Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Here’s a fascinating discussion about marriage (and whether women are being selfish little beyotches and ruining everything by refusing to do it) on the best news show on television.

Unconscionable and unacceptable

by David Atkins

They say that guns don’t kill people–people kill people. They say that we don’t need gun control laws because murder is already illegal, after all. If that’s the case, we might as well let people have sarin gas, tanks and bazookas, too, as long as we’re going to let this happen:

Batman massacre suspect Joseph Holmes bought 6,000 rounds of ammunition and a 100-round magazine for an assault rifle used in the shooting on the Internet in recent weeks, the Aurora police chief said Friday night.

A drum-style magazine for an AR-15 assault rifle was recovered at the movie theater, said police Chief Dan Oates at a news conference.

Holmes bought four guns recently from area retailers and 6,000 rounds of ammunition and several magazines that fit the assault rifle on the Internet, Oates said. He said 3,000 rounds were .223-caliber bullets for the AR-15. The chief said he didn’t know where Holmes obtained the full suit of body armor and gas mask he was wearing when arrested.

With the 100-round magazine, “he could have gotten off 50 to 60 rounds — even if it was a semi-automatic — within one minute,” Oates said.

“All the weapons he possessed, he possessed legally,” the chief said. All the ammunition and the clips were legal as well, he said.

Oates said a revised count of victims show 70 injured and 12 dead. A few of those injured were hurt from trauma that didn’t involve gunshots, he said.

I’m no ballistophobe. I own a rifle handed down to me by my grandfather; I have firearms training, took a gun safety class in college, and I’m a fairly decent shot.

But nothing like this should even begin to be allowed to happen. There is zero excuse whatsoever for allowing some random kid to have an AR15, a 100-round magazine and 6,000 rounds. That’s not a self-defense or hunting gun. That’s a murder machine, no different from high-grade explosives or military grade anthrax.

There’s just no excuse for allowing a random civilian to have access to that kind of firepower.

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An antidote

by digby

Humans aren’t all bad:

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“It’s the enabling attitudes of the political left”

by digby

A comment from a right wing blog on the president’s speech today:

“senseless” and “beyond reason,” adding, “We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings…

Nonsense. Of course we know what motivates some of these atrocities, it’s the enabling attitudes of the political left, the stoking of envy, jealousy, and discontent by community organizers that take an angry mob of people into a bank lobby and demand low interest loans be made to people who have no money. Of course many of those loans then go to the very movement leaders who organized the angry mobs in the first place.

It’s the class warfare rhetoric of Obama and his leftist party loyalists who blame the rich for someone’s dire circumstances. It’s the rhetoric of leftists who insist that education is every man’s right and once educated to government standards that individual then has a right to employment at a ‘living wage’. Never mind that a ‘living wage’ is never enough no matter how high the pay scale.

Now we have to sit and listen to these same leftists tell us that government can protect us, that police departments are only minutes away, that if only government agents had the power to disarm everyone, that these atrocities would never happen. Unfortunately, government agents never seem able to actually disarm the criminal, or the terrorists. But what Obama wants us all to believe is that we are defenseless sheep who can not defend ourselves, that our best strategy is to run away and hide.

The truth is, our self defense is our own responsibility. These atrocities would be over in 30 seconds if we were not a nation of cowards who have been trained to let our superiors do our fighting for us. It then becomes a situation where our superior’s use the power of government to destroy their enemies rather than protect us from people who would do us harm.

We need to regain our courage, learn to defend ourselves and stop waiting for government to come to our rescue.

They have all the answers if only we would listen.

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What could go wrong?

by digby

iPhone buzz:

In this news story about it the inventor is quoted as saying that he tried it on himself and “it hurt.”

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Politicizing the tragedy

by David Atkins

This from Digby bears repeating a second time:

We aren’t shocked anymore when children are killed. It’s become a normal part of American life. The taboo has shifted from horror at the shootings to horror at talking about shooting. This is called “politicizing tragedy” as if these mass murders are an act of nature rather than an act of human evil or madness (or both) enabled by easy access to the tools of mass murder.

But let’s not go there. We will mourn the casualties the way we mourn the deaths of those in hurricanes and tornadoes. Gun violence is now a “natural” event in America, as unpredictable as the weather, and there’s nothing we can do about it except gather together in the aftermath to help the victims. Indeed, the only enduring threat these events foretell is from those who would question a culture that deifies the gun as if it were a religious symbol rather than a lethal weapon.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, nobody said that we should just pray for the victims and do nothing about it. When terrorists used planes full of people as missiles and killed thousands of Americans, few suggested that it was an inevitable tragedy that shouldn’t be politicized. The country took action to prevent those things from happening again. In fact, the nation went far beyond the bounds of decency and reason to do so, locking up entire races of Americans, starting needless wars and ramping up an expensive and unnecessary police surveillance state. Multiple Constitutional rights were and continue to be violated.

But very few went out of their way to suggest that the only reaction to these tragedies should be solemn mourning. These incidents involving heartbreaking loss of innocent life were intensely political, and appropriately so. In fact, to have done nothing in the wake of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor would have seemed to most Americans to have shown callous disregard for the victims, and disdain for the lives of victims of similar attacks to come.

There is no reason that these almost routine gun massacres in America should be viewed any differently. Those who wish to take steps to ensure that the next massacre be prevented–and they are entirely preventable–are showing the greatest respect for the lives of the victims. They’re the ones who are trying to make sure that they didn’t perish in vain, and that similar future massacres don’t claim any more innocents. It is intervention of the most necessary kind.

Prayers and sympathy are nice. But they accomplish nothing, and show no greater respect. Prayers won’t help the victims or stop the next massacre. Call it politics or any other term that seems fitting, but it’s long past time we started making sure this sort of thing cannot happen again. It’s the right thing to do.

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Blowing past a billion

by digby

Meanwhile, back in the horserace:

Less than four months until Election Day, the battle for the White House already has crossed the $1 billion mark — as the presidential candidates, political parties and the two super PACs closely aligned with President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney race to collect political cash.

The biggest spending is yet to come in a presidential race that could hit an eye-popping $3 billion, said Bob Biersack of the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign money. Much of it may never be fully disclosed as it flows through “social welfare” groups active in politics this year.

How many jobs do you suppose this is creating? How much demand? Just asking.

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Deal For All vs the Grand Bargain

by digby

Isaiah Poole at CAF reports that progressive House Democrats have done something shocking. They are offering up an alternative to the Simpson-Bowles fiscal cliff CW nonsense. If we are truly facing a debt Armageddon, the people deserve to know that they do not need to sacrifice the future or their own security to do it:

Congressional Progressive Caucus leaders Reps. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., and Keith Ellison, D-Minn., are trying to get political support for a congressional resolution that would repudiate any “grand bargain” on the federal deficit that cuts Social Security, Medicare or other programs vital to economic security.

Their resolution calls for a “Deal for All” that would protect Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; contain “serious revenue increases,” including corporate tax loopholes and higher tax brackets for the highest-income earners; significant reductions in defense spending; and “strong levels of job-creating Federal investments in areas such as infrastructure and education.”

The Caucus co-chairs issued a joint statement that said, “Congress is gearing up for high-stakes tax and budget negotiations, and we’re standing with working families to make sure we build a stronger and fairer economy. While both parties will need to make sacrifices, we cannot do so at the expense of economic growth or the middle class. A balanced approach like the Deal for All would end tax breaks for the richest 2 percent, close tax loopholes for the wealthy and special interests, and ensure Americans don’t lose the benefits they’ve paid into for decades such as Social Security and Medicare.”

The “Deal for All” stands in sharp contrast to the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan offered by the co-chairmen of President Obama’s fiscal commission, Erskine Bowles and former Sen. Alan Simpson. That plan would, among other things, lower tax rates on the wealthiest Americans while cutting more than $400 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over the next 10 years and reducing cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients.

Many Democrats are being pushed into believing that such policies are necessary to keep the government and the economy from falling over a “fiscal cliff” by the end of the year. Fortunately, some of these Democrats are pushing back, arguing that this is the time to end flawed tax policies that favored the wealthy at the expense of working-class Americans, and reject the austerity policies that we see failing miserably in Europe.

So far 38 members of the House have signed on to the resolution. Ask your member of Congress if he or she will also co-sponsor the resolution. The answer will tell you a lot about whether you are represented by a lawmaker who sides with rebuilding the middle class on a platform of shared prosperity or one who is all too happy to make a “grand bargain” with the 1 percent that shafts the rest of us.

It is an article of faith among the Villagers that the deficit is the greatest problem facing our country. They give lavish attention to Paul Ryan and his dystopian budget document and take it as an article of faith that Simpson-Bowles represents the “common sense” approach to dealing with it. It isn’t true. There are better ways to deal with the deficit besides the conventional wisdom that says slashing spending on social and safety net programs and lowering tax rates are a given it’s just a matter of how much.

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The real crime is talking about the causes

by digby

So I understand from the twitter scolds that we are not supposed to talk about this mass murder except to share clinical details about what happened and express condolences to the victims. The shutting down any discussion of the social, cultural and political implications of yet another horrific act of deadly gun violence is becoming more and more successful after each event.

Some people are talking anyway, although I’m sure they’ll be excoriated for their bad manners and divisive conduct:

The truth is made worse by the reality that no one—really no one—anywhere on the political spectrum has the courage to speak out about the madness of unleashed guns and what they do to American life. That includes the President, whose consoling message managed to avoid the issue of why these killings take place. Of course, we don’t know, and perhaps never will, what exactly “made him” do what he did; but we know how he did it. Those who fight for the right of every madman and every criminal to have as many people-killing weapons as they want share moral responsibility for what happened last night—as they will when it happens again. And it will happen again.

The reality is simple: every country struggles with madmen and ideologues with guns, and every country—Canada, Norway, Britain—has had a gun massacre once, or twice. Then people act to stop them, and they do—as over the past few years has happened in Australia. Only in America are gun massacres of this kind routine, expectable, and certain to continue. Does anyone even remember any longer last July’s gun massacre, those birthday-party killings in Texas, when an estranged husband murdered his wife and most of her family, leaving six dead?

But nothing changes: the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in The New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed.

I agree except for that last sentence. We aren’t shocked anymore when children are killed. It’s become a normal part of American life. The taboo has shifted from horror at the shootings to horror at talking about shooting. This is called “politicizing tragedy” as if these mass murders are an act of nature rather than an act of human evil or madness (or both) enabled by easy access to the tools of mass murder.

But let’s not go there. We will mourn the casualties the way we mourn the deaths of those in hurricanes and tornadoes. Gun violence is now a “natural” event in America, as unpredictable as the weather, and there’s nothing we can do about it except gather together in the aftermath to help the victims. Indeed, the only enduring threat these events foretell is from those who would question a culture that deifies the gun as if it were a religious symbol rather than a lethal weapon.

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Republican Humor

By tristero

Asshole:

Introduced to a man who had just been fitted for a new hearing aid, Pawlenty decided to josh him by “moving my lips as if I were talking but without saying anything so he’d think something was wrong.”

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