In other news ….

There’s a few other headlines I’d like to share tonight on this open thread.

It seems that Senator Kerry will lull us to sleep the next four years as Secretary of State.  Senators Graham and McCain must be very proud of themselves tonight.

President Barack Obama has chosen Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts to be the next secretary of state, a source has told Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed.

His replacement as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will be Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the Sneed source said.

This comes on the heels of Thursday’s announcement that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice had removed herself from the list of candidates to take over from Hillary Clinton. Rice said that what was sure to be a contentious and lengthy approval process took attention away from more pressing problems facing the nation.

Results of the 2012 election continue to show exactly how much single women don’t like the GOP.

As Republicans dust off their Election Day drubbing last month, their party must confront the reality that the ranks of unmarried women are growing rapidly, and these voters overwhelmingly have backed Democrats for decades.

Women increasingly are graduating from college and joining the workforce, and postponing marriage. From 2000 to 2010, the number of unmarried women increased 18 percent, according to census data.

Republicans have spent the past month tallying up all their demographic weak spots, including with Hispanics and Asian-Americans. But some warn that single women, already one-quarter of the electorate, represent the most serious threat to the party’s viability.

“It’s a faster-growing demographic than most others,” said Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster. “That’s a cultural zeitgeist that demands a political response.”

In 1960, the average American woman married at age 20. Now it’s 27. That reflects, and is partly the cause of, a boom in solo living, with nearly one-third of all U.S. households comprised of single people living alone, according to Eric Klinenberg, a New York University sociologist and author of a book on the subject. In 1950, it was 9 percent.

Around the world, as women gain more education and earn more money, they increasingly are delaying marriage, said Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and is director of research for the Council on Contemporary Families. “Nowadays, women don’t feel so driven to get married because they can support themselves,” she said. “A lot of this is driven by women and a combination of lowering payoffs to just marrying any man and rising expectations” of what marriage will bring, she added.

Economist Dean Baker tells Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that the biggest lie about the current fiscal situation is the idea that we actually face a fiscal cliff.

DEAN BAKER: Well, there’s an endless number of myths, but the first and foremost is that we face any sort of cliff. You know, you’ve had this effort, certainly in Washington, to hype this December 31st deadline. Basically, if we miss that deadline, nothing happens. You know, you come to January 1st, we’ll be subject to higher tax withholding rates. Not a lot of us are going to get paid January 1st. If there’s a deal worked out somewhere in the first, second week of January, we’ll probably never see anything extra deducted from our paycheck, and even if we do, we’ll get it back in the second paycheck. I mean, no one wants to see money deducted out of their paycheck, but, you know, if you’re going to get it back in the second check—I mean, I know that will be a hardship for some people, but the impact on the economy will be pretty much minimal.

And on the spending side, President Obama controls—has enormous control over the pace of spending. And if there’s a deal outlined that—you know, outline of a deal that he sees with Congress, he’ll just keep spending in accordance with that deal. So this idea that, somehow, if we don’t get a deal by the end of the year, you know, we’re going to see the economy collapse, go into a recession, really that’s just totally dishonest. And I’ve seen that said I don’t know how many times. And it’s based—the basis for this is that we don’t have a deal all year. And the fact that you don’t have a deal December 31st does not mean you don’t get a deal by December 31st, 2013. And I think everyone knows that.

One last link on Gun Control and the Connecticut Shooting and then I’ll wish you a quiet and safe wintry night.  The right lies to us all the time about the second amendment and what it implies about gun ownership .

The American Right is fond of putting itself inside the minds of America’s Founders and intuiting what was their “original intent” in writing the U.S. Constitution and its early additions, like the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms.” But, surely, James Madison and the others weren’t envisioning people with modern weapons mowing down children in a movie theater or a shopping mall or now a kindergarten.

Indeed, when the Second Amendment was passed in the First Congress as part of the Bill of Rights, firearms were single-shot mechanisms that took time to load and reload. It was also clear that Madison and the others viewed the “right to bear arms” in the context of “a well-regulated militia” to defend communities from massacres, not as a means to enable such massacres.

The Second Amendment reads: “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.” Thus, the point of the Second Amendment is to ensure “security,” not undermine it.

The massacre of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, on Friday, which followed other gun massacres in towns and cities across the country, represents the opposite of “security.” And it is time that Americans of all political persuasions recognize that protecting this kind of mass killing was not what the Founders had in mind.

I personally think that today’s “gun enthusiasts’ are really insurrectionists.  I’ve been watching some interviews on MNBC with the sister in law of Nancy Lanza mother of the Connecticut Child Shooter.  It appears she was preparing for the collapse of the economy.  That was a root source of her gun “enthusiasm”.  My biggest question isn’t how this happened, but why is some one allowed to leave guns around the house and buy an arsenal when you live with a person with developmental disorders and allegedly some kind of personality disorder? Why would a shooting range let a child with emotional and developmental issues shoot guns?  You can see the video here.

As family and friends talk to national media, one answer to that question has emerged — Nancy Lanza was more than a “gun enthusiast,” she was “something of a survivalist” who bought guns because she “had been stockpiling” for the coming “economic collapse” ,,

I’m sure the FBI profilers have been finding some pretty interesting things in the computers in that house and I”m looking forward to finding out more about this.

Meanwhile, this is an open thread.  I going to make myself a vodka martini as I think about what kind of crap the right wing will come up with to justify that kind of thinking that says training emotionally disturbed children is okay coupled with an easily accesible arsenal.  This kid had the training to really do the damage he did and he even knew which of the weapons would do the most damage.

Investigators have linked Nancy Lanza to five weapons: two handguns, a semi-automatic rifle and two traditional hunting rifles. Her son took the two handguns and the semi-automatic rifle to the school. Law-enforcement officials said they believed the guns were acquired lawfully and registered.

Nancy Lanza is being described by a family member as a “survivalist,” and someone who owned a collection of guns.

My oldest child’s godfather is a hunter.  It’s something his wife and I don’t understand but it’s part of his Fargo ND upbringing.   We’ve been friends for about 30 years and both of them are just the sweetest people I know.   We used to eat antelope stew a lot and backstrap steaks back in the day.  Back when I didn’t hold Buddhist vows.  It’s not my thing nor will it ever be. It’s something he does with his dad every year.   I never saw his guns.  They were always locked up in a hunting locker at some place that rented things like that.  He only used them when he went hunting.  As I said, if I found there were guns in a house, my kids were told to stay outside.  I never took a chance that some enterprising child with an imagination would figure out a way to get at them. I’ve seen the statistics on accidents in homes with guns.  I’ve really never known any one saved by owning a gun.  Those numbers are minimal.   I actually have to say that I’d rather not know any one that would rather kill some one then hand over junk and money.  I frankly would die before I would take another life.  But then, I’m a Buddhist and very much an outlier in this American Life.  I now carry vows and one of them is to plead with people not to kill anything for me.  Not a mosquito.  Not an attacker.  Not a source of food. But, that’s my choice and my vows.  I just can’t fathom living with the idea of taking another life for trivial pursuits.

So, have a great night.