A Flaccid Boehner
Posted: December 20, 2012 Filed under: Breaking News | Tags: fiscal cliff, Plan B 48 Comments
We currently have a Speaker of the House that couldn’t deliver the mail with an army of letter carriers at his bid. John Boehner’s spurious Plan B has turned into fiasco. The Plan was not brought to the floor for a vote because the speaker and his limp whip couldn’t get the math straight.
Plan B had been loaded down with so many goodies that all the establishment nuts–like Grover Norquist–were putting themselves into pretzels to get members to vote. Obama had promised it veto and Senate Majority Leader Reid had said it would not pass. Boehner and cronies couldn’t do it.
Beneath the fracas on the fiscal cliff fight, the Republicans’ Plan B proposal would check off many items on the GOP’s financial services wish-list, gutting core pieces at the heart of the Dodd-Frank 2010 reform law and terminating one of the administration’s main housing relief programs, under the radar.
The bill, which would extend Bush-era tax cuts for earners who make up to $1 million a year, would erode Dodd-Frank by cutting the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s automatic funding from the Federal Reserve and subjecting it to the annual appropriations process.
Plan B would repeal a section of the reform law that gives federal regulators tools to unwind ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions, known as “orderly liquidation authority.”
The Republican proposal for addressing the fiscal cliff would check off another GOP banking goal of shuttering the Office of Financial Research, which is meant to churn analytical data from financial companies to help regulators identify and knock down emerging threats to the financial system.
The financial services measures in Plan B also include a provision to terminate the Home Affordable Modification Program, one of the administration’s main homeowner assistance programs.
In April, the House Financial Services Committee passed the same package of financial services provisions along with a flood insurance reform component as a way to come up with $35 billion in spending cuts. The package was rolled into the GOP-backed Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act that passed the House in May.
But much of the savings from eliminating the “too big to fail” provision were attributable to a budget gimmick, by finding artificial savings, which National Journal reported at the time.
Boehner made an impassioned plea to his caucus. He begged them to for vote for the plan. There are rumors of screaming matches within the caucus meeting. This puts into question his job security and makes it more likely that nothing will be done this year. That means it’s its fiscal cliff time!
The fate of US negotiations to avert the fiscal cliff were thrown into turmoil after efforts by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to pass their back-up plan to avert most of the tax hikes collapsed amid a conservative backlash.
After calling an emergency meeting of his own party’s lawmakers, Mr Boehner issued a statement saying there would be no vote on Thursday night on the Republican “plan B”, as planned.
“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass. Now it is up to the president to work with Senator [Harry] Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff,” Mr Boehner said, referring the Democratic Senate majority leader.
The failure to hold a vote – after a short but dramatic arm-twisting campaign by Republican leaders – will cast serious doubt on Mr Boehner’s ability to muster support for any deal he might cut with Barack Obama, US president, leading to pessimism about the prospects for any agreement. If no budget deal is reached by January 1, the US will be hit by a series of $600bn in automatic tax increases and spending cuts next year, threatening a new recession. US equities futures markets dove sharply on the news.
The failure of plan B came towards the end of a week that had begun with widespread optimism over the prospects of a bipartisan agreement between Mr Boehner and Mr Obama to reduce the deficit and avert the fiscal cliff. Both Mr Obama and Mr Boehner had made significant concessions on both taxes and spending last weekend, narrowing their differences sharply. But they failed to close the deal, and Mr Boehner decided to take his chances and move ahead with a purely Republican proposal, in order to exert more pressure on Mr Obama and boost his leverage.
But the plan backfired, as conservative rank-and-file members balked at “plan B” – which would have raised taxes on income over $1m but extended tax rates for all other taxpayers. This would have been the first vote for a tax increase in more than two decades for House Republicans.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The vote here is all about establishing an argument. That’s all it is about. And what Boehner will say — he said it in the clip you showed — is the president hasn’t offered anything. What he’s offering, what he spoke about yesterday in the news conference where he said ‘I’ve offered a balanced plan,’ is a swindle. There’s nothing but essentially tax hikes. And not only revenue hikes but increases in rates, where the Republicans have caved, as Obama himself has said. Boehner himself has admitted. And they have gotten nothing of any importance, any significance, on spending — whether discretionary and nothing on entitlements of any importance.
So what he’s doing by passing “Plan B” is to say we’re ready to do exactly what the president has said he wants to do. He says I campaigned on taxing, raising the rates on millionaires. Well the definition of a millionaire is a guy who makes a million dollars a year, that’s exactly what we’re passing. So, the president has no argument to justify a veto or the Senate rejection of this. And I think that is a smart move because they’re going to lose either way and at least he can now say in resisting the swindle — the deal he offered is a swindle, I can’t see him accepting it if the president isn’t going to move — at least he can say we gave the president what he wanted and what he said he campaigned on.
I’ll just add one thing. If the “Plan B” does not succeed, if he fails in the House, Boehner has a “Plan C.” That’s the Mayan apocalypse tomorrow.
Questions:
Did Cantor really work this thing or is he planning a coup?
Will the Tea Party Republicans bring down the party?
Will Dancing Dave and his Disco Party be able to inject enough media blue pill magic into the conversation to make themselves all feel better about themselves?
It’s been a bit of a long day here …
Posted: December 17, 2012 Filed under: Domestic terrorism, Foreign Affairs, fundamentalist Christians, Gun Control, just because, open thread, religion, religious extremists, Republican politics, right wing hate grouups, Second Amendment, Syria, The Media SUCKS | Tags: Dr. Dobson, Larry Pratt, Megan McArdle, National Idiots, Richard Engle 12 Comments
It seems JJ’s having some issues with word press so I thought I’d just provide a few links to discuss since I really have a good case of blurry brain today. Something intense and wonky is beyond me this evening.
I don’t know if any of you watch Richard Engle on NBC. He’s one of the better foreign correspondents around. He’s missing in Syria right now. He hasn’t been in touch with NBC since Thursday. Syria’s a serious war zone right now with a mad dictator in charge of some fairly scary weapons so this is concerning.
NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel has gone missing in Syria, according to Turkish news reports. The reports also say that Aziz Akyavaş, a Turkish journalist working with Engel, is unaccounted for. NBC News has been successfully keeping Engel’s status subject to a news blackout—one to which Gawker agreed until now—for at least the past 24 hours.
Turkish newspaper Hurriyet is reporting that Engel and Akyavaş were last known to be in Syria and haven’t been in contact with NBC News since Thursday morning. The news has been reported widely in the Turkish press over the past 24 hours, including by Turkish news channel NTV, which presents itself as an international partner of MSNBC. It’s also been widely distributed on Twitter.
A lot of the worst nuts are keeping their mouths shut about the Sandy Hook massacre. However, there’s alway Dr. Dobson to bring on the theocratic fascism.
James Dobson dedicated his radio program this morning to discussing Friday’s tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Connecticut, which he attributed to the fact that God has “allowed judgment to fall upon us” because the nation has turned its back on him by accepting things like abortion and gay marriage:
Our country really does seem in complete disarray. I’m not talking politically, I’m not talking about the result of the November sixth election; I am saying that something has gone wrong in America and that we have turned our back on God.
I mean millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed fifty-four million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition. Believe me, that is going to have consequences too.
And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us. I think that’s what’s going on.
I’ve really thought a lot of the gun nuts represent an insurrectionist attitude and that many of them are still what I would chararterize as neoconfederates or confederacy hold outs. Larry Pratt proved that royally on HardBall today. Frankly, I hope the FBI keeps a really good eye or twenty on him.
Pratt believes gun ownership is necessary to scare office holders and to remind them that we can take them out. I have no idea what to say to a man that is so obsessed with stolen elections that he suggests assassination as a way to correct things.
During the interview on Hardball, Pratt argued that guns are necessary to “control the government.” When Matthews asked for an example, Pratt pointed to 1946, in Athens, Tenn., when townsmen took up arms against corrupt government officials.
David Chipman, a former special agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who now works with Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told Matthews that Pratt’s argument was bogus.
“Law enforcement is here as a force of good and we’re the good guys, and that’s what we saw in Newtown. When we get rhetoric like I’m hearing right now, I think this is extremely fringe, I believe most Americans believe otherwise.”
Pratt scoffed at Chipman as a tool of the government. I really think that people like Pratt–read Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann, Allen West, etc.–need to be outed for the insane extremists they are.
In what can only be seen as a malicious plot
by Newsweek’s editors[Update: this is a long blog post, not a magazine piece] to ensure Megan McArdle’s reputation does not outlive Newsweek, the Daily Beast has published a 4,000 word essay by its new hire on how to stop massacres like last Friday’s. McArdle begins her essay with a prescient harbinger (“There just aren’t good words to talk about Newtown.”) but recovers to churn out a fairly standard libertarian argument about why various government remedies won’t work. And it’s true, to some extent, that various regulatory solutions all have complications.The problem comes at the end when, having dismissed the standard liberal regulatory measures as unworkable, she has to propose her own solution. This is what McArdle comes up with:
I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.
Are you kidding me? You think gun control is impractical, so your plan is to turn the entire national population, including young children, into a standby suicide squad? Through private initiative, of course. It’s way more feasible than gun control!
Yes, if only those first graders had learned to tackle a shooter with 2 semiautomatic weapons in hand and a chicken-fried brain. What a morooonnnnnn!!!!
@AngryBlackLady The larger children can throw smaller children at shooter.#MeganMcArdleDefenseTips
There is one major headline today worth mentioning. That is the death of Hawaiian former Senator and World War 2 Hero Daniel Inouye.
Democrat Daniel Inouye, the U.S. Senate’s most senior member and a Medal of Honor recipient for his bravery during World War II, has died. He was 88.
He died of respiratory complications and had been at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center since earlier this month. His office said his last word was “Aloha,” the traditional Hawaiian word for “hello” and “goodbye.”
President Obama praised Inouye, saying the nation has “lost a true American hero.”
“In Washington, he worked to strengthen our military, forge bipartisan consensus, and hold those of us in government accountable to the people we were elected to serve,” Obama said in a statement. “But it was his incredible bravery during World War II — including one heroic effort that cost him his arm but earned him the Medal of Honor — that made Danny not just a colleague and a mentor, but someone revered by all of us lucky enough to know him.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced the news of Inouye’s death on the Senate floor, sparking a round of tributes for the man Reid called “a giant of the Senate.” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., hailed Inouye’s service and his reserve as a mark of “men who lead by example and expect nothing in return.”
Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes appear to part way on gun fetishes.
While Ailes’s network said it wasn’t the right time to talk about legislation, Murdoch had no hesitation. Within hours of the attack, he took to Twitter to call for an automatic-weapons ban. “Terrible news today. When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy,” he wrote, referring to Australia’s move to ban assault weapons in 1996 after a man used two semiautomatic rifles to kill 35 people and wound 21. That massacre came six weeks after the horrific mass school shooting in Dunblane, Scotland, in which sixteen children and one adult were murdered. (Despite Murdoch’s plea, automatic weapons are already illegal in the United States; Adam Lanza used semiautomatics.)
As a global media mogul, Murdoch’s newspapers and television networks have the power to shape public opinion. Already there are signs that parts of Murdoch’s empire are adopting the boss’s position. Today’s New York Post cover, fronting a photo of Obama, declared, “ENOUGH!” In London, where gun culture is decidedly outre, the cover of the Sun screamed, “END THE LUNACY.” Murdoch “is obviously very affected by what’s gone on,” News Corp. executive vice-president Joel Klein told me. “I think most rational people would think there’s no place for assault weapons. I don’t think it’s complicated.” He said that Murdoch will continue to advocate for gun-control policies.
Have you found anything worth sharing?
Oh, here’s a musical interlude to read by:
Monday Reads
Posted: December 17, 2012 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bobby Jindal, fiscal cliff, Sandy Hook 67 Comments
Good Morning!
The embarrassingly, nakedly ambitious pol that is my governor decided that taking a stab at the birth control issue on the front of the WSJ would bring back national attention to him. The man will do anything for attention. So, I covered his suggestion to make birth control over the counter last week. Here’s some feedback from a blogger at kos.
Ah, yes. Because it’s Democrats who run around like headless chickens, screaming and wailing about “religious liberty” and how making birth control affordable and accessible to women is just like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor day . It’s Democrats who’ve said that only sluts use or want birth control. It’s Democrats who’ve said that even married couples should not use birth control because the whole point of marriage is to pop out babies in the name of Jesus.
Oh, no, wait. That’s actually the Republican Party.
But Jindal, who is also head of the Republican Governors’ Association as well as a possible presidential candidate in 2016, thinks it’s high time Republicans stand up for women and their health care because—Nah. Just kidding. In fact, Jindal manages to completely omit any mention of the benefits of birth control for women and their families. But boy, oh boy, does he see an awful lot of political benefits for Republicans if they’d stop giving Democrats such a good reason to criticize them. And that’s apparently reason enough to support the recommendation of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to make birth control available over the counter.
Oh, and also, Obama sucks. In fact, it’s his fault women don’t have better access to birth control. No, seriously:
Over-the-counter contraception would be easier to obtain if not for some unfortunate aspects of President Obama’s health-care law.
Ah, yes. Who doesn’t remember how Republicans were demanding that the president’s health care law be bigger and better to provide even greater access to, say, reproductive health care?
Oh, and lest you think that “pro-life” Jindal has suddenly turned away from the Every Sperm Is Sacred ideology of his party, don’t worry. He hasn’t:
As an unapologetic pro-life Republican, I also believe that every adult (18 years old and over) who wants contraception should be able to purchase it. But anyone who has a religious objection to contraception should not be forced by government health-care edicts to purchase it for others. And parents who believe, as I do, that their teenage children shouldn’t be involved with sex at all do not deserve ridicule.
This comes on the heels of Jindal’s embarssingly ignorant response to the problem of the fiscal cliff where he demonstrated he has no idea what he’s talking about. Meanwhile, we’re about to suffer yet another blow to higher education and health down here in Louisiana in the name of Peyush’s search for higher office.
Governor Bobby Jindal’s administration announces sweeping state budget cuts totaling $165.5 million.
The mid-year tax cuts will hit the state’s Department of Children and Family Services and those who receive hospice care, the hardest.
Every Saturday, you can listen to Sue May of Cannon Hospice on the radio, trying to counsel families on end of life decisions for their loved ones.
But today, she has bad news for listeners when she hits the radio airwaves.
Governor Jindal’s cuts include hospice care.
“Bobby Jindal and his crew are telling us that if you have a serious illness you can’t receive any further treatment,” says May. “You can get any assistance at end of life care no symptom management, no pain control, no outreach of compassion.”
The cuts to hospice care affect Medicaid patients who are not in nursing homes.
May says thousands of terminally ill patients so often choose to die at home with dignity might no longer have care.
“Medicaid is also for people who struggled through serious illness and who have gone through all of their savings and their funds to get care and are seeking the assistance of the state to help them,” says May. “Last time they made these changes in Medicaid we found out about it on Friday and they came in effect on Monday, we don’t get any huge notification.”
Yes folks! It’s compassionate conservatism with some southern fried curried hospitality thrown in. Jindal is well know for throwing sick people out on the streets. Now, we’re going to be tripping over dying people too.
Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, says he wishes Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of the Sandy Hook Elementary School, was armed with an M-4 assault rifle when she confronted Adam Lanza, the shooter who killed 20 children.
“I wish to God she had an M-4 in her office locked up so when she heard gunfire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in her hands but she takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids,” Gohmert said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
Dawn Hochsprung, Sandy Hook’s principal, was reportedly killed when she confronted Lanza after he forced his way into the school.
The M-4 carbine is a smaller version of the M-16 and AR-15 assault rifles. It was developed for urban combat and its semi-automatic version, which is available to civilians, can fire 45 rounds per minute.
Lanza was armed with a semi-automatic M-4 Bushmaster rifle and two semi-automatic handguns, a Glock and a Sig Sauer.
Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, said all of the victims at the school were killed by a “long gun” rifle, suggesting the Bushmaster was the murder weapon.
Ah yes, the answer to a shoot out at the OK Corral is more guns!!!
Here’s a link to the WAPO coverage of the President’s sermon last night.
President Obama’s speech Sunday night at a memorial service for the victims — mostly children — of a mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut was a forceful assertion that the politics surrounding guns (and gun control) must change.
“We can’t tolerate this anymore,” Obama said. “We are not doing enough and we will have to change.” (Full transcript of speech here.)
Obama noted that this was the fourth time in his presidency that he has had to grieve with a community after an incident of mass murder with a gun. But, his speech in Connecticut Sunday was a significant departure from the other addresses he had given to communities torn apart by shooting sprees.
Speaking in Aurora, Colorado just days after a gunman opened fire in a movie theater this summer, Obama was somber, subdued — and decidedly apolitical. The closest Obama got to making a statement (of any sort) came in the speech’s last line in which he said: “I hope that over the next several days, next several weeks, and next several months, we all reflect on how we can do something about some of the senseless violence that ends up marring this country, but also reflect on all the wonderful people who make this the greatest country on Earth.”
It was a very different Obama who took the stage at the Newtown memorial Sunday, a president not just saddened by the tragedy but fed up with the lack of forward movement in hopes of preventing the next one.
One sentence in Obama’s speech sums up his state of mind. “I’ll use whatever power this office holds…in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this,” he said — a line the incumbent never came close to uttering in Aurora or, before that, in Tucson in 2011.
Speaker Boehner appears to be warming up to the process of negotiating.
House Speaker John A. Boehner has offered to push any fight over the federal debt limit off for a year, a concession that would deprive Republicans of leverage in the budget battle but is breathing new life into stalled talks over the year-end “fiscal cliff.”
The offer came Friday, according to people in both parties familiar with the talks, as part of the latest effort by Boehner (R-Ohio) to strike a deal with President Obama to replace more than $500 billion in painful deficit-reduction measures set to take effect in January.
With the national debt already bumping up against a $16.4 trillion cap set last year, Congress risks a government default unless it acts to raise the debt ceiling in the next few months. Some Republicans had argued that party leaders should use the threat of default to demand additional spending cuts from Obama.
Boehner’s offer signals that he expects a big deal with sufficient savings to meet his demand that any debt limit increase be paired dollar for dollar with spending cuts. That would permit him to keep a key vow to his party — and head off a potentially nasty debt-limit fight — at least until the end of next year.
So, that’s it from me.What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Sandy Hook Up Dates
Posted: December 16, 2012 Filed under: Gun Control | Tags: Assault rifles, gun control, NRA, Sandy Hook 49 Comments
The President will speak tonight in a memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook Shooting. I thought I’d try to provide you a list of various articles and updates to read as we try to make sense of something senseless.
This moving article by Gary Wills in the New York Review of Books aligns the interests of the gun fetishists with the worship of Moloch a blood thirsty old testament god who was only appeased by the sacrifice of small children.
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?
Its power to do good is matched by its incapacity to do anything wrong. It cannot kill. Thwarting the god is what kills. If it seems to kill, that is only because the god’s bottomless appetite for death has not been adequately fed. The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.
Senator Diane Feinstein announced her intention to introduce gun control legislation on the first day of Senate Business in 2013.
Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein said Sunday that she will introduce a new ban on assault weapons when the new Congress convenes next year, and she expects President Barack Obama to support it.
Appearing on Meet The Press in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 26 on Friday, Feinstein, who sponsored the first federal ban on assault weapons which expired in 2004, said she is ready to push to reinstate it.
“It’s being done with care, it will be ready on the first day, I’ll be announcing House authors, and we’ll be prepared to go — and I hope the nation will be prepared to help,” she said.
State Police in Connecticut announced what we all knew and feared. The slaughter in Sandy Hook was caused by a military style semi-automatic assault rifle capable of showering those little bodies with hundreds of bullets in a matter of minutes. The shooter had hundreds of rounds and magazines.
Adam Lanza had hundreds of rounds and used multiple high capacity magazines when he went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first graders and six adults, Connecticut State Police said today.
After shooting at victims in two classrooms and a hallway with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle, he put a bullet into his own head with a handgun.
“The weapon that was utilized most of the time during this horrific crime was identified as a Bushmaster AR-15 assault weapon,” Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance said. “The trajectory of the shots and all of the ammunition used in the horrible crime will be examined.”
Vance said three weapons were found at the scene, while a fourth, a shotgun, was recovered from Lanza’s vehicle.
Amid all the discussion, the NRA remains silent. Additionally, no pro gun rights senator would appear on MTP. Many folks believe that “The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Has Blood on His Hands”.
There should be special place in hell reserved for LaPierre. He likes to fulminate about gun owners’ rights. But so far he’s has been silent on the nation’s most recent gun massacre.
The NRA not only lobbies on behalf of “stand your ground” laws, but also offers insurance to members to pay for the legal costs of shooting people in “self-defense.” The NRA also defends the right of Americans to carry concealed weapons, including handguns.
Adam Lanza—the 20-year old man who walked into the Connecticut school shot his victims with a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle—is no doubt deranged. He’s not alone. There are lots of crazy people around. But if we make it easy for them to obtain guns, they are more likely to translate their psychological problems into dangerous and deadly anti-social behavior.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2011 there were 15,953 murders in the United States and 11,101 (30 a day) were caused by firearms. Suicides and unintentional shootings account for another 20,000 deaths by guns each year. Of course, many more people are injured—some seriously and permanently—by gun violence.
Will we actually see the NRA’s death grip on Congress come to an end?
According to a 2011 Gallup survey, 47 percent of Americans own some kind of firearm, and the total number of nonmilitary guns in circulation exceeds 300 million. There are nearly 130,000 federally registered gun dealers across the country, three and a half times the number of grocery stores. Although the sales transacted by registered dealers are subject to the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which screens out buyers with disqualifying felony convictions or histories of confinement in mental institutions, 40 percent of gun sales are unregulated transactions made by private, unlicensed vendors, many at gun shows and conventions.
In other news ….
Posted: December 15, 2012 Filed under: open thread 19 Comments
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.
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.
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