Today's Today

Every year, I Google "9/11 sale", thinking somebody's gotta have the balls to try it.

I honestly expect some enterprising soul will eventually kick it off and we will begin the next phase in this agonizing process of getting the fuck past it already.

Nothing to report again this year - but hope springs eternal.

Today's Best Wordsmithing

Teabagistan - from Addicting Info:
(on the continuing cry-baby bullshit of certain parts of the country where the Baggers are pushing for "secession")

So the political movement that has wrapped itself in the American flag so tightly that it’s cut the blood flow off to their brains wants to take their toys and run away because they’re not winning the game anymore. It’s important to note that these are the people that are the “real” Americans in their own mind. They love love LOVE America, democracy and mom’s apple pie. But only as long as most of the pie is theirs and they get to make the rules. Once they have to share and everyone else gets a vote, suddenly, democracy is not fair, not right and they want their country back!

--and--

The problem with this plan of making little ruby red states is that it would only delay the inevitable and, actually, be an ENORMOUS drain on the rest of the country. Red states are, by and large, total failures. The decades of sabotaging education and the social safety net while allowing corporations free reign to poison and exploit the population have left far too many of them in dire straights. True to the hypocrisy of the right, even as they scream about helping others with “handouts” they scream even louder if their own handouts are threatened. Even if we allowed them to form, in a generation or two, these right wing utopias would be the equivalent of third world countries. The rich would live lavish lifestyles and everyone else would be dirt poor.

Connect the Secession dot with the Impeachment dot with the Voter Suppression dot, and you get a pretty clear picture of some people who just can't come to terms with the simple fact that they're in a shrinking minority and that their agenda is being rejected by a big (and growing) number of Americans who're getting hip to how shitty these "conservative" policies are.

Because He's Not There

Today's Eternal Sadness

Firing a gun in Yellowstone is against the law, so why was a loaded gun available in the first place?  Isn't this kind of the whole point in reverse?  Guns are outlawed in Yellowstone, so an outlaw had a gun; and now that outlaw's 3-year-old daughter is dead.

(Reuters) - A child died of a gunshot wound on Saturday at a popular campground in Yellowstone National Park, according to park officials, who said the girl's mother reported that her young daughter had shot herself with a handgun.

Emergency responders were unable to resuscitate the girl after her mother called emergency dispatchers from a campsite near Yellowstone Lake, park spokesman Al Nash said in a statement.

The names of the mother and girl in the incident, which is under investigation, were not released pending notification of extended family members, Nash said. The child's age was also not released.

**A U.S. law that took effect in 2010 allowed people to carry guns into national parks as long as federal, state and local firearms laws were met, according to the National Park Service.

Although hunting is permitted at a handful of national parks, including Grand Teton in Wyoming, hunting or even firing a gun is unlawful in Yellowstone, according to park literature.

The forested campsite where the shooting occurred sits near a developed area in the Wyoming section of the park known as Grant Village, which features a ranger station, lodge, stores and other amenities.

Yellowstone, which was the first area designated a U.S. national park and is among the country's most popular outdoor destinations, spans 2.2 million acres of pine forests, river valleys, mountain lakes and geysers in parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, and attracts about 3 million visitors a year.

(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho; Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Peter Cooney)

Am I being insensitive?  Should I try to put it a different way?  Go blow yourself - that little girl is dead because law-abiding citizens placed their need to compensate for whatever vulnerability issues they struggle with ahead of common sense and the wellbeing of their family.  Or maybe the parents honestly believed carrying a gun was the best bet to ensure their safety.  I suppose some will call it ironic, but it isn't - it's just fuckin' stoopid.

**In 2009, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) added an amendment to the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act that allowed concealed weapons to be carried in national parks. President Barack Obama signed the Credit CARD Act into law in 2010.

Today's Pix

20/20 Hindsight

Wes Clark's been trying for a while to get us to step up and understand what's happening.  Not that he knows everything, but he's a smart cookie and he's been around the block more than once, and he seems at least to have maintained his sense of the need for those checks and balances to prevent too much power from being concentrated in too few hands.

What really strikes me is that even when "the Neo-Cons" - guys like Cheney and Rumsfeld - aren't "in power", they still somehow have the stroke to get us to take on these disgustingly imperial (ie: mercantile) projects.

One other thing:  Eventually, we gotta get hip to ourselves and start to understand that if we lose the need for the oil, the Middle East loses its strategic primacy, and we can stop letting the Saudi Royals (eg) use our Oil Jones to make us dance to whatever tune tickles their fancy at any given time.

Today's PFU

Our Culture of Gun Violence costs us a lot in a lot of ways we're generally not even aware of.

7 Big Ones

Today's Toon

They're All The Same

Yeah, but not really.

hat tip = The Richmonder