GOP Backs Path to Citizenship Unless Obama Supports It
A new Washington Post poll finds that 70% of Americans said they would support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, including 60% of Republicans.
But when the same question was asked of a separate sample of respondents, this time with Obama's name attached to it, support dropped to 59% overall and just 39% among Republicans.
Horror as gunman executes woman while she decorates church for children's party in new shooting rampage that left four dead.From MLive-Flint Journal, 1-15-13:
Deadly church shooting at Flint funeral is widely ignored outside of Genesee CountyThere have been 20 or more Church Shootings in the last dozen years in the US.
An attorney representing two women who were delivering newspapers when they were shot by police during a massive manhunt for an ex-LAPD officer called the incident "unacceptable," saying his clients looked nothing like the suspect.
Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the 33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and injuring two others.
Hernandez, who attorney Glen T. Jonas said was shot twice in the back, was in stable condition late Thursday. Carranza received stitches on her finger.
"The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn't take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don't look like a large black man," Jonas said.2 Latina women are very nearly killed. These 2 Latina women - who were in a pickup truck that looks nothing like the one Dorner was reported to be driving - barely survive the encounter with some highly trained and experienced officers of the law.
But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation. (If you’re not on Twitter, you can email slatedata@gmail.com.) And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.About 5500 Americans are dead because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 12 years of war, 5,500 dead Americans.
Conservatives take human relationships seriously and know that they require nurturing. In community lies our best hope of enjoying a meaningful earthly existence. But community does not emerge spontaneously. Conservatives understand that the most basic community, the little platoon of family, is under unrelenting assault, from both left and right. Emphasizing autonomy, the forces of modernity are intent on supplanting the family with the hyper-empowered—if also alienated—individual, who exists to gratify appetite and ambition. With its insatiable hunger for profit, the market is intent on transforming the family into a cluster of consumers who just happen to live under the same roof. One more thing: conservatives don’t confuse intimacy with sex.--and--
The key to success will be to pick the right fights against the right enemies, while forging smart tactical alliances. (By tactical, I do not mean cynical.) Conservatives need to discriminate between the issues that matter and those that don’t, the contests that can be won and those that can’t. And they need to recognize that the political left includes people of goodwill whose views on some (by no means all) matters coincide with our own.
So forget about dismantling the welfare state. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and, yes, Obamacare are here to stay. Forget about outlawing abortion or prohibiting gay marriage. Conservatives may judge the fruits produced by the sexual revolution poisonous, but the revolution itself is irreversible.Of course, I have to diverge from some of his points (eg: his take on "Original Sin" is actually pretty good, but I've come to view it from the opposite perspective), and some of his agenda items leave something to be desired.
The Greenville Police responded to a shooting at Haywood Plantation Apartments around 7:30 p.m. on Friday night.
A 3-year-old boy named Tmorej Smith was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head.
Investigators say the child and a 7-year-old sibling were playing with a pink handgun that they thought was a toy when the gun went off.
The shooting has been ruled as accidental. No charges have been filed at this time and the investigation continues.
Officials are reminding gun owners to keep them locked at all times and out of reach of children.--and--
There has been a concerted effort in the gun industry to increase interest and awareness among women. An array of “cute” weapons are available, including Hello Kitty AK-47 assault rifles, a “Lady Di” Handgun, and even a delightful Mardis Gras themed “My Little Carbine”. For the especially careless girl, there is a Care Bear body armor vest.hat tip = Addicting Info
A couple with four children were shot and killed in an argument over dog feces on Monday, police in Texas said.
Officers were called to a shooting at the Sable Ridge Apartments in Dallas at about 8 a.m. Monday.
When officers arrived, they found two people, later identified as 32-year-old Michelle Jackson and 31-year-old Jamie Stafford, dead at the scene from apparent gunshot wounds. An infant inside the couple's apartment was not injured.
After talking with witnesses, police began searching for Chung Kim, a resident of the complex identified by residents as a man who lived in the unit below Stafford and Jackson and was seen leaving the complex after the shooting.US News on NBCNews.com
The arresting images combined with the crackle of what everyone immediately recognizes as old audio made everyone at our Super Bowl party stop and watch. Dodge, I'm sure, had good demographic analysis of their audience, so they knew they could go godly with the message and encounter little backlash. So God made a farmer, and also the advertising agencies who will use him to sell trucks. Quibbles aside, I'd rather have this kind of Americana than GoDaddy's bizarre antics.
But there's a problem. The ad paints a portrait of the American agricultural workforce that is horribly skewed. In Dodge's world, almost every farmer is a white Caucasian. And that's about as realistic as a Thomas Kincade painting.
Stipulating that visual inspection is a rough measure for the complex genealogical histories of people, I decided to count the race and ethnicity of the people in Dodge's ad. Here's what I found: 15 white people, one black man, and two (maybe three?) Latinos.
I couldn't help but wonder: Where are all the campesinos? The ethnic mix Dodge chose to represent American farming is flat-out wrong.Taking one short step beyond the race thing (and remembering the last shot in this video), let's think about what a farm actually looks like here in 2013. And then maybe we can talk about the simple fact that a farm isn't really a farm anymore - it's a factory. You don't feed 7 Billion humans on a coupla chickens and a few acres of beans and millet and pygmy cucumbers.
Authorities stormed an underground bunker in southeastern Alabama Monday, freeing a 5-year-old boy and shooting his captor to death after a week of fruitless negotiations that left authorities convinced the child was in imminent danger.But put yourself in the shoes of that kid's parents for a short moment - some asshole Doomsday Prepper has murdered a school bus driver in the process of kidnapping your son; a coupla phones calls are made and, as if by magic, the cops materialize at your door and they say - oh I dunno - they say something that can easily be paraphrased and boiled down to, "We're from the government and we're here to help you". Is your first inclination to spit on their shoes and tell 'em to get the fuck off your porch?
Jimmy Lee Dykes, 65, had taken the child off a school bus after fatally shooting the driver Jan. 29 and was holed up with the child for seven days, authorities said.
An FBI Hostage Rescue team launched the rescue attempt after concerns mounted that Dykes was growing more unstable and presented a growing threat to the boy's safety, a U.S. official told CBS News. At some point during the negotiations, authorities had inserted a camera into the bunker and observed that Dykes had begun brandishing a gun and acting increasingly agitated - signs his mental state was deterioriating. Rescuers stormed the bunker from an entrance at its top, set off a diversionary explosive device and ultimately shot Dykes.
Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.This mirror-imaging thing has been effective for a long time, and it's the big reason (I think) for why Democrats get beat even when they have better ideas; why they're seen as weak in the face of political opponents who've got nothing but slander going for them. Unfortunately, The Mud-Slinger usually wins - especially if he's the first to sling that mud. Gerrymandering has plenty to do with why Dems couldn't get a majority in The House this time even when they got more votes overall, but the main thing is that way too often, the Repubs have put out some bogus crap - either a false positive for themselves or a false negative for the Dems - and let the already-in-place belief that "both sides do it / they're all the same" do the rest.
Myth #1: They're coming for your guns.Great rebuttals for each one - and easy to remember.
Myth #2: Guns don't kill people—people kill people.
Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society.
Myth #4: More good guys with guns can stop rampaging bad guys.
Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer.
Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer.
Myth #7: Guns make women safer.
Myth #8: "Vicious, violent video games" deserve more blame than guns.
Myth #9: More and more Americans are becoming gun owners.
Myth #10: We don't need more gun laws—we just need to enforce the ones we have.
Fox News host Stuart Varney claimed that federal discretionary spending is "out of control." In fact, discretionary spending has already been reduced by $1.5 trillion, and non-defense discretionary spending is projected to be at the lowest level in 50 years.
As we never get tired of pointing out, Fox Nation is a web-site where totally non-racist editors post links to stories guaranteed to anger up the blood of their no-doubt-about-it racist readers, many of whom immediately take to the Fox Nation comment threads to uncork monstrous slurs those editors then have to delete. It's a brilliant scheme guaranteeing those editors never go out of work: Cram internet babies full of anger protein, and then hose out the diapers!That's a good bit of honest-to-god journalism right there. It's a little sad to think an awful lot of people still believe Fox is actually a news operation, but it's good to know there are more folks who see it for the political organization it is - and to let us witness the enormous coincidence of the GOP trying desperately to improve its chances with "the brown demographic" and this rather sudden appearance of a Latin version of DumFux News (launched late 2010).
Last week I mentioned the effects that China's latest pollution emergency was having on Chinese citizens and foreigners living there. Here's a picture posted on Twitter just now from a friend in Beijing, showing the view from the 30th floor out toward our former neighborhood.
I'm 40. Just got my J.D. in 2011, passed the SC Bar first go. This is my third career, after Aerospace Maintenance (got our when the airline business model tanked after 9/11) and IT. I've opened a virtual (ie, no overhead) solo practice because no one else will hire me. While having my own business sounds nice, I'm probably going to gross only about $4000 this year. We don't make enough to meet our budget and our credit and savings are almost out. I owe a quarter million in student loans. We've moved to a smaller (rented) house, scrimped, minimized our consumer debt for stuff like phones and cars and TV and such, but we're going to run out of resources this year. If it was just my wife and I, we could find a way, we could eat ramen for a few years. In theory, we could live apart and I could work where the jobs are; I could take a contract and work overseas - Xe, or many of their competitors. But we have an infant daughter, and that changes everything.
Sounds not too bad, right? Well, here's the reality: I've applied for more than 1100 jobs since I graduated in May 2011, legal and anything else I might be remotely qualified for. Pay scales from $20 grand to six figures. Nothing - not a peep. Never had an interview. Not a callback. Only a few rejection letters - just got one recently (September) for a job I applied for last December. It is like I do not exist. I am shouting in a vacuum.
So I've got a solid BS in business and info systems, JD and bar membership, aerospace background, 13 year USAF veteran with management experience both inside and outside the military. I have international experience in Asia (mostly business and education in Japan), have traveled extensively thanks to being a cargo plane mechanic, I get a veteran's preference on fed and state jobs for being mildly disabled (going deaf). Hell, I got the undergraduate version of a Fulbright scholarship (a Gilman). When I was in Law School, and looking at my peers whose previous experience was usually something like waitressing or summer camp counseloring, I thought I'd be fine in the employment area. I could always go back to one of my earlier careers, right?
Even better, rolling all my experience into one job. Or so I thought.
At first, it was merely frustrating. I was sending out about two dozen resumes a week for posted job openings anywhere within sane commuting distance. I figured I had good credentials, good experience, and a good resume - had it worked over by 4-5 different career services. The VA guys told me I had a better resume than they all did. The suspicion that my resume was getting tossed either because it wasn't believable, or because I fell in a black hole of not having enough law experience and having too much education for anything else began to grow. Now I'm certain of it. If I leave off my law degree, I've got to explain a 4 year gap in employment. If I put it in, I'm not considered for anything not a legal job, and even entry-level legal stuff wants 2-5 years of litigation experience. Now, I've given up. I recognize that what I am is surplus to the new economy, that this situation will only worsen, and no one will ever hire me again.
That realization turned frustration into despondence. I went from having the military discipline and drive that gave me the confidence to tackle anything, that had led me to greater and greater successes prior to law school, to the knowledge that I wasn't good enough for anything, that not only had I educated myself out of the job market but by doing so on student loans I had put my family at risk as well. Every day is a struggle to find a reason to get out of bed. Most days that reason is to take care of my daughter - but as a first-time dad at 40, I feel incompetent at that as well. I spend way too much time wondering if my wife and kid would be better off by themselves.
The funny thing is, before I joined the USAF I was actually homeless. I lived in a tent in the mountains, killed my own dinner, and I was happier then. Colder, but happier.
I don't want a handout. I don't want the government to step in and help me (unless they want to tackle my student loans, in which case go US government). At this point I don't even want a small business loan anymore - no one will loan you money if you don't have a house they can take. I just want enough paying clients to keep our lights on.
SCAttorney/IT Guy/Airplane Mechanic... someday.
The rewriting of history in the South is a retreat by beleaguered whites into a mythical self-glorification. I witnessed a similar retreat during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. As Yugoslavia’s economy deteriorated, ethnic groups built fantasies of a glorious past that became a substitute for history. They sought to remove, through exclusion and finally violence, competing ethnicities to restore this mythological past. The embrace by nationalist groups of a nonreality-based belief system made communication with other ethnic groups impossible. They no longer spoke the same cultural language. There was no common historical narrative built around verifiable truth. A similar disconnect was illustrated last week in Memphis when the chairman of the city’s parks committee, William Boyd, informed the council that Forrest “promoted progress for black people in this country after the war.” Boyd argued that the KKK was “more of a social club” at its inception and didn’t begin carrying out “bad and horrific things” until it reconstituted itself with the rise of the modern civil rights movement.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to be OK with pre-Bush 2 tax rates.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to resist wasteful Defense spending levels and to see the wisdom of staying out of wars.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to live with a health care system many Republicans endorsed two decades ago.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to practice a productive legislative relationship with the other party.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to allow that at least some regulation is essential for a trustworthy business environment.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to quit gratuitously insulting minorities and women.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to quit using sneaky ways to circumvent democratically representative voting results.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to use your small-state Senate seat responsibly.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to have a gun policy that respects Second Amendment rights, but isn’t written by the firearms industry.
- You don’t have to be a liberal to conserve our natural resources.
“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.” --HP Lovecraft, 1936hat tip = Democratic Underground
A Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area won a trial Friday in his lawsuit seeking $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.
Barack Obama won 51.16% of the vote. Under the new bill he would have won four of the states 13 electoral votes.Yup - it's right about three fifths. Each Obama voter would be counted as 3/5 of a Romney voter. Ring any bells for anybody?
And do you know how much it counts an Obama voter as? (It's 4/13 divided by 51.16%. I'll wait. Do it. Get a calculator. You'll crap yourself.)
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
