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Government To Confiscate One Person’s Guns Just To Make Rest Of Them Squirm

In a massive, highly coordinated raid, 50 armed agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives will reportedly storm the home of a randomly selected law-abiding gun owner in the dead of night and seize every weapon on the premises. According to sources, the surprise operation has been several months in the planning stages and is being conducted entirely for the sake of watching the individual gun owner—and subsequently, the nation’s gun-rights activists as a whole—completely freak out over it.

I say we expand this program to cover all gun bloggers and commenters on gun blog sites:)

What Part Of Infringed Did She Not Understand?

Four-Year-Old Fatally Shot in Head in Albuquerque Road Rage Incident: Police

Gallup: More Americans Favor Stricter Gun Laws

Tired of being held hostage by the American Taliban? Well, you're not the only one.  More Americans favor stricter gun laws and it's not just them. More gun owners want stricter laws as well. Perhaps some are beginning to see the writing on the wall...

The greatest threat to our national security right now is the fucking Gun Cult. As we have done with international extremists, our own local nutjobs need to be taken out. In many ways, this is a form of sedition and they need to be held accountable for their actions.

Responsible Gun Owners?

*10/11, SC: grandmother shot by 2-year-old grandson
*10/10, NV: 8-year-old boy fatally shot self
*10/10, MD: 75-year-old man fatally shot by 14-year-old boy 
*10/07, CA: 13-year-old girl shot self in hand
*10/02, OH: 12-year-old boy fatally shot 11-year-old brother
*9/26, IN: 18-year-old boy fatally shot by 15-year-old boy
*9/24, OR: 2-year-old boy shot self in leg
*9/24, MI: 6-year-old boy shot self in hand
*9/22, NY 24-year-old mother shot by 3-year-old son
*9/20, UT: 13-year-old girl shot by 11-year-old sister
*9/18, IN: 3-year-old girl shot by 13-year-old boy
*9/14, OK: 16-year-old boy shot self in leg
*9/11, NY: 15-year-old girl fatally shot by 15-year-old boy
*9/08, IL: 15-year-old boy shot self in head


And that's just in the last month...

Get Them Laid?

Last week, both Bill Maher and The Christian Science Monitor laid the blame for spree shooters at the foot of a heretofore unmentioned culprit: the male libido. Consider that all spree shooters are young men and nearly all of them have complained about a lack of sex in their lives. Both Maher and the Monitor posit that if these guys got laid more often...or at all...there wouldn't be as many spree shooters.

Of course, that translate into our society becoming massively less uptight about sex, including the legalization of prostitution. Honestly, our culture needs to unclench about sex and many other problems would go away as well.

Here's the Maher clip. It's the last new rule.

 

Hilz and NH

Check out Hillary's poll numbers in New Hampshire. She was trailing Bernie pretty badly until the debate and now it looks like she's basically even with him.

Will This Prophecy Come True?

Lights Out!

The Other Gun Lobby

If I were the Gun Lobby, I'd start shitting myself now.

You may laugh and not see it right away but you've already lost. We're coming for you, assholes.

Still Too Moderate!!

Crushing It

Hillary wasn't the only one who absolutely crushed it last night at the debate. All five candidates showed exactly why the Democrats are the party that should run the federal government. They actually (gasp!) talked about the issues, showed what a team looks like, and offered valid and comprehensive solutions to our nation's problems. In short, the behaved like adults. Not only would any one of those candidates be a decent president but each of them completely buries all of the rest of the GOP field in terms of both substance and style.

The Nation has a great piece up about why the GOP is doing so poorly these days.

The GOP finds itself trapped in a marriage that has not only gone bad but is coming apart in full public view. After five decades of shrewd strategy, the Republican coalition Richard Nixon put together in 1968—welcoming the segregationist white South into the Party of Lincoln—is now devouring itself in ugly, spiteful recriminations. "...  At the heart of this intramural conflict is the fact that society has changed dramatically in recent decades, but the GOP has refused to change with it. 

Americans are rapidly shifting toward more tolerant understandings of personal behavior and social values, but the Republican Party sticks with retrograde social taboos and hard-edged prejudices about race, gender, sexual freedom, immigration, and religion. 

This contrast was massively on display last night. The Democrats understand the shift that has been occurring since President Obama took office. The Republicans don't and are hilariously going in the opposite direction. Conservatives can't even govern themselves for pete's sake.

Her Own Worst Enemy?

Politico has a great piece up about Hillary Clinton's email woes. It's a very balanced look at what has transpired thus far. Check this out.

“I am having two problems,” she bluntly told the supporter at a social event. “On the one hand, I feel like I’m rolling out a lot of substantive programs on issues that people care about. We’re getting one day’s news coverage. But there’s nothing larger knitting it together. We’re not breaking through. … And my team needs to get their act together on the email response.”

Clinton’s frustration with her own campaign staff was striking. So was her refusal for much of the year to characterize the escalating email controversy as anything other than a failure of communications, messaging or the vast right-wing-and-media conspiracy. Both complaints were consistent with what other campaign advisers told us in dozens of interviews for this story—except some of them laid equal blame on the candidate herself. 

I said the same thing two months ago.

Tonight at the debate she has to answer questions using her own voice and not some obviously prepared talking point. If she speaks her mind and from the heart, she is going to rock it. If she doesn't, more people are going to turn off from her.

Good Words

The justification for guns on campuses — or in elementary schools or churches or wherever else gun-related mayhem has recently struck — is usually some variation on the famous line by the NRA's LaPierre: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." If only the real world were as simple as an old-timey Western film, or a game of cops and robbers. In reality, good guys with guns accidentally kill people a lot of the time. The guns that belong to "good guys" accidentally or purposely kill people. 

The good guys lose their cool or get into a fight or get drunk or become overwhelmed by depression, and someone dies, or the good guy himself does. The reality of gun violence isn't usually good guys versus bad guys. It's a chaotic world in which people fight and disagree and forget and stumble and err, a world populated by fallible human beings and made infinitely bloodier by easy access to deadly weapons.

Yep.

Yet Another Gun Cult Lie Exposed

The Gun Cult often likes to trot out the lie about how states with stricter gun laws have higher deaths. As is usually the case with them, they are lying to avoid the reality which is the opposite.

Check out all that red...

Dedicated To Right Wing Blog Commenters Everywhere...

I Don't Think They Understand That They Are In The Tiny Minority

Today's piece in the Times on the mess in the House has made me wonder....does the Freedom Caucus understand that they are in the tiny minority? I get that they want to have more power (who doesn't?) but if they are able to get the committee assignments they desire, that means they drive the agenda. This translates into moonbat crazy on display nationally and I don't think their brains are ready for the cognitive dissonance.

There's a reason why Boehner did what he did. He knows that if the wingnuts get unleashed so more than just the political junkies like me get to hear and see them, their party's demise will be hastened.

Here's another eye opener from AP that shows just how rudderless the GOP is at present. Just like a blog comments section, all they are capable of are personal attacks. They have no real position of their own...other than the trifecta of hate, anger and fear.

More Good Words

Good Words

My mother was an elementary school principal, not a Marine who signed up to be on the frontlines of a shootout. 

--Erica Lafferty, daughter of Dawn Hochsprung, principal of Sandy Hook elementary school.

And Erica? They are beyond morally bankrupt. They are criminally responsible for what's happening in this country in terms gun violence and they need to be taken out.

We've done it in the past with previous totalitarian and ideological instransigent groups. The time is now to do it again.

How This Came to Pass

House Republicans are so screwed up that they're seriously considering electing a "caretaker" speaker, John Kline from Minnesota, to serve until they can get their act together.

How did this come to pass?

It's not just that Republicans are prone to adolescent temper tantrums. It's their doctrinaire attitude about ideological purity, which fractures them into smaller and smaller subgroups that are always at war with each other.

This boils down to one thing: their inability to compromise.

They like to compare themselves to the Founding Fathers. But they're nothing like the men who built this country.

Those guys sat around in meetings for weeks and months on end, hammering out the Constitution with compromise after compromise to make this country work. This is best illustrated by the the most ridiculous and outrageous compromise of all: the Three-Fifths Compromise. It read:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Representation in the House (and presidential elections) is based on population, and Southerners -- who deemed slaves chattel with no more rights than livestock -- still wanted them to be counted as full human beings when it came to apportioning seats in the House. The compromise gave Southern states more political power to keep men enslaved, but it was the price that had to be paid to keep the country together.

It was doomed to fail, as it ultimately did less than a century later when slavery was abolished. But that's the nature of government. Nothing is forever. Times change. After a time you have to agree to something and move on, with the full knowledge that it will have to be revisited.

It is silly and petulant to pretend that you can make a decision once for the rest of eternity. Science, technology and social realities are in constant flux. A government -- or any organization, be it a company, philanthropic foundation or church -- has to adapt to new conditions.

Insisting that nothing can change and we have to do everything the way our great-great-great-grandfathers did won't just mire you in the past, it will doom you to failure.

A huge part of the problem is that Congress doesn't actually do the work of governing anymore. They work maybe three days a week, then they jet off to their home districts or some boondoggle to shmooze with big donors and PACs.

Unlike the Founders, who were stuck in the capitol for months at a time with nothing to do but the actual job of governing, modern congressmen spend all their time raising campaign cash, even when they're in DC supposedly doing their work.

If Congress actually stayed in DC and talked to each other, instead of spending all their time trying to appeal to megadonors and cranky "base voters," this country would run a hell of lot better.