The Whole "if guns were cars" Argument=Torpedoed

Ever notice how a debate about gun laws usually elicits a guns to cars comparison?

It usually goes something like this. A completely rational and logical person asks a member of the Gun Cult why we shouldn't alter our existing gun laws. After wiping away the spittle and mouth foam from their shirts, this same rational and logical person is given a long  and very adolescent diatribe about the American Revolution, totalitarian governments, and tough history coming.

Mixed in with his wacky, ideological nonsense is the inevitable and childish comment about how there should be more car laws or changes to automobile technology because, after all, cars are death machines and kill far more people.

Well, guess what? We ARE doing that.

The chances of a driver dying in a crash in a late-model car or light truck fell by more than a third over three years, and nine car models had zero deaths per million registered vehicles, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Among the improvements credited for declining death rates is the widespread adoption of electronic stability control, which has dramatically lessened the risk of rollover crashes. SUVs had some of the highest rates a decade ago due to their propensity to roll over.

Side air bags and structural changes to vehicles are also helping. Automakers are engineering vehicles with stronger occupant compartments that hold up better in front, side and rollover crashes, allowing the seatbelts and air bags to do their jobs well, said Russ Rader, an institute spokesman. Improved technologies were responsible for saving 7,700 driver lives in 2012 when compared to how cars were made in 1985, the institute said.

So, how about some improvements to gun technology then, eh? Since we like to compare cars and guns, why not use the same method that has been effective here? I would think we could come up with all sorts of techno add ons that would prevent, say, yet another child picking up their parent's gun and shooting themselves or others with it.

What do you say, Gun Cult?

The Week In Politics

Since the State of the Union, the political scene sure has gotten interesting. As I have previously suggested, the president's approval ratings would rise if he started to appeal more to his liberal base. The fact that he was done in the low 40s was partly due to the left (and not exclusively the right) not approving of him because he was being too moderate. Well, they have come home, folks.

The president's tone in last Tuesday's speech shows that he's finally getting it right. You start off far left and then force Republicans to meet you in the middle. You don't start off at the 40 yard line on the left side of the field. Then you end up with a policy that is on the 30 yard line on the right side of the field. Now he's more or less forced the GOP to meet the reality of governing. Yes, that's right, conservatives. Now YOU GUYS have to deal with approval ratings running 30 percentage points behind the president.

Mitt Romney decided not to run for president today. That's too bad because I would have like to see him gum up and already gummed up field. I've heard a lot of talk about the deep bench on the side of the GOP but I see it more like this.

7 right-wing demagogues that will be shoved down our throats in 2016

In many ways, this is good news, though, because Reince Preibus's dream of being able to hide the batshit will not come to pass. These guys are going to be out there with their short wave radio lunacy and wacky, ideological nonsense, straw manning their way to their next appeal to fear to old, white men who can't seem to get over their problem with their parents...I mean, authority.

I say we let them have center stage for the next few months and then President Grandma can announce her candidacy sometime later in the year. What could possibly go wrong?:)

Simply Let Them Speak

From a letter to my local newspaper...

The Jan. 27 editorial “As the Midwest warms, economy will suffer” is the 2015 version of a sky-is-falling progressive scare. We have seen it all before. In the 1970s, it was the “population bomb,” then the coming of a new ice age — both wrong. The next iteration was Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth,” complete with a dramatic hockey-stick graph of temperature rise. Undaunted by being totally wrong, progressives revised the global-warming mantra using the meaningless term “climate change.” Since climate changes from day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year, this latest scare tactic to save Minnesota, the United States and the world is guaranteed to require more government with higher taxes to support a big new bureaucracy with big new programs. The inconvenient truth is that this is but another boondoggle in a long history of progressive, tax-and-spend, save-the-world ideas.

Wow....

A Very Active Gun Lobby

Two Cops Get Shot and Fox News Isn't Covering It

On Monday a man shot two cops outside a city council meeting in New Hope, Minn. The news has been all over the Twin Cities, but the national press has been almost completely silent about it. NPR and ABC have stories, but Fox News has nothing to say about it.

This seems curious, given the extreme attention that the national press has given such shootings since two cops were assassinated as they sat in their squad cars.

Why is the cop shooting in Minnesota being ignored? Maybe it's because the cops in New Hope survived with only relatively minor wounds.

Or maybe it's because the shooter was a crazy old white guy with a gun fetish.

The shooter, Raymond Kmetz, had a history of mental illness, terrorizing and attacking judges, police officers, lawyers, city council members, and so on. He had dozens of charges filed against him over the years, and his own attorneys filed restraining orders against him.

His son, Nathan, wrote long rambling diatribes on the Internet insisting that his father wasn't crazy, that they'd locked him up in a mental institution and ruined his life. But Kmetz's brother Marvin always feared his crazy brother would get someone killed.

Why did Kmetz go to the city council meeting with a gun?  This appears to be the motivation:

In 2008, he tried to sell the house on Nevada Avenue N. where he had lived for 40 years to the city of New Hope for nearly $1 million, though it was worth well below half that amount. He argued that it was in an industrial zone ripe for development. The council rejected the unsolicited offer. The property was last sold in 2013 for $140,000 and now is boarded up. 

In other words, he was in financial difficulties and wanted to get bailed out.

If Kmetz had been a schizophrenic young black Muslim angry that the city council had blocked the building of a mosque in his town, what do you think the reaction of Fox News and the national news media would have been?

But if a crazy old white man tries to shoot up a city council meeting? That's just another Monday in Minnesota.

Ecolab Going All Solar

Ecolab, a global company that is a seller of hygiene, energy and water technologies to businesses, is the first big Minnesota company to go all-in on solar. With this deal, Ecolab will acquire more solar output than now exists across the entire state.

“It’s groundbreaking in many ways,” Ken Johnson of the Solar Energy Industries Association, a Washington, D.C., trade group, said of the Ecolab-SunEdison deal. “When people think of solar they tend to think of places like California, Arizona, Hawaii and Florida. They don’t traditionally think of the Midwest. This is going to open up a lot of eyes.”

It's been pretty amazing to drive around Minnesota and Iowa the last few years and see the renewable energy market exploding. Wind turbines have already dominated rural areas in southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa. Now we are going to see more solar panels and deeper buy in from private concerns like Ecolab with renewable energy.

In my view, this shift in the free market will render further discussion about climate change largely moot. If corporate America decides that's where the money is, climate deniers will end up about as relevant as the cassette tape.

Stunning...

I've appreciated Frank Scaeffer's mea culpas over the years but this one is, hands down, fucking awesome. Soak it in deeply, readers, and attempt to answer the following question...

How are Christian conservatives different from Islamic conservatives?

R.I.P., Political Career of Sarah Palin

With Sarah Palin's recent speech in Iowa, I think we can now safely say that her political career is over. Rambling, incoherent, and filled with a whole lot of wacky ideological nonsense, Palin's recent speech in Iowa was so bizarre even conservative Byron York was wondering WTF.

Of course, her speech (which can be seen in its entirely below) is honestly an excellent representation of what happens when you smoke too much right wing blog. I'm happy to report that even people inside of the bubble are starting to realize this.

 

Tea Party "Scam PACs" Are Screwing Over Conservatives

An article in Politico describes a problem that appears to be unique to Tea Party conservatives: PACs that pop up instantly, beg for money to defeat Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney, collect millions and then spend all that money on themselves:

A POLITICO analysis of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission covering the 2014 cycle found that 33 PACs that court small donors with tea party-oriented email and direct-mail appeals raised $43 million — 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs. POLITICO’s list is not all-inclusive, and some conservatives fret that it’s almost impossible to identify all the groups that are out there, let alone to rein them in.

People who think they're supporting the Tea Party are just lining the pockets of con artists.

“These groups have the pulse of the crowd, and they recognize that they can make a profit off the angst of the conservative base voters who are looking for outsiders,” said the influential conservative pundit Erick Erickson, who has taken it upon himself to call out PAC operators and fundraisers he sees as scams. They are “completely a drain,” said Erickson, whose assessments of candidates and groups carry particular weight among tea party activists and the Republicans who court them. “The conservative activists feel like they’ve contributed to a cause greater than themselves, but the money goes to the consultants, and eventually the activists get burned out and stop giving money, including to the legitimate causes.”

The groups ripping off conservatives under the Tea Party banner are the same sort that the IRS was going after before House Republicans hammered them for doing their job.

These organizations lie about what they're doing and rip off people who think they're helping their political movement. They do just enough to lend an air of credibility to their organization, but they pocket most of the cash.

If only there was an organization that was dedicated to uncovering fraud and abuse of the tax laws and the campaign financing system.

But wait! There is! It's called the IRS. After Citizens United the IRS had a really tough job trying to figure out who the crooks were. They tried to stop Tea Party groups with fishy sounding names that were skirting campaign financing laws and committing perjury on official forms, groups that said they were social welfare groups when they were really just self-dealing fund raisers and political hucksters. And for their efforts to protect the American people from these rip-off artists the IRS was dragged before a House committee and blasted for "singling out" Tea Party groups that were stealing from conservative voters.

The crucifixion of the IRS and the Federal Elections Commission is coming back to bite Republicans. The Republican House has forced the IRS to back off and let these pirates running under the Tea Party banner rip off conservatives. Now Tea Party conservatives are reaping the oats they sowed.

A cynical person would say that all Tea Party organizations are like this. One of the first was formed by Clarence Thomas' wife, almost the instant after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. I can just imagine the dinner table conversations in the Thomas household about how they could cash in big time with their supremely conservative credentials.

Clearly, there need to be controls over these organizations. Word of mouth isn't good enough, because so much of this fund raising goes on over the Internet or cable TV and they all use similar sounding names to intentionally confuse people.

Is the Tea Party is real, or just another scam to rip off cranky old farts?

At this point you've really got to ask whether the Tea Party is real, or just another quick-buck scam like cheap Viagra, dietary supplements, or motorized scooters, designed solely to rip off cranky old farts.

And you can't count on "luminaries" like Karl Rove, or Erick Erickson, or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh to tell you who the good guys are. Because they all have their own PACs and their own consulting firms that are competing for the dollars of conservatives.

We need the FEC and the IRS to do their jobs and watch these clowns so they don't rip us off.

Going Solar!

The cover piece for this week's Christian Science Monitor is truly splendid. Africa is experiencing a quiet solar revolution and brushing off the usual criticism of developing countries not being able to do renewables.

Now, however, a new solar energy movement is bringing kilowatts to previously unlit areas of Africa – and changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The idea behind the latest effort isn’t to tap the power of the sun to electrify every appliance in a household. Instead, it is to install a small solar panel not much bigger than an iPad to power a few lights, a cellphone charger, and other basic necessities that can still significantly alter people’s lives. 

Going smaller better fits the budgets of the rural poor. People use the money they normally would spend on kerosene to finance their solar systems, allowing them to pay in small, affordable installments and not rely on government help. The concept is called pay-as-you-go solar.

Check out the whole piece, folks. There are going to be big things happening with renewables in the next couple of years!

Gun Control: An Inconvenient Truth

Senate Admits Climate Change Is Real, Whining that It's Not Our Fault

Last week the Senate acknowledged in a 98-1 vote that climate change is real, but like some rich kid who wrecked the family car, Republicans whined that it's not our fault.

Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Republican who has for years insisted that climate change is a hoax, voted in support of the measure, saying:

Climate is changing and climate has always changed and always will. There is archaeological evidence of that, there is biblical evidence of that, there is historical evidence of that, [but t]here are some people who are so arrogant to think they are so powerful they can change climate.

What's arrogant is that Inhofe thinks that 7 billion people pumping 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year for centuries will have no effect on the climate. We are burning thousands of billions of tons coal, oil and gas that it took nature billions of years to bury in the span of a few hundred years.

A few million people can change the climate of entire states just by burning gasoline, or by replacing vegetation with concrete and asphalt. A few thousand people can change the climate of Brazil by cutting down hundreds of millions of acres of rainforest over a period of a decade or two. Hundreds of coal plants in China belching out smoke and ash can not only foul the air and kill thousands of Chinese annually, but that much crap in the air alters air temperature by several degrees.

It took just a few tens of thousands of people to create a dust bowl in Inhofe's own Oklahoma in the 1930s. Over the decades farmers cut down millions of acres of oak savannahs and tore up the natural prairie grasses and replaced them with crops. Poor agricultural practices combined with drought caused terrible dust storms that forced tens of thousands of Texans, Oklahomans and Kansans to abandon their farms, exacerbating the effects of the Depression. It took decades to recover, economically and ecologically.

Removing vegetation -- forests and prairies -- and replacing it with crops, roads or buildings on a large scale changes the climate. Forests are one of the major the driving forces of climate. Trees put oxygen into the atmosphere and take carbon dioxide out. Remove them and you change the climate. Drastically.

Inhofe doesn't seem to understand how big a number 7 billion is, or the massive scale of what we do to the environment. He seems to think that humans are tiny and insignificant compared to the wide world.

The fact is, earth's atmosphere originally contained no oxygen. Earth has an oxygen atmosphere today only because tiny and insignificant cyanobacteria began to emit oxygen billions of years ago.

We are millions of times bigger than those tiny, insignificant bacteria and there are 7 billion of us. We humans now produce more CO2 than all the oceans, trees, plants and algae in the world can absorb. That's why CO2 is slowly building up in the atmosphere.

Since we're making more CO2 than plants are making oxygen, the undeniable conclusion is that we are altering the climate.

Of course, we'll run out of oil and coal long before we turn the planet into an inhospitable desert planet like Venus. But the economic and social costs of dealing with the mess we're creating will far exceed the costs of curbing our gluttonous appetite for carbon. And because the oil and coal will eventually run out, we'll have to make this change in any case.

Why not do it now, while we are still rich enough and aren't going to war with every other country for the last few barrels of oil beneath the arctic?

If These Were Deaths By Muslim Extremists...

....what do you suppose would be the reaction of the American people?

Republicans Raising Taxes

It appears that Republicans are finally getting the message: middle class economics works.

At least eight Republican governors have ventured into this once forbidden territory: There are proposals for raising the sales tax in Michigan, a tax on e-cigarettes in Utah, and gas taxes in South Carolina and South Dakota, to name a few. In Arizona, the new Republican governor has put off, in the face of a $1 billion budget shortfall, a campaign promise to eliminate the unpopular income tax there.

But why?

Still, the shift is striking, and it comes in the wake of problems that Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a Republican, suffered after pushing though sharp cuts in business and income taxes. Governor Brownback, who found himself in an unexpectedly tough race for re-election in part because of a budget deficit fueled by the tax cuts, recently called for raising cigarette and liquor taxes and slowing planned reductions in the income tax rate to help reduce the shortfall. 

By most accounts, the proposals emerging from state Republican lawmakers seem like acts of pragmatism rather than shifts in philosophy for the Republican Party. 

Pragmatism indeed.

Speaking of pragmatism, it looks like Scott Walker could sure use some. If only he had embrace the now proven to be enormously successful economic policies of Mark Dayton here in Minnesota. Perhaps Wisconsin would have then been named the best state in the country.

Again With The Rape

I'm please to report that Republican Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina is at least owning the GOP's problem with women. Recognizing that you have a problem is a big step. Of course, this simple fact has seemed to have escaped Lindsey Graham.


What exactly is a "definitional problem" with rape? More importantly, why are they talking about rape AGAIN?

Mea Culpa, Fox News Style

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Ten)

The question of which political party is more racist was recently addressed on Quora. This answer was by far the best one given. Several key takeaways emerge from it. First, a summary timeline... 

-From 1828 to 1948, the Democratic Party was clearly the party favored by Southern whites who supported slavery and then Jim Crow & segregation. In 1948, Democratic President Harry S. Truman ordered the integration of the U.S. Armed Forces. Things start to get murky. 

-From 1948 to 1968, it was a period of great flux with regard to race in politics in America. This was the period of Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign, the Dixiecrats and George Wallace. Again in play was The American South. 

-From 1968 until 2005, the Republican Party had a clear pattern of exploiting racial resentments in the South over the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In what has become known as the "Southern Strategy," the Republican Party – first with Barry Goldwater and then more successfully with Richard Nixon – sought to exploit racial anxieties of Southern Whites. In 2005, then RNC Chair Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy and repudiated it at the annual conference of the NAACP.

With the last segment, we see an admission from the highest ranking member of the GOP at the time that they employed the Southern Strategy to win the white conservative vote. Interestingly, his apology drew criticism that illustrates the point I have been making all along: the GOP has a problem with race, particularly black people.

But what about from 2005 to 2015? In his answer on Quora, Mr. McCullough offers a detailed look at the racial implications of voter ID laws followed by this:

Bottom line: whichever party appeals to and builds upon the voting bloc of Southern White Conservatives owns the legacy of slavery and institutionalized racism in the United States. These days, that party is the Republican Party. ...look away, look away, look away Dixieland.

I completely agree. "Owning" is not a word conservatives do really well at all. Their first reaction is to DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) and blame the liberal media. It will never cease to amaze me that the party that preaches responsibility completely fails to take any of it on a myriad of issues today.

But own it they must because Southern White Conservatives are a substantial part of their base.

Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats? (Part Nine)

In looking at the index of all of the graphics I have put up thus far, it's quite clear that white Republicans tend to be more racist than white Democrats.

The good news is that the trend is downward for both parties. Still, it's far too high for 2015.

Part of what is driving all of this is "the old ways" of the South. Take a look at this.

The above graphic is from Humboldt University's Geography of Hate map and which tracks where the most tweets with the word "nigger" originate. The primary cluster of red globs are located around and below the Mason Dixon line.

Which party overwhelmingly dominates these states?

The Brick Wall

Mocking Conservative Appeal To Fear

John and Mike from Fox News - Eric et Quentin du 16/01