Dire Threat To The 2nd Amendment

What Obama originally proposed in January 2013:

Proposed Congressional Actions

• Requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales, including those by private sellers that currently are exempt.
• Reinstating and strengthening the ban on assault weapons that was in place from 1994 to 2004.
• Limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds.
• Banning the possession of armor-piercing bullets by anyone other than members of the military and law enforcement.
• Increasing criminal penalties for "straw purchasers," people who pass the required background check to buy a gun on behalf of someone else.
• Acting on a $4 billion administration proposal to help keep 15,000 police officers on the street.
• Confirming President Obama's nominee for director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
• Eliminating a restriction that requires the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to allow the importation of weapons that are more than 50 years old.
• Financing programs to train more police officers, first responders and school officials on how to respond to active armed attacks.
• Provide additional $20 million to help expand the a system that tracks violent deaths across the nation from 18 states to 50 states.
• Providing $30 million in grants to states to help schools develop emergency response plans.
• Providing financing to expand mental health programs for young people.

Executive actions

• Issuing a presidential memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.
• Addressing unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.
• Improving incentives for states to share information with the background check system.
• Directing the attorney general to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.
• Proposing a rule making to give law enforcement authorities the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.
• Publishing a letter from the A.T.F. to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.
• Starting a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.
• Reviewing safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).
• Issuing a presidential memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.
• Releasing a report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and making it widely available to law enforcement authorities.
• Nominating an A.T.F. director.
• Providing law enforcement authorities, first responders and school officials with proper training for armed attacks situations.
• Maximizing enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.
• Issuing a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research gun violence.
• Directing the attorney general to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenging the private sector to develop innovative technologies.
• Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.
• Releasing a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.
• Providing incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.
• Developing model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.
• Releasing a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.
• Finalizing regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within insurance exchanges.
• Committing to finalizing mental health parity regulations.
• Starting a national dialogue on mental health led by Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, and Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.

And this is what the US Senate couldn't bring itself to vote on this past week:

1) Expanding background checks
2) Cracking down on gun trafficking and straw purchasing
3) Reauthorizing and expanding a Justice Department grant program for school safety

That's it - that's what Wayne LaPierre lied about, and couldn't allow his bitches in congress to bring up for a vote.

Music

Dreamin' in a slow groove on a dreary Friday afternoon.

Malkin Blows Another One

And be sure to spend most of your day watching DumFux News - that way you're sure to stay dumb enough to spend most of your day watching DumFux News.

Seriously - what the fuck's wrong with these people?

Hit "Like" If You Don't Like This Shit

I dearly love to hate facebook - and with good reason I think.  Read the whole thing and learn something important about marketing in the age of digits.

From an editorial in a Canadian newspaper:

"Anyone else getting sick of these daft posts?" my "friend" Chardon asked. This was on Facebook a while back.

That's why I put "friend" in quotation marks. She was talking about an annoying trend: posts showing up on Facebook news feeds, saying something like, "Name a city without an 'R' in it. It's harder than it looks!"

It's not hard, of course. Ouagadougou, Vilnius, Montevideo all leap to mind. And Budge Budge in India. I'm sure there are others.

So what's the deal? Why go to the trouble of posting such an easy puzzle on Facebook?

Another "friend" replied, "Maybe someone is testing to see how many posts this rubbish can get."

And he was partly right. The rest of the explanation turns out to be creepy and may affect you even if you're among the dwindling minority of Canadians not on Facebook.

It gets especially creepy when the post is less benign and strikes an emotional chord:

"'Like' if you hate cancer."

"'Like' if you hate bullying."

--snip--

A Facebook page is created, with an appeal for readers to like, comment or share. The creators, who are working together to build these pages, share it among themselves. They all have big networks, so the pages instantly get into thousands of other people's news feeds.

When those people respond with a "like" or a share, then it reaches their friends. Suddenly, the thing has spread faster than a high-school rumour.

Then what? Then the people who started it, having quickly acquired tens of thousands of followers, sell the page. Now an advertiser has all those names and Facebook addresses. And that advertiser, who isn't allowed to phone you and whose flyers go straight to your recycling box, is sending you commercial messages on Facebook.

Not That Anybody Noticed

It seems like we're so stuck in "Yay Us" mode, that we can't even acknowledge reality.

And sometimes it's like we don't have the confidence (or maybe the courage?) we need to cut thru the politics to get at the truth.

If I can't trust The Red Team or The Blue Team not to make it about nothing but politics, how are we supposed to hold people in the Junior Bush Administration accountable for the horrors of this last decade?  And how do we demand that Obama's Admin stop whatever they're doing to continue those horrors - making it even harder to put an end to it all?

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

I dunno - but i think refusing to acknowledge the reality of how fucked up we let ourselves get is actually what keeps us stuck in "Yay Us" mode.  And it appears we'll be there for a while longer.

Careful What You Swallow

The Big Lie works wonders.  And just how big are the NRA's lies?

MoJo breaks it down:

Music

Mr Curtis Stigers - covering Dylan's Things Have Changed

Today's Featured Website

Just in time for all the bullshitty douchebaggery coming out of Washington, here's a great way to let your favorite Congress Critters know just how much you appreciate all their hard-workin'-kick-ass attempts to fuck us all with our pants on.

http://www.shitsenders.com/

hat tip = JG

I have no idea if it's real or not, but what a great idea.

Lotsa Layers

Peel this one like an onion:

Today In Good Government (updated)

And now, a message from the US Senate for the 90% of Americans who want sensible and reasonable regulations for gun ownership:

There is no soul and no honor in American politics anymore - not when the senate can't even scrape together enough courage to vote in favor of voting on the matter of some pretty simple rules about selling guns.

And way too many Press Poodles keep telling us "the measure failed".  The measure didn't fail; the measure was never voted on.

I'll have to take a day or two off, as I try to get the stench of this latest sorry episode out of my nostrils.

It occurs to me though, that some of these Coin-Operated Politicians pull this kinda shit on purpose.  If enough of us are disgusted enough by the way these assholes behave, then maybe enough of us will just throw up our hands and walk away - leaving them to do their shitty little deals without being seen by the people they're supposed to represent.  If I stay too close to this junk, I start feeling like I should be throwing furniture at people's heads.

I'll be back - and I'll be watching.

How We React

...to the event is what's important now.

From Bruce Schneier at The Atlantic:

As the details about the bombings in Boston unfold, it'd be easy to be scared. It'd be easy to feel powerless and demand that our elected leaders do something -- anything -- to keep us safe.

It'd be easy, but it'd be wrong. We need to be angry and empathize with the victims without being scared. Our fears would play right into the perpetrators' hands -- and magnify the power of their victory for whichever goals whatever group behind this, still to be uncovered, has. We don't have to be scared, and we're not powerless. We actually have all the power here, and there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.

It's hard to do, because terrorism is designed precisely to scare people -- far out of proportion to its actual danger. A huge amount of research on fear and the brain teaches us that we exaggerate threats that are rare, spectacular, immediate, random -- in this case involving an innocent child -- senseless, horrific and graphic. Terrorism pushes all of our fear buttons, really hard, and we overreact.

Note to the terrorists/nutballs/wingnuts/whatever:

You're not going to make me close myself off from the world.  I won't be cowering in a Safe Room behind doors and windows sealed up with plastic sheets and duct tape.

I sure as hell don't get everything right every time, but I claim the right to keep trying; to go on stumbling forward; and you're not going get me to strangle myself in a security blanket just because you don't have enough hair on your sack to look me in the eye and call me out on the shit you don't agree with.

I live my life, and I do my little FreedomThing out in the open where everybody can see it.  You don't like it?  Well here I am, asshole.  Come and get me.

And oh yeah - almost forgot - there's 300 million of me, so fuck you.

The Kooch Fails Again

Virginia AG / Repub candidate for Gov, Ken (Kenny The Kooch) Cuccinelli has crashed and burned once again - this time in his attempt to get the Federal Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to consider his petition to affirm and reinstate Virginia's Crimes Against Nature laws.

The Fourth Circuit panel rejected Cuccinelli's petition unanimously.

Considering the fact that the SCOTUS decision in Lawrence vs Texas knocked all the stuffing out of every "anti-sodomy" law in every state, nobody but the uber-est of the uber-zealots thought he had any chance at all.  But there he was - our intrepid Culture Warrior King - flailing away; fighting to hold back the tides of change of the mid-20th-fucking-century.

Taxpayers put a fair bit of money in your pocket every month, Ken.  So we're gonna need you to do a little something more than runnin' in circles or just standin' there leanin' on your shovel.

One Way to Look At It

Yeah - OK.  So maybe this is just too over the top.

Maybe the system's not really rigged in favor of a few very high-level-mover-shaker-hyper-motivated entrepreneurs with lucrative book deals extolling their highly effective habits who just happen to be so well-connected that they get special deals and federal protection, plus they get to name practically anything they want after themselves.

And maybe you really aren't a low-life loser who can't quite figure out how to get out of his own way; somebody who'd be a lot better off if he just went to church like he's supposed to; somebody who needs to learn his lesson about how to act like a proper citizen of the empire...

...but y'know what?  I could sell it that way - I'm pretty fucking good at sellin' shit.

What're you buyin'?

Today's Pix

Music

From her "break out" album - back when she wasn't hung up writing semi-crappy tunes for the suits to put in their mostly-crappy movies.

Today's Music

Soundtrack for a Tuesday.  This has a kind of 70s vibe to it in some ways, but the poetry and the jazz tinges are right tasty.

Today's Plucky American

Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice has about the best angle I've seen regarding the bombing at the Boston Marathon yesterday, talking about the old guy (Bill Iffrig) in the video who got knocked down by the first blast; was helped up; and then not only did he finish his race, but he walked the half mile back to his hotel:

I kid you not: Every local Boston channel showed at least one interview with Mr. Iffrig, pleading for a 'how bad was it? how traumatized are you? do you think you can ever recover from the horror of that life-changing moment?' sound bite, and he just would not take the bait. He got knocked down, scraped his knee, it was pretty scary. Then he got up, and a nice young volunteer made sure he could cross the finish line. Of course he finished the [unspoken expletive] race, he’d just run 26 miles and there was no point in quitting within yards of the goal. When one interviewer pushed him, he added that he’d run last year’s Marathon in the record-breaking heat, “and that was pretty bad, but today I was having a good run, right up until that bit at the end.”

We prob'ly won't know what the deal is on this bombing for a while.  If it follows the pattern, and it turns out to be something from the standard playbook of some asshole terrorist, then we need to focus on guys like Mr Iffrig, and not on some show-horse-congress-critter like Peter King; and definitely not on any of the Press Poodles who seem to believe this is their Great-American-Tragedy moment - their chance to show America what a superb Walter Cronkite impression they can do.

Here's the thing:  Americans are as far from perfect as anybody gets.  And some of us seem hellbent on doing all the things really bad guys do - things that make other really bad guys believe they have perfect justification to respond by killing and maiming hundreds of innocent people who're just trying to get by, same as them and everybody else.

The point is kinda what Patton Oswalt posted on facebook:

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

The bad guys among us are not us, and they don't represent us.

hat tip = Addicting Info

Way Off In The Weeds On This One

I guess this is kinda like needing to know what you know before you can know what you don't know - which is how you know that you don't really know much of anything at all.

So the more you learn, the less you know how much or how little you actually know, depending on what you know.



My head hurts.  This shit's worse than math.

hat tip = d r i f t g l a s s

Another One Bites The Dust

Maggie Thatcher died last week in England, and now Bob (Swift Boat Butthead) Perry is dead in Texas.

It would seem god's on a bit of a roll.  And while I really do try not to celebrate anybody's death, well, it could get pretty interesting watching 'em drop like this.  It's not gonna hurt my feelings much anyway.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Republican mega-donor Bob Perry never cared for the spotlight. But writing big checks and financing one of the most famous television ads ever in a presidential campaign made the Texas millionaire famous nonetheless. 

The Big Bamboozle

Devoted to separating rubes from their money.



I won't say there's absolutely nothing "on the left" designed to make money off of a daily dose of "Oh my god - those bastard Republicans are at it again" (I get those emails every day, plus like Maher says, there's Whole Foods), but there's seriously nothing that compares with the straight up scam being played by "conservatives" of all stripes on so many otherwise good-hearted and well-meaning people.