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Month: December 2012

People do kill people. But people with guns kill a lot more people. by @DavidOAtkins

People do kill people. But people with guns kill a lot more people.

by David Atkins

There are a lot of ways to slice and dice the statistics on guns and violence in society, but most approaches leave themselves open to critiques about the way other statistical variables such as poverty, media and other factors are controlled.

But one study in particular back in 1992 seems to have made an open and shut case of it, looking at almost exactly similar populations in proximate Vancouver and Seattle, with the only significant difference between them being gun ownership.

The results could not have been more clear:

Those studies were discussed, together with others, in the current issue of The American Prospect, a liberal political journal, by Carl T. Bogus, a professor of law at Rutgers in New Jersey. He led with the Seattle-Vancouver comparison, pointing out that the two cities, one in the United States, one in Canada, had about the same population, the same household income, the same unemployment, the same crime rate, and whose citizens even watched the same television shows during the six years of the study.

“Burglary rates in Seattle and Vancouver were nearly identical,“ wrote Bogus.“There were almost identical rates of assaults with knives, clubs and fists, but there was a far greater rate of assault with firearms in Seattle. During the seven years of the study, there were 204 homicides in Vancouver and 388 in Seattle.“

The reason for that difference — and the fact that the adolescent suicide rate in Seattle is 10 times higher — is the availability of guns. It is simply easier for people to kill others or themselves with the power of a gun in their hands. There were then guns in 41 percent of Seattle homes, but in only 12 percent of Vancouver homes.

When people get angry enough or depressed enough to want to kill someone or kill themselves, they grab the heaviest weaponry around. If that weapon is a knife or a club, there will probably be blood, broken bones and bruises. If a gun is handy, it is more likely there will be a corpse.

The difference, then, is gun control. A Canadian needs a certificate from the police to buy a gun and must go through an investigation process, during which the citizen must demonstrate need and reason for gun ownership — and self- defense is not an acceptable reason. The penalty for illegal possession of a handgun is two years in prison. In Seattle, you do not need a reason, but there is a five-day waiting period for gun purchases.

Quod erat demonstrandum, as they used to say. But then, facts and scientific evidence never did much bother the American Right. This fight is being waged by the gun nuts on a prejudicial, emotional basis that has no grounding in reality.

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h/t Debra Cooper for pointing out the article

Bipartisan Ostriches: 60 years of consensus on the national security state

Bipartisan Ostriches: 60 years of consensus on the national security state 

by digby

Greenwald is justifiably disgusted at yesterday’s spectacle of Diane Feinstein once again playing handmaiden to the National Security State and stepping up as the chief endorser of extending the wiretapping of American citizens. He’s even more disgusted at this latest evidence of Democratic hypocrisy on the issue, since virtually nobody even raised a peep about extending it despite the great outcry on the left when it was first proposed.

Kevin Drum says it’s because it’s become institutionalized rather than because people are consciously hypocritical. I think there’s a little bit of both. But I also think it’s because none of the horrible things we predicted happening has come to pass. Or rather, none of it has been revealed yet. So people who were legitimately afraid the government was going to spy on them (particularly for political reasons) are complaisant.

One could hope that a whistle blower will come forward or that the press will wake up and do some serious investigating to find out what’s been happening in this secret program. But I’m sorry to say that probably won’t make a difference. After all, we’ve been here before. Here’s a Greatest Hit from a few years back talking about this very subject.

Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Going Back To Church

by digby

In dday’s post below he discusses this chatter about a challenge to the retroactive immunity in the wiretapping cases, he quotes McJoan over at DKos saying this:

That should not, however, preclude Congress from finally conducting its own investigation in the form of a reconstituted Church Commission and the Obama administration from cooperating fully with that investigation. There really isn’t a way for Congress to recover everything it lost in its myriad capitulations to a lawless administration. But a bright light shined on the whole affair might just keep it from happening yet again.

Sadly, if history is any indication, that is highly unlikely to happen. Over the holidays, at the behest of Rick Perlstein, I read a book called Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBIby Kathryn S. Olmsted. I had written something similar to what McJoan says above and he thought I should look more closely into the results of the Church (and Pike) committees and what lessons the congress and the media have likely drawn from them.

It’s always interesting to have one’s own recollections challenged by historians. And this was, to say the least, mindblowing:

When Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974, the United States concluded one of the most traumatic chapters in its history. During the Watergate scandal, Americans had been shocked by the crimes of the Nixon presidency. Investigations by the press and Congress had exposed previously unimaginable levels of corruption and conspiracy in the executive branch. The public’s faith in government had been shaken; indeed, the entire “system” had been tested. Now, with Nixon’s resignation, two years of agonizing revelations finally seemed to be over. The system had worked.

Yet only four months later, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh disclosed that the government’s crimes went beyond Watergate. After months of persistent digging, Hersh had unearthed a new case of the imperial presidency’s abuse of secrecy and power: a “massive” domestic spying program by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). According to Hersh, the CIA had violated its charter and broken the law by launching a spying program of Orwellian dimensions against American dissidents during the Vietnam War. The Times called it “son of Watergate.”

These revelations produced a dramatic response from the newly energized post-Watergate Congress and press. Both houses of Congress mounted extensive, year-long investigations of the intelligence community. These highly publicized inquiries, headed by experienced investigators Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike, produced shocking accusations of murder plots and poison caches, of FBI corruption and CIA incompetence. In addition to the congressional inquiries, the press, seemingly at the height of its power after Watergate, launched investigations of its own. The New York Times continued to crusade against CIA abuses; the Washington Post exposed abuses and illegalities committed by the FBI; and CBS’s Daniel Schorr shocked the nation by revealing that there might be “literal” skeletons in the CIA closet as a result of its assassination plots.

In this charged atmosphere, editorial writers, columnists, political scientists, historians, and even former officials of the CIA weighed in with various suggestions for reforming an agency that many agreed had become a ”monster.” Several policymakers, including presidential candidates Fred Harris and Morris Udall, called for massive restructuring or abolition of the CIA. Media and political pundits suggested banning CIA covert operations; transferring most CIA functions to the Pentagon or the State Department; or, at the very least, devising a new, strict charter for all members of the intelligence community.

Few barriers seemed to stand in the way of such reforms. The liberal, post-Watergate Congress faced an appointed president who did not appear to have the strength to resist this “tidal shift in attitude,” as Senator Church called it. Change seemed so likely in early 1975 that a writer for The Nation declared “the heyday of the National Security State’, to be over, at least temporarily.

But a year and a half later, when the Pike and Church committees finally finished their work, the passion for reform had cooled. The House overwhelmingly rejected the work of the Pike committee and voted to suppress its final report. It even refused to set up a standing intelligence committee. The Senate dealt more favorably with the Church committee, but it too came close to rejecting all of the committee’s recommendations. Only last-minute parliamentary maneuvering enabled Church to salvage one reform, the creation of a new standing committee on intelligence. The proposed charter for the intelligence community, though its various components continued to be hotly debated for several years, never came to pass.

The investigations failed to promote the careers of those who had inspired and led them. Daniel Schorr, the CBS reporter who had advanced the CIA story at several important points and eventually had become part of the story himself, was investigated by Congress, threatened with jail, and fired by CBS for his role in leaking the suppressed Pike report. Seymour Hersh’s exposes were dismissed by his peers as “overwritten, over-played, under-researched and underproven.” Otis Pike, despite the many accomplishments of his committee, found his name linked with congressional sensationalism, leaks, and poor administration. Frank Church’s role in the investigation failed to boost his presidential campaign, forced him to delay his entry into the race, and, he thought, might have cost him the vice presidency.

The targets of the investigation had the last laugh on the investigators. “When all is said and done, what did it achieve?” asked Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA who was at the heart of many of the scandals unearthed by Congress and the media. “Where is the legislation, the great piece of legislation, that was going to come out of the Church committee hearings ? I haven’t seen it.” Hersh, the reporter who prompted the inquiries, was also unimpressed by the investigators’ accomplishments. “They generated a lot of new information, but ultimately they didn’t come up with much,” he said.

This was immediately post-Watergate, probably the most likely time in history for the government and the press to be able to change the way things were done. The new congress, the bumbling appointed president, the country’s weariness with Vietnam and the shocking revelations of Nixonian overreach all argued in favor of the congress being able to step up and make serious changes. And I actually thought they did. But I misremembered. The sturm and drang of the period and my own youthful political leanings led me to believe that the Pike and Church Committees resulted in real reforms. And because it so damaged the careers of so many of those involved who tried, the political lesson is pretty stark.

The book discusses all of this in great depth, including the natural desire of the political and media establishment, through their similar class backgrounds and social hierarchy to find ways to excuse this kind of illegal behavior and avoid adversarial confrontations. The political consensus around the cold war did show some cracks and the establishment took on a slightly different character, but as we’ve seen these last few years, it comes back together quite seamlessly at the first opportunity. It is the fundamental character of the place.

When I see someone like ex-company man Michael Scheuer whimpering as he did today on CNN about the Panetta appointment, I see all the old arguments being pulled off the shelf:

MICHAEL SCHEUER, FMR. CIA OFFICER: I think the impression that will be brought in the intelligence community is that the Obama administration means to punish those people who were defending America through the rendition program or through Guantanamo Bay.

As many of us have ruefully observed, nobody has said anything about punishment. But the intelligence community are old hands at this kind of bureaucratic battle and they know how to rally the political establishment around them, which I think is quite clear by the fact that a highly respected bipartisan fetishist like Panetta can suddenly be seen as a controversial choice simply because the intelligence community insists on running their own show. We’ve seen this movie before.

I wish I believed that this Democratic congress could possibly be more effective than the Pike and Church Committees of yore, but the thought makes me laugh. (The only thing they seem to get exercised about is being dissed by Rod Balgojevich.) And while Seymour Hersh is still out there doing his thing and there have been fine examples of the press revealing illegal government activity these past few years, it has only penetrated the government to the extent that they are willing to disavow torture and eventually close down Guantanamo — or so we think.

And it was press complicity that led us into an illegal and unnecessary war in Iraq (and ironically Watergate hero Bob Woodward who created such a hagiography around Bush that he was nearly unassailable for nearly four years of violent and unchoate leadership.) Nobody wants to delve too deeply or “look in the rearview mirror” or “play the blame game” because their primary duty is always to protect each other. 

And they are all guilty to one degree or another.

How’d that work out? Turns out Panetta was quite the good company man who reassured the spooks that they wouldn’t rock the boat. And they didn’t. In fact they went out of their way to keep the national security state running smoothly.

This is the story of the American Empire since World War II.   And I’m sorry to point out that those few moments after 9/11 when the American left became alarmed about civil liberties was the exception rather than the rule. It’s (mostly) been a bipartisan consensus to not worry our pretty little heads about such things for more than 60 years. I wish I had an answer as to how to change it.


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QOTD: Ezra Klein

QOTD

by digby

Ezra Klein:

…[A]t the elite level — which encompasses everyone from CEOs to media professionals — there’s a desire to keep up good relations on both sides of the aisle. And so it’s safer, when things are going wrong, to offer an anodyne criticism that offends nobody — “both sides should come together!” — then to actually blame one side or the other. It’s a way to be angry about Washington’s failure without alienating anyone powerful. That goes doubly for commercial actors, like Starbucks, that need to sell coffee to both Republicans and Democrats.

That breaks the system. It hurts the basic mechanism of accountability, which is the public’s ability to apportion blame. If one side’s intransigence will lead to both sides getting blamed, then it makes perfect sense to be intransigent: You’ll get all the benefits and only half the blame.

The two parties are not equivalent right now. The two sides are not the same. If you want Washington to come together, you need to make it painful for those who are breaking it apart. Telling both sides to come together when it’s predominantly one side breaking the negotiations apart actually makes it easier on those who’re refusing to compromise.

From his lips to the Villagers’ ears.

Unfortunately, their prescription for this problem is for the Democrats to be “grown-ups” which means, in practice, enacting the worst parts of the Republican agenda “for the good of the country.” And too many Democrats are inclined to throw up their hands and say “fine” — then bask in the glow of the approbation of the DC elites who are just so very glad the squabbling over measly cat food prices is finally over and we can go back to talking about sex.

Welcome news from our newest senator, by @DavidOAtkins

Welcome news from our newest senator

by David Atkins

There are more than a few in the progressive community who are upset that Coleen Hanabusa was overlooked by Hawaii Governor Neil Abercrombie in favor of Brian Schatz. But this sort of language on climate change coming from America’s newest Senator is a breath of fresh air:

The replacement for the late Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye (D) said Wednesday that climate change is at the top of his legislative agenda.

“For me, personally, I believe global climate change is real and it is the most urgent challenge of our generation,” Lt. Gov. Brian Schatz (D), whom Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) tapped for the seat, said in brief comments Wednesday.

People who live on islands tend to understand the existential threat of climate change at a more deeply personal level than most. But in the end it won’t just be them. Most of the planet will become practically uninhabitable if we don’t do something extremely soon.

Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: the wimmins

*This post will remain at the top of the page today. Please scroll down for newer material.

Holiday Fundraiser Greatest Hits: the wimmins

by digby

Once again, thanks very much for your support this year. It’s a thrilling affirmation of the work we do and I’m very grateful.


My advocacy for a woman’s right to abortion predates this blog by decades. But blogging certainly gave me a platform that I hadn’t had before and I have never shied away from using it, even when it wasn’t commonly assumed that I was a woman. It’s a fundamental struggle for half the population and I’ve very much appreciated the attention and support of my readers over these last 10 years of writing about it.

In this last election rape unexpectedly became a campaign issue.  Oddly enough the concept of “legitimate rape” was something I’d written about some years ago when South Dakota tried to pass a ban on abortion without an exception for rape or incest (pending reversal of Roe vs Wade, of course.)  This was, at the time, an unusual position. It’s much more mainstream in the pro-life community today.  It remains the most linked post I’ve ever written:

The Sodomized Virgin Exception 

by digby 

South Dakota:

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.  

BILL NAPOLI: A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.


Do you suppose all these elements have to be present for it to be sufficiently psychologically damaging for her to be forced to bear her rapists child, or just some of them? I wonder if it would be ok if the woman wasn’t religious but she was a virgin who had been brutally, savagely raped and “sodomized as bad as you can make it?” Or if she were a virgin and religious but the brutal savage sodomy wasn’t “as bad” as it could have been?  

Certainly, we know that if she wasn’t a virgin, she was asking for it, so she should be punished with forced childbirth. No lazy “convenient” abortion for her, the little whore. It goes without saying that the victim who was saving it for her marriage is a good girl who didn’t ask to be brutally raped and sodomized like the sluts who didn’t hold out. But even that wouldn’t be quite enough by itself. The woman must be sufficiently destroyed psychologically by the savage brutality that the forced childbirth would drive her to suicide (the presumed scenario in which this pregnancy could conceivably “threaten her life.”)  

Someone should ask this man about this. He seems to have given it a good deal of thought. I suspect many hours have been spent luridly contemplating the brutal, savage rape and sodomy (as bad as it can be) of a religious virgin and how terrible it would be for her. It seems quite vivid in his mind. 

This one is from the last campaign, 6 years later, after a group of candidates for national office made it obvious that Bill Napoli is just another mainstream Republican.

Thursday, October 11, 2012

The question of abortion is “simpler” than they think

by digby

Here’s another interesting highlight from an interview for the Frontline Choice 2012 program. This one is with Lawrence Tribe, who has known Obama very well since his earliest days at Harvard Law:

Q: Let’s go backward just for a second, but I think it informs everything that we’ve said now. When you were working on the abortion — was it a book?

It was a book called Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes.

Q: He emerges as centrist, trying to figure it out in a way — I don’t need to put words to it. You can.

It was a book that I cared a great deal about. I believe and believed then — still believe — that women need to be able to control their lives and their bodies if they are to be fully equal citizens. On the other hand, I have enormous sympathy for those who think of the helpless unborn as an entity with rights of its own and who find abortion a tragic choice.

And Barack Obama and I, I think, were on the same wavelength in recognizing that there is this important clash of values. It’s not simple. And indeed the reasons that people come out one way or the other on this impossible clash of absolutes, those reasons have to do with their comfort or discomfort with modernity, with what is happening to society, with the role of women, but with also the marginalized role of cultural minorities who have views that others mock and don’t take seriously.

So it was a struggle, and it was a wonderful project to work with him on, because he saw all sides. He was interested in not necessarily finding a point in the middle of the spectrum, but in finding a line that was sort of perpendicular to the normal access of disagreement, ways of coming to terms. We wouldn’t necessarily agree, one side and the other, and we wouldn’t each of us individually see ourselves necessarily as on one side or the other of that clash.

But we could find ways of making abortion less necessary, making less people feel desperate enough to feel that they had to end a pregnancy, making contraception more available, making education more widely available, making adoption a more realistic option. And working with him on that clash and on how to resolve it, not find a midpoint but ways of getting beyond it, was a way of seeing a very interesting and all-encompassing mind at work. …

Notice the assumptions in all that — that abortions are only “necessary” if women feel desperate or are uneducated or simply can’t find a good way to put their children up for adoption. As if the millions and millions of American women who have abortions year after year just need some “services” that will make it so they will be happy to go through pregnancy and childbirth regardless of the circumstances in their own lives at the time or the emotional difficulty of then giving up their own offspring for someone else to raise. (Do these people think that’s easy to do if only you have the right phone numbers?)

I know this is Tribe talking and not Obama and I’m not attributing those thoughts to him because of that. But I assume that Tribe does have some insight into the way the President reasons and this doesn’t sound all that different from the post-partisan POV he came into office with (combined with the typical technocrat’s faith in problem solving by the numbers.) The fallacy, of course, is that these answers would ever fully satisfy the anti-abortion people unless one also agreed to ban the practice. Did they not understand this?

This issue will never be “solved” at least not that way. There will always be unintended pregnancies. That is a function of being human. And there will always be abortion. There always has been. Some people do not agree that women should have the right to do that and they will agitate to outlaw it. But it will not prevent it. Because women do own their own bodies and direct their own lives and some of them will go to extreme lengths to maintain that autonomy, even if it means putting their health and lives in danger. We have centuries of data supporting this.

So when a couple of elite males decide that they will find some sweet spot that will make these women happy as well as those who don’t think these women should have the right to make that choice, it’s an infuriating denial of women’s basic human agency. It is simple. Women are going to have abortions, full stop. The only question is whether or not they are going to be forced to go through hell and possibly die to get them — and whether society is going to admit that it cannot and should not make that decision for them. Once you accept that reality, the rest is just talk. If religious leaders want to counsel their adherents not to do it, fine. If politicians want to lecture the public that it’s wrong, fine. If they want to create programs to help women get access to birth control and afford to raise kids if they want them and all the rest, terrific. If you care about your fellow humans, you should want all of that. But the right to abortion is a fundamental human right and the necessity of it being safe, legal and available is a requirement for a decent society.

The common behavior of everyday women from all walks of life proves that this is a simple question:

This one doesn’t seem to be going away. One can hope that they reached peaked wingnut in 2012.  But then I’ve thought that before.


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Negotiatin’ Democrat style

Negotiatin’ Democrat style

by digby

This man was a very, very powerful American politician widely admired for his bipartisan bonafides:

“My own belief,” Conrad said, “is what we ought to do is take Speaker Boehner’s last offer, the president’s last offer, split the difference, and that would be a package of about $2.6 trillion.”

Chris Wallace, to his credit, pressed Conrad for details. And Conrad provided them. “The spending cuts would be $1.45 trillion. The revenue would be $1.15 trillion. So, you see there, that’s a combination of $2.6 trillion.”

This in an amazing offer for a Democrat to make. House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) has already accepted that “a balanced deal,” by his definition, would include a ratio of 1:1 spending cuts to tax increases. Indeed, his second offer included $1 trillion in tax increases in return for $1 trillion in spending cuts ($1.3 trillion if you count interest). By averaging Boehner’s second offer with Obama’s third offer — that is to say, by starting from a baseline that includes more rounds of Democratic concessions than Republican concessions — Conrad is proposing a more lopsided deal than Boehner is currently asking for.

Boehner obviously isn’t getting the job done properly so the Democratic Chairman of the Budget committee and Finance subcommittee on Taxation, IRS Oversight, and Long-Term Growth stepped up to show him how it’s done. Selling out average Americans, that is. He’s a champion.

(Ezra also explains why the Democrats are so terrified of going over the cliff. Don’t read it on an empty stomach.)

“Arguably the most popular history author in America”

“Arguably the most popular history author in America”

by digby

That is how the New York Times described …. Bill O’Reilly:

“Abe would have liked this book,” the Fox News television host Bill O’Reilly said confidently of his blockbuster best-seller “Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever.” Even the ending?

Mr. O’Reilly reasoned that Lincoln would have liked this fast-paced, thrillerlike retelling of his death “because it is simple and he was a really simple guy, straightforward guy. He didn’t like a lot of subterfuge or a lot of nonsense.”

“I don’t know if Kennedy would have liked the book,” he added with a tad of reflection about “Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot,” his other history book written with Martin Dugard that is currently dominating the nonfiction best-seller lists, “because it really lays him out as far as what he did, and some of it wasn’t very nice. But in the end he comes off as fairly heroic.”

No one could accuse Mr. O’Reilly, 63, of playing down his own appeal — and perhaps justifiably so. He anchors the highest-rated news program on cable, his political and personal writings like “A Bold, Fresh Piece of Humanity” (2008) and “Pinheads and Patriots” (2010) have been huge sellers, and now, in his latest franchise, he has become arguably the most popular history author in America.

Well, he does have a knack for fiction anyway. Here’s a little bonus Greatest Hit:

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Inner Lives  

by digby 


Riffle found some rather surprising similarities between O’Reilly’s alleged phone porn and a hot and steamy shower scene in his hot and steamy novel: 

Here are some snippets of O’Reilly’s [alleged] phone sex technique from the (real) lawsuit

O’Reilly: Well, if I took you down there I’d want to take a shower with you right away, that would be the first thing Id do… yeah, we’d check into the room, and we would order some room service and uh

You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I’d join you and you would have your back to me and I would take that little loofa thing and kinda’ soap up your back.. rub it all over you, get you to relax, hot water [….] 

get your nipples really hard … ‘cuz I like that and you have really spectacular boobs….

So anyway I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind ….

And here’s a bit from O’Reilly’s novel, Those Who Trespass:

The spray felt great against her skin as she ducked her head underneath the nozzle. Closing her eyes she concentrated on the tingling sensation of water flowing against her body. Suddenly another sensation entered, Ashley felt two large hands wrap themselves around her breasts and hot breathe on the back of her neck. She opened her eyes wide and giggled, “I thought you drowned out there snorkel man.”

Tommy O’Malley was naked and at attention. “Drowning is not an option”, he said, “unless of course you beg me to perform unnatural acts – right here in this shower.”



Who knew that Big Bill was so obsessed with erotic fantasy? (And, furthermore, who ever wanted to?) 

Presumably his Lincoln “history” isn’t quite as spicy.  But you know he thought about it.

Now I must go an cleanse my brain. Cheers.

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Political gun talk

Political gun talk

by digby

One of the underdiscussed topics in the gun debate is the effect that people who carry guns in public have on the ability of people to express themselves freely.  I know that I have been very reluctant to engage in political debate over the years with people I’ve known who indulge themselves in open carry or who are known to have guns at the ready.  (The idea of allowing them in bars where altercations happen frequently under the influence of alcohol absolutely amazes me.)

Surely you all will recall this picture from a Tea Party rally in 2010,  right?

And these aggressive sentiments:

How about that gun rally at which Senator elect Rand Paul proudly spoke? The leader of the local militia had this to say that day:

We are the original homeland security, not the paid agents that today masquerade as such in ninja outfits, dressed in black to intimidate the people with their faces covered to keep them from being held accountable for their actions. I have even been shown proof that they consider the founding fathers like George Washington, Sam Adams and Thomas Jefferson to be the terrorists of old. 

Unless you are a member of the active military, it is your historical, constitutional and moral duty to participate in a citizen’s militia. And I’ll say this, shame on those who are either too busy or too scared or too apathetic to step up. The British aren’t coming. It is the Soviet socialists that have occupied our Capitol. It might as well be Moscow on the Potomac. 

The question is: do we have the courage and the spirit of our forefathers? Our people do. Today we want to tell the Marxist control freaks out there, don’t dare cross that bridge. But we know they will. We the militia, and hopefully with your support, stand ready with no apologies, cause what we have forced upon us is not from a legitimate government, or the American values of self reliance and independence. If you want to be a European, move. 

The Declaration of Independence says that when a government is no longer beneficial or responsive to the people, it is our right and duty to change it. Now some citizens are holding out hope that the upcoming elections will better things, and you know we’ll wait and see. Lots of us believe that maybe that’s not reliable, considering the fact that the progressive socialists have been chipping away at our foundations. Regardless, the founders made sure we had plan B (holds up his gun). You know what that is. 

The treasonous left wing socialist politicians, and their lapdogs in the press, have gotten a wedgie here recently in their underpants over the tea parties. And a little broken glass (wink, wink). I sure hope they’re out there today. If they read history, they should know and fear what came after those events over 200 years ago. This latest forced health care bill, which is really about people control, the same thing as gun control, is the modern day equivalent of the 1765 standback, its only more disastrous to our freedom living way of life, etc… 

History it seems is ready to repeat itself. After a long and costly civil war that is eminent, and sure to be forced upon us, we are taking note of those who are responsible for the treason, and they will be held accountable. I advise the press to start getting it right from this moment on, and stop aiding and abetting un-American activities. Like the Tories of old, the worst shall be hung, most will be exiled, and I’m a contractor so I have a little bit of tar and feathers for those who are only partially guilty. 

In closing, let me implore you to keep the torch of freedom burning bright, god bless the republic, death to the New World Order. We shall prevail.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds an awful lot like a threat. But even that’s ok as long as it’s just a bunch of macho gasbags exercising their right to free speech. But what about when they back up their free speech with this?

That’s what they were wearing at that rally.Would you feel comfortable exercising your first amendment right to disagree around people who are carrying guns like that in public? Is that liberty?

Anyway, what made me think of that is the story of Dick Armey travelling with a gun toting aide to confront the Freedomworks people. I got lots of email from readers pointing out that this would be illegal in Washington DC, (which is richly ironic since the right wing is flipping out over David Gregory appearing to break the law by showing banned ammunition in a DC TV studio.)

Armey has now given his version of the story: 

Armey tells Mother Jones that this episode has been hyped up by his FreedomWorks foes, and he says the not-so-mysterious gun-touting assistant was a former Capitol Hill police officer named Beau Singleton, who used to be part of Armey’s congressional security detail and who has volunteered his security services to Armey and FreedomWorks for years. “He was well-known to the people at FreedomWorks,” Armey says. “He has provided me personal security on many occasions when I was in Washington.” Singleton also oversaw security for FreedomWorks in September 2009 when it organized a large rally in Washington. Singleton, Armey says, is authorized to carry a gun, but he does so in a back holster that cannot be seen by an onlooker. “I was unaware he had a gun [at the meeting],” Armey maintains. “He kept it under his coat in the back….But the news looks like Armey came in there like John Dillinger, all guns a-blazing. That was false.”

Armey says that his wife, Susan, and his assistant, Jean Campbell, were concerned about a FreedomWorks official losing his temper at this meeting and suggested that Singleton join Armey and the two of them on this trip to the group’s office. But he insists there was nothing odd with him showing up at FreedomWorks with Singleton by his side.

Singleton, 56, confirms Armey’s account. He says that he has known Kibbe and Brandon for years and that he had often “been around” at FreedomWorks. He adds that during the meeting between Armey and Kibbe, he “just observed. I was just kind of there….I can’t see why they would act like I was menacing.”

Well, maybe it’s because they obviously knew he carried a gun, which is by its very nature intimidating and, one assumes, the point.  After all, that’s the whole idea behind the “an armed society is a polite society” trope. It’s not self-defense — it is that someone will risk getting shot if they lose their temper in a meeting or otherwise step out of line in the presence of a “responsible gun owner.”  That’s also known as intimidation. He can pretend “who me” all he wants, but they didn’t bring along an armed man by coincidence.

This is a different issue than the horrors of Aurora and Sandy Hook. That’s just a straight up public health issue — too many lethal weapons getting into the hands of people who are willing to use them on innocent people for God only knows why.  But the political dimension of this is different, and it speaks directly to the NRA and its power in Washington despite the fact that their leader is completely daft and the country knows this is out of control. Just as a group of armed men at a political rally can shut down the free flow of  political dialog in a democratic society, a powerful interest group like the NRA is able to control the debate over gun control. And I’m not honestly sure it isn’t related to a common subconscious fear of macho blowhards  armed to the teeth with para-military weapons and threatening a civil war against the government and the “progressive socialists” who are allegedly destroying their way of life. It certainly makes me uneasy.

Update: Josh Marshall has some interesting thoughts on that publishing of gun registration information on the internet. I’m a privacy advocate, so I am against doing this sort of thing. But he brings up some interesting points.


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Who needs the Tea Party when you have John McCain and Dan Coates?

Who needs the Tea Party when you have John McCain and Dan Coates?

by digby

Hageling is the new normal:

To “allege that Hagel is somehow a Republican — that is a hard one to swallow,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said last week, criticizing Hagel’s long-ago reference to a “Jewish lobby” and his record on Iran sanctions.

That’s quite a change from the sentiments McCain and his GOP Senate colleagues expressed about Hagel the last time his name was mentioned for high office, when he resigned from the Senate in 2008. At that time, presidential candidate McCain said he and Hagel were “close and dear friends” and that Hagel could have a place in a McCain administration.

“I’d be honored to have Chuck with me in any capacity,” McCain told the New York Times in 2006. “He’d make a great secretary of state.”

Well, he’s always been a “maverick.” Meanwhile:

“[I]deologically [Hagel] has moved from a conservative Republican coming out of Nebraska to someone that looks like they are out of the most leftist state in the country and exceeding even a lot of Democrats, who also have concerns about his ideology and where he is coming from,” Coats said.

But Hagel’s positions on things like unilateral sanctions, the use of force abroad, and the role of America are the same as they were in 2008. He has taken no votes that would indicate a policy shift and he has authored no papers that show a departure from his long held views.

By contrast, his former GOP colleagues have completely changed their tune on Hagel in the four years since he left the Senate. During speeches on the floor to commemorate his retirement in 2008, several senior GOP senators praised Hagel effusively.

The article goes on to quote McConnell, Kyl and Alexander effusively praising their colleague.

I don’t think people truly understand how big a departure this is from what used to be standard procedure. It wasn’t long ago that these votes were pro-forma. It was presumed that elections have consequences and the president got the cabinet he wanted. Then it became a little more dicey and it was presumed that the president would always get any ex-Senator approved. That has changed too, to the point at which a president has to think twice about nominating a Senator of the president’s party who is considered to be “too partisan.” Now they are refusing to approve a president’s choice even if he is a Senator and member of their own party.
At this point I’m not sure they’d approve Dick Cheney.

Every time I watch Fox news they bring up the pulled nomination of John Bolton for Undersecretary of State as an example of recent similar Democratic behavior. (And there is also the myth of Teddy Kennedy “starting it” with Bork, of course.) But Bolton wasn’t a member of the Senate and their own party. This is truly taking it to a new level.

These aren’t Tea Partying weirdos who don’t understand how Washington “works.” These are card carrying members of the elite Republican establishment doing this. And nobody seems to give a damn.

Oh, and by the way, this was probably inevitable too although he will likely be confirmed. Everything’s fair game with these people:

The Senate is expected to take up Kerry’s nomination in early January, but multiple Republican senators have already said they won’t agree to a vote on Kerry’s nomination until Clinton testifies about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.

Their 9/11 Commission …

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Who gives a damn what the ratings agencies say? by @DavidOAtkins

Who gives a damn what the ratings agencies say?

by David Atkins

You might not have heard, but mighty Moody’s has downgraded France’s credit rating from AAA to AA, just as S&P did to the United States. So should France care and start panicking like so many centrist fetishists did in the United States?

Not quite:

Bond-market history indicates that the utility of sovereign ratings may be limited. Almost half the time, yields on government bonds fall when a rating action by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s suggests they should climb, according to data compiled by Bloomberg on 314 upgrades, downgrades and outlook changes going back as far as the 1970s.

After S&P stripped France and the U.S. of AAA grades, interest rates paid by the countries to finance their deficits dropped rather than rose.

No kidding. Realize what this means: it’s not just that the ratings agencies spectacularly failed to accurately predict the risk involved in collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps in the lead-up to the Great Economic Catastrophe of 2008.

It also means that the ratings agencies have almost the same record as flipping a coin when it comes to determining if a country’s interest rates will rise or fall, even though ratings agency grades are a lagging indicator of conventional wisdom, and even though many ratings downgrades of countries actually in significant trouble such as Greece or Zimbabwe should easily pad the agencies’ stats in the predictions department.

And finally, it means that the ratings agencies have this incredibly mediocre record in spite of the fact that pronouncements from the ratings agencies themselves should theoretically be self-fulfilling prophecies, in that investors should theoretically be following the lead of the ratings agencies in fleeing from downgraded countries’ debt, if the agencies’ proclamations have any value whatsoever.

So what value, then, are the ratings agencies except as tools of the plutocratic elite to publicly embarrass and punish nations that care too much for their people instead of demonstrating the “flexibility” and “lack of rigidity” demanded by the contemptible few who want labor as cheap and fungible as possible?

None. Which consequently means that no moral nation should pay the ratings agencies the slightest heed.

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