Last Call

Orange you glad No Labels is back?

Next week when Obama addresses the House of Representatives and the Senate in a joint session, 40 lawmakers from the two parties hope to add some beef: Under their official congressional lapel pins, they’ll wear orange buttons identifying themselves as Problem Solvers and displaying their pledge, “Committed to fix not fight.”

With congressional approval ratings at historic lows, the 23 Democrats and 17 Republicans say they want to move beyond mere symbolism as they tell their peers that they’ve pledged to try to end hyper-partisanship and work across the aisle to solve the country’s most pressing problems.

“We’re meeting on a regular basis, Democrats and Republicans just talking about areas where we think we can work together in a bipartisan way,” said Rep. Ami Bera, a California Democrat who defeated incumbent Republican Rep. Dan Lungren in November.

“The idea is we’ve got to move past being only Democrat or Republican,” Bera said in an interview. “It’s very evident in my freshman class. All of us got elected knowing there was an expectation that we would work together.”

Aww.  Aren't these guys precious?  And let's remember, the top priority of these totally bipartisan sentinels of awesome bipartisanship that is bipartisan is the House GOP Super Austerity Budget so we can get rid of that awful debt crisis that doesn't actually exist.  And yet they're against sequestration, too...because that would cut defense spending, a big no-no.  See, the kind of deficit reduction these guys are looking for has to be made up of all of us taking it in the shorts so the 1% can get more money, and then gift us with life like the overclass they were always meant to be.

In short, the primary constituency of No Labels is totally Villagers like Joe Klein.

For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude. We simmer with anticipation each time a new bipartisan initiative or Gang (of Six, of ... anything) is offered--and we are inevitably disappointed. The results are either too pedestrian, in a Solomonic slice-the-baby way, or far too ambitious. Abolish the Electoral College! Grant public funding for election campaigns! Start a third party! In 2012 there was a megafoolish, if well-funded, effort by a group called Americans Elect to raise an independent Cincinnatus to run for President via an Internet draft. It flopped, spectacularly. Oh, there are worthy think tanks with names like the Bipartisan Policy Center and Third Way. And there is the memory of a centrist research group, the Progressive Policy Institute, that provided Bill Clinton with many of his best proposals in 1992. But we moderates generally suffer from too much righteousness, too little populist grit and too many compound sentences.

I am, however, slightly optimistic again. On Jan. 10 I witnessed a public act of humility by 24 members of Congress, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. The event was sponsored by a centrist group called No Labels. It was revolutionary not only in its humility but also in its agenda. There was no agenda. They simply agreed to start talking to one another.

Oh there's an agenda there.  It completely involves bipartisan agreement to streamline and fix broken Washington and the political process, which I agree with.  They want to really, actually, totally reform the filibuster, which I agree with.  They want the parties to come together to form a large majority to pass major legislation, together, which I agree with.  They want to form a huge voting bloc of power enough to break the deadlock of Washington politics, which I agree with.

And then they want to take those badly needed structural repairs to our political machine in order to immediately ram through a massive austerity package and cause economic suffering of an overwhelming majority of American citizens for the benefit of enriching people with eight or more digits in their personal net worth numbers, which I kinda have a major friggin' problem with.

So yes, you No Labels guys can take your Right Ideas Used For Impressive Amounts Of Evil and go have a seat during the State Of The Union addy.  Thanks.

The Cold Core Remains Of What Began With A Passionate Start

But that can’t happen to us, cause it’s always been a matter of trust.

PPP’s annual poll on TV news finds that there’s only one source more Americans trust than distrust: PBS. 52% of voters say they trust PBS to only 29% who don’t trust it. The other seven outlets we polled on are all distrusted by a plurality of voters.

Just like its actual ratings, Fox News has hit a record low in the four years that we’ve been doing this poll. 41% of voters trust it to 46% who do not. To put those numbers into some perspective the first time we did this poll, in 2010, 49% of voters trusted it to 37% who did not. Fox has maintained most of its credibility with Republicans, dropping just from 74/15 to 70/15 over that period of time. But it’s been losing what standing it had with Democrats (from 30/52 to 22/66) and independents (from 41/44 to 32/56).

We find once again this year that Democrats trust everything except Fox, and Republicans don’t trust anything other than Fox. Democrats put the most faith in PBS (+61 at 72/11), followed by NBC (+45 at 61/16), MSNBC (+39 at 58/19), CBS (+38 at 54/16), CNN (+36 at 57/21), ABC (+35 at 51/16), and Comedy Central (+10 at 38/28). Out of the non-Fox channels Republicans have the most faith in PBS at -21 (27/48),  followed by NBC (-48 at 18/66), CNN (-49 at 17/66), ABC (-56 at 14/70), MSNBC (-56 at 12/68), CBS (-57 at 15/72), and Comedy Central (-58 at 8/66).

I would feel sorry for FOX News, but they brought this upon themselves with a business model designed specifically around building an echo chamber and then complaining about the acoustics to everyone else.  Dick Morris is gone, as is Snowmobile Snooki, but they’re picking up Assclown Assclownson and Professional New England Himbo Scott Brown, proving once again that wingnuts never really get discredited, they just fail along various vectors with a partial positive component.   In other words, if FOX is only bleeding credibility among the GOP at the rate of only one percent a year, they have a very long and lucrative time left wrecking our country.

Call it the Calculus of Derp.

Enjoying The Northern Lights

When it comes to light bulbs in the 21st century, it may be time to look to that world-famous bastion of technological innovation...

...Canada.

A trio of Canadians claimed Wednesday to have invented the world’s most energy-efficient bulb: a 12-watt LED light that shines as bright as a 100-watt incandescent one.

Product developer Gimmy Chu told AFP the NanoLight design consists of a circuit board dotted with LED lights and folded into the shape of a bulb that plugs into a regular light fixture.

“We needed the light to shine in all directions to mimic a traditional incandescent light bulb,” said Chu, who with pals Tom Rodinger and Christian Yan launched a company last year to market the product after working on it for three years.

The idea has raised more than $100,000 on a US crowdfunding website and generated pre-orders for more than 3,000 bulbs in the last month, according to Chu.

The best thing about the NanoLight is the fact it's a Kickstarter project.

The NanoLight is still dealing with an issue common to LED lightbulb replacements: cost. A 100W equivalent NanoLight will set you back a $45 pledge. If you want the super-bright white version that outputs 1800 lumens, it will cost you $100. Depending on the cost of electricity in your area, you may be able to recover the investment over time, especially considering the expected longevity of the LEDs.

Interest in the NanoLight has been pretty intense. With 44 days left to go on the project, it has already nearly quadrupled the original $20,000 funding goal. Kickstarter may well be giving us an early glimpse into the future of household LED lighting.

Indeed, looking at the page this morning, the NanoLight has left that $20,000 goal in the dust and is over 150 grand with a month to go still.   Considering the success of Kickstarter tech projects like the Pebble watch as full-fledged tech start-ups these days, it's nice to see that Thomas Edison's Menlo Park digs lives on here on the net, with a global reach.

And yeah, I just might drop a couple bucks on a light bulb with corners.

StupidiNews!

• On a trip to Egypt, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had to dodge shoes thrown at him by men in a crowd in Cairo.
• President Obama has ordered the release of administration memos on drone strikes to Congress ahead of today's confirmation hearing for CIA director nominee John Brennan.
• The President's pick for Interior Secretary is Sally Jewell, the CEO of outdoor outfitter REI, leaving both conservationists and energy lobbyists cautiously optimistic.
• Ahead of its PlayStation 4 console release later this spring, electronics giant Sony posted its eighth consecutive quarterly loss as it continues to struggle versus Apple and Samsung.
• Microsoft's next Xbox console is expected to use a persistent internet connection to lock out used games and prevent re-sale of game discs.

Last Call

Last call for Saturday mail, folks.

The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service says it plans to stop delivering mail on Saturdays, but continue delivering packages six days a week.

In an announcement scheduled for later Wednesday, the service is expected to say the cut, beginning in August, would mean a cost saving of about $2 billion annually.

The move accentuates one of the agency's strong points — package delivery has increased by 14 percent since 2010. The delivery of letters and other mail has declined with the increasing use of email and other Internet use.

Let's recall why the USPS is struggling:  because Republicans in Congress forced the agency to pay their retiree helth care costs decades down the road up front in 2006, then refused to give them the money to do that.  As a result, the USPS made massive workforce cuts and forced thousands into early retirement, which of course means the USPS has to pay those health care benefits up front, putting them into a death spiral.

The financial woes of the U.S. Postal System have become a point of contention on Capitol Hill. The Postal Service is supposed to make a $5.5 billion payment to its retiree health care fund by November 18th... but doesn't have the money.

US Postal Service workers have a retiree health care benefit in addition to their pension. Before Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, the USPS operated under a pay-as-you-go model for retiree health care funding. The new law requires the Postal Service to pre-fund its benefit obligations.

"The idea is that enough money is saved over the course of a career that the benefit is fully paid for by the time the worker retires.

Thanks to these prefunding payments, the Postal Service has greatly reduced its unfunded obligations for retiree health benefits. At the end of fiscal year 2010, these obligations were under $49 billion – a substantial sum, but much more manageable. If the Postal Service continues making its prefunding payments, its unfunded obligations for retiree health benefits will be around $33 billion by the end of the decade. And the postal service will be on course to pay these benefits over time," a Congressional insider explained.

Sure, unless you force early retirement so that the benefit is paid for well ahead of time, thus leaving the USPS unable to pay for anything else.  Like, you know, operating costs.  It's like the government came to you and said "OK, you're 25 years old, but you have to pay for every dime of your Medicare that we project you will use for the next ten years, rather than over the next 40 years.  We'll be docking half of your paycheck until you get to that number.  Good luck paying your rent or feeding your kids."

Also, let's remember who lost the roughly 160,000 jobs since the PAEA was passed:  middle-class civil service workers, a disproportionate amount of them African-American.

African-Americans make up about 20 percent of U.S. Postal Service workers - and are the majority in some urban centers, representing 75 percent to 80 percent of the 5,000 letter carriers in the Chicago area, according to Mack Julion, president of the Chicago branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers.

But the public sector has cut nearly 600,000 jobs since 2009, due to shrinking government budgets and a range of other issues, according to the Bureau of Labor Relations. The slower recovery for African-Americans in the labor market has, in part, been the result of government layoffs after the end of the recession was declared, according to the DOL report. In December, the black unemployment rate was 14 percent, roughly double that of whites.

While some other sectors of the economy are seeing recovery, the biggest problems may be just beginning for the Post Office, the nation's second-largest civilian employer after Wal-Mart with about 536,000 career workers.

Death spiral accomplished, right?  There's a reason why the Postal Service was targeted folks, it was a source of tens of thousands of middle-class jobs, especially for minorities.  Since We Can't Have Nice Things, the PAEA was passed and BLAMMO, a recession coupled with structural failure in the Postal Service all but guaranteed a massive loss of jobs.  And the USPS still has another 4 years to go to pay off the $22 billion or so it has left to pay off, thanks to Dubya.  On top of all this, there are plenty of folks who keep saying the only way to save the USPS is to privatize the mail system completely.

In the case of the Postal Service, though, privatization has become the best path forward, mainly because it would take Congress out of the picture. As New York Times columnist Joe Nocera recently argued, “the problem is that neither the management nor the workers really control the Postal Service. Even though the post office has been self-financed since the 1980s, it remains shackled by Congress, which simply can’t bring itself to allow the service to make its own decisions.” And Congress won’t do so, as long as the post office remains part of the government.

The Postal Service has many assets that could be managed more efficiently, if Congress got out of the way. In addition to its 32,000 post offices, it has 461 processing facilities, monopoly access to residential mailboxes and an overfunded pension plan. These assets would attract bidders. Consider, for example, that many processing facilities and post offices sit on valuable real estate, and it may be smarter to sell many of them than to keep them.

Which awful glibertarian scold said that?  You get points for coming up with none other than former Obama OMB head and current Citigroup exec Peter Orszag before clicking on the above link.  Saving the USPS is not something that's apparently very high priority for the current administration either, and this is one of the times I disagree with them on economic policy.  These are jobs that aren't going to be coming back, either, especially here in Cincy.

So yeah, part of me feels like going postal on just about everybody in DC.  This was one of those "self-inflicted wounds" to the economy that President Obama was talking about yesterday, and not a hell of a lot happened to try to fix it.  Ironically, it's postal service in rural areas that will be cut back the most because of these changes, but this was a needless anchor thrown around the neck of the USPS, and nobody in DC threw them a lifeline when the opportunity was there.  Postal jobs aren't sexy.

See ya, Saturday mail.  It was cool while it lasted.

Here's What Paul Harvey's Farmers Really Look Like

Dodge had a questionable commercial set to an old Paul Harvey speech during the Super Bowl, depicting the heroic American Farmer.  Only one problem:  today's massive corporate farms have about as much to do with the mythical vaunted family farm as the migrant workers who provide all the labor.

Isaac Cubillos posted his version of the ad, similarly set to now-deceased right-wing radio personality Paul Harvey 1978 speech “So God Made a Farmer.” But instead of images of white male farmers, as featured in Sunday’s Dodge ad (riffed from an already existing YouTube video), but instead featured images of Latinos and Latinas.

Latino rights group Cuéntame also made a similar tribute to immigrant farmers, below.

A 2012 fact sheet released by the National Center for Farmworker Health, based on a Department of Labor survey, estimated that 72 percent of all farmworkers are foreign born. They also estimated that 22 percent of crop workers were female.

Picking your produce is one of the "jobs Americans won't do".  We leave that to immigrant seasonal workers paid less than minimum wage, under the table, with no benefits, and then we complain Latinos are all "lazy takers" who are there to score government money.

Funny how that works.

Another Dead Shot Situation

It's a good thing America has 300 million firearms, so that only bad guys get hurt.

Police say a 75-year-old man in Dallas is being charged with Capital Murder after he allegedly shot and killed two neighbors because they had dumped dog feces on his porch.

According to The Dallas Morning News, Chung Kim had repeatedly complained to management at Sable Ridge Apartments that Michelle Jackson and Jamie Stafford, who lived above him, had dumped dog feces on his porch and allowed their dog, Selena, to urinate on the upstairs balcony which dripped down to his patio.

Tension finally boiled over on Monday when Kim was on his patio and shot 31-year-old Jackson multiple times as she stood on the patio above him, police said. He then reportedly went upstairs and shot Stafford, who was also 31, as he was trying to escape. After Stafford fell from the second floor, Kim is accused of going back downstairs and shooting him again.

Of course Second Amendment, so FREEDOM. 

"But Zandar, none of the existing gun control laws on the books could have stopped this senseless murder," you'll say.   And people still die from drunk driving accidents, but nobody ever says "Well, you can't stop drunk driving deaths with laws so why have laws involving drunk driving?"  Furthermore, nobody has large paranoid cults of people screaming "Obama is coming to take my booze!" when this stuff happens, either.

Oh, and has anybody asked if the 75-year old guy had an XBOX yet?  I'm sure it was the fault of video games, right?

StupidiNews!

• The Boy Scouts of America will decide today whether or not to end the organization's ban on openly gay members.
• A 3-year old boy in South Carolina was killed last week when he mistook his mother's loaded pink handgun for a toy.
• President Obama will visit Israel and the West Bank this Spring with speculation growing about reviving the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process in his second term.
• The Royal Bank of Scotland is expected to face fines of nearly $800 million for its role in manipulating the world's key currency rate, the Libor.
• A new largest prime number has been discovered, an extremely rare Mersenne Prime, by a volunteer researcher at the University of Central Missouri.

Last Call

For the Paranoid Patrol, the President's gun control agenda plus drone warfare equals mass assassination squads taking out "patriots" in 2013.  Stephanie Mencimer at MoJo:

Various tea party activists, libertarian websites and other conspiracy-minded Obama haters are claiming that Russian security forces have discovered that Obama is about to unleash "death squads" across America to assassinate defenders of the Second Amendment. According to Liberty.com, one of the sites perpetuating this latest story, Russian intelligence has outlined the whole nefarious plot in a memo for President Vladimir Putin, detailing the Obama's administration's dispatch of "VIPER teams...which is the acronym for Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response Team, a programme run by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and whose agents terrify millions of Americans with Nazi-like Gestapo tactics on a daily basis at airports and who report to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)."

Liberty.com (run by a Florida tea party leader), which echoes the theory promoted by similar sites, maintains that these teams—800 of them, to be precise—are set to "disperse throughout his country in preparation for what Russian intelligence analysts are predicting to be a series of high-profile killings of dissident Americans set to begin as soon as February 22nd." Obama has apparently been emboldened to launch such an operation by the recent federal court ruling upholding his right to kill American citizens with drone strikes without explaining why.

Supposedly OBAMA DEATH SQUADS have already killed off a couple wingers and in a few weeks, America will be swarming with SOCOM guys and WOLVEREEEEEEENS.

Or here's another option: the conspiracy theorists and anti-Obama activists warning of impending death squads could have fallen for a pretty obvious hoax. They don't, after all, seem to have an actual copy of the alleged Russian security memo to Putin. And there's this: WhatDoesItMean.com was one of the earliest promoters of this "story," and it's an infamous conspiracy and "alternative news" site that is the source of hundreds of fictional doomsday reports. (It once published a story claiming that the earthquake in Haiti was caused by erroneous weapons testing by the US Navy.) Liberty.com and other sites have been quoting directly from WhatDoesItMean.com. So perhaps gun-rights activists should relax; they've got nothing more menacing to worry about than the pending legislation on Capitol Hill.

Imagine that.  You know, "President killing people" theories are delightfully old school Clinton playbook stuff, which is a nice change of pace from the usual racist twaddle we've been seeing since 2007, don't you think?

Eating Your Obamacare Broccoli

More and more GOP-controlled states are quietly taking advantage of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion programs, and it's really pissing off the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.  Shocking, huh.  Even GOP Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona thinks it's a good idea, and she's singled out for particular scorn.

Providers are especially powerful at the state and local level, and the goal now is to rush the Brewer-Obama condominium through the Phoenix legislature with little debate. A particular offender is the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, a trade group whose 2012 agenda includes "Oppose Taxpayer Bill of Rights-style legislative referendums or bills that arbitrarily limit state spending."

Ms. Brewer's other rationale is that everybody else is doing it, and that if Arizona opts out of a larger Medicaid then "Arizona's tax dollars would simply be passed to another state." Well, no, Washington would simply spend less money that it doesn't have. In any event Arizona is already a net tax beneficiary—pulling down $1.19 from the feds for every dollar it sends to D.C., according to the Tax Foundation.

Ten other GOP Governors have rejected Mr. Obama's Medicaid bribe, with another 20, Democrats and Republicans, undecided. Twenty are expanding, including Republicans Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Jack Dalrymple of North Dakota and even, on Monday, Ohio's John Kasich. Thus does modern government create the carrots and sticks of ever-larger government.

Those ten other states will come around.   Why?  Because Medicare expansion is the most cost effective way to deal with a growing population that has health care needs to be met.  Government is going to and should grow as America's population grows...but don't try telling the WSJ that.

Crossed Wires And Mixed Signals

My only question about this FCC plan to take part of the unused public broadcast spectrum and turn it in to national WiFi is how quickly the telecom giants will get Republicans to kill it...if it wasn't a load of nonsense in the first place.

The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.

The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google, Microsoft and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor.

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.

If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, con­nections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.

“For a casual user of the Web, perhaps this could replace carrier service,” said Jeffrey Silva, an analyst at the Medley Global Advisors research firm. “Because it is more plentiful and there is no price tag, it could have a real appeal to some people.”

Sounds too good to be true?  It is.  This will die a quiet, lonely death.  Republicans will never allow this to exist.  They will block it until the telecoms can rally around a "grassroots" ad campaign that will show vast hordes of Those People using FREE OBAMA WIFI to watch porn, blow up churches, deal meth to preschoolers, get remote control abortion procedures, play violent video games and vote Democratic.

By the time the GOP is done with this nonsense, it'll be a near felony to have a social media account, and Republicans will be on TV screaming about how the real plan is to put America's phone companies out of business and destroy millions of jobs and will cost trillions of taxpayer dollars a month and how if you use his SOCIALIST ABOMINATION that Baby Jesus will die in your arms when the President's army of Twitter Cops track you down in real-time for insulting President Killwhitey McReparations so FREEDOM AND TREE OF LIBERTY AND DON'T TREAD ON ME.

On top of that as Jon Brodkin over ar Ars Technica reminds us, this FCC "White Spaces" plan has been sitting there for years and isn't going anywhere..and the above Washington Post story is mostly fantasy.

I saw the story this morning, read it, and was confused. Isn't this just the White Spaces proposal that's been around for a few years and has never once been pitched as "free Wi-Fi for all"? White Spaces may well be an important step toward expanding Internet access, but it isn't going to bring free Wi-Fi to every major US city.

It seemed no one was asking the most obvious question: who would build Wi-Fi everywhere and give it away for free? "It would cost money, so I don't see a path toward ubiquitous free Wi-Fi that is at an acceptable quality level," wireless engineer Steven Crowley told me in an e-mail today.

White Spaces takes the spectrum from empty TV channels and allows the airwaves to be used for Wi-Fi, or "Super Wi-Fi" as it's sometimes called. Using lower frequencies than traditional Wi-Fi, White Spaces signals would be better at penetrating obstacles and thus travel farther.

But the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) isn't going to build the network itself. The agency allocates spectrum for certain uses to spur private investment—someone else will have to find a reason to build it.

So why would wireless carriers build something that would put themselves out of business?

Above all, a national WiFi network would, you know, actually convinced tens of millions of people that the federal government can serve the greater good, and we can't have that.  Besides, people might actually look up science on the internet and learn how the Earth isn't 6,000 years old with fossils planted by THE DEVIL, and then that will lead to slow dancing and then end of the universe.  Even if it wasn't the overactive imagination of the Washington Post.

The story vastly overpromises what the FCC is planning, but don't worry, the same Republicans who insist President Obama gave away millions of government cell phones to buy votes will insist that taxpayer dollars will be used to give Those People free Super WiFi and this becomes the next Solyndra.

Count on it.

StupidiNews!

• After six days, an Alabama child is safe and the man who took him hostage in an underground bunker is dead after police made their move to save the child from "imminent danger".
• Leicester University researchers have confirmed through DNA evidence that the bones found under a British parking lot are indeed the remains of King Richard III.
• The Senate GOP led by Alaska's Lisa Murkowski has released an energy plan that calls for more drilling and eliminating a host of environmental regulations.
• Ratings agency Standard & Poors is being sued by the Justice Department for its role in evaluating subprime mortgages as risk-free.
• The White House has released a legal policy review that gives the President "broad authority" with the power to conduct "pre-emptive cyber warfare."

Last Call

The Great Conserva-schism I talked about over the weekend is now a war in earnest.  The corporate wing of the GOP has decided enough is enough with Tea Party anchors around the GOP's collective necks when it comes to trying to win back the Senate.  They've formed the Conservative Victory Project to push the Tea party loonies out the back door.  The problem is that the Tea Party isn't taking this lying down, and they have plenty of money backing them too.

Both the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund – two of the most prominent groups that have boosted candidates on the right – mocked the new initiative as yet another hapless establishment-side attempt to muzzle the GOP base.

Matt Hoskins, executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, branded it the “Conservative Defeat Project.”

“The Conservative Defeat Project is yet another example of the Republican establishment’s hostility toward its conservative base. Rather than listening to the grassroots and working to advance their principles, the establishment has chosen to declare war on the party’s most loyal supporters,” Hoskins said. “If they keep this up, the party will remain in the wilderness for decades to come.”

Club for Growth spokesman Barney Keller essentially responded by pointing to the scoreboard in recent primaries in which conservative insurgents have prevailed and emerged as influential GOP leaders.

“They are welcome to support the likes of Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist and David Dewhurst,” Keller said of the new Crossroads group. “We will continue to proudly support the likes of Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.”

Them's fightin' words, kids.  The war over the direction of the GOP is finally on.  Both sides are now drawing lines and taking up battle positions ahead of the 2014 primaries.  Each side is convinced the other will lead the GOP to total defeat and domination by the Democrats.

The funny part is this:  both of them are right.  The GOP is screwed either way.  They can't win national elections with the reactionary right, and they can't win primaries without them.  It's going to be awfully fun watching these guys rip each other to shreds to see who's left standing...

...because it'll be the Democrats, either way.

Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammu-Nation

The nation's largest semi-automatic rifle dealer (that would be your local Wal-Mart, by the way) is instituting a national limit on ammunition to three boxes a day as paranoia over "Obama's gun grab" ramps up towards a fever pitch.

"In order to take care of as many customers as possible, starting Thursday, January 24, all ammunition sales were limited to three boxes per customer, per day as supply is limited at this time," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Ashley Hardie Read said.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is the world's largest retailer and the United States' largest gun seller, a position that comes with a lot of responsibility. In the past, the company has said it tries to provide firearms and accessories in a responsible manner without interfering on the customers' right to own firearms, Christian Post reported.

According to data from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System, nine of the top 10 days for firearms checks in the U.S. from Nov. 30, 1998 to Jan. 27 2013, occurred since the shooting at Newtown Elementary School, Dispatch noted. 

In other words, gun and ammo sales are at record highs since Newtown.  As I said earlier today, Wayne LaPierre and the NRA know exactly what they are doing.  Gun makers are suffering shortages in firearms and now ammunition because they believe armed fascist government agents are going to come and take their guns from them, and by God they will water that Tree Of Liberty if they have to.  The reality of that is nowhere near that, but the NRA isn't going to do a thing to moderate its rhetoric when the NRA's job is to lobby for the gun industry, and the gun industry has never had better sales.

At some point we're going to have something like Ruby Ridge on our hands.

Midnight In The Garden Of Dumb And Dumber

If the NRA's Wayne LaPierre can't go to FOX News Sunday to get a free platform for his paranoid fantasies without being called out by host Chris Wallace, where can he go?

Wallace asked his guest on "Fox News Sunday" if he regretted airing a controversial TV ad in which the NRA went after President Obama for providing armed security to his daughters but not supporting their proposal to put armed guards in all schools.

"They also face a threat that most children do not face," Wallace said of Obama's daughters.

"Tell that to the people in Newtown," LaPierre responded.

"You really think that the president's children are the same kind of target as every other school child in America?" Wallace said. "That's ridiculous and you know it, sir."

Of course he does.  That's the point.  He knows there's tens of millions of paranoid fellow-travelers out there.

Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the NRA, accused the Obama administration of wanting to seek more restrictions on guns than they currently are saying, arguing that the White House was similarly deceptive on the president's healthcare law.

"I think what they'll do is they'll turn this universal [background] check on the law-abiding into a universal registry on law-abiding people," he said on "Fox News Sunday."

When pressed by host Chris Wallace on the fact that the White House has said nothing about a universal registry, LaPierre responded, "And 'ObamaCare' wasn't a tax until they needed it to be a tax. I don't think you can trust these people."

And Wallace didn't call him out and that one.  "Fair and balanced" is a much better slogan than "dangerous and paranoid", don't you think?  The NRA has been playing the "You can't trust them, you can only trust your guns and ammo" card for years now.  Eventually, someone's going to take them up on that offer.