Dead To Rights In Missouri

You know what they say, "Guns don't kill people..."

Of course, making it much easier to obtain a gun as Missouri did in 2007 means that the state now has a significantly higher rate of people using guns to kill people, so there's that.

In the past decade, Missouri has been a natural experiment in what happens when a state relaxes its gun control laws. For decades, it had one of the nation’s strongest measures to keep guns from dangerous people: a requirement that all handgun buyers get a gun permit by undergoing a background check in person at a sheriff’s office.

But the legislature repealed that in 2007 and approved a flurry of other changes, including, last year, lowering the legal age to carry a concealed gun to 19. What has followed may help answer a central question of the gun control debate: Does allowing people to more easily obtain guns make society safer or more dangerous?

We now have a pretty clear and tragic answer in Missouri.

Research by Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, found that in the first six years after the state repealed the requirement for comprehensive background checks and purchase permits, the gun homicide rate was 16 percent higher than it was the six years before. During the same period, the national rate declined by 11 percent. After Professor Webster controlled for poverty and other factors that could influence the homicide rate, and took into account homicide rates in other states, the result was slightly higher, rising by 18 percent in Missouri. 

Federal death data released this month for 2014 showed a continuation of the trend, he said. Before the repeal, from 1999 to 2006, Missouri’s gun homicide rate was 13.8 percent higher than the national rate. From 2008 to 2014, it was 47 percent higher. (The new data also showed that the national death rate from guns was equal to that from motor vehicle crashes for the first time since the government began systematically tracking it.) 

Other measures suggested that criminals had easier access to guns after the permit law was repealed. Professor Webster analyzed data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and found that the share of guns that were linked to crimes soon after they were bought doubled in the state from 2006 to 2010. The portion of guns confiscated by the police in Missouri that had been originally bought in the state — ordinarily a very stable statistic — rose to 74 percent last year, from 56 percent before the law changed.

The firearms industry would like you to believe that this is a case where correlation has nothing to do with causation, but the statistics are difficult to reconcile otherwise.

Missouri made it much easier to get a gun.  As a result, more people used them for their intended purpose.  There's now several years of data backing this up...but remember, according to Republicans, science is all a lie, so why bother?

This Week In Dispatches From Bevinstan, Con't

Somehow, I think I'm going to be writing a Stupid Shit My Governor Does column enough so that I should just make it a weekly "all in one place" kinda thing.

Anyway. now that ol' Matt has had a few weeks in house, he's starting to warm up to this whole "executive order" thing when it comes to those pesky same-sex mariage licenses that cause trouble over the fall.

To ensure that the sincerely held religious beliefs of all Kentuckians are honored, Executive Order 2015-048 directs the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives to issue a revised marriage license form to the offices of all Kentucky County Clerks. The name of the County Clerk is no longer required to appear on the form.

So a win for Kim Davis.  Who else can Bevin make happy?  You remember Steve Beshear signing an order to restore voting rights to felons?

GONE.

While Governor Bevin has been a strong advocate for the reinstatement of non-violent felony offenders’ voting and civil rights, Executive Order 2015-052 suspends the provisions of Executive Order 2015-871 as that order is contrary to the Kentucky Constitution and undermines the very right it seeks to restore by circumventing elected representatives in the state legislature and the voice of the people at the ballot box. The Office of the Governor will continue to utilize the processes and procedures under current law in the same manner as the previous administration pending further study and consideration by the Kentucky General Assembly. This Executive Order does not affect anyone whose rights have already been restored by the previous Executive Order.

Also gone, higher minimum wages for state employees and vendors

Executive Order 2015-049 relieves executive branch agencies and vendors of the obligation to comply with the higher minimum wage established by Executive Order 2015-370, except as to classified employees with status who have already received increases as a result of the Executive Order. Their remuneration will not be affected.

...and a new permanent hiring freeze on state positions.

Executive Order 2015-050 prioritizes effective and efficient management of state government operations by implementing a new moratorium on hiring. This order removes all oversight of the merit system hiring from the Governor’s Office. Unlike Gov. Beshear’s Executive Order, which had the Secretary of the Governor’s Executive Cabinet approve all personnel actions regarding merit employees, this Executive Order transfers that responsibility to the Personnel Secretary. Approval of non-merit employees will remain the duty of the Secretary of the Governor’s Executive Cabinet. Furthermore, effective immediately, all vacant positions in any agency will be reviewed to determine if they are necessary to the maintenance of essential government services.

Going to be real fun when Bevin determines that current employees are no longer essential to government services and fires tens of thousands of state workers.

The fun's just beginning here in Bevinstan, folks!

StupidiNews!

• NASA is sending a faulty instrument discovered in its upcoming InSight Mars mission back to Lockheed Martin for repairs, meaning a scheduled March launch is suspended until 2018.
• Greece's parliament has passes a same-sex civil union bill, but critics say the bill still denies several rights to same-sex couples and could lead to more EU legal action.
• Iraqi Army forces say they expect routed Islamic State forces to be removed from the captured city of Ramadi within days, but that still leaves a third of Iraq under ISIS control.
• Low oil prices continue to take a toll on Alberta's economy as provincial unemployment is on the rise above Canada's national average for the first time in more than a decade.
• A New Zealand judge has ordered Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom to be extradited to the US to face criminal copyright infringement charges.

Last Call For Liar, Liar

I know I've long sworn off Politifact's "fact checking" as a source for viable research, but I will note that Donald Trump told so many ridiculous whoppers on the campaign trail this year that the outfit couldn't pick just one as its infamous "Lie of the Year".

Remember, this is a group that once called Obama's "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it" the biggest lie in 2013 when somehow, former Bush press secretary Dee Dee Myers wrote a book on Benghazi claiming that Ambasaador Chris Stevens's body had been dragged through the streets and in 2011 ripped Democrats for daring to attack Paul Ryan's Medicare block grant scheme as the biggest political whopper of that year when in May 2011 Romney called Obamacare a government takeover of healthcare.

So take their determination of Trump with an entire salt mine.  No doubt in 2016, a Democrat will be found as liar of the year so Republicans ca tell whatever whoppers they want starting in January.

Helping Those People Again

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you want to know why Republicans are so eager to sabotage Obamacare, there's a method to the madness.

Whatever Obamacare's shortcomings, a new paper shows one place where the law has been a clear success: narrowing the race gap in health insurance. So why aren't more Democrats shouting that from the rooftops? 

In 2013, the year before most of the law's provisions for subsidized insurance took effect, non-elderly blacks were 47 percent more likely than whites to be uninsured. For American Indians, that figure was 93 percent; for Hispanics, 120 percent. 

In 2014, not only did the share of whites without insurance fall; the share of blacks and Asian Americans fell by more. The difference between whites and Hispanics shrank, from 14 percentage points to 11.8 percentage points.

So yes, Obamacare is helping minorities.  If you want to know why Democrats aren't saying more about that, well, ask Kentucky Governor Jack Conway sometime.

The point of the paper, written by Algernon Austin at the Center for Global Policy Solutions, isn't just to celebrate those gains, but also to show how much room remains for improvement. One of the biggest obstacles to reducing the number of uninsured blacks is the refusal of many states with large black populations to accept federal money to expand their Medicaid programs. Some of those states may come around eventually, but don't hold your breath. 

What's odd about the race gap isn't its persistence, but that its narrowing isn't more celebrated as one of the law's accomplishments. When asked why he thought the gap doesn't get more attention, Austin noted that Obama has spent less time than his predecessors talking about race. "It's been a stance of the administration to really emphasize that President Obama is the president for all Americans," Austin said. 

Perhaps the administration worries that emphasizing the benefits of Obamacare for minorities might make whites think the law isn't so much about them, jeopardizing already tepid public support. In that sense, not harping on race might be good strategy: Maybe the country's fraught relationship with race means the only way to close the gap in health insurance is, in effect, by stealth.

It's okay, Republicans are making the emphasis that Medicaid expansion would help those people more than it would help white Americans for the President and Democrats, which is exactly why red states and Republicans are doing everything they can to stop Medicaid expansion.

Funny how that works.

Trump's Rump, Con't

So where do Donald Trump supporters live, and where does he have the strongest support?  He does well in rural and Christian conservative counties, for sure...but his strongest support comes from Republicans who live in counties with large black and/or Hispanic populations.

The celebrity businessman does particularly well in counties that the American Communities Project calls Minority Centers. Data from the last three polls show Mr. Trump has the support of 34% of Republican primary voters who live in those communities, the highest share seen in any of the seven county types that the communities project is studying for the 2016 campaign. 

You can see a map of all the 2016 county types as designed by the communities project here. Note the green Minority Center counties running through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Many of those states vote on March 1; South Carolina votes even earlier. March 5 brings Kentucky and Louisiana. On March 8 is Mississippi. 

With polling scarce in most of the Southern states, Mr. Trump’s strength in the Minority Center counties is one of the few available signals of how he might perform in the region. 

Moreover, the analysis suggests that Mr. Trump has pockets of strength that could prove valuable in states, some of them beyond the South, that award delegates to the top vote-winner in each congressional district. Districts with a large minority population may not include large numbers of Republicans, but they award delegates, nonetheless. Winning those districts could yield Mr. Trump a sizeable cache of delegates in states such as South Carolina and California.

Trump is doing the best among Republicans who live in counties in the South with a lot of non-white people?

You don't say.  WHOCUDDANODE?

I never would have imagined.

StupidiNews!

• Commercial spaceflight company SpaceX successfully launched and landed its reusable Falcon 9 space rocket at Cave Canaveral on Monday, a major milestone for CEO Elon Musk.
• A Pennsylvania state Supreme Court Justice faces suspension after sending racist joke emails at work, the state is considering judicial misconduct charges. 
• Iraqi army troops have made a final push to recapture the city of Ramadi from Islamic State forces after losing the city in November.
• After cost overruns in the original design topped $2 billion, Japan has gone with a redesign of the main Tokyo Olympic Stadium for the 2020 Summer Games.
• Google will be teaming up with auto giant Ford for a self-driving car project to be announced at the 2016 CES, the two will form a joint venture.

Last Call For Trump's Rump

Fellow liberals, we should be ashamed of thinking Trump supporters are anything other than working-class real Americans who are simply tired of a broken political system and an increasingly difficult economic future for those without college degrees, I mean it's not like they're listening to Trump's rhetoric and trying to blow up Muslims as a result or anything.

A Donald Trump supporter was arrested after police detonated an explosive device they believe he planned to use against Muslims. 

Police received a tip Thursday that 55-year-old William Celli, of Richmond, California, was making explosive devices and threatening to harm Muslims, reported KPIX-TV.
Officers evacuated his neighborhood Sunday morning and detonated a suspicious device found in Celli’s home. 

Police have not yet determined if the homemade device was inert or active, but they said the reported threats greatly concerned law enforcement officers. 

Celli posts frequently on his Facebook account, where he complains about Syrian refugees, Democrats and insufficiently conservative Republicans. 

He appears to be a strong admirer of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump — who has been fanning the flames of anti-Muslim hysteria in the wake of mass shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, California. 

“Donald trumps on again I’m happy leaders okay but this guys a great point man I’ll follow this MAN to the end of the world,”Celli posted Oct. 21.

Yep, rock-ribbed, salt-of-the-earth conservatives here.  Nothing to worry about.

Domestic terrorism?  What's that?

Huckleberry Hounded Out

Sen. Lindsey Graham is smart enough to take his Christmas vacation early, it seems.

Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is dropping out of the presidential race. 

“While we have run a campaign that has made a real difference, I have concluded this is not my time,” he said in a statement Monday 

Graham, who first told CNN of his decision in an interview, faced the deadline Monday to be removed from the ballot in his home state of South Carolina. Graham has been mired at the bottom of polls - both nationally and in his home state - and could have faced an embarrassing showing in the state’s February primary. 

The hawkish South Carolina senator had been the Republican field’s most vociferous early critic of Donald Trump.

Which is true, and being the "Hey guys, Trump is goddamn crazy on immigration and Muslims but let's send tens of thousands of US troops into Syria" candidate got him a whopping 0% at the polls and seriously threatening to break the crucial 1% mark.

I'm thinking since we're in effectively in election news dump mode until January, we're going to see a few folks drop out over the next week or two anyway.

Time to catch up on your Netflix queue, man.

The New Gunmerican Workplace

More and more companies in the US are responding to the Age of the Active Shooter not with lockdown and shelter-in-place procedures, but by training employees to team up and fight back to overwhelm and incapacitate.

The paradigm shift in response — from passive to active — has been endorsed and promoted by the Department of Homeland Security. Last month, it recommended that federal workplaces adopt the training program “Run, Hide, Fight,” which it helped develop. D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier used the same phrase on a recent episode of “60 Minutes.”

“Your options are run, hide or fight,” Lanier said last month. “I always say, if you can get out, getting out’s your first option, your best option. If you’re in a position to try and take the gunman down, to take the gunman out, it’s the best option for saving lives before police can get there.”

Gun rights proponents have a much different view of what works. They say that if more law-abiding citizens were armed, more mass shootings could be prevented. But most employers ban guns from the workplace, even in states that embrace concealed-carry permits.

At NeighborWorks, almost three dozen employees were taught to throw things at a shooter — chairs, books, purses, pens, phones, anything — and swarm. Those items don’t seem all that threatening compared with an AR-15, but that’s not the point.

“If you can move him from offense to defense, you have changed the outcome of the event,” said Greg Crane, a former SWAT officer whose company, the ALICE Training Institute, trained workers at NeighborWorks as well as at Facebook and Apple. “He’s thinking about what you are doing to him, not what he’s doing to you. Mentally, he’s going through a whole different process.”

ALICE, based near Cleveland, has been teaching these methods since about 2001. But in the past few years, as mass shootings have killed moviegoers, congressional constituents, first-graders, Navy Yard workers, TV journalists and college students, hundreds of competitors have sprung up, charging thousands of dollars for classroom lectures and intense simulations. 

In other words, the new cost of Second Amendment "freedom" is paying experts to teach your employees how to disorient a somebody armed with an AR-15 with a thrown object.  Lots of money for training they will almost certainly never have to use, but why should gun manufacturers and ammo makers be the only folks profiting from Gunmerica?

Call it the cost of doing business in the US.  Part of me is upset that corporate America has resigned themselves to a workplace that will at some point include an armed employee on campus willing to kill.  The other part is impressed that the American way is to find a way to make money off of tragedy, and this looks like a solid growth industry for the economy, right?

StupidiNews

• Both FIFA President Sepp Blatter and European soccer head Michel Platini were banned Monday from the sport for eight years by FIFA's Ethics Committee.
• Nashua, New Hampshire schools will be closed today due to threats of violence specific to Monday, they will be re-opened tomorrow as police investigate.
• One person was killed and more than two dozen injured as Las Vegas police say a woman deliberately drove her car onto a crowded hotel sidewalk on the Strip.
• The box office awakened with 'Star Wars: Episode VII' easily claiming the all-time biggest opening weekend total over this May's 'Jurassic World', topping $238 million domestically.
• House Republicans have included measures that would allow private companies to share their online data with the government as part of the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill.

Last Call For Screaming Into The Abyss

Washington Post columnist Caitlyn Dewey got a year and a half out of her weekly feature fighting The Stupid before hanging it up this week and correctly arriving at the conclusion that you can't beat confirmation bias in the age of the internet.

We launched “What was Fake” in May 2014 in response to what seemed, at the time, like an epidemic of urban legends and Internet pranks: light-hearted, silly things, for the most part, like new flavors of Oreos and babies with absurd names.

Since then, those sorts of rumors and pranks haven’t slowed down, exactly, but the pace and tenor of fake news has changed. Where debunking an Internet fake once involved some research, it’s now often as simple as clicking around for an “about” or “disclaimer” page. And where a willingness to believe hoaxes once seemed to come from a place of honest ignorance or misunderstanding, that’s frequently no longer the case. Headlines like “Casey Anthony found dismembered in truck” go viral via old-fashioned schadenfreude — even hate.

There’s a simple, economic explanation for this shift: If you’re a hoaxer, it’s more profitable. Since early 2014, a series of Internet entrepreneurs have realized that not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers. Where many once wrote celebrity death hoaxes or “satires,” they now run entire, successful websites that do nothing but troll convenient minorities or exploit gross stereotypes. Paul Horner, the proprietor of Nbc.com.co and a string of other very profitable fake-news sites, once told me he specifically tries to invent stories that will provoke strong reactions in middle-aged conservatives. They share a lot on Facebook, he explained; they’re the ideal audience.

The primary feature of the internet is, not to put too fine a point on it, the Speed Of Total Bullshit.  It's a feature, not a bug.  It directly results in things like fewer than half of Iowa Republicans believe President Obama was born in the US.  It's demonstrably true that he was, but the people who need facts the most are the least swayed by them.

This is America, a country where quite literally the facts no longer matter.

Lone Star Gunmen

Texas, like many other red states, is in the process of putting open carry laws into effect.  Starting in 2016 the state will allow people to carry handguns in holsters.  The challenge now is for as few people to die from this law as possible, I guess.

Experts predict that open carry will most likely take place in small numbers in rural areas, but unlike Oklahoma, six of the most populous cities in the country are in Texas: Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Austin, Fort Worth, and El Paso. And that’s not taking into account the political climate around gun control in Texas this year. There have been number of demonstrators openly carrying rifles in large cities, the most recent being a group of armed protestors in front of a mosque in Irving and demonstrators who marched with rifles near UT-Austin and later held a mock mass shooting to protest “gun-free zones.” It’s still unclear why they felt the need to protest what would soon be law.

But one of the biggest concerns of law enforcement is establishing the fine line between respecting the rights of someone legally carrying a handgun and protecting the general public. “What happens when an officer sees someone openly carrying a handgun in a holster, in accordance with the law, what can an officer legally do?” Shannon Edmonds, director of governmental relations for the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, told theHouston Chronicle. “We keep getting more questions than answers.”

The fear is that open carry will make it harder for police officers to tell the difference between a law-abiding citizen legally carrying a gun and someone with criminal intentions carrying a gun. In the Houston Chronicle, comments like these from Ray Hunt, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, don’t really help to clarify things.

Houston police, he said, will not “be doing random stops of people simply to see if they have a CHL,” but they also will not “sit back for 30 minutes” if they have a reasonable suspicion to stop someone.

So, what will they do?

My guess is police in Texas are going to be much, much more likely to open fire on people carrying weapons, not less...especially if the people carrying weapons aren't white.

It's going to be tragic when it happens...and of course, for Texas, the solution will be -- all together now -- MORE GUNS.

Trapped In A Hell Of Our Own Making

The NY Times editorial board takes on Republican TRAP laws designed for one purpose: to make legal abortions impossible to get for as many women as possible. 2015 was a banner year for TRAP legislation, and the only thing preventing national versions of these ridiculous laws was a Democrat in the White House (which may not be the case in 2017.)

In many states, including Texas, these laws have resulted in the shuttering of all but a few clinics that perform abortions, forcing women to travel hundreds of miles for the procedure. Among other burdens, this increases the chance that a woman will try to end her pregnancy on her own. This is extremely risky, and in some states it is even grounds for a charge of attempted murder. One study, based on a recent survey, estimated that 100,000 to 240,000 Texas women ages 18 to 49 have attempted a self-induced abortion without medical assistance. These women, the study found, were significantly more likely than average to have less access to basic reproductive-health services like birth control.

TRAP laws are the only ones currently before the Supreme Court, but they are far from the only roadblock to reproductive health care put up in 2015.

Just a few examples: Five states enacted or extended waiting periods for abortions, joining the more than two dozen states that already had such laws. Some of these laws also require a woman to undergo in-person counseling, which means two separate trips to a clinic or hospital. Two states, Arizona and Arkansas, passed laws requiring doctors to give women misleading information about the possibility of “reversing” a medication-induced abortion. Arkansas also became the third state to ban the use of the modern, evidence-based drug protocol for medication abortion, which is cheaper and more effective than what the Food and Drug Administration approved in 2000.

And then there is the unrelenting, but politically unpopular, campaign by Republicans in Congress, in statehouses and on the presidential campaign trail to deny funding to Planned Parenthood. The organization, which is the only reproductive-health service provider for millions of poorer women, is already prohibited by law from using federal funds for almost all abortions.

We're one election away from the outlawing of legal and safe medical abortions across the country, period.  Either the GOP will impose a national ban, or a Republican president will appoint enough conservatives to make it happen.

Sunday Long Read: Suppression Procession

This week's Sunday Long Read is part 7 of Jim Rutenberg's Disenfranchised series at the NY Times Magazine on GOP voter suppression.  This time he focuses on the Hispanic vote, and how Republicans and the Supreme Court are working to wipe out Hispanic and especially Latino voting power in Texas.

The 2016 presidential election will be the first to take place after the gutting of the V.R.A. and with all of these new laws potentially in place. Civil rights lawyers are just as concerned about provisions they don’t yet know about — the last-minute changes that could deter voters in ways that were previously disallowed. North Carolina, Virginia and Florida are among the states previously covered in whole or in part by Section 5, and they will be closely contested. Marc Elias, a longtime Democratic lawyer and the lead counsel for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, told me, ‘‘You are likely to see more litigation over the fundamental right to vote this election cycle than we have seen since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.’’

But the bigger voting rights fight isn’t about the map of today. It’s about the map of tomorrow, which will be reshaped by Hispanics in ways that could realign national politics for generations. Hispanic Americans have faced a long legacy of white hostility, dating back to the mid-19th century, when Texas state and local officials began a sporadic campaign to chase Hispanic citizens from polls with threats of violence or prison. Congress placed Texas under Section 5 oversight in 1975, based partly on its continued use of English-only ballots. But even now, Hispanic citizens are registering and voting at levels that are not much better than those of blacks near the end of Jim Crow — a 38.8 percent turnout in Texas in 2012, according to the Census Bureau, as opposed to more than 60 percent for both blacks and ‘‘Anglos,’’ the widely used informal term for non-Hispanic whites. (In the census, Hispanics can be of any race, and do not count as a racial category.)

If Hispanics were to start registering and voting in the same percentages that Anglos do in Texas, and continued to prefer Democrats over Republicans in the same proportions that they do now in presidential elections, Democrats would be able to shave the 16-point deficit they saw there in 2012 to 6 points by 2024 — less than the deficit the party faced in Virginia in 2004, four years before it managed to win the state. Continuing demographic trends would push Texas toward the Democratic column by 2036, but by then national Democrats, seeing a winnable presidential race, would already be flooding the state with money, staff and volunteers — something they haven’t done in earnest in nearly 20 years — to put it in their column even sooner. Projections have shown black and Hispanic population growth combining to force a similar dynamic in Georgia by as early as 2020 and making North Carolina a safer Democratic bet by 2024 or 2028; Hispanic growth alone could make Arizona competitive for Democrats by 2024, if not sooner.

The stakes are highest in Texas. Its 38 Electoral College votes make it ‘‘the last line of defense’’ against the Democrats, its Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has said. This explains why liberal groups like Battleground Texas have started spending so much money — $10 million in 2013 and 2014 — on, among other efforts, registering new voters. It also explains why Representative Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, would go on the conservative cable network NewsMax TV to charge that the Obama administration was encouraging undocumented immigrants to come into the country to vote illegally. The right defense against those illegal voters, he suggested, was Texas’ voter-ID law. If they’re not stopped, Gohmert warned, ‘‘it will ensure that Republicans don’t ever get elected again.’’

And that is why Republicans are doing everything they can to lock in voter suppression now.  If they do not, the country belongs to Democrats in 20 years.  It is the last gasp of a dying party, a party that will scorch the earth rather than hand over power.

The Hispanic vote is key.  Republicans have no chance at it.  So they must destroy it.