Following up on David’s post below, I think it’s probably important to also note that while the NRA is hoodwinking its members, it’s also running roughshod over our national discourse. The newest strong arm tactic is to insist that it’s rude and improper to even talk about gun violence in the wake of mass shootings.It’s “politicizing” the tragedy and cruel to the victims to question the fact that lunatics and terrorists are mowing down innocent citizens because of easy access to deadly weapons.
Three days after a gunman calling himself the Joker from the Batman series shot dead 12 people in a suburban Denver movie theater, the National Rifle Association sent out a letter asking for money.
“The future of your Second Amendment rights will be at stake,” the letter said. “And nothing less than the future of our country and our freedom will be at stake.”
The letter was dated July 23. The Aurora Colorado massacre was July 20th.
Basically, we are now at a point at which the NRA has decreed that it’s only acceptable to talk about phantom gun confiscation in the wake of mass murders committed with guns. Can we all se what’s wrong with that picture?
The libertarians all base their fear of government on the fact that it enforces its will at the point of a gun. I’ve got to say that at this point, I’m equally fearful of all the other “men with guns” who are enforcing their will on the culture and the government. I don’t know who’s going to win this shoot-out at the OK Corral of the 21st century, but it’s a sickening comment on our society that innocent people are being killed by dozens in the crossfire.
I hadn’t been following closely this Ohio military voter dust-up assuming that the notion that only citizens who are in the military deserve to have the early, in person voting right that everyone enjoyed in 2008 was so discriminatory that it would never get anywhere. But apparently, military groups believe they should have this right above everyone else and are arguing for it.
This is incomprehensible. Of course those who are deployed overseas should get some dispensation and their absentee ballots should be given a little leeway. It’s been that way for years and nobody questions it. But some guy who is deployed in the motor pool at Wright-Patterson Air Force base (the only base in Ohio besides some coast guard facilities) can get his ass down to the polling place on election day if everyone else has to do it. If he’s on leave visiting his family, he certainly has enough time and if he isn’t going to be there on election day he can fill out an absentee ballot.
The Democrats protested this thing because they believe that early in-person voting is good thing for everyone, which it is, and want the law restored to what it was in 2008. To take it away is undemocratic and wrong, but to give it as a special right to the military is downright offensive in a free country.
This military fetish is reaching absurd levels and it isn’t funny anymore. The military deserves respect and gratitude, but they aren’t super-citizens who don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else just because they wear the uniform. This is some dangerous stuff and I hope a judge will see through this nonsense.
And any sentient being should see through this pile of sophistry:
Joshua Holland at Alternet has a great piece today on how the NRA deceives its membership. First, it’s important to note that most gun owners do not buy into the NRA’s extremism:
As Cliff Schecter noted last month, studies of public opinion find that a majority of gun-owners are in favor of closing the gun-show loophole the NRA championed (85 percent of all gun owners, and 69 percent of NRA members). Eighty-two percent of NRA members believe that people on the federal terror watch list should be barred from buying firearms. Almost seven in 10 NRA members disagree with the organization’s efforts to prevent law enforcement from determining the origins of weapons used in crimes.
Schecter writes that the NRA has “fought all efforts to make reporting lost or stolen guns to the police a requirement,” and in some cases has “actually threatened to sue to overturn these laws.” But 88 percent of gun owners – and 78 percent of NRA members – think that requiring people to report lost or stolen weapons is a pretty good idea.
The uptake from all this is that we can have reasonable, commonsense restrictions on firearms, but we’ll never achieve that until people realize that nobody’s trying to ban all firearms, and that the NRA in no way represents the interests of most gun owners.
So why does the NRA take such extremist positions? For money, of course:
The NRA president’s motives for lying to his members are clear: his fearmongering brings a windfall of fundraising to the organization and expands the market for the arms manufacturers — his true base — that finance much of the lobby’s work. As Alan Berlow wrote in Salon, “The only way to avert this calamity, the NRA’s 4 million members are told in daily email alerts, the organization’s various magazines and regular fundraising appeals, is if they all dig deep into their pockets and send money to the NRA.”
While a lot of gun owners are quite concerned, the arms industry is laughing all the way to the bank. Just after the 2008 election, the New York Times reported that “sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms.” A year later, CNN noted that “Gun shops across the country are reporting a run on ammunition, a phenomenon apparently driven by fear that the Obama administration will increase taxes on bullets or enact new gun-control measures.”
There will come a day when our descendants look back in amazement at a culture that placed the pursuit of reckless profits ahead of all other goods and freedoms. Those who stand up to it will be honored. Those who helped perpetuate it will be the shame of posterity.
You can’t ask for a more rousing endorsement of Barack Obama and his presidency than this:
Former Vice President Dick Cheney criticized President Barack Obama and said it was crucial to help elect Mitt Romney, for whom he held a recent fundraiser at his home in Jackson Hole, Wyo.
“I think he’s been a terrible president,” he said on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” in an interview to air later Monday, adding that he “fundamentally” disagreed with him.
There’s a lot of chit-chat about this post by Barry Eisler in which he discusses an exchange between Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hayes:
[T}he most thought-provoking part of the interview came at the end, when Greenwald asked Hayes about Hayes’s assertion that even the most well-intentioned people will inevitably be corrupted — what Hayes calls “cognitive capture” — by entry into the American elite (aka the One Percent, aka the American Oligarchy). Given that Hayes, who started out writing for The Nation, is now an establishment TV personality and employee of one of the world’s largest media corporations (Hayes hosts his own talk show, Up with Chris Hayes, on MSNBC), Greenwald wanted to know what steps Hayes is taking to prevent his own cognitive capture.
As someone who deals extensively with questions of subornment in fiction (and who once had some training on the subject, courtesy of Uncle Sam), I found the question itself extremely interesting.
It is. He claims that Hayes didn’t have a good answer beyond saying that he would do his best, although later on twitter, Hayes replied to him by saying:
I’ve given this a *lot* of thought. Biggest single element is constant reaffirming willingness to walk away.
Eisler’s entire post is very thought provoking and probably correct, but he gets one thing wrong in the beginning, in my opinion, as relates to Hayes. He writes:
For me, Hayes’s first big test came after he said on his show that he was “uncomfortable” calling American war dead “heroes,” and I wish Greenwald had asked about this specifically, as it was directly relevant to Greenwald’s more general question. There was a predictable Twitter and blogosphere outcry in response to Hayes comments, and Hayes quickly apologized. I thought the apology was unfortunate. Of course my heart goes out to every family that’s ever lost a loved one in combat. But whether it follows from this that every American soldier who dies in combat is automatically a hero is, at a minimum, not a topic that in a democracy should be taboo.
I don’t know the extent to which Hayes’s apology was heartfelt (personally, I find it incomprehensible). But my guess is that he felt he had to make it — perhaps because of pressure from corporate higher-ups; perhaps because he felt that his show wouldn’t be properly heeded if he became a poster boy for rightist attacks.
I don’t have any inside information about that. But I do know, having read Hayes’ book, that the apology was both sincere and comprehensible and I believe he made it out of intellectual integrity, not because of craven professional concerns.
Here is what he wrote:
On Sunday, in discussing the uses of the word “hero” to describe those members of the armed forces who have given their lives, I don’t think I lived up to the standards of rigor, respect and empathy for those affected by the issues we discuss that I’ve set for myself. I am deeply sorry for that.
As many have rightly pointed out, it’s very easy for me, a TV host, to opine about the people who fight our wars, having never dodged a bullet or guarded a post or walked a mile in their boots. Of course, that is true of the overwhelming majority of our nation’s citizens as a whole. One of the points made during Sunday’s show was just how removed most Americans are from the wars we fight, how small a percentage of our population is asked to shoulder the entire burden and how easy it becomes to never read the names of those who are wounded and fight and die, to not ask questions about the direction of our strategy in Afghanistan, and to assuage our own collective guilt about this disconnect with a pro-forma ritual that we observe briefly before returning to our barbecues.
But in seeking to discuss the civilian-military divide and the social distance between those who fight and those who don’t, I ended up reinforcing it, conforming to a stereotype of a removed pundit whose views are not anchored in the very real and very wrenching experience of this long decade of war. And for that I am truly sorry.
This “social distance” concept is a central thesis of his book, and it makes perfect sense that, upon reflection, he would see his comments as a validation of the very thing he condemns so strongly. And that’s exactly what he says in that apology. I don’t know know if NBC wanted him to write one or what kind of pressure they brought to bear. But it was clear to me from the specific wording that Hayes was very carefully addressing that aspect of the flap and no other.
I wrote about this at the time for Mother Jones, and in the post I questioned the concept of social distance in this instance. I think Hayes is generally right about it (my own Villager trope is related to this idea) but I can also see the downside —- what I would call the “tyranny of personal experience” which says that only people who have direct knowledge of something can have an opinion. But regardless of my own murky intellectual evolution on this subject, I do not doubt that Hayes acutely feels the pressure to not be “a Villager”, and that cuts in a bunch of different directions, not the least of which is a need to be sensitive to the fact that he is not, as all the other wealthy TV pundits would have us believe they are, some regular Joe who has a direct pipeline to “Real Americans.”
I don’t doubt that someone in his position wrestles constantly with the temptations that comes with celebrity, money and power. Any human being would. And I have no way of knowing what kinds of compromises, if any, he’s made and will make now that he’s in that position. (Eisler’s piece spells out the possible pitfalls in chilling detail.) But in my view it’s not correct to attribute that apology over the “heroes” comment to one of them. And at the very least, since there is a perfectly reasonable and obvious explanation as to why he would have done it out of personal and intellectual integrity, I think it’s only fair to grant him the benefit of the doubt.
Jello Biafra has some words for the Wisconsin shooter
by digby
So the Wisconsin shooter was allegedly a Neo-Nazi punk band member. I’m sure he’s very talented. I recall back in my younger days that these same wingnuts tried to identify one of the seminal American punk bands who had recorded a song called California Uber Alles as one of them. Being the morons that Neo-Nazis are, they missed the point, of course and Jello Biafra responded with this little ditty:
“I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” — Ralph Reed
I don’t know why nobody’s paying attention to what the far right is doing in this election, but Adele Stan at Alternet is documenting it. She attended Karl Rove’s billionaire financed Americans for Prosperity conference this week-end and filed a report. It’s long and it’s well-worth reading, but this stuck out for me:
At a breakout session titled “Battlefront Wisconsin: What Worked, and How to Repeat It,” Luke Hilgemann, director of Americans For Prosperity’s Wisconsin chapter, showed off the organization’s winning ground strategy, which combined whiz-bang technology with the application of old-fashioned shoe leather, together with some tight messaging that was likely focus-group-tested.
AFP activists were outfitted with iPad-like tablet devices that featured artfully phrased survey questions respondents could answer on the tablet’s touch screen. AFP foot soldiers took these tablets with them to households identified by the kind of micro-targeting strategies used by Web advertisers. (For more detail on these strategies, see our July report, Religious Right’s Ralph Reed Field-Tests Plan to Defeat Obama.) Using the tablet’s GPS feature, activists are directed to particular homes in a given neighborhood, based on the micro-targeted voter database that AFP has assembled.
Hilgemann said that Americans For Prosperity activists knocked on 75,000 doors and made 50,000 calls in the days leading up to the recall election.
As Ralph Reed, a former business partner of Americans For Prosperity President Tim Phillips, explained to activists at his Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in June, the polling that predicted a tight race in the recall election between Walker and Barrett was wrong because the polling models did not account for the uptick in right-wing turnout that vote-wranglers like Phillips and Reed made happen.
Phillips noted with pride that the AFP Wisconsin chapter now has “more grassroots activists than the Wisconsin teachers’ union has members.” And if Wisconsin activists could do all that, so could AFP activists around the country, officials told conference attendees throughout the two-day confab.
For many in attendance, the highlight of the weekend was a Friday night speech delivered by Scott Walker, whose career was shaped by Americans For Prosperity going back to the days when he was the elected executive of Milwaukee County. In his speech, Walker cast himself as a David against a labor-backed Goliath in the days when the state erupted in an uprising in February 2011, after Walker sent a bill to the legislature that effectively ended collective bargaining rights for the state’s public employees.
Nah, nothing to see here…
Again, this is the kind of organizing that could pay off this fall but is far more likely to come to full fruition in the 2016 election. Unlike liberal donors, who either get bored or frustrated when the world doesn’t immediately turn on their dime, the conservatives fund their infrastructure for the long term.
If you ever wanted to see a quintessential Villager in action, look no further than Jonathan Karl, boy reporter, on This Week yesterday:
Well, first of all, it’s one of the most outrageous charges that I’ve ever seen actually made on the Senate floor. Sometimes you see this stuff out, you know, first there was an interview with Huffington Post, that’s one thing, but when Harry Reid comes to the floor of the Senate and makes this outrageous charge that has absolutely no evidence — I mean, Mitt Romney paid $3.1 million to the IRS in the one tax return that we’ve seen so far. He paid taxes. It’s a completely false charge. But Reid loves it. The Democrats love this. Because no matter how much he digs in, no matter how much he gets attacked, you know, here or by Jon Stewart, or anywhere else, it gets the story out there again and again.
Here’s the thing. As Charles Pierce points out in his piece on the subject, nobody is talking about the tax returns we’ve seen. It’s all the tax returns he refuses to show to the American people. So Karl is being disingenuous.
And no, this is not the most outrageous thing ever said on the floor of the Senate. I seem to recall a gentleman by the name of Joe McCarthy saying some pretty outrageous things. Indeed, a Senator was once caned by another one there. However, Karl wasn’t around for any of that and he didn’t personally see them, so I guess they aren’t relevant. However, he was around for the Senate testimony of Representative Bill McCollum, who gave this recitation on the floor before the entire country, which was watching with rapt attention:
If you believe Monica Lewinsky, the President lied to the grand jury and committed perjury in denying he had sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky even if you accept his interpretation of the Jones court’s definition of sexual relations. There isn’t anything clearer in this whole matter. Just look at the President’s grand jury testimony on pages 93-96. (CHART 5) I urge you to read every page of this carefully. Specifically I call your attention to the following questions and answers:
Q So touching, in your view then and now – – the person being deposed touching or kissing the breast of another person would fall within the definition?
A That’s correct, sir. …
Q If the person being deposed touched the genitalia of another person would that be – – and with the intent to arouse the sexual desire, arouse or gratify, as defined in definition in (1) would that be under your understanding then and now – –
A Yes, sir
Q – – sexual relations?
A Yes, sir.
Q Yes, it would?
A Yes, it would. …
A You are free to infer that my testimony is that I did not have sexual relations, as I understood this term to be defined.
Q Including touching her breasts, kissing her breasts, or touching her genitalia?
A That’s correct.
In her sworn testimony Ms. Lewinsky described nine incidents of sexual activity in which the President touched and kissed her breasts and four incidents involving contacts with her genitalia. On these matters Lewinsky’s testimony is corroborated by the sworn testimony of at least six friends and counselors to whom she related these incidents contemporaneously.
In 1998, Mr. Karl was the first reporter to obtain the Starr Report, one of the most sought after political documents in recent years.
Considering the rank partisan gossip they routinely pass off as news, the mere idea that these reporters are claiming that Reid must produce his anonymous source is hilarious.
But this is the Villager in action — putting on bourgeois affectations in order to appear as if they are morally upright Real Americans when, in fact, they live in a decadent world of double dealing and backstabbing and participate in it with relish, just as courtiers have done for millenia. Jonathan Karl clutching his pearls over Reid’s political gambit is akin to the NRA protesting gun violence. Except the NRA would never try to get away with something so absurd.
As to the merits, Joe Conason and Juan Cole have both written about the legal doctrine known as the “missing evidence instruction” which explains better than anything why Jonathan Karl and the rest of the doofuses who are rending their garments over Reid’s ploy are wrong:
There is a legal doctrine that applies to Romney’s current behavior, as Indiana attorney John Sullivan points out – and it doesn’t place the burden of proof on Reid:
At law, if a person in control of evidence refuses to produce the evidence, then the jury is instructed that there is a presumption that the evidence would be against the party failing to produce. It is called the “Missing Evidence” instruction.
The missing evidence is in Romney’s grasp, yet he insists that he will never produce it. Does anyone need instruction from a judge to make the correct inference.
If a party to this case has failed [to offer evidence] [to produce a witness] within his power to produce, you may infer that the [evidence] [testimony of the witness] would be adverse to that party if you believe each of the following elements:
1. The [evidence] [witness] was under the control of the party and could have been produced by the exercise of reasonable diligence.
2. The [evidence] [witness] was not equally available to an adverse party.
3. A reasonably prudent person under the same or similar circumstances would have [offered the evidence] [produced the witness] if he believed [it to be] [the testimony would be] favorable to him.
4. No reasonable excuse for the failure has been shown.” IPI Civil (Supp. 2003) No. 5.01.
No reasonable excuse for the failure has been shown. These are documents that presidential candidates routinely provide and thre’s nothing stopping him from doing it. But for the first time in history, the press and many commentators have decided that it’s indelicate to cite an anonymous source who claims to know why they are not being released.
If only he had mentioned breasts and orgasms (or even dirty twitter pics) perhaps they might have been persuaded that it was newsworthy anyway.
