A Shot In The Dark

Living here in Kentucky, I found the tragic and awful story of Caroline Sparks, the two-year old Burkesville girl who was shot and killed by her five-year old brother Kristian, to be especially disturbing.  I grew up in small-town North Carolina and while nobody in my family had guns, I grew up with kids whose families did, and the people of Burkesville feel like they've been singled out as what's wrong in America, like they're awful parents who are being trashed nationally for the crime of living in rural Kentucky.  Trip Gabriel's story in the NY Times features this paragraph:

“I think it’s nobody else’s business but our town’s,” said a woman leaving a store, who like many people here declined to be interviewed. A woman who answered the phone at the office of John A. Phelps Jr., the chief executive of Cumberland County, whose seat is Burkesville, said, “No, I’m sorry — no more statements,” and hung up.

Nobody else's business but our town's.  Having grown up in and around towns like Burkesville, I've seen my share of tragedies.  The problem is when something like this happens, and happens because a rifle specifically manufactured and marketed to parents to be a "child's first firearm" was in the house, you don't get to make that claim that it's not anyone else's business.

The Crickett rifle fired in the fatal shooting is all of our business, all of America's.  We have to ask ourselves if rural culture in the US is being used as a convenient excuse to avoid the responsibility of the gun culture marketing and selling pink and blue .22 caliber rifles to kids.  That's not the fault of the people of Cumberland County, Kentucky.  That's the fault of the gun manufacturers and their nearly unbeatable lobby creating a situation where it's permissible to make real working firearms for kids who should be playing with squirt guns and aren't old enough to know the difference between the two.

I don't blame the people of Burkesville for being horrified and defensive while burning in the national spotlight, but frankly this should have never happened in the first place.  The NRA exists to sell firearms, and they've gotten so powerful now we have gender-coded rifles for your little hunters.  This was apparently going on without too much issue, either.  The company that sold Crickett Rifles made a pretty penny over the years, because it was a popular product.

The issue of course is why it was popular.  I'm betting it still is, hell the NRA is telling parents for safety they need to keep a gun in your kid's room, because that's where you're going to barricade yourself in when the inevitable jackbooted thugs come for you.  I can't think of an outfit that has successfully leveraged the paranoid style better than the NRA, and in rural America, that means there's no way we're going to make any headway with gun control.  Not unless the culture changes, and that's going to take another generation or two.

It's a shot in the dark at best.

Don't Call It A Comeback

He's been here for years.  Looks like I may very well have to eat my words on Mark Sanford losing tomorrow.

PPP's final poll of the special election in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District finds a race that's too close to call, with Republican Mark Sanford leading Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch 47-46. The 1 point lead for Sanford represents a 10 point reversal from PPP's poll of the race two weeks ago, when Colbert Busch led by 9 points at 50-41.

Sanford has gotten back into the race by nationalizing it and painting Colbert Busch as a liberal. A plurality of voters in the district- 47%- say they think Colbert Busch is a liberal compared to 43% who characterize her as ideologically 'about right.' Colbert Busch's favorability rating has dropped a net 19 points compared to 2 weeks ago, from +25 then at 56/31 to +6 now at 50/44.

While Colbert Busch is seen as too liberal, 48% of voters think that Sanford's views are 'about right' on the issues compared to just 38% who see him as too conservative. Sanford's also seen some repair to his image over the course of the campaign. Although he's still unpopular, sporting a -11 net favorability rating at 43/54, that's up a net 13 points from our first poll in March when he was at 34/58.

Pretty good, considering national Republicans walked away from the guy.  SC-1 remains a R+11 district according to the Cook Political Report, meaning that Colbert Busch's 9 point lead was not going to last.  It didn't.  The liberal card still works, folks....and SC Republicans set up the district to make sure that card could be played.

So now we have a tight race that Sanford can definitely pull off, and the election is tomorrow.  We'll see if Colbert Busch can get out the vote, but even if she wins, next November she'll be among the top targets for the GOP to take back in 2014, and the reality is thanks to gerrymandering, it will be a lot easier for them to do so with any candidate who isn't as flawed as Sanford, as Nate Silver points out.

Since 1997 (which is as far back as records of special elections go on history.house.gov), candidates who won a special election in a district carried by the opposing political party in the preceding presidential election have had fleeting tenures in Congress.

There have been 59 special elections since 1997, and just 14 candidates have carried districts that leaned away from their political party (a Republican representing a Democratic-leaning seat or vice versa). Of those 14, 13 no longer hold those seats.1 The lone exception is Representative Ron Barber, who won a full term in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District in 2012 after winning a special election to replace former Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Here's a guy who should be losing by 10...in a district where the Republican has an 11 point advantage.  Voila, a one point lead.  Any nominally competent Republican would win this by double digits, and even if she does pull it off tomorrow, odds a really good that November of next year this goes back to the GOP.

This is the political reality of gerrymandering, folks:  flipping partisan House districts long-term is nearly impossible.

StupidiNews!

• The Senate is expected to vote today and pass legislation to collect state sales taxes from all internet purchases and send the bill to the House.
• Police in Springfield, Mass. are turning to community-building counter-insurgency tactics seen in Iraq and Afghanistan to deal with gang violence.
• Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords has received the 2013 Profile In Courage award from the Kennedy Presidential Library.
• French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici has declared an "end to the dogma of austerity" in the Eurozone as Germany moves to relax financial requirements.
• New research shows bees that feed on high fructose corn syrup instead of nectar are more susceptible to colony collapse.

Last Call: A Case Of Syria's Misjudgment

Meanwhile, our GOOD FRIEND ISRAEL is bombing the crap out of suspected Syrian chemical weapon convoys, and Syria is treating it as an act of outright war.

A series of massive explosions illuminated the dark sky over Damascus early Sunday, igniting renewed claims that Israel has launched attacks into the war-torn country.

Syria's government said the explosions were the second Israeli airstrike in three days. The latest target, officials said, was a military research facility outside the Syrian capital.

A top Syrian official told CNN in an exclusive interview that the attack was a "declaration of war" by Israel.

Syrian authorities vowed to retaliate against Israel but did not specify what action they would take.

The Israeli military would not confirm or deny the Syrian claim that Israel fired rockets that hit the Jamraya research center in the Damascus suburbs.

Syria is apparently giving Hezbollah the green light to attack from Syrian territory and as a result, we've got all but open war about to kick off in the Middle East.  The problems are much bigger however, as it looks like we may have been lied into another war yet again.

U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

I keep telling people that the Syrian rebels are not exactly the sunshine and flowers committee, and I keep telling people we can't get involved in the Syrian civil war because there are no good guys.  Now the UN is saying that one of the rebel groups, not the Asaad regime, that used sarin.  That's exactly what the rebels would want to do in order to draw Israel and the US into a wider international conflict, and Israel has happily obliged them.

Now we've got a shooting war on our hands unless some kinds of miracle happens.  Enjoy, folks.  Syria's going to get turned into a parking lot, and Israel will have all the excuse it needs to take Syrian land.

It's going to be an ugly week, folks.  Stay turned.

Meet The New Boss, Just As Insane As The Old Boss

Meet the NRA's incoming president, Alabama attorney Jim Porter.  Here's a guy who continues a long tradition of insane paranoia and persecution, only he's in charge of an organization of millions of heavily armed people, and dammit, it's Obama's fault.

“Last fall, just before the elections, as community-organizer-in chief, President Obama demanded that his followers extract revenge,” Porter said. “I can’t remember a president ever publicly using that word against fellow Americans. Revenge is what’s motivating the president’s unrelenting attacks on gun owners today.”

The statement was an apparent reference to the president’s Nov. 2 statement at a campaign rally that “voting’s the best revenge” after his supporters booed the mention of Republican congressmen.

Porter also said the president’s push for expanded background checks on gun sales was motivated by revenge, calling it a “national gun registration” incited by the defeat of the Toomey-Manchin amendment in the Senate.

“What this universal scheme would have done is to make honest citizens do a criminal act,” Porter said. “Sell a gun to a good neighbor, just like you would do today, become a felon. And the government takes your guns. But losing in a Senate vote is not going to stop Obama. He’s now threatening Democratic senators who are friends of [the] NRA. He will destroy them, if he can.”

Porter is of course outright lying.  The Manchin-Toomey legislation specifically made using background check information in creation of a national gun registry a federal felony, not less than three times in the bill.  The current Brady Bill legislation also prevents that.  Jim Porter is, like Wayne LaPierre before him, a complete liar, but it doesn't matter.

Paranoia with a hair-trigger is an awesome way for someone involved in all this to get hurt or killed.  But the NRA doesn't care:  if they did, they'd be pushing responsible firearm ownership instead of this nonsense.  It sure is making gun and ammo manufacturers a lot of money, however.

Funny how that works, huh?

Check Your Suit (And Ego) At The Door

As promised, I review Robert Downey, Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow in Iron Man 3:



Tony Stark (Downey) is flying pretty high these days, he's saved the world from an extra-dimensional alien invasion in The Avengers and his girlfriend and current Stark Enterprises CEO Pepper Potts (Paltrow) has moved in with him to the World's Biggest Man Cave in Malibu.  His pal Col. Jim "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle) has upgraded his War Machine suit to become the Iron Patriot, and the world is happily running without the need for ol' Shellhead Stark to save it.

But Stark's nagging perfectionism, relentless drive, and boundless ego are always an armory full of double-edged swords, and without anything positive to focus on, he's latched on to his near-death experience in New York at the hands of the aliens and it's driving everyone around him nuts, most of all Pepper.

When his friend Happy Hogan (director Jon Favreau) is critically injured in a bombing attack (on Grumman's Chinese theater no less) by international terrorist The Mandarin (played by the totally awesome Ben Kingsley, devouring scenes wholesale), Stark has something new to obsess over and immediately calls out the criminal mastermind.  It's a check his ego writes that his technology can't cash, as The Mandarin's counterstrike leaves Tony presumed dead, without anything except his wits, a wrecked Mark 42 Iron Man suit, and a poncho.

From there the movie tries to answer the question:  Who is Tony Stark outside of his suit?  Without his toys and billions in resources, is he really a hero or just a fast-talking egomanaical jackass with a lot of money and weapons, more of a danger to humanity than an example of its best qualities?

Stark has to get his crap together pretty quickly, because The Mandarin actually has one of the best comic book supervillain master plans I've seen in a long time, and on top of all that Tony Stark's going to have to pay for a mistake he made 13 years earlier, involving a scientific genius named Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce) and his super-tech think tank, Advanced Idea Mechanics...

I don't want blow the ending, but it's definitely the best movie in the Iron Man franchise and comes very, very close to the greatness of The Avengers to boot.  (Yes, it's good enough to make you forget all about the awful Iron Man 2.)  Go see this one folks, be sure to check out the trailer for Thor: The Dark World and as always with a Marvel film, be on the lookout for Stan Lee and stick around for the stinger at the end (especially you Science Bros. fans!)

Excelsior!

StupidiNews, Best Weekend Ever Edition!

First weekend in May is still the best weekend ever, with Star Wars Day today (May the Fourth be with you!) as well as Derby Day here in Kentucky on top of Free Comic Book Day (and Iron Man 3 is out!) as well as Cinco de Mayo tomorrow.

I'll have a review of the third film starring Robert Downey Jr. in the role the universe created him to play, Tony Stark, here later today.

Have a good one, folks!

Last Call: Worse Than You Know Who

Former Dubya-era White house press flack Ari Fleischer talking about the Gitmo hunger strikes, go home, you're drunk.

The events sparked a debate on CNN last night, prompting former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer to defend his former boss’s decision to open Gitmo to begin with. “We have it because these people did not even follow the law of war, let alone the rule of war,” he said, adding, “These people didn’t even wear a military uniform. They engaged in battle against America as terrorists, a violation of the laws of war. That’s why Guantanamo got invented.”

But most legal experts say detention practices at Gitmo violate international law.

“This country fought Adolf Hitler. And I don’t really believe that Osama bin Laden and his group are worse or more dangerous than Adolf Hitler,” CNN legal expert Jeffery Toobin countered Fleischer, adding, “We managed to defeat Adolf Hitler by following the rule of law.”

 Free advice:  He's a bad guy.

Backed in a corner, Fleischer then went a bit off the rail:

FLEISCHER: They [the Germans] followed the law of war. They wore uniforms and they fought us on battlefields. These people are fundamentally, totally by design different. And they need to be treated in a different extrajudicial system.

Oh sure, a snappy uniform makes all the difference, Ari.  Jesus wept.  Jackass.

Dispatches From The Green Lantern Pundit Corps

News that unprecedented GOP obstruction of President Obama’s executive appointments (not to mention sequestration) has left several cabinet departments and federal agencies simply unable to function has gotten the usually reasonable Jonathan Bernstein to pen an application to join the Green Lantern Pundit Corps over the glacial speed to which the GOP has reduced the President’s vetting process to.   Faster, President!  Vet!  Vet!

Their motto:  “In brightest day, in blackest night, if Obama just had the will to fight!”

The answer is to reduce, as much as possible, the vetting that goes into these choices. Yes, that probably increases the chances of a scandal down the road sometime. But that cost, visible as it is when it happens, just isn’t as important as the cost of leaving offices empty — and of disqualifying perfectly good men and women who want to give some of their abilities to the public.

I’ve talked before about getting cover for change on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue by putting a commission together dedicated to stopping the madness. But Obama can do most of this on his own. It just takes realizing that the cost of the current levels of vetting are in fact huge, and that it really isn’t that big a deal if a bad apple (or someone who can be portrayed as a bad apple) sneaks in every once in a while. Reduce vetting now!

The problem here remains the Republicans, Jon.  Accepting the framing here that Obama needs to be the one to change to accept the “new reality” of GOP blocking is exactly what the Republicans want, because then that becomes the acceptable norm for the next 44 months.

The far greater cost than the empty agency positions is the damage the Republicans are doing to the idea of good government itself, and the fact that we’re letting them get away with this petty crap only means that “a bureaucracy that can’t possibly function correctly because it’s been hamstrung” is the new normal, and what Americans will be conditioned to accept.  Furthermore, the next time Republicans are in charge, they’ll simply redefine the framing and move the goalposts to “We can fill these positions with whomever we want, plenary executive, suckas!”

Besides, if President Obama speeds up or eliminates the vetting process, A) Republicans will keep obstructing the process anyway, meaning that this isn’t a solution to the root cause of the problem, B) a scandal is exactly what the GOP will need in order to “prove” that Democrats can’t govern, and C) pretty sure President Obama thought of A and B and is going this route anyway.  The actual solution to the problem is to do exactly what the President is doing, carefully vetting and to continue to point out that the Republicans are making governance impossible.  That particular message is penetrating the public.

What this isn’t however is an issue of the sufficiency of the President’s willpower.  The.  Problem.  Is.  The.  Republicans.  Period.  Generate your own willpower to fight them and vote them out of power.

Even More Nullification Nonsense

Once again, South Carolina Republicans are trying to deliberately sabotage federal health care laws as the GOP-controlled state House has quit tinkering around the edges and has now passed legislation that would make any implementation of Obamacare a state felony.

The South Carolina state House on Wednesday passed a so-called “nullification” bill that declares President Barack Obama’s health care reform law to be “null and void,” and criminalizes its implementation.

The South Carolina Freedom of Health Care Protection Act was passed by a state House vote of 65 to 39. The bill intends to “prohibit certain individuals from enforcing or attempting to enforce such unconstitutional laws; and to establish criminal penalties and civil liability for violating this article.”

The measure would allow the state Attorney General “to restrain by temporary restraining order, temporary injunction, or permanent injunction” any person who is believed to be causing harm with the implementation of the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Any South Carolina taxpayer who is forced to pay a penalty due to the federal health care mandate would be able to deduct the full amount of the penalty from their state taxes.

Additionally, the measure would outlaw state and local government from creating or using non-profit health care exchanges a outlined by the health care reform law. 

Fort Sumter all over again.  The state's Senate is expected to pass the law and it could be on Gov. Nikki Haley's desk by the end of the month.  The question now becomes if Haley, who has sworn not to enforce or implement the bill, will subject the state to federal lawsuits by putting that stance into a clearly unconstitutional state law that will cost taxpayers millions to defend in court.

Meanwhile, I say Republicans should continue to overplay their hand on Obamacare, and throw ridiculous Gadsden Flag fits in public like this.  The people who will get hurt will be red state voters, and if they go to these lengths to make implementation impossible under state law, it's Republicans who then own the consequences, 100%.

We'll see where it goes.

StupidiNews!

• With the signature of Gov. Linc Chafee, Rhode Island becomes the tenth state to legalize same-sex marriage, with ceremonies approved to begin Aug. 1.
• Police in Austin, Texas are asking for help from the public for information about who planted an unexploded explosive device in the city's business district last week.
• Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly told law enforcement officials that the attack was originally planned for July 4th, and was moved up.
• Britain's UK Independent Party has won a quarter of the vote in local elections as the party's main plank, the movement to leave the EU, grows among voters.
• Researchers have gotten tiny robot insects to take flight, but there's a long way to go to make the robots commercially viable.

Last Call

For Bon, a giant rubber duck story.




Because GIANT RUBBER DUCK.

Chucking An Airball On Jason Collins, Race, And Homophobia

There's a distinct reason Esquire's Charles Pierce is in my blogroll.  He is, on a daily basis, one of the truly excellent and most unabashedly liberal voices out there in any medium.  But his take on Jason Collins's coming out over at Grantland contains a rather nasty paragraph that's frankly far beneath him.

To be sure, he's already couched his decision somewhat in the iconic; he says he chose to wear no. 98 in Boston and Washington in honor of Matthew Shepard, the young man who was tied to a fence and beaten to death in Wyoming in 1998, a hate crime so horrific that national hate-crimes legislation bears his name. (Collins also caught President Barack Obama's reference to Stonewall in his second inaugural address in January, a citation that caused a lot of heads to spin.) His explanation for his decision to come out is rich with the historical "dual identity" forced on black Americans under Jim Crow, and the similar dynamic within which he lived as a gay man. Homophobia in the black community — indeed, even among the leaders of the civil rights movement of the 1960s — was some of the most virulent and stubborn of all, and there are still some who resent the equation of the gay rights movement with their struggle. In his announcement in Sports Illustrated, then, Collins gave every indication that he's fully aware of the historic and cultural dimensions of his decision, and of the sacrifices made elsewhere so that he would be free to make it now.

Adam Serwer rightly points out the glaring awfulness of that passage:

There was certainly homophobia in the civil rights movement—but in the 1950s and 60s, American society was homophobic, and Pierce offers no evidence that the civil rights movement was more homophobic than any other American institution during that period. Given that one of the architects of the civil rights movement's nonviolent strategy was Bayard Rustin, it was arguably less homophobic than much of society at the time. With a few notable exceptions, surviving leaders of the movement, from Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), to Rev. James Lawson, to Jesse Jackson, to Julian Bond are all in favor of gay and lesbian rights.

There's also little evidence for the proposition that black homophobia is "the most virulent and stubborn of all." Black folks, who were disenfranchised for centuries, didn't put any of those old anti-sodomy laws on the books. The legal architecture of discrimination based on sexual orientation is one of the few things in America that dates back to colonial times that wasn't built by black people.

Serwer's point is extremely important.  I've written multiple times myself on the completely false notion that African-American voters were responsible for Prop 8 passing in 2008, to the point that it was being manufactured to try to specifically fracture the Obama coalition.  The fact that a writer of Pierce's caliber brings it up in passing is just further evidence of how pervasive this nonsense is.

And if you haven't noticed, our black President came out and said bluntly that full equality, not just tolerance, was the goal for LGBT Americans.  The jarring and visibly hypocritical message of intolerance by some black pastors and priests doesn't equate to "black folks are more homophobic" any more than it does among white pastors and priests, yes?

I'm not slagging on Pierce here, I'm not one tenth the writer he is and I've been wrong ten times as often.  But Adam Serwer is in the right, and the lesson here is that everyone needs to be more aware of this.

Haters Gonna Hate

Well, if this story is true, I hope this guy gets to cool his jets in prison for a very, very long time.

A 39-year-old Muslim cab driver who served in the Iraq war says that an executive from an aviation company accused him of being a jihadist and broke his jaw in what activists are calling a hate crime.

Mohamed A. Salim told The Washington Post that Emerald Aviation President Ed Dahlberg attacked him after he picked him up at Country Club of Fairfax in Northern Virginia at around 2 a.m. on Friday. Dahlberg had been drinking and was told that he would have to finish his open beer before getting into the cab.

Salim recorded audio of the encounter on his cell phone. 

Dahlberg's rant, as recorded on the phone, is pretty horrific.  It's just straight, raw, hate, bred by a decade plus of stupid, ignorant Islamophobia.

Dahlberg was charged with misdemeanor assault and police are determining if charges should be elevated to a felony hate crime. The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on Monday said that medical records and the 11-minute cell phone recording were being used as evidence in the case.

In a statement, Dahlberg’s attorney, Demetry Pikrallidas, admitted that his client “became rather emotional as the discussion turned to jihad and 9/11, and especially heated on the subject of jihadists who want to harm America.”

But Salim is an Iraq War veteran.  Unreal.  Just unreal.  And yet the haters on the right will now ruin Salim's life anyway.  It doesn't matter that he served his country in the military.  Muslims are nothing but subhuman animals to these morons and this is what they want to happen.

Keep openly backing these clowns, GOP.

StupidiNews!

• Three college friends of Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsaenaev have been taken into custody by the FBI on charges of obstructing justice and allegedly removing evidence.
• A team of Smithsonian archaeologists have uncovered remains of a 14-year old girl from the lost Jamestown colony that show evidence starving colonists resorted to cannibalism.
• President Obama has picked Congressman Mel Watt of NC to head the agency that oversees federal mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• North Korea has sentenced an American tourist to 15 years of hard labor, accusing Pae Jun Ho of "committing hostile acts" against the DPRK.
• Cable and internet industry giants are reportedly very happy with President Obama's choice of former lobbyist Tom Wheeler to head the FCC.