The Lady Michelle

Body language makes a beautiful sound sometimes, and Michelle Obama speaks with a lyrical perfection in this short clip from the Inaugural Luncheon.



Can't wait to hear from Wingnut-topia about what a horrible person it makes her for having the nerve not to put up with the drunken antics and attempted glad-handing (ie: pawing) of Sir John the Orange of Paintboothshire.

1,384,171

1,384,171 is the number of Americans who have been killed by guns in the last 43 years.

One million-three-hundred-eighty-four-thousand-one-hundred-seventy-one.

Since 1775 (237 years), having fought dozens of battles, skirmishes and outright wars; putting many millions of American uniformed people in harm's way - the estimates look like this:

CONFLICT - TIME SPAN - DEAD AMERICANS
War of Independence (1775-1783) 25,000
Quasi-War (1798-1800 ) 20
Barbary Wars (1801-1815) 35
War of 1812 (1812-1815) 20,000
1st Seminole War (1817-1818) 30
2nd Seminole War (1835-1842 ) 1,500
Mexican-American War (1846-1848) 3,283
3rd Seminole War (1855-1858) 26
Civil War (1861-1865) 623,026
Indian Wars (1865-1898) 919
Spanish-American War (1898) 2,446
Philippine War (1898-1902) 4,196
Boxer Rebellion (1900-1901) 37
Mexican Revolution (1914-1919) 35
Haiti Occupation (1915-1934) 146
World War 1 (1917-1918) 116,708
World War 2 (1941-1945) 407,316
Korean War (1950-1953) 36,914
Vietnam War (1964-1973) 58,169
El Salvador (1980-1992) 20
Beirut (1982-1984) 266
Persian Gulf Support (1987-1988) 39
Invasion of Grenada (1983) 19
Invasion of Panama (1989) 40
Persian Gulf War (1991) 269
Somalia (1992-1993) 43
Bosnia (1995) 12
Afghanistan / Iraq (2002-2012) 6,616

For a grand total of 1,317,130

In just 43 years we've killed 67,041 more Americans than all of our "enemies" have managed to kill in 237 years of armed conflict.  Who looks at this and then says to himself, "So, yeah - I guess what we need is a lot more opportunity for Americans to kill each other"?

The Internet Is Outa Control

Today's Pix

Manti T'eo

Here's a picture of all the fucks I give:

Seriously - I've tried, but I just really really don't care.  And it's not that I don't care about a young man on the verge of fame and fortune being scammed to the point where he somehow felt compelled to go along with it (WTF?) only to get publicly fucked over anyway -  the story here is that the Press Poodles couldn't be bothered to do their fucking jobs.

As usual, Charlie Pierce gets it about right:

I remain fascinated by the unfolding saga of Manti Te'o and the alleged death of his imaginary girlfriend — Who exactly got the white roses he sent to the funeral anyway? — partly for the pure schadenfreude of watching the perpetual-motion Notre Dame mythmaking machine sputter and wheeze, leaving gears and tiny springs and pieces of itself all over the landscape as it augers in spectacularly, and in full public view. (And the Gipper was a gambler and a bounder and drank South Bend dry. Pass it on.)

Yesterday's Dildo-Brained Gun-Fucker News

From Balloon Juice:

Today is “Gun Appreciation Day.” An event created by right wingers with penis issues, and so called because “Insensitivity To First Graders Being Slaughtered Wholesale Day” doesn’t roll as glibly off the tongue. It also gives the game away, but I digress.

At gun shows across the country, the hicks and goobers line up to look at and buy all sorts of guns, and more guns and still more guns instead of getting the roof fixed, buying a used truck less than eight years old, or saving up for Billy Bob’s and Jolene’s tuition at the junior college that might have allowed them to not work at Walmart as adults.

And here are some hi-lites from This Week In Gun Safety:

• a 6-year-old in Cleveland, Ohio who died after she likely shot herself in the face.
• a 15-year-old in Anchorage, Alaska who was shot in the leg as guns were fired at her home.
• a 12-year-old in Bainbridge, Georgia who was seriously injured, already requiring two surgeries, after shootinghimself in his leg while hunting.
• a 4-year-old in Richmond, Virginia who unintentionallyshot and killed a relative in his home using a gun he found on a table.
• a 2-year-old in Savannah, Georgia who unintentionallyshot himself with a gun he found in a drawer.
• a 17-year-old in Cleveland, Ohio who was unintentionally shot in the chest while he and a friend were handling a gun.
• a 16-year-old in Kearny, New Jersey who was shot and killed in her home while babysitting her younger brother.
• a 15-year-old in Chicago, Illinois who was shot in the shoulder near LaFollete Park.
• a 17-year-old in Chicago, Illinois who was shot and killed just outside the Chicago State University gymnasium after a high school basketball game.
• an 18-year-old in Watsonville, California who was shot and killed.
• a 16-year-old in St. Louis County, Missouri who was shot in the leg after leaving a high school basketball game.
• a 15-year-old in Columbus, Ohio who was shot and killed during an after-school fight.
• a 17-year-old in Baltimore, Maryland who was shot and killed.
• a 15-year-old in Wilmington, Delaware who was shot in the leg.
• a 12-year-old in Hazard, Kentucky who was shot and killed in a parking lot at Hazard Community and Technical College, along with her father and 20-year-old cousin.
• a 15-year-old in Yakima, Washington who is in critical condition after he was shot in the head. A 17-year-old companion was shot in the back.
• a 16-year-old in Lexington County, South Carolina who was shot in the back while sitting in a pickup truck.
• two young children in Kansas City, Missouri who were shot as gunfire from the street entered their house.
• a 14-year-old in Las Vegas, Nevada who was shot and killed outside a party at an apartment complex.

--paraphrasing here: When it's stupid to own a gun, only the stoopid own guns.

A Small Win

...or maybe that should be the word 'win' spelled with the lower case 'w'(?)

From Addicting Info:

The full body scanner technology, which produces a semi-nude image of a persons body, has been controversial since they were first introduced. While the advocates for it called the scanners safe, that the images were not clear enough to be considered intrusive, privacy advocates have taken, at times, odd measures to protect the scanners.

What has been neglected in much of the media attention, however, is the safety of these scanners. The radiation used by the models of machines built by OSI Systems has been called into question, with serious concerns about the levels of dosage used. Late last year, OSI failed to meet critical safety requirements, and on Friday, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) announced their termination of the OSI contract. While OSI is not the sole supplier, its systems were under the most scrutiny due to the clarity and detail they provided.

So first, chalk one up for even a slight delay in stomping all over people's rights - of course, with one contractor out, it only makes things better for somebody else's brother-in-law to become very wealthy at taxpayer expense while doing practically nothing effective about the problems of terrorism.

Second, it's kinda nice to know that an opportunistic slug like Mike Chertoff is being left on a dry sidewalk under a scorching summer sun.

Today's Toon

Today's Toon

The Directory Of Sick Fucks

Via Democratic Underground:

In the increasingly distant past, the National Rifle Association (NRA) largely advocated for policies related to hunting and marksmanship, but today its leaders are defined by unsavory conduct and the advancement of extreme, anti-government ideology. While the NRA innocuously describes itself as the “nation’s oldest civil rights organization,” this portrayal serves only as a smokescreen to mask the fact that the organization is a rogues gallery of the most odious voices in the contemporary Conservative Movement.

One only has to look to the NRA’s leadership to discover that the organization is operated by a group of individuals who promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-immigrant animus, religious bigotry, anti-environmentalism, and insurrectionism. Some active NRA board members have even had close relationships with brutal dictators in outside nations. Put simply, members of the NRA leadership no longer make for polite company.

Moreover, while superficially bipartisan, the NRA is closely aligned with the most extreme elements in the Republican Party and has brought a number of the GOP’s most influential operatives into positions of power within the organization. The GOP and NRA are now locked in a symbiotic relationship where Republican legislators advance the NRA’s extreme agenda while the NRA musters its hardcore supporters to serve as attack dogs for a wide range of conservative causes.

This website shines a light on the background of members of NRA leadership, in large part by allowing them to comment on the issues of the day in their own words. It is intended as a resource for those who cherish moderation, civility and principled advocacy in American politics.

Take a look around at some of the leading lights in the NRA - some of these people are too nutty for granola.

NRA Leader Profiles

Today's Great Idea

pure fucking genius

Music Redux

Some of my visitors have been hitting on this Steely Dan tune I posted a coupla years back.  The original YouTube video had been taken down, so I updated it with this one, which I think is pretty timely now that we're busily trying so very hard not to do anything about our gun problems.



It occurs to me that during the last 65 years or so (aka America's Imperial Period), we've spent a lot of time shooting people just about everywhere in the world, and so it shouldn't come as a big surprise that eventually, it wouldn't seem at all unusual for us to shoot each other.

Solar Dreams

I've not confirmed this is real -

- but what a great idea.

Of course, the real problem is that once the utilities companies perceive any threat to their 19th-Century Profit Model, they put their Coin-Operated Politicians to work knee-capping anybody who dares to compete with them.

From The Mail & Guardian (Africa Edition):

But renewable energy has become politically divisive as businesses complain the shift away from nuclear power towards subsidised renewables is adding to consumer costs and jeopardising economic growth.

The government agreed last year to cut the level of feed-in tariffs – the industry's lifeblood as long as solar power is more expensive than conventional forms of energy to produce – in order to reduce the pace of installations.
Tariffs were cut by 2.5% a month between November 1 2012 and January 31.

Installation decrease
An Environment Ministry spokesperson said installed capacity in the last quarter of 2012 was less than a fifth of overall installations last year.

An American Hero

He doesn't carry a gun; he doesn't threaten anybody with bodily harm; he isn't throwing bombs - he isn't doing anything in the mode of violence that we've come to expect just in the everyday transaction of living with other people.

He's "just a kid" asking to be told the truth; so he isn't passing on a lie.

From io9:

Kopplin, who is studying history at Rice University, had good reason to be upset after the passing of the LSEA — an insidious piece of legislation that allows teachers to bring in their own supplemental materials when discussing politically controversial topics like evolution or climate change. Soon after the act was passed, some of his teachers began to not just supplement existing texts, but to rid the classroom of established science books altogether. It was during the process to adopt a new life science textbook in 2010 that creationists barraged Louisiana's State Board of Education with complaints about the evidence-based science texts. Suddenly, it appeared that they were going to be successful in throwing out science textbooks.

"This was a pivotal moment for me," Kopplin told io9. "I had always been a shy kid and had never spoken out before — I found myself speaking at a meeting of an advisory committee to the State Board of Education and urging them to adopt good science textbooks — and we won." The LSEA still stood, but at least the science books could stay.

hat tip = Democratic Underground

New Vocabulary

Here's my new term - this is what I'll be calling members of the GOP for a while at least:

Renege-licans

• If you voted for a shitload of spending under last year's budget (or actually Continuing Resolution, since we don't really do budgets anymore) - but anyway; if you voted to spend the money last year and now you're talkin' about voting against the Debt Ceiling which allows us to pay for the shit you voted to spend all that money on, well, you might be a Renege-lican.
• If you intend to vote to cut Social Security benefits or Medicare for people who've been paying into the system for 50 years, you might be a Renege-lican.
• If you jumped up and down thumping your chest chanting "USA USA" sending a million Americans to fight and to bleed and to die in various desert shit-holes, but now you're having second thoughts on paying for VA Benefits or Survivors' Benefits or or or - then you're a fuckin' Renege-lican all the way.

Renege-licans:  buncha whiny-butt pussies who want all their relatives and especially all those best-buddy beltway thieves to get a good long slurp at the federal trough, but when it comes time to pay the check, these pricks are absolutely nowhere to be found.

Today's Toon

John Fugelsang

It Ain't Healthy

From NYT:

The 378-page study by a panel of experts convened by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council is the first to systematically compare death rates and health measures for people of all ages, including American youths. It went further than other studies in documenting the full range of causes of death, from diseases to accidents to violence. It was based on a broad review of mortality and health studies and statistics.

The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.

“Something fundamental is going wrong,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”

Coupla things: "This is not the product of a particular administration or political party."

WTF?  Even if I'm willing to say it's not so much a particular party but a particular outlook, that statement is borderline criminally stoopid.  Which side in any debate over any health-related issue has been funding the kind of quack science that said cigarettes aren't that bad?  that said Love Canal wasn't making the whole neighborhood sick?  that AGW and Climate Change are parts of an elaborate hoax?  that Obamacare is a federal takeover?  that artificial food additives are a good source of nutrition?  that Fracking isn't contaminating our drinking water?  that even the study of gun violence wasn't something we should spend tax dollars on? and and and.

So OK - let's focus on fixing the problem instead of the blame - but if we're gonna have any real shot at getting it right, we hafta identify the full scope of the problem.  And a big part of the problem is that "one side" keeps lying us into making bad decisions or actively seeks to keep us from making good decisions.

It's good to get this info out into the light of day, but let's remember to have the balls it takes to see the whole problem - and to call the problem by its full name.

Today's Toon

The Party Of Dementia

From Charlie Pierce:

Look at all the state representatives and senators proposing these bills and voting for them. That's your next generation of national Republican politicians. That's your Triple-A ballclub. For all the phony introspection that followed Romney's defeat, the internal processes by which the Republican party is shaping itself into a regional white-people's party that for an ideology has substituted only its various fears and hatred continue apace. The sudden media superstardom of a one-term governor of New Jersey isn't going to obviate the fact that, out there, more people take Glenn Beck seriously than take Chris Christie.

We can't make the mistake of 2008, and kinda sit back after the election thinking good ol' Barack'll take it from here.

Constant, steady pressure.  Call your reps and senators, and tell 'em what you expect.