Kellermann found people turned those guns on themselves and others in the house far more often than on intruders. “In other words, a gun kept in the home was 43 times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than to be used in self-defense,” he says.
(Source: NPR)
Hint: It’s not the Democrats.
According to a piece in Politico, significant numbers of Republican representatives are willing to trash the full faith and credit of the United States — and incidentally dynamite the entire international economic order — so that they can “send Pres. Obama a message”. Some of them are more reasonable, according to the bizarre new definition of “reasonable” that pervades today’s GOP: They only want to force a government shutdown, not a full-on default.
This is insanity. It’s time for everyone who’s not, you know, crazy to start calling it out for what it is. And that begins with the numerous sane moderate Republicans we are always assured are lurking in the background in the Party, rolling their eyes at their wayward brethren. It’s time for those so-called leaders to step up and call out this craziness. Someone calling for a platinum terabuck is a lark; someone calling for the US to default — to score points! — is a loon.
By the by, it’s not even sound fiscal policy motivating these guys. Apparently, it’s all in the testosterone.
“They think this is the only way to get Obama’s attention.”
“This is where they could choose to shut down the government to dramatize their contention that for four years Obama has promised in words to cut spending but in action only piled up debt. Many Republicans believe this is precisely what they will do.”
We’ll leave aside the fact that spending has been cut, to the tune of two trillion dollars. After all, the official GOP position is, if the numbers don’t support you, ignore the math.
The best part of the Politico piece is this:
Obama assumes Republicans would never be so foolish as to put the economy at risk to win a spending fight. Conservatives say he’s definitely wrong on that score.
He is wrong. Even the conservatives admit, they are exactly so foolish.
.
Well, it only took a month for the NRA to forget that gun massacres are the result of violent videogames. Now they’ve released an app allowing you to take target practice. On coffins. With a Mk11 sniper rifle (but that’ll cost a a buck).
Way to stay classy, Mr. LaPierre and company.
Starting tomorrow, I’ll be sharing my “30 Days of Marc Cohn”, to get myself ready for the Valentine’s Day show I’ll be attending with Annie. (And this message is mostly about testing some WordPress features I intend to use.)
So in Arizona, the NRA is mad that guns turned into the police at a buyback are going to be destroyed rather than, say, put back into circulation. Let’s unpack that:
“We just go back and we tweak it and tune it up, and we work with our friends in the Legislature and fix it so they can’t do it,” Rathner [an Arizona lobbyist and a national board member of the NRA] adds.
In other words, “We can rewrite the laws of our state and thwart the will of the people due to a legislature we control through a mix of cowed legislators plus the bat-crazy ones who agree with us.”
All of this because the people of Tuscon dare to decide that, just maybe, it’s OK to voluntarily get rid of some guns.
I think I am just about done caring about the delicate sensibilities of these people. Here’s a newsflash: The Second Amendment is not a suicide pact. And until you’re actually and in fact part of a “well-regulated militia”, I don’t really care that you want to own a gun. (And it has to be a real militia, not a self-selected group of paranoid nutjobs.)
Following Noah Smith’s lead, I am simply copying John Derbyshire’s ludicrous racist screed to do my bit to prevent it from vanishing down the memory hole once he and his sponsors realize how damning it is. Distributed democracy for the win.
Racist nonsense below the fold. UPDATE: Smith has published some thoughts on the screed, which capture some of what I’d been thinking, so I figured I’d link to that too.
Recently, I and my fiancee signed up for a PNC joint account to manage our wedding expenses. Little did I know I was signing up for the positively worst online banking experience I have ever encountered, perhaps the worst online experience period. PNC drives new users into something they call “Virtual Wallet”, which is supposed to be clever and hip and fun. It’s a buggy, busy, clunky mess that obscures more than it reveals. It is slooooow, even on a big pipe on a new machine. Since it’s coded in Flash (yippee), it takes down my browser from time to time. In any event, the Flash doesn’t talk to the enclosing web page, so after fifteen minutes, you get booted for “inactivity” even if you’ve been using the site continuously throughout that time.
When I first wrote this review, PNC rejected it because I dared to mention competitors. Then they suggested I revise it — but provided no link and no obvious way to do. The second time, the site froze on my and crashed my browser. So I’m posting this on my blog as well as on the PNC site, so maybe the word can get out.
Edited to correct some grammatical mistakes.
The new school year is about to start, and it’s customary to take a moment and philosophize. But I’m really busy, so I’m going to dust off something else and let that stand in. Back in 2010 December, I was nominated for a prize offered by Princeton University Teacher Prep. Part of the process was to submit a statement of my “philosophy of education”. I’d never actually put down on paper my educational philosophy, so I had to write it fresh.
I didn’t win the prize 🙁 but I did get to spend some time thinking about why I’m doing what I’m doing. That’s worthwhile. And since I was once instructed by a very wise professor that anything worth writing is worth using at least three times, I figured I’d recycle my statement here. Enjoy.
TR had the Square Deal. FDR had the New Deal. Harry S has the Fair Deal. Barack Obama will have the Raw Deal.
So a debt-ceiling “deal” has been reached. Going in to this, the President was willing to compromise but had a few lines in the sand:
What did he get? None of these. None of them. What he got was a temporary extension of the debt ceiling, but he must take ownership of it now and again in six months. He got a “super congress” stacked against him with triggers that hurt only one side. He got an agreement that the hostage-taker would not shoot the hostage at this time, though he let the hostage-taker keep the gun and even gave him more bullets.
He got rolled. That’s what he got.
I am not a Tea Party default denialist. I fully understand that the scope of a default would be unprecedented and uncharted and very likely catastrophic. I just don’t see how surrendering the principle of democratic government is better. The Republicans know that their policies would be unpopular — fatally so, in fact. So they don’t try to enact them. Instead they manipulate the far-too-easily-manipulated Democrats into making the hard choices, doing the hard things, and then getting savaged by an electorate that doesn’t understand what’s going on and can’t be bothered to learn.
There are many who say the President should have stared down the Republicans and bluffed harder about using the so-called constitutional option, invoking the 14th Amendment. I’m not one of those; I don’t believe in bluffing. He should have stared down the Republicans fully intending to invoke the 14th Amendment if need be. He should have said, This far and no further. He would have looked decisive because he would have been decisive. He would have the public on his side. More importantly, he would have been right. And given the certainty of disaster implicit in the rise of the Crazy Caucus to power, a roll of the dice would have been preferable.
I’ve already called my congressman to find out where he’ll vote. (It’s Yes for surrender.) And I’ve implored him (or rather his intern) to reconsider. The best option for the country right now is that this abomination goes down to defeat in the House. (It seems assured passage in the Senate.) Then, with the clock ticking, the President can demand a clean bill to save the nation’s credit rating, with these tough choices made not under pressure from a hostage-taker. Sadly, on this, apparently the Democrats have found their message unity that they so often lack.
The best hope for the nation, then, is that the Crazy Caucus, having been handed literally everything it wanted, will find itself still congenitally unable to take “Yes” for an answer — that the Tea Party’s visceral hatred for that upstart in the White House will compel them to vote against a bill their own leadership has negotiated and is whipping hard.
Yes, our only hope lies in the rabid right. May Heaven help us all.???????????????? ?????????? ?? ??????