Gun Culture

Posted: January 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Gun Control, open thread, Second Amendment | Tags: , , , , , | 25 Comments

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

That’s the amendment that’s seems to define the United States right now.   The others appear to be to be negotiable or endangered.

Here’s a few tidbits in the news today dealing with Guns.

One strange headline from Politico:

Evidently, Republican Pete King thinks it’s okay to carry guns around, just not around him.  Well, at least not within about 1,000 feet of him and his colleagues.  I guess preschoolers don’t deserve the same kind of protection.

“It would give law enforcement the weapon they need to protect federal officials, and just as importantly, it would provide a large measure of security for those who want to meet with their federal elected officials,” said King, who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

According to The Hill, Weeper of the House John Boehner just says NO to gun control.   Guess he really wants an NRA fundraiser for his next election.

King’s legislation got the cold shoulder from Boehner and other Republicans after it was announced.

Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said the Speaker would not support King’s legislation.

The office of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the majority leader is reserving judgment until the King bill is finalized.

“Mr. Cantor believes it’s appropriate to adequately review and actually read legislation before forming an opinion about it,” Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring stated in an e-mail.

Michael Riley of Bloomberg writes that “Glock Pistol Sales Surge in Aftermath of Arizona Shootings”. Guess I’ll be ordering the latest fashion for those chickens among us:  a bullet proof space suit.

After a Glock-wielding gunman killed six people at a Tucson shopping center on Jan. 8, Greg Wolff, the owner of two Arizona gun shops, told his manager to get ready for a stampede of new customers.

Wolff was right. Instead of hurting sales, the massacre had the $499 semi-automatic pistols — popular with police, sport shooters and gangsters — flying out the doors of his Glockmeister stores in Mesa and Phoenix.

“We’re at double our volume over what we usually do,” Wolff said two days after the shooting spree that also left 14 wounded, including Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition.

A national debate over weaknesses in state and federal gun laws stirred by the shooting has stoked fears among gun buyers that stiffer restrictions may be coming from Congress, gun dealers say. The result is that a deadly demonstration of the weapon’s effectiveness has also fired up sales of handguns in Arizona and other states, according to federal law enforcement data.

“When something like this happens people get worried that the government is going to ban stuff,” Wolff said.

Yes, it’s the good old U S of A where you too can be a militia of one.

Yup, it’s an open thread, but please don’t lock and load!   I’m your Huckleberry.

A War on Public Servants

Posted: January 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , | 31 Comments

I’ve noticed a developing villager meme about the people who put out our fires, teach our children, complete the paper work to give us driver’s and hunting licenses, and paint the picnic tables at parks.  Are they the new enemy or just the collateral in the War for Austerity?   Are we experiencing the first shot heard round the world in the Battle against Public Servants?

If you believed the senile President Reagan, government was the problem.  If you believe the current set of villagers, government workers are the problem.   This actually appears to be part and parcel of a plan to tear down any sort of union where ever it possibly could sprout up.   Silly government workers still want and get pensions, health care plans, and are not subject to firing on management whimsy.   Their examples must be held up as source of public disgust and disgruntlement.  The Power class certainly wouldn’t want their serfs getting any ideas.   Therefore, we’ll just shuffle public workers into the bigger theme of they’re wasting your tax dollars and all because their unions can get them a decent work arrangement. I continue to be amazed how they get us dogs under the table to fight for scraps and bones while they continue the feast up top.

Truth-Out riffs on this them in an article called   We Welcome Our New Plutocratic Overlords.  It describes the new ‘ruling’ class as mostly comprised of Wall Street Bankers and Silicon Valley Geeks.  Chrystia Freeland explains this concept in the cover story of Atlantic Monthly.   Because these folks don’t necessarily come from wealth, they assume they are wealthy because they’re gifted and deserving.  They ignore a lot to maintain that frame.  The new old buzz word is Plutocracy. Freeland argues the super-rich are a nation to themselves.  She explores this in a section called Winner-Take-Most.  The deal, she says, is that the same thing that’s caused the rest of us to be poorer is the very same thing that’s mega-enriched the new plutocrats.

Many corporations have profited from this economic upheaval. Expanded global access to labor (skilled and unskilled alike), customers, and capital has lowered traditional barriers to entry and increased the value of an ahead-of-the-curve insight or innovation. Facebook, whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out of college just six years ago, is already challenging Google, itself hardly an old-school corporation. But the biggest winners have been individuals, not institutions. The hedge-fund manager John Paulson, for instance, single-handedly profited almost as much from the crisis of 2008 as Goldman Sachs did.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of U.S. workers, however devoted and skilled at their jobs, have missed out on the windfalls of this winner-take-most economy—or worse, found their savings, employers, or professions ravaged by the same forces that have enriched the plutocratic elite. The result of these divergent trends is a jaw-dropping surge in U.S. income inequality. According to the economists Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population. The financial crisis interrupted this trend temporarily, as incomes for the top 1 percent fell more than those of the rest of the population in 2008. But recent evidence suggests that, in the wake of the crisis, incomes at the summit are rebounding more quickly than those below. One example: after a down year in 2008, the top 25 hedge-fund managers were paid, on average, more than $1 billion each in 2009, quickly eclipsing the record they had set in pre-recession 2007.

So, their new frame is that they did it ‘on their own’ and the rest of us are just plain lazy and insufficient.  Unions are our  ‘affirmative action plans’ that cripple the American Dream.  Their frame also translates into the refusal to recognize obligations to the public and public goods as being part of a society.  This makes public workers easy targets. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday Reads: The Anniversary of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights

Posted: January 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Anti-War, Barack Obama, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Equity Markets, Federal Budget, financial institutions, Global Financial Crisis, John Birch Society in Charge, New Orleans, Regulation, Social Security, Stock Market, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 125 Comments

Good Morning!!

History Reads

Ever so often, we need to be reminded of history.  I read a tweet yesterday by one of our long time news anchors down here in New Orleans.

normanrobinson1 norman robinson

Wondering if we as Americans really value what we have and whether we really care about leaving a future for the generations to follow.

This started me thinking about what future was left to me by the generations directly before me.    Of course, we’re living in a world mostly free of NAZIs and Fascists because of the greatest generation.  We’re living in a world where the Jim Crow Laws of Separate-But-Equal were torn down by the generation after that with the sacrifice of the heroic leaders of the civil rights movement.   I have the right to vote because of my grandmother’s generation and her mother’s generation and what they did for us.  I’ve also had consistent access to family planning and birth control because the first women of the baby boom generation and several generations of women before them worked hard for it.  Stonewall made a tremendous difference in the lives of GLBTs.  Then, there are programs like Social Security and institutions like the United Nations that came from the vision and leadership of  FDR and the people who served in his cabinets like Francis Perkins, Henry Wallace, Cordell Hull and many others.  They cared enough to build us quite a legacy.

Today is the 67th anniversary of a speech that was to convey that vision of a post-war America.  The Second Bill of Rights was part of a State of the Union speech.  I’m bringing this up for two reasons.  First, because it clearly provides a road map–even today–for “what Americans really value”. I say that because poll after poll shows that the majority of American’s agree with these values even though our government doesn’t seem to reflect that at the moment.   For that reason, I share with you today, the words of a leader with a vision and a gift for elocution.

From the FDR American Heritage Center Museum’s Website:

On January 11, 1944, in the midst of World War II, President Roosevelt spoke forcefully and eloquently about the greater meaning and higher purpose of American security in a post-war America. The principles and ideas conveyed by FDR’s words matter as much now as they did over sixty years ago, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt American Heritage Center is proud to reprint a selection of FDR’s vision for the security and economic liberty of the American people in war and peace.

The second reason I want to share this is that we’re coming close to President Obama’s third State of the Union Address. It is scheduled for January 25th.  My guess is that FDR’s Second Bill of Rights and the vision he elucidated will officially die on that day. I am not expecting any thing close to the utterance of ‘Necessitous men are not free men’ or “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made”.

Despite the obvious parallels between right now and  the Great Depression–the high unemployment rates, the incredible number of foreclosures, and the breadth of necessitous men and women and children–I’m expectting many of the vestiges of FDR’s vision that prevent future calamities to be assaulted during Obama’s third State of the Union Address.  Look closely at the list I put up top because so much of what was handed us has been trickling away.

As Norman Robinson contemplated via tweet, do we really value what we have today? Will we witness the destruction of what was handed to us and hand our children and grandchildren broken infrastructure, no hope for upward mobility, and useless institutions drained of funds by the greedy?  Will any shell of what was envisioned for us in both the first bill of rights and the second remain? Frankly, I am expecting an ‘austerity’ speech that endorses the findings of the cat food commission. I also expect we will hear nothing of overreaching intrusion by the Patriot Act into our internet and cell phones. We are expected to diligently watch Football and bail out billionaires while everything else trickles up and away.

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Late Night: Hillary on the Cover of The Advocate!

Posted: January 11, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: GLBT Rights, Hillary Clinton: Her Campaign for All of Us, Human Rights | Tags: , | 25 Comments

Holy moly! I was going to try to get my insomniac self to bed, but this simply can’t wait. While catching up on my twitter feeds from Monday, I saw this from stacyx/secyclintonblog:

SecyClintonblog: Secretary Clinton on the Cover Issue of the Gay Rights Publication The Advocate : http://t.co/pyKkJBS #glbt #gay #hillaryclinton #secclinton

Well, y’all this is yet another one to file under “why I’m a ‘Hillary fan’ and 100% unapologetic about it”:

You may have trouble reading the caption and not have instant access to a newsstand at the moment, so I’ll type it out for you:

YES, SHE DID: Hillary Clinton emerges as the administration’s fiercest advocate–and explains why gay rights will never take a backseat at the State Department.

It’s a lengthy, meaty must-read interview. I’m still working my way through it myself, so go read at the link or get your hands on a copy (I know I can’t wait to go buy my own later today). I’ll include an excerpt here of the first page to get you started, emphasis in bold is mine:

From The Advocate January 2011

Madame Secretary

“Gay rights are human rights.” With that declaration — and the team she has assembled at the State Department—Hillary Rodham Clinton has elevated the dialogue on LGBT rights around the globe.

By Kerry Eleveld

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reveled before a standing-room-only crowd of more than 500 State Department employees celebrating gay pride at the agency’s Loy Henderson Auditorium in Washington, D.C. last summer. “Gee, let’s do this every week!” she said. This, it seemed, was to be more of a reunion of old acquaintances than a perfunctory speech on diversity.

At first, Clinton glanced down—to the lectern and her prepared remarks. But her focus on the written page melted away as she looked up and rolled on with the speech, channeling the myriad mental notes she had made over the years.

Displaying an uncanny depth of understanding for the challenges that many LGBT youth experience, Clinton spoke of tragedies that would only come to national attention months later after a spate of heart-wrenching teen suicides dominated headlines for weeks. She called on the staff members before her to help create a safe space for gays and lesbians everywhere, “Particularly young people, particularly teenagers who still, today, have such a difficult time and who, still, in numbers far beyond what should ever happen, take their own lives rather than live that life.”

Men and women around the world were being “harassed, beaten, subjected to sexual violence, even killed, because of who they are and whom they love,” she said.

“This is a human rights issue,” Clinton told the rapt audience. She ad-libbed, recalling an oft-quoted line from a landmark speech on women’s rights at a U.N. conference in China: “Just as I was very proud to say the obvious more than 15 years ago in Beijing—that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights—well, let me say today that human rights are gay rights, and gay rights are human rights, once and for all.”

Asked months later what was going through her mind when she offered the unscripted line at the pride celebration, Clinton responds with her inimitable laugh. “Oh, heavens, I don’t know—I don’t know,” she says before settling back into the moment. “I was looking out at the audience where a lot of longtime friends, political supporters, colleagues were sitting, and it just seemed so important and right to make that statement.”

I’d like to point out that Hillary said all this back in June, before the disturbing string of suicides related to anti-gay bullying began to appear in the headlines. And, remember how when that happened, Hillary took the lead then too, including “going purple” in a sea full of gray suits.

In case you missed it at the time or want to see it again, here’s the video of the speech that the Advocate is referencing above (the link goes to the State Department transcript; Hillary declares that “human rights are gay rights, and gay rights are human rights” at around the 6:20 mark below):

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Not all of us “Hillary fans” can be painted with the same broad brush and lumped together with the obligatory Hillary groupies out there. Hillary won my support, exactly because she’s the kind of woman to make the speech above and do this cover story interview with the Advocate.

Oh, Yes, She DID, indeed. Brava, Madame Secretary, on emerging as the “fiercest advocate” in this Administration. I never had a doubt.

 

The Thought Police and TwitterCrime

Posted: January 10, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Patriot Act | Tags: , , , , | 33 Comments

The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) is the secret police of Oceania in George Orwell‘s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime, or, in Newspeak, crimethink.

Welcome to 1984 2011. You thought Nixon and Reagan were bad?  Let’s see what the Obama/Holder Department of Justice has been up to while you may have been watching football.  Glenn Greenwald heard and ignored a cautionary tale. He tells it all with the knowledge of present sight.

One of the more eye-opening events for me of 2010 occurred in March, when I first wrote about WikiLeaks and the war the Pentagon was waging on it (as evidenced by its classified 2008 report branding the website an enemy and planning how to destroy it). At the time, few had heard of the group — it was before it had released the video of the Apache helicopter attack — but I nonetheless believed it could perform vitally important functions and thus encouraged readers to donate to it and otherwise support it. In response, there were numerous people — via email, comments, and other means — who expressed a serious fear of doing so: they were worried that donating money to a group so disliked by the government would cause them to be placed on various lists or, worse, incur criminal liability for materially supporting a Terrorist organization.

Will we join the ranks of those the Justice Department consider materially supporting a Terrorist group if Wikileaks is redefined by the Justice Department from whistle blower site to Terrorist group?  Should we all be getting lawyers like those peace activists who were hauled in for sending off old clothes to naked Palenstinians I described in a post called Nostalgic for Nixon?  Better yet should we all line up with confession letters before we get hauled off to Saudi Arabia for extraordinary interviews and held in solitary confinement for extraordinary thought crime?

Better question:  Is this still the USA?

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