Good Question (s)

Are We Still Yammering About Whether the Civil War Was About Slavery? Really?

Are we still arguing about whether the Civil War was really fought over slavery? Seriously? What's next? The Holocaust was really about Jews overstaying their tourist visas? The Inquisition was a scientific exploration of the limits of the human body? The Romans were genuinely curious about whether a man could kill a hungry lion? The Bataan death march was a controlled trial of different brands of army boots? WTF?

Indeed...

A Change is Gonna Come

Regular readers will note that as of today Markadelphia is no more. In keeping with the changes already in place with the comments section, this site has been renamed in order to move away from a personality based site to a general political discussion forum where ideas are at the forefront, not the people who write about them.

Nikto has been contributing a great deal to this site and gets more hits than me anyway so it's way past time that a change was made to truly make it a site for both of us (as well as John Waxey if he ever stops digging for artifacts long enough to share his wisdom). We have a few other people in mind that may end up being contributors as well in the future.

This won't be the the only change. We're planning on implementing some design changes as well as different types of content in addition to the regular posts that 300-600 of you enjoy every day. We got close to 1,000 hits in a 24 hour period after the two big SCOTUS decisions this week and I think that's pretty amazing. Thank you very much!!

So, what is "Zombie Politics?" Well, we clearly have been having the same political discussions in this country from day one. Sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes that's a bad thing. Either way, we here at Zombie Politics will be talking about it!!

What A Week!

What a fantastic week for Barack Obama, Democrats and liberals everywhere. The Affordable Care Act is solidified...gay marriage is the law of the land...the trade bill is about to be signed by the president...Confederate flags finally coming down...and this speech....





Stunning...

The reaction from conservatives has largely been the typical adolescent furor. This, however, caught my eye...

Huckabee and Santorum Sign On with Minister Who Wants To Set Himself on Fire Over LGBT Rights

...as a fantastic example of how conservatives in this country are really no different than Islamic extremists (see: American Taliban). If I were in Homeland Security, I'd keep an extra eye on the right wing groups for the next few weeks and possibly in perpetuity.

Because our country is finally moving in the right direction and the mouth foamers are likely not going to stand for it. Given that they throw a good hump into their gun collection every day, I'd wager that more than a few of them are going to act up violently, as was the case with Dylan Roof.

Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll accidentally shoot each other:)

The Not So White House

Not The New Normal

Pants on Fire!

Ever had some old,m conservative uncle in your family foam at the mouth about how the Civil War wasn't really about slavery? What follows is invariably a giant pile of wacky, ideological nonsense.

The fine folks at Politifact recently tackled this very same issue and ruled it PANTS ON FIRE.

The erratic anti-feminist and purposefully politically incorrect Gavin McInnes added his take on the Confederate flag controversy. McInnes, a frequent Fox News guest, tweeted to more than 50,000 followers on June 23, 2015, that the Confederate flag should continue to fly. Why? Because, "The Civil War wasn't about slavery," he wrote. "It was about secession." In a companion tweet, McInnes said anyone, like Northerners, who think the Civil War was about slavery should go to Google. "Look it up," said McInnes, who was born in England and grew up in Canada. 

So we did.

And what did they find?

We typed in "causes of the Civil War." The first hit was History.net which told us, "The burning issue that led to the disruption of the union, however, was the debate over the future of slavery. That dispute led to secession, and secession brought about a war in which the Northern and Western states and territories fought to preserve the Union, and the South fought to establish Southern independence as a new confederation of states under its own constitution." The second link on Google was to PBS and its History Detectives series. There we read, "What led to the outbreak of the bloodiest conflict in the history of North America? A common explanation is that the Civil War was fought over the moral issue of slavery. In fact, it was the economics of slavery and political control of that system that was central to the conflict." No. 3 on the Google hit parade was Americanhistoryabout.com. That page offered five main reasons and the first one was "Economic and social differences between the North and the South." And what were those differences? 

Well, slavery.

The fourth link on Google was from the Civil War Preservation Trust. The trust wrote "The Civil War was the culmination of a series of confrontations concerning the institution of slavery." 

Perhaps they should have been directed to those sites which tell the (ahem) real story. You know that ones I'm talking about, right? They all have the same common, unspoken theme: I can't face the ugliness in my own ideology so I'm going to blame the victim and redirect. 

Of course, the internet can be wrong so Politifact reached out to some experts on the Civil War.

Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University, used the words of secessionists themselves as proof of their intentions. "Read South Carolina's Declaration of the causes of secession," Foner said. "It is all about protecting slavery." Indeed, the first sentence refers to slaveholding states, and throughout, the institution of slavery is the pivot point around which all else turns. Historian Stephanie McCurry at the University of Pennsylvania points to Mississippi’s declaration of secession. Sentence two begins, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery." 

So just to be clear: Slavery led to secession, which led to the Civil War.

Of course, we here on this blog know how the conservative brain works. The more facts they get, the worse they get and we all get to experience the backfire effect. My advice is to simply chuckle and say, "Sure, Unc...anything you say."

A Blow To Right Wing Bloggers and Commenters Everywhere

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the subsidies for the Affordable Care Act 6-3.  

“It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner,” the majority of the justices wrote. “Congress made the guaranteed issue and community rating requirements applicable in every State in the Nation. But those requirements only work when combined with the coverage requirement and the tax credits. So it stands to reason that Congress meant for those provisions to apply in every state as well.”

In short, stop with the adolescent wordsmithing.

This ruling illustrates what adults in reality think of right wing blog arguments and comments, essentially the plaintiff's case. They rejected it utterly.

Combine this with the likely ruling striking down gay marriage bans and our country is really looking a heckuva lot better these days!

Choosing Our Heritage

Before pretty much everyone in the South decided that it was time to take down the Confederate flag, there was a lot of hemming and hawing in the immediate aftermath of Dylann Roof's terrorist attack on a church in Charleston, SC.

Initially many southern politicians defended the flag as "their heritage." Many, like Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, said that the flag "is part of who we are."

No. That is not who we are. That flag is who our ancestors were.

And even though half my ancestors didn't come to this country until the 20th century, I can still say we. My maternal grandfather was from Tennessee and I'm related to General Stonewall Jackson.

We are not our fathers -- we own neither their victories nor their sins. We can only learn from their mistakes and preserve their successes. The idea that our heritage -- our ancestry -- defines who we are is an antiquated, stupid, racist misconception. We define who we are by what we say and what we do.

As Americans we're all equal. We're supposed to make our own way in the world and not leech off our ancestors' reputations. As Americans we pick our own heritage -- we're not stuck with whatever random traits our genetics gave us.

Sometimes people carry this idea to ridiculous extremes, as in the case of Rachel Dolezal. She claimed the heritage of African Americans. It sounds weird, but it's no different than every Republican from Ted Cruz to Bobby Jindal claiming the heritage of Ronald Reagan. The only thing Dolezal really did wrong was lie about it.

If you have white skin, no one can just assume you're intolerant and racist. If you have brown skin, no one can just assume you're lazy and stupid. You can't choose your skin color. But if you choose the Confederate flag as your emblem, you're claiming a heritage of disunion, racism and oppression.

That choice is key: being able to define who we are is our real American heritage.

Warning Labels

Just got this in an email...

Two issues here, racism, and the proliferation of gun culture and acceptance of gun deaths. I am far more concerned how we are growing a new crop of racial bigots than I am with ISIS. As for guns, 30,000 people a year die here in gun violence. This simply (with a few notable exceptions) doesn't happen in other developed nations. If ISIS were killing even a tiny percentage of that 30k in the US...we would lose our minds. This doesn't even register with the American public.

It doesn't register with them because the "liberal" media (especially Hollywood) are ammosexuals. If they reported on the Gun Cult the same way they report on ISIL, it would be a much different situation.

The Tax Revenue Zombie Lie Rises Again

It amuses me to no end when zombie lies rise again. Check this out.

GOP strategist Christie: Tax revenues rose after Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003

Once again...

What we found is Christie is carefully picking his starting and end points to make the most dramatic comparison. Changing the timeframe makes all the difference, as we’ll show you.

Indeed:)

The Tax Policy Center, a joint project of two academic centers the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, summarized the CBO numbers. This chart based on the center’s table shows revenues initially falling, not rising.



In short, federal revenues were below 2000 levels (after adjusting for inflation) until 2006. They outpaced fiscal year 2000 collections for a bit, then fell again in 2008. The same pattern roughly holds if you use 2001 as the starting point. What’s that all mean? When you adjust for inflation, the 47 percent revenue growth from 2003 to 2007 becomes 28 percent. And if you start the clock in 2001, revenue growth drops to 4 percent. By 2009, of course, the numbers look even worse. Here’s another way to look at it, using data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Over Bush’s two full terms, federal revenues dropped 13 percent.

Christie’s statement has some superficial accuracy but a more complete picture shows that he has omitted many details that would lead to a different conclusion. We rate this claim Mostly False.

Superficial accuracy pretty much sums it up!

Protect Your Home From A Killer!

Very Tired of Idiots

Many in Nation Tired of Explaining Things to Idiots

Of the many obvious things that people are sick and tired of trying to get through the skulls of stupid people, the fact that climate change will cause catastrophic habitat destruction and devastating extinctions tops the list, with a majority saying that they will no longer bother trying to explain this to cretins. 

Coming in a close second, statistical proof that gun control has reduced gun deaths in countries around the world is something that a significant number of those polled have given up attempting to break down for morons. 

Finally, a majority said that trying to make idiots understand why a flag that symbolizes bigotry and hatred has no business flying over a state capitol only makes the person attempting to explain this want to put his or her fist through a wall.

Amen.

An Unbroken Line from Jefferson Davis to George F. Will

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a long article that discusses the origins of the Civil War. It consists mostly of quotes from Southern politicians who justified slavery as being necessary for civilization and even white equality. 

Coates' point is that the Confederate flag is undeniably the emblem of slavery and is why it should be taken down. 

But reading these quotes makes it clear that the political philosophy and economic theory of pro-slavery secessionist Southerners have been directly adopted by modern conservative "thinkers" and corporate elites in the United States.

For example, here's an excerpt of the statement of Mississippi justifying secession:

[A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.

Jefferson Davis believed that without slavery, equality among white men was impossible:

[E]quality ... cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.
— Jefferson Davis

You too know, that among us, white men have an equality resulting form a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. The mechanic who comes among us, employing the less intellectual labor of the African, takes the position which only a master-workman occupies where all the mechanics are white, and therefore it is that our mechanics hold their position of absolute equality among us.

Many southern "gentlemen" held slaves in particular and working people in general in utter contempt (from the Muscogee Herald):

Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern men and especially the New England States are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meet with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.

This last was a reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would allow the voters in the two new territories to decide whether slavery would be allowed. People like Jesse James flooded into Kansas and Nebraska to influence the outcome of the slavery vote. Southerners wanted slavery to spread to new states and dreaded the outcome of new territories voting down slavery.

How many poor white Southerners fought for the Confederate Army because Jefferson Davis told them that if blacks were freed from slavery, poor whites would become the slaves?

The wealthy upper classes of the South considered themselves the real Americans, the well-bred, genteel Anglo-Saxon nobility of the United States. They despised a free society. They thought of the vast "northern hordes" as inferior, a lower caste, a servile race, greasy mechanics and filthy farmers.

That is the heritage the Confederate battle flag represents. How many poor white Southerners fought for the Confederate Army because Jefferson Davis told poor whites that if blacks were freed from slavery, whites would become the slaves? Were the men who fought in the Confederate Army fighting to preserve slavery simply to avoid being forced into slavery themselves?

The idea that there must be masters and there must be slaves appears to persist in the South to this day. The best way to do this is to minimize the political and economic power of workers, which means busting unions. If workers are unorganized and intimidated, you can pay them slave wages. That's why "right to work" laws were first enacted in former slave-holding states and have effectively destroyed private-sector unions there. Such laws have slowly spread to northern states as Scott Walker and other northern politicians have been co-opted by corporate elites like the Koch brothers.

Many corporate execs espouse the same slave-holding mindset as Jefferson Davis: the only thing that matters is profit. Today's Republican Party falls in line, parroting the narrative that maximizing the wealth of a few individuals and cutting their taxes will benefit the country much more than paying the people who actually do all the work a living wage.

But union busting still wasn't good enough for corporate America: even non-unionized Americans make too much damned money. So corporate America ships jobs off to other countries.

That brings us to the present day, when in March George Will told us proudly that income inequality is a good thing. Will is making exactly the same argument the well-bred gentlemen of the South: slaves are necessary for commerce and civilization. Will casts this in the light of shipping jobs off to Vietnam, where surrogate slaves perform the "drudgery" of manufacturing cheap shoes and plasma TVs for the United States. But it's just the same argument Jefferson Davis and well-bred Southern aristocrats used a century and a half ago.

Back then southern plantation owners needed African slaves to maintain their wealth and power. Today, corporate America needs wage slaves to maintain their stock bonuses and profit margins.

We had a Civil War to disabuse Southern slave holders of their quaint notions about "civilization and commerce." As more and more Americans fall into poverty -- especially white Americans in the South -- notions in board rooms will need similar adjustments.

There's some evidence that corporate America is beginning to understand how untenable growing income inequality is (note Walmart's increase to their minimum wage).

Let's hope they don't dawdle too long.

Feel Safe Yet?

Following the Money

A lot of Republicans had a hard time calling for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina's capitol in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Charleston, even as it became more and more obvious that Roof's motivations were linked to glorification of the Confederacy, white supremacy and slavery. 

Most said that taking the battle flag down was something that people should "begin discussing," though some -- like Mitt Romney, to his credit -- did quickly call for its banishment to the ash heap of history.

The question is, how can anyone possibly defend the Confederate flag, especially in light of the horrors of slavery and the treacheries of the Civil War that it invokes?

The answer's obvious: money.

It turns out that Republicans get a lot of money -- and votes -- from racists. The Guardian looked into this:

The leader of a rightwing group that Dylann Roof allegedly credits with helping to radicalise him against black people before the Charleston church massacre has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republicans such as presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum.

Earl Holt has given $65,000 to Republican campaign funds in recent years while inflammatory remarks – including that black people were “the laziest, stupidest and most criminally-inclined race in the history of the world” – were posted online in his name.

Additionally:

Holt has since 2012 contributed $8,500 to Cruz, the Texas senator running for the Republican presidential nomination, and his Jobs, Growth and Freedom Fund political action committee, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. On some filings Holt’s occupation was listed as “slumlord”.

And it's not just presidents: Holt spent his cash affecting election outcomes across the country:

Holt has also distributed tens of thousands in campaign contributions among prominent Republicans in congress, such as Representative Steve King of Iowa ($2,000), Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas ($1,500) and Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona ($1,000). He also gave $3,200 to the former Minnesota congresswoman and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.

Holt's website and its focus on the fiction of "huge numbers" of heretofore unknown black-on-white murders was what radicalized Roof.  Curiously, the signal event that started Roof down this path was the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

What?! you say. How can that be? Well, following the lead of Fox News, in which whites and Christians are always the victim no matter who gets killed, racists like Holt twisted the killing of a black teenager walking home in the rain into a call to action for white supremacists. Roof's impressionable young mind was warped by Holt's propaganda, just like young Somali Americans whose minds are warped by Al Qaeda and ISIS propaganda on the Internet.

The constant refrain of conservatives is always, "We're the victims! We're the victims!" even when whites kill blacks. To distract from the injustice of Trayvon Martin's murder, racists like Holt manufactured a phony scandal that sucked Dylann Roof in.

Fox News and Republicans like Cruz, Bachmann, King, and Cotton all jumped on the Zimmerman bandwagon, repeat the same stupid chant, knowing that it's what angry racists in the South want to hear. It wasn't the exact same tune that Holt was pushing, but it was an accompanying melody, a sort of racist-light counterpoint that lent mainstream credibility to Holt's ridiculous claims.

Now, Republicans and most of their supporters in former slave holding states don't openly advocate the radical racist agenda of Holt and his ilk. But they use the code words and the dog whistles that let racists like Holt and Roof know where their sympathies really lie. They push policies in Congress -- privatizing Social Security and Medicare, cutting welfare, repealing the ACA -- that are calculated with the express intent to do maximal harm to minorities. This agenda was clearly described by Paul Krugman just today:

Only one former member of the Confederacy has expanded Medicaid, and while a few Northern states are also part of the movement, more than 80 percent of the population in Medicaid-refusing America lives in states that practiced slavery before the Civil War.

And it’s not just health reform: a history of slavery is a strong predictor of everything from gun control (or rather its absence), to low minimum wages and hostility to unions, to tax policy.

These policies are intended to keep black and other minorities on the lowest economic rungs of society. The downside is that with increasing income inequality, much of it due to jobs shipped overseas and union busting, more and more white Americans are falling into the same trap. But to Holt, that's a good thing: the poorer whites become, the more scared and pissed-off they get.

Holt wants white kids like Roof, now facing the same dismal prospects that blacks have faced for the last 150 years, to blame blacks for their problems. It's an easy sell in the South, where racism is always bubbling below the surface.

Now Cruz and the other Republicans are falling over themselves to return Holt's donations. But it's a sham. They'll keep the millions of dollars of donors who are smarter than Holt and don't put their racist rants online, couching them in gentler terms like "combating voter fraud," "states rights," "balanced budgets" and "tax reform" that have the ultimate goal of crushing minorities.

But everyone still knows who's calling the shots in the Republican Party.

Let Them Live On Their Own

Today, I'm wondering why the GOP candidates for president are hedging on the Confederate flag still being flown in South Carolina. Could it be because their base is filled with old, white southern racists? Nah, that can't be it. It must just be me and my bias against them:)

In objective reality, they simply can't face the negative aspects (see: racism, prejudice, bigotry) of the people in their base and the core tenets of their ideology. They should face it and consider what it's like for black people who live in Charleston (and other places in the South) who have to see the confederate flag every day when they go to work. Or drive on a road named after a Confederate general who fought to keep them in human bondage.

The fact that we are even still debating this makes me fucking sick to my stomach. The South is filled with racist assholes like Dylan Roof who have a profound warped sense of reality. Take a look at this photo of Roof from trip to a Confederate museum.

One of the slaves is fucking SMILING? Yes, that's right. They were all really happy and comfortable during the time as slaves.

I've really had enough of these assholes. They hate the federal government? Great. Kick them out and let them live on their own.

Political Preachers

It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that Michele Bachmann is fleecing people, similar to an evangelical preacher, to pay off debt from living a lavish lifestyle. Stupid people are always willing to part with their money, eh?

I think what's kind of surprising is that her donors don't seem to have noticed that she doesn't hold public office anymore. They are still giving her money as if she is some sort of candidate. Is this the future of failed GOP candidates? Just begin to ask people for donations so they can continue on with their private club memberships and pricey dinners?

Well, they do love themselves some aristocracy...

Do These Pictures Clear Things Up about Dylann Roof?

Through Internet sleuthing the New York Times and other outlets have reported on Dylann Roof's white supremacist web site, The Last Rhodesian, and a trove of pictures of Roof apparently in his back yard and at various slave plantations and Confederate landmarks.

Fox News and Republicans have been expressing confusion and uncertainty about what could have possibly motivated Roof to commit a terrorist attack on a bunch of old ladies in a church basement.

These pictures should answer that question:

In every Congress between 1995 and 2006 Republicans put forth "flag desecration" amendments. The last time it failed by a single vote.

And here's Dylann celebrating his Conferate heritage:

Here's Dylann celebrating his Southern pride with the Stars and Bars and a .45:

And here's Dylann showing his white supremacist and Nazi sympathies:

"1488" is white supremacist code for "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. Heil Hitler!” The othala rune beneath that is another symbol used by white supremacists.

How representative is this young man of the citizens of Dixie who have "Southern pride" and speak fondly of their "Confederate heritage?" How far removed from Dylann Roof are the Tea Partyers who angrily shout about "taking our country back" from a black president? Or the secessionists in Texas, who fear the Army is set to invade them any day now and are itching for a rerun of the Civil War?

American conservatives have to stop waffling and call a spade a spade. They must stop exercising Republican partisan correctness. They must call these people out for continuing to honor the racist, anti-American, flag-burning traitors who caused the deadliest war in our history. 

If any flag should be burned, it's the Confederate battle flag that was still flying high over the capitol in South Carolina, while the American flag was at half-staff to honor the victims of Roof's terrorist massacre.

Climate Change Warrior

Let's just make today a climate change day!

Check out this piece from the New York Times.

Dr. Oreskes’s approach has been to dig deeply into the history of climate change denial, documenting its links to other episodes in which critics challenged a developing scientific consensus. Her core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. 

And most surprisingly, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people. 

The central players were serious scientists who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years apparently came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny.

Hmm, those people sound awfully familiar...:)

It's both sad and devastating, but entirely understandable given their System 1 brain thinking, how easily manipulated people are by these actors.

The Caveat

In my previous post I said that my initial reaction was that I didn't think that gun laws could stop Dylann Roof's terrorist attack on the church in Charleston. But as I've considered it, I'm not so sure. Roof was on the cops' radar, and if he hadn't been white, things likely would have played out differently.

In particular:

Mr. Roof has had two previous brushes with the law, both in recent months, according to court records. In February, he attracted attention at the Columbiana Centre, a shopping mall, when, dressed all in black, he asked store employees “out of the ordinary questions” such as how many people were working and what time they would be leaving, according to a police report.

Clearly the cops suspected Roof was casing the mall for some sort of burglary or other nefarious activity. If he'd been black and caught doing this, what are the odds they would have just let him go on his way?

Buying a gun should require a license, practical testing and a rigorous background investigation. Roof's suspicious behavior at the mall is exactly the kind of thing that should show up on a criminal background check. The logical conclusion is that Roof was trying to buy a gun to commit a robbery.

That shouldn't prevent a person from getting a gun out of hand. But it should trigger a deeper investigation. They should talk to his family and friends. Had the authorities done that, they might have remarked upon his recent racist behavior. Had they checked him out on the Internet, they might have learned of his racist sympathies from his Facebook page, which might have led them to his Last Rhodesian white supremacist web site, where he divulged his racist plan to attack Charleston.

That level of investigation would cost money, of course. Which means a gun license would have to cost a fair amount of money. Which might have prevented Roof from getting a gun in the first place.

Admittedly, that's a lot of ifs. But as we already know, it's impossible to prevent all murders. But the higher the bar is for gun purchases, the fewer guns will be sold, especially to angry losers like Dylann Roof.

The only possible goal is to reduce the number of deaths without imposing undue burdens on the rest of society. Making sure that gun buyers aren't white supremacists planning to rob malls or murder old black ladies in church isn't an unreasonable burden.

Now, suppose Dylann Roof had been a Muslim. What do you think the cops' reaction at the mall would have been? A Muslim skulking around a mall, wearing black, asking questions about employees and closing times. They would instantly suspect he's preparing for a terrorist attack, looking to sneak into the mall after hours to plant a bomb. If they didn't arrest him for this on the spot, at a minimum they would have placed him on a watch list, which would have been flagged when he tried to buy a gun.

American conservatives are more than willing to allow the authorities to invade our privacy by x-raying us, rifling through our personal belongings and making us take off our god-damned shoes every time we board an airplane.

Yet somehow they think everyone in the country should have complete and untrammeled access to weapons of mass murder at their local gun stores. They can shoot up churches and schools and malls with impunity -- why would any terrorist bother with an airplane anymore?

NRA people don't seem to understand that lax gun laws they insist upon also allow Muslim terrorists to obtain guns easily -- just like the guns Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem provided the jihadists who were killed in the Muhammad cartoon ambush contest in Texas last month.