mass gun ownership and gun deaths. It seems obvious that a country flooded with guns will have higher rates of gun deaths than countries with few of these weapons. Why are land mines and hand-grenades forbidden in the so-called “Land of the Free,” despite their obvious value in home defense? Because everyone understands that placing these killing machines in circulation would get a lot of people killed. So why don’t we recognize the same problem with guns?
Lie #2: We don’t need stronger gun regulation because gun violence is declining. This lie is fun because of the way it depends on careful framing. Gun violence, defined as crimes committed with guns, has been declining for decades. That makes sense, since crime in general has been declining for decades.
Lie #3: We didn’t have this problem “in my day” because people loved Jesus and didn’t play violent video games. According to Franklin Graham, gun violence happens because Americans “turned our backs on God.” His “kids these days” explanation of gun carnage is a favorite of drunk uncles in MAGA caps all over the country. Though these claims frequently sour Thanksgiving dinners, they lack empirical support.
Lie #4: The Second Amendment blocks gun regulation. Americans happily place curbs on our rights to religious freedom, blocking people from committing acts of violence, fraud or abuse in the name of faith.
Lie #5: The solution to gun violence is more gun ownership. This lie would be too bizarre to earn column space, but politicians are actually using it build policy, putting guns in places like schools, churches and bars. There is no empirical basis for the claim, but it is sometimes accompanied by one misleading data point.
Lie #6: Chicago has tight gun restrictions and mass gun violence. Ergo, gun laws don’t work. Chicago’s seemingly intractable problem with gun violence is one of America’s fondest fascinations. It’s also a myth. Chicago has more gun murders than other large cities like New York and Los Angeles, thanks mostly to its long, unsecured border with North Alabamastan (sometimes called Indiana). However, Chicago’s murder rate still lags far behind the nation’s leaders, many of which are in red states with loose gun restrictions.
Lie #7: We should enforce existing gun laws before imposing new ones. Calls for more determined enforcement of existing gun laws are the most darkly cynical lie in the debate over guns. Our gun laws are carefully crafted to be unenforceable.
Lie #8: We need guns to protect ourselves from the government. Until 2008, no federal court had ever recognized an individual constitutional right to own a firearm. If anyone imagined that the Constitution protected a right to use violence to overthrow the government, that idea was put to rest in 1794, when George Washington marched an army across Pennsylvania to squash citizens’ “Second Amendment remedies.”
Lie #9: No legislation can curb gun deaths in the US. Americans now have more guns in circulation than citizens. No credible regulatory scheme, no matter how smart or ambitious, is likely to bring the rate of gun deaths in America in line with global standards anytime soon. Whatever we achieve politically in the near term can only be a down-payment on a better world for our children.
Lie #10: Americans oppose tighter gun regulation. When presented with concrete proposals to regulate guns, majorities of Americans almost always favor them. That support is so universal that it spreads across partisan lines. In fact, a ballot proposal on gun control passed in Nevada of all places. More than 90% of gun owners support universal background checks. A majority of Republicans support a national gun registry.
It's kinda pleasing and affirming, but at this point, the joke is getting very stale. Which should be a red flag for us. Stay in the game. Stay busy. Stay focused.
A glimmer of what, I don't really know. Not yet anyway, but WaPo ran an OpEd piece today that tells us the truth about our "Hyper-Partisanship Problem". Catherine Rampell: Dysfunctional Washington refuses to work out its differences to solve problems that matter to Americans.
So say pundits and policy activists, perhaps hoping that diffuse criticism, rather than finger-pointing, will yield a government willing to govern.
But the problem isn’t “Washington.” It isn’t “Congress,” either. The problem is elected officials from a single political party: the GOP. - and - ...Even the awe-inspiring Marjory Stoneman Douglas High student survivors, while calling for stronger gun-control measures, have appeared cautious about disproportionately picking on Republicans.
“I was very partisan in the beginning and violently attacking the GOP. I was angry and scared. Now I know that people from every party are supporting us. Everybody is demanding change,” junior Cameron Kasky tweeted when a critic accused him of spouting “Democrat talking points.”
Kasky is, of course, correct that Americans of all parties demand change. But politicians of all parties do not.
I used to devote more time and viscera deconstructing the Weekend Gasbag Cavalcade back when there was a glimmer of hope that if enough of us documented and published the catastrophic failures of our political media over and over and over again, it might change their collective behavior.
I no longer believe that.
Clearly, their contemptable collective behavior is an organizational feature and not a bug, and therefore unfixable until it becomes unbearably more painful for the men and women who control our corporate media to change their ways than to maintain the status quo. I still take note of the weekly crimes against journalism and the vipers and pettyfoggers who commit them, but now it is more with an eye towards the future. Just a dime-store Josephus documenting who we are and why this is happening to us as our country is systematically gutted by forces beyond my control. And I think I write a pretty honest stick, but this Sunday I can't sum things up any better than @51Renee on the Twitter machine: Trump having a meltdown today.
Jill Stein having a meltdown today. Bernie snapping at Chuck Todd today. Hillary Clinton is laughing her ass off. She tried to tell you. #StillWithHer
Yeah, that's about where we're at. I don't expect driftglass to stop doing what he does, but the guy's been at it for 10 years, thinking only a few of us are hearing it. And he needs a break - everybody does once in a while. You can only slam your face into that wall so many times before you have to walk away, find a good place to sit, and just think about nothing for a while. So Ms Rampell comes through for us with a good assessment, and hope lives in expecting more of that. Hang in there, driftglass - and everybody else too.
Fart-Breathing Purists will always be with us. And we must always love them - we must always consider their viewpoints - so we can make sure they understand why it's essential for us ultimately to ignore them on most occasions.
In a perfect world, Jill Stein’s legacy will be permanently ending the utterly moronic practice of throwing away votes on losers in some bullshit “principled” stand.
From a piece in Forbes by Chris Ladd, last October, listing the Top 10 Lies Obscuring The Gun Debate: In a ritual as central to American life as football on Thanksgiving, each new mass shooting spawns a wave of unfocused political energy that quickly dissipates into “thoughts and prayers.” No matter how many people die, no matter the cruelty of the methods or the youth and innocence of the victims, we cannot translate our outrage into sensible gun control measures.
Key to this failure has been a dense fog of misinformation, shrouding debate and thwarting any potential response. Cutting through the gun lobby’s campaign of confusion will be key to building public consensus around reform. Unless we pierce this fog and develop a focused political agenda, Las Vegas will recede from consciousness, one more mass slaughter on our way to the next one. My current fave: Lie #8: We need guns to protect ourselves from the government.
Claims of a Second Amendment right to overthrow the government may be false, but they get us very close to understanding the honest motives behind the gun lobby.
Until 2008, no federal court had ever recognized an individual constitutional right to own a firearm. If anyone imagined that the Constitution protected a right to use violence to overthrow the government, that idea was put to rest in 1794, when George Washington marched an army across Pennsylvania to squash citizens’ “Second Amendment remedies.”
If the Second Amendment was about resisting the government, why have we only enjoyed a personal right to firearms for less than ten years? And why don’t we have the right to obtain other critical supplies for our jihad, like mortars, land mines and fighter planes?
A dark truth lurks in the “Second Amendment remedies” lie. What fuels the most passionate wing of the gun lobby is the American tradition of mob violence. A population armed with infantry weapons is no match against the organization and equipment of a modern nation-state, but with the inaction or complicity of local law enforcement a well-armed population can run riot over unprotected minorities.
What happens when citizens take up arms against the government? Study the history of the Black Panthers. Despite being reasonably well-armed and organized, they were systematically hunted down and killed until the movement died out. Absent some zone of safety, protected by complicit law enforcement or benefiting from a smaller "sub-state," private use of weapons is ineffective. Reconstruction featured many similar examples. Racist militias failed to capture New Orleans in the Battle of Liberty Place in 1874 despite being reinforced by Confederate veterans and strengthened with weapons captured from US forces. However, these same militias found success in the rural countryside, where they enjoyed the complicity of local law enforcement.
Private weapons are ineffective in resisting the government, but highly effective as an unrecognized extension of government. Well-armed white paramilitaries were the lynchpin of Jim Crow, waging a campaign of terrorism in black communities. Their private activities allowed local governments to impose crippling limits on black citizens while escaping accountability. Many black Americans were armed as well, but their weapons did them little good. Racist militias could operate with the tacit backing of local law enforcement, while any use of force by black residents in self-defense was be ruthlessly punished.
Behind the “Second Amendment Remedies” lie lurks a dark reality: private arsenals have always been the bloody left hand of white supremacy. When gun enthusiasts shrug off the mass slaughter of innocent civilians to preserve “freedom,” they aren’t talking about your freedom or mine. Runner-up: Lie #5: The solution to gun violence is more gun ownership.
This lie would be too bizarre to earn column space, but politicians are actually using it to build policy, putting guns in places like schools, churches and bars. There is no empirical basis for the claim, but it is sometimes accompanied by one misleading data point.
In a twist on Lie #2, gun advocates sometimes point out that a massive rise in gun sales in recent decades has coincided with a long decline in crime rates. Reductions in crime have also coincided with a long trend of rising ocean temperatures, and an increase in the number of black quarterbacks in the NFL. Without some explanation of cause, this factoid is useless.
Further complicating this argument is an inconvenient fact – crime rates have been falling in recent decades all over the civilized world. How has the surge in US gun sales somehow triggered simultaneous declines in criminal activity in Britain, Germany, France and so on? It hasn’t, because there is no connection between US gun sales and declining crime rates.
There’s another interesting dimension to this lie. Gun sales have surged in recent years in the US, but gun ownership is declining. Fewer American households own a gun than at any point in the past half a century. Only three percent of gun owners possess about half of all the weapons in circulation in the US. Today in the US, the average gun owner possesses eight weapons. America has far more guns in private circulation than at any time in its history, but three quarters of Americans do not own one. Mass gun ownership has no relationship to declining crime rates.
I'm not trying to pretend everything would be just peachy if we had the actual winner of the election in the White House now. But I think it's safe to say we wouldn't have quite the criminal enterprise in power either. May you live in interesting times - my ass.
The power of anonymity. In a section titled “Use of U.S. Computer Infrastructure,” prosecutors noted that some of the defendants and co-conspirators “purchased space on computer servers located inside the United States in order to set up virtual private networks.” Once they had those, they could create social-media accounts and communicate with American campaign activists “while masking the Russian origin and control of the activity.” What obligation do campaigns have to vet the people and information they encounter? Under current law, campaigns must document the sources of their funding (to insure, among other things, that they receive no foreign donations, which are against the law).
The power of voter suppression. To promote Trump, the Internet Research Agency did not just amplify his supporters’ enthusiasm; it actively sought to deter others from participating in the democratic process. Months before Election Day, Russian trolls “began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 US. presidential election or to vote for a third-party US. presidential candidate.” In one case, a Russian-controlled account on Instagram, with the name “Woke Blacks,” posted, “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”
The power of news illiteracy.At the heart of the Russian fraud is an essential, embarrassing insight into American life: large numbers of Americans are ill-equipped to assess the credibility of the things they read. The willingness to believe purported news stories, often riddled with typos or coming from unfamiliar outlets, is a liability of today’s fragmented media and polarized politics. Even the trolls themselves were surprised at what Americans would believe. According to the indictment, in September, 2017, once U.S. authorities had begun to crack down on the fraud, one of the defendants, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, e-mailed a family member, saying, “We had a slight crisis here at work: the FBI busted our activity (not a joke). So, I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues.” She went on, “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.” Let's review, shall we?
Hillary was such a lousy candidate it only took the entire RNC and the FBI and Wikileaks and the Russian government and 25 years of shit dropped on her by the Wingnuts to "beat" her even though she got 3 million votes more than the guy who came 2nd. And look, kids - I'm not crazy about her either. But my first choice didn't get the nomination, so I went with the least bad. Which is what you do. And please don't give me shit about how great Bernie is. He was my first choice because he was the least bad during the primaries. When the Democrats "conspire" to nominate a Democrat, you can color me unsurprised.
"Conservatives" love to bitch about the timelines of the Mueller investigation. They contend (eg) that the investigation started before 45* began his run, and somehow, that means he couldn't possibly have anything to do with the Ruskies' rat-fucking. Here's a tiny hint: "Make America Great Again" - Trump applied for a patent on that slogan in November of 2012. Another one: The rat-fucking began (more or less) in 2014, but Trump claims he wasn't even running, and besides, he'd never had anything to do with the Ruskies back then - The 2013 Miss Universe Meat Parade was held in Moscow, and Trump was there, having boasted about doing "a lot of business with the Russians" and that he'd met Putin. The indictment published 16FEB2018 is an interesting 'next step'. U.S. law bans foreign nationals from making certain expenditures or financial disbursements for the purpose of influencing federal elections. U.S. law also bars agents of any foreign entity from engaging in political activities within the United States without first registering with the Attorney General. Previous indictments have established that there were people inside the Trump campaign, doing dirty things, possibly in cahoots with "the Russians". This new indictment tells us who "the Russians" are, links them to people in this country, and tells us how the Rat-Fucking crosses the threshold into Unlawful Campaign Activity.
We ain't there yet, but just like Grandma said: "Oh honey, If that thing had fangs and a rattle, you'd be close to dead now."
