How Many Times Does this Have to Happen?

A story in the Denver Post about a woman who shot herself in the head with her own assault rifle epitomizes why the NRA's position on guns make us "safer" is so silly:

Adair and her husband, Dana "Shane" Adair, 40, were drinking beer in the garage with three other people — described as housemates — when Anastasia went into the home to get her recently purchased rifle to show it off, Toldness said.

Witnesses told investigators Anastasia Adair was coming downstairs back into the garage and was handing the rifle to Dana Adair when she slipped or stumbled. The rifle discharged and she was hit in the head. Dana Adair was close enough to his wife that he caught her as she fell.

Another incident in Colorado occurred just days before, when a school employee shot a kid in the parking lot of a school:

About an hour after school let out for the day, the student was getting a ride home from a school employee who also works a second job as an armed security officer, according to police. The employee was trying to put his gun into the glove box of the car when the weapon fired, hitting the student in the leg.

This happens several times a day. Your average kid is at much higher risk of getting shot by their dad, their friends, a security guard dropping trow in the john, or by a random drive-by in front of their house targeting someone else than they are of being shot by the likes of Adam Lanza. More guns in schools won't make kids safer -- every time someone touches a gun there's a small but non-zero chance they'll screw up and shoot themselves and or an innocent bystander.

The obvious conclusion is that way too many people who own guns are oblivious and incompetent dolts. This is exemplified by the ammunition shortage that has hit several police departments recently.

Apparently people are hoarding ammo because they've been listening to NRA propaganda. They're afraid that Obama's going to take away their ammunition TOMORROW!!!

This is utter nonsense. If they had a brain they'd know that the GOP controls the House of Representatives, and there's no way that any kind of legislation controlling ammunition could even reach the House floor until 2015, and that's only if wildly liberal Democrats staged victories in every state south of the Mason Dixon line in 2014. And that would happen only if known Al Qaeda terrorists committed half a dozen mass shootings across the country with guns and ammo bought at gun shows that flout the background check process.

The honest truth is Obama is not interested in forcing members of his party to take votes on even the most mild gun control reforms beyond beefed-up background checks, for fear of losing ground in the House in the 2014 midterms. So gun-lovers rejoice: as long as Obama is in office there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that any meaningful nationwide gun control legislation will pass. You've won!

Meanwhile, gun manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank as the people being duped by NRA propaganda are crying all the way to the hospital. And the cemetery.

Peanuts

A lot of people are fretting about the way the president is handling the raft of scandals that have hit him this week. The fact is, Obama's scandals are peanuts compared to W's scandals, not to mention Watergate and Iran-Contra.

Benghazi: four men died because terrorists attacked an American consulate in Libya. Security wasn't up to snuff in part because the Republican-controlled House had stiffed the State Department for years, preferring to spend more money on bombs than on diplomacy. Republicans apparently got the result they were aiming for: they brought a scandal down upon Obama by getting four Americans killed by hamstringing State's budget. Release of emails leading up to the talking points show that there was confusion and disagreement between State and CIA, but no master plan from the administration.

Contrast this with 9/11: 3,000 Americans died in New York just a month after the damning "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo hit Bush's desk and was roundly ignored because he was on vacation. In seven bloody years 5,000 American soldiers died in a pointless war in Iraq, started on a pack of lies sold by Bush and the neocons, who were either duped by Iranian agents like Ahmed Chalabi, or complicit with them. Dozens of American diplomats were killed on Bush's watch in incidents nearly identical to Benghazi.

The real difference? The Bush administration was eager to instantly blame "terrorists," rather than ascertain actual responsibility and plan a response before opening their yaps.

The IRS scandal: apparently some IRS employees took shortcuts, subjecting conservative groups to more questions and longer waits based on their names. This occurred after it was painfully obvious many of these so-called "non-profit social welfare" groups were patterned after Karl Rove's organization and were just fronts for billionaire trying to get taxpayers to foot the bill for their propaganda. The most salient fact is this: no Tea Party groups were denied tax-exempt status. However, the IRS did deny a Democratic group such status.

Obama has (correctly) condemned the Cleveland office's actions and fired the interim IRS director. Maybe if Republicans had let Obama appoint a real director this wouldn't have happened. It's like they're trying to sabotage the administration by preventing them from getting properly staffed and organized.

Contrast this with the Bush administration's handling of the firing of US attorneys. Certain Bush appointees were fired by Alberto Gonzalez because they weren't working hard enough to sabotage registration of voters from certain ethnic groups. The firings eventually resulted in Gonzalez' resignation. But the Bush administration never admitted any wrongdoing.

Republicans have long used the IRS to attack their enemies, going back to at least Nixon.  During the Bush administration the IRS harassed the NAACP, Greenpeace and even a California minister for speaking against the Iraq war.

The real problem here is with the Supreme Court's fallacious Citizens United decision. None of these groups should be tax-exempt. If they are trying to influence elections they should -- be they conservative or liberal -- pay taxes and reveal all their donors. Unless we have that kind of transparency we can never be sure that foreigners aren't buying American elections -- and that's a very serious concern with guys like Sheldon Adelson's mountains of Chinese cash towering over us.

The very existence of the IRS scandal shows how monumentally naive (to be kind), monumentally stupid (to be honest), and monumentally greedy (to be cynical) the Citizens United decision was. Why greedy? One of the very first Tea Party organizations to cash in on this scam was formed by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.

The only reason Benghazi gained any traction at all is that the Obama administration has been nearly scandal-free for five years. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Fox News has been trying to shock its viewers to life with Benghazi lightning, but many of the inarticulate creatures on the Fox slab don't even know what country Benghazi is in.

The IRS scandal is much juicier and fits into the scary big government anti-tax motif, so now Republicans have been saved from running out of ridiculous things to be outraged by. Huzzah! Let's celebrate by wasting another couple million dollars of Congressional man-hours to vote to repeal Obamacare for the 37th (literally) time!

Whew! It was beginning to look like they'd have to go back to birth certificates and Saul Alinsky.

Born This Way?

Just after Minnesota became the next state to legalize gay marriage, a story about a child who was born with two sets of genitalia appeared that puts another spin on the same-sex marriage debate:

A South Carolina couple is suing the state's Department of Social Services, a hospital, a medical school and individual hospital employees, alleging that a "medically unnecessary" genital removal surgery violated their adopted intersex child's constitutional rights.

Mark and Pam Crawford say that their child, identified as M.C., is now 8 years old and chooses to identify as a boy, despite doctors deciding that M.C. should be a girl at 16 months old. The couple say that they chose to adopt M.C., who was in state custody at the time of adoption, knowing about the intersex condition.

Intersex conditions occur about one percent of the time according to the Intersex Society of North America. There is a spectrum of intersex conditions, usually caused by genetic errors or minuscule imbalances in hormone levels during fetal development..

This begs the question: are gays and lesbians simply on the subtlest end of the intersex spectrum, in which only the brain is affected?

There's been a good deal of research that shows the brains of gay men more closely resemble straight women, and the brains of lesbians resemble straight men. All fetuses start out essentially neuter (but to all appearances are female) and are differentiated by increasing levels of either testosterone and estrogen. If those levels are out of kilter at specific times during gestation, genital and fetal brain development will be affected. That may result in an intersex or a gay/lesbian child depending on what stage the hormone imbalance occurs at.

Opponents of same-sex marriage insist being gay is a choice and a moral and religious issue. But if people are "born gay" or intersex because of hormone levels in the uterus, they will be hard-wired for a certain sexual orientation. It makes no sense to stigmatize and punish them for a genetic condition that is no more under their control than being nearsighted, being genetically predisposed to breast cancer, having blue eyes -- or dark skin.

Disallowing same-sex marriage is no different than the genetic logic embraced by miscegenation laws that used to prevent blacks and whites from marrying. It's tantamount to racism.

Opponents of gay marriage will immediately object to this. They will insist that this condition is an error and not a badge of honor. Maybe so. But once someone is born this way, there's no way to "fix" it.

The question opponents of gay marriage might ask is what's causing these developmental errors, and if there's anything we can do to prevent them from occurring.

There are many common chemicals, such as BPA, that break down into synthetic estrogens. These have been shown to cause feminization in fish and amphibians, which has raised a great deal of speculation about whether BPA is contributing to the feminization of male humans and shrinking their penises. And maybe making them gay?

BPA is in thousands of products, from plastic bottles, to linings of Coke cans, to cash-register receipts. Perhaps the best thing we can do to stop the "gay plague" is to force companies to prove that the chemicals they use are safe, and to remove them from the market when they're shown to affect fetal development.

Damn. Nothing is worse than having to choose between two firmly held dogmas...

Oh Really?

Interesting piece in the Times yesterday on the origin of the IRS controversy.

Any group claiming tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(4) of the internal revenue code can collect unlimited and undisclosed contributions, and many took in tens of millions. They are not supposed to spend the majority of their money on political activities, but the I.R.S. has rarely stopped the big ones from polluting the political system with unaccountable cash.

Right. So, the initial motivation for this was the Citizen's United decision and the fallout that has come since that time.

So, my question is this: would all this have happened if Citizen's United had not passed and the IRS was not tasked to get tough on the tax cheats?

Indeed

So Proud!

Dayton signs same-sex marriage law at outdoor ceremony

I am so proud of my state today. See Nikto's story below for more in depth coverage.

Gay Marriage and the Real Job of a Senator

Yesterday the Minnesota Senate passed a gay marriage bill, following the House's vote last week. Governor Mark Dayton is set to sign it tonight. The bill passed the Senate by a 37 to 30 margin, mostly along party lines, with three Democrats voting against it and one Republican voting for it.

Just last November Minnesotans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage. There had already been a law against it, but Republicans did an end-around the governor and tried to write a discriminatory law into the constitution.

One of the Democrats voting against the marriage bill that just passed was Dan Sparks, from rural Austin:

Sparks, a four-term Democrat, said he voted against the bill to align with his southeastern Senate District 27, which voted about 60 percent in favor of the constitutional amendment last fall. Sparks and nine other rural Senate Democrats hail from districts that voted in favor of the constitutional amendment in November.

“At the end of the day it wasn’t a personal vote for me, it was a vote about representing my district,” Sparks said. “Today I still wasn’t positive after hearing some of the emotional speeches. It was weighing heavy on myself and my family.” Sparks said it was “by far” the most difficult vote he has taken as a senator.

Voters in my district voted against the constitutional amendment by a 3-2 margin, but my senator, David Hann, announced he would vote against it the day before the vote.

The lone Republican who voted for the bill, Branden Peterson, co-sponsored it. Members of his own party vowed to defeat him in the next election. On the floor of the Senate he said:

“I stand here, quite honestly, more uncertain about my future in this place. When I walk out of this chamber today, I know that I’m standing on the side of individual liberty.”

Scott Dibble, of Minneapolis, was a Democratic sponsor of the bill. Most of his constituents supported its passage.

Which of these men did the right thing, and why? It depends on what we think a senator's job is in the first place:

• A: A senator is an employee of all the people in his district. He should vote the way the majority of his constituents want him to. In that case, Dibble and Sparks did the right thing and Hann and Petersen did the wrong thing.
• B: A senator is an employee of just the people who voted for him. Sparks may have done the wrong thing (because he's a Democrat, and it's possible the majority of them wanted the bill passed), Petersen did the wrong thing, and Dibble and Hann did the right thing.
• C: A senator is an employee of his party. Sparks and Petersen did the wrong thing, and Dibble and Hann did the right thing.
• D: A senator is just a job. Sparks and Dibble did the right thing (because they voted the way the majority of the voters in his district voted, and that may get them reelected). Petersen did the wrong thing. Hann may have done the wrong thing if the constituents in my district voted against the constitutional amendment because they felt gay marriage should be allowed. If those constituents thought it was wrong to hack the constitution every time the legislature can't get their way through the normal legislative process (which was why I've voted all recent amendments), then Hann may have done the right thing.
• E: A senator is a moral and ethical leader who is supposed to make this country a freer and fairer place, in a truly libertarian sense. Sparks and Hann did the wrong thing, and Dibble and Petersen did the right thing. Because prohibitions against gay marriage are exactly the same as anti-miscegenation laws that banned interracial marriage, which have now all been struck down in all the states.
• F: A senator is religious leader who is supposed to obey the commandments of whatever religion holds him captive. Sparks may have done the right thing depending on his religion, Petersen probably did the wrong thing (if he's a typical Protestant Republican), and Dibble and Hann did the right thing (assuming their religions support their votes).
• G: A senator is an employee of the people who paid for their election. Sparks and Petersen did the wrong thing (members of their parties almost certainly contributed the majority of his funds), and Dibble and Hann did the right thing.

Judging by the behavior and rhetoric of Democrats, most of them seem to perceive their job to fall into one or more of A, C, D, and E. Republicans seem to favor B, C, D, F and G. This difference might be at the core of why Republicans seem to think governing should be so easy while Democrats find it so complex.

This makes me wonder if the vast majority of people have ever considered what the job of legislators is supposed to be. They just get mad when someone votes in a way they don't like. But having no common definition of what the hell a politician's job should be may be the reason we're so dissatisfied with their performance.

More Often

With seven million people working for the federal government, I'm surprised that we don't here more stories about government fuck ups and hare brained schemes similar to what we have seen in the last few days with the IRS and the Department of Justice. Honestly, it's fundamental sociology. Anytime you increase the number of people from 2 to 3 in any sort of situation, there are going to problems. Infighting, conspiracies, jealousy, and unlawful competition are just a few of the many problems that arise in any group of people. Imagine what sorts of issues seven million people bring to the table let alone trying to keep track of all of them. Why on earth would anyone want to be president? Simply by design, one would know very little about what goes on yet expected to take all of the blame.

This is truly the problem of "big government." Conservatives make the mistake and think that the government acts like a monolith, organized to an evil, Big Brother like perfection. That is completely false. In reality, the government is made up of hundreds of mini-kingdoms who all war with one another and behave in criminal fashion. With these latest two scandals in IRS and the Department of Justice, this fundamental truth will reveal itself.

The IRS story is the one that is really going to hurt, not just the president and the Democrats but the view of the federal government in general (as if it needed any more bad press!) Targeting only conservative groups is simply illegal and shameful. Those involved should be fired as quickly as possible but even then this one is going to linger for a long time.

The AP story will go away fairly quickly because conservatives hate the media and love national security. This whole thing was born out of desire to uncover who was leaking classified information, another thing hated by conservatives (exception: libertarians).We simply don't have enough information at this point to call for Eric Holder's head, although this fact alone would be a highly motivating principle for conservatives to stick around.

The good news for the president? I'd say this is pretty much the end of the non-scandal of Benghazi. That's not really saying much because the IRS story is going to seriously impede the immigration bill, budget talks, and a renewed look at a gun bill. Along with everyone else, I'm interested  to see what information will be uncovered over the next few weeks.

No Shit

A Lesson Learned

The video below completely demolishes every pro gun argument I have ever heard and shows it to be exactly what it is: a paranoid fantasy. 

 

Mother Earth

It's Mother's Day and I thought I'd giver a shout out to Mother Earth. Recent data from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration shows that we have now reached the milestone of 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere and I'm wondering if people are finally going to start to wake up.

Thankfully, the Department of Defense has been alert for awhile. Here are a few tidbits of what we have to look forward to regarding climate change.

• First, climate change will shape the operating environment, roles, and missions that the Department undertakes. It may have significant geopolitical impacts around the world, contributing to greater competition for more limited and critical life-sustaining resources like food and water. While the effects of climate change alone do not cause conflict, they may act as accelerants of instability or conflict in parts of the world. Climate change may also lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response, both within the United States and overseas.

• Second, DoD will need to adjust to the impacts of climate change on its facilities, infrastructure, training and testing activities, and military capabilities. DoD’s operational readiness hinges on continued access to land, air, and sea training and test space, all of which are subject to the effects of climate change.

Grim, indeed and we can already see it happening. Yet the good news is that we can affect change and reverse our course by simply changing the grazing habits of cattle.

When all is said and done, the end result is what counts. Environmentalist Bill McKibben observes, "Done right, some studies suggest, this method of raising cattle could put much of the atmosphere's oversupply of greenhouse gases back in the soil inside half a century. That means shifting from feedlot farming to rotational grazing is one of the few changes we could make that's on the same scale as the problem of global warming."

Not only could we stop loading up the atmosphere with CO2 but we could actually put it back in the soil within 50 years. Here is the full TED talk by Dr. Savory



The new milestone of 400ppm in our atmosphere should be the red line in the sand. If we implement these changes along with a gradual shift to renewable energy, the future detailed by the DoD will not come to pass. It's time to start taking care of Mother Earth.

The Obsessives

I've been saying for quite some time now that the Right's obsession with the deficit and the debt is detrimental to our economy. Apparently, everyone agrees now that this is the case. By "everyone," I mean the people who live outside of the bubble and actually deal with economic and financial matters on a daily basis.

Example #1

“Fiscal tightening is hurting,” Ian Shepherdson, chief economist of Pantheon Macroeconomic Advisors, wrote to clients recently. The investment bank Jefferies wrote of “ongoing fiscal mismanagement” in its midyear report on Tuesday, and noted that while the recovery and expansion would be four years old next month, reduced government spending “has detracted from growth in five of past seven quarters.”

Agreed. The article details how unemployment would likely be around 6.5 percent and quarterly growth between 3 and 4 percent as opposed to the 2 percent we are at right now.

Example #2

The Federal Open Market Committee, which sets policy for the central bank, noted signs of improvement in the private sector last week in a statement. “But fiscal policy is restraining economic growth,” it added, echoing public comments that Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has made for months. In April, the International Monetary Fund said the United States would achieve further growth “in the face of a very strong, indeed overly strong, fiscal consolidation.”

Again, US fiscal policy is restraining growth. One would almost think that the Right doesn't want the president to succeed. Hmm....

Example #3

“Whenever I talk to our customers or clients, they sort of brush off everything that’s related to fiscal policy,” Mr. Daco said. “The view is, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ That’s what I hear a lot.” “What we try to convey is that it does matter,” he said. “It is important in terms of growth. It’s also important in terms of confidence.” He noted that the economy was much stronger than Europe’s largely because the United States initially opted for stimulus measures and allowed deficits to increase when the recession and financial crisis hit five years ago. European governments pursued austerity policies to cut their debts, further stalling economic activity and in turn inflating deficits.

Isn't it time we did away with all this debt and deficit obsessiveness? It's all rooted in emotion anyway. The Right just doesn't like government spending. The only way they would embrace it is if Jesus himself came down and told them it was poor fiscal policy. And even then, I'd have to wonder....

Maybe A Different Spokesman?

In looking at the new NRA President, Jim Porter, one has to wonder why they are sticking with the "old, fat, bigoted paranoid white guy" image considering how that really has not worked in the last few elections.

Likely, a hot item!

The Epitome of Appeal To Fear

Like Mr. Parkman in the video below, when I first saw the ad for the "Obamacare Survival Guide," I could not believe how deeply the Right had fallen into the logical fallacy of Appeal to Fear. Unlike him, however, I spent several minutes laughing my ass off.

Of course, that didn't sit too well with the militant looking individual behind the counter at Firestone where I was getting new tires. He was glued to Fox News (where the ad aired) like a true believer on a Sunday. He glared at me and asked, "What's not true about the ad?" I started to tick off the list and as the facts spilled out, he acted more and more like a 5th grade boy. By the time my new tires were on, he had proceeded to warn me of how Obama was destroying the economy and civil war was imminent.

Oh, and he also told me that Kim Jong-un was going to launch a nuclear missile at the United States. He knew this because he served in the military in South Korea. This was about a month ago and, as of yet, no missile.

Anyway, Mr. Parkman's analysis here is spot on.

Modern-Day Caligulas

The Roman emperor Caligula was notorious for his debauchery: he hosted orgies, turned the palace into a brothel, killed for amusement, and supposedly appointed his horse to the Senate of Rome.

Well, the people of South Carolina have done Caligula one better: they elected a horse's ass to the United States House of Representatives. Tuesday South Carolinians elected Mark Sanford in a special election to replace the congressman who was appointed to fill Jim DeMint's seat in the Senate.

Sanford was almost as notorious as Caligula: he conducted a years-long affair with a South American hottie, spent state money to see her, and told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was really seeing his mistress in Argentina. When caught he blathered about soul mates at press conferences and in TV interviews. His wife divorced him in short order after this most embarrassing and public betrayal, yet he had the gall to ask her to run his campaign when the House seat opened up earlier this year (he said he'd pay her this time!). He violated a court order keeping him off his ex-wife's property multiple times (he just admitted guilt and settled the complaint today). Even the national Republican Congressional Campaign Committee withdrew their support.

In short, Mark Sanford represents everything Republicans claim to hate: he violated the sanctity of his marital vows, he's a liar, a cheat, he stole state money, he shredded every bit of his dignity in the national spotlight, he eviscerated his own manhood with his weepy pronouncements, and he made South Carolina a mockery and the butt of endless jokes.

Dozens of elected officials have resigned from the House of Representatives for far more minor offenses, including numerous Republicans for extra-marital affairs, and even relatively tame offenses such as inappropriate Internet postings like Anthony Weiner tweeting pics of his weiner.

Yet South Carolinians have just elected a man who has no shred of dignity or shame. The crazy thing is, these people had a choice! Sanford had 16 opponents in the first Republican primary held a few months ago, but he survived that handily and Republican voters picked him in the runoff!

There's been a great deal of debate about Caligula's appointment of his horse to the Senate. Some say he was crazy, but others say he was simply showing his low opinion of the Senate.

Do the people of South Carolina hold the House of Representatives in such low regard that they elected an adulterer, a liar and a cheat? Did they elect him because their moral and ethical standards are as low as his? Did they elect him simply because they heard his name before? Did they elect him out of spite for the rest of the country?

Or did they elect him because he's a good old boy in the Republican money machine and all that talk about morals and ethics and responsibility is just a standard line of BS, and the Republican Party is just another criminal organization like the mafia where the currencies of power are loyalty, intimidation and violence?

My money is on the last.

From now on, any time a Republican starts talking about "character" and "Republican Party" in the same sentence, just saying "Mark Sanford" should shut them right up.

One thing is for sure: Mark Sanford will embarrass South Carolina many times again.

More Benghazi Bluster

The Benghazi attacks have resurfaced again in the political world with the same ol' lines and tired reasoning. The mouth foaming about anti-Muslim videos, not using the word "terror," and not providing additional security remind us, once again, which party really embraces the credo "Do it again, only harder" (see also: the Affordable Care Act). Apparently, the Right needs a reminder again of a few key facts.

First, the attack in Benghazi was not on a US Embassy or a consulate. The official word is that it was a "diplomatic mission." In truth, it was a CIA listening station and that's why it was attacked. If you want to bitch about government secrets, that's fine but that means you can't move to crucify guys like Julian Assanges. There are secrets the government is keeping about this location and they have everything to do with why the word "terror" wasn't used and why additional security was not allowed there. The latter was also hampered by lack of funding, another fact that seems to have been conveniently forgotten.

Second, FORMER, not present, Navy SEALS were killed, along with Ambassador Chris Stevens. These men were private contractors working for the CIA. Be honest about this.

Third, this was an extremely destabilized area of the world, not on US soil. We had another attack on September 11th that was on US soil in which there was none of this "outrage" from the Right. Anyone remember that one? We've also had a few other attacks on consulates over the years that (hmmm...) were met with the sound of crickets.

Fourth, just admit that you're pissed off that the anti-Muslim video was brought into the mix because it reveals the rampant bigotry in your population of red faced miscreants. I love the "IT WASN'T THE VIDEO!!! IT WASN'T THE VIDEO!!!" screeches of desperate insecurity combined with the redirect on the president. Methinks thou protest too much...

I realize the Right is trying to find something to latch onto that will stick with the president but nothing is working. So, they keep going over the same ground because they can't find anything new. About time for another vote to repeal Obamacare, isn't it?

Charles Ramsey=Greatest Interview In Television History

This is the man that many across the nation are hailing as a hero today. His name is Charles Ramsey and he rescued three women in Cleveland who had been held hostage for more than a decade. Greatest interview EVER!

 

Miserable and Pathetic

I watched in complete wonder and awe at last weekend's annual NRA convention. I say that because I don't think I have ever seen a collection of more angry, hateful and paranoid people gathered in one place. Everyone is out to get them and they are eternally in a state of conflict. What a miserable and pathetic way to live your life. I'm nearly certain that many of the folks who fought hard for Manchin-Toomey and who still are fighting for changes to our gun laws felt beaten down after seeing the all the chest thumping and mouth foaming going on down in Houston last weekend. To those of you that do, I say this: the NRA is finished.

Their recent gathering demonstrated that they are going all in with one political party. They have more or less given up on the Democrats and have aligned themselves with the nutballs running the GOP today. Ultimately, this will prove to be a fatal error. Why? Because the GOP have a political agenda consisting of one belief: denying President Obama and the Democrats success. We've seen in the last several elections that only being the party of "No" is a loser. You have to stand for something.

The NRA used to stand for something and had broad support in both political parties. Heck, they used to even stand for universal background checks. Take a look at this...


WTF happened? Well, politics, along with business, did. The NRA knows that there are less people that own guns today than they did 20 years ago. They want those people to buy more guns and the only way to get them to do that is use the propaganda of fear, hatred, and anger. What better place to have a captured and ripe audience for this than the GOP in 2013.

The problem is that this demographic is shrinking and the NRA knows it. This is their last gasp to earn enough money to invest and live comfortably on a beach somewhere for the rest of their lives. There aren't very many younger people that own guns or are as fervent about this issue. Further, it's only a matter of time before the political head winds blow them over. The 80-90 percent of Americans who support universal background checks are going to remember this vote next year and in 2016 and it's not going to be good for many senators.

It's going to be even worse for them when another shooting happens, especially if the shooter purchased the guns at a place that would have had to require a background check under the new law. I'm betting that one of the next shootings is going to personal affect the gun community in such a horrific way that the paranoid bullshit will all finally be over.

Here's to hoping I'm wrong because I'm truly sick and tired of a collection of psychotic assholes putting the people I love at greater risk every day simply because they are riding the Randian high of a fevered, adolescent power fantasy that is clearly causing them to see and hear things that do not exist. Truly, we do not need any more senseless death from gun violence, particularly at this time when some of it could be mitigated by simply refining our gun laws.

Take heart, sensible people everywhere who don't see visions of government troops seizing your guns. It's only a matter of time now. Be patient...

Yet Another Terrorist We'll Immediately Forget

The FBI arrested a terrorist in Montevideo, MN, last Friday.

Buford “Bucky” Rogers, 24, of Montevideo, was arrested and charged Friday with being a felon in possession of a firearm after federal authorities found Molotov cocktails, suspected pipe bombs and guns during a search of his mobile home, according to a federal criminal complaint and affidavit.

Authorities believed Rogers was about to attack the Montevideo Police Department.

Why will we forget Bucky? He's a white supremacist. He formed a group called the Black Snake Militia. Some of his Facebook rants include:

“The NWO [New World Order] has taken all your freedoms the right to bear arms freedom of speach freedom of the press ...” read one profanity-punctuated message.

“ever one better get your guns ready cuz there comeing FEMA” and “The war is here tsa agents are doing random cheeks and shooting people for no reson,” read others.

In short, Rogers is parroting all the nonsense the NRA and the Republican Party have been spewing for the last five years.

When two smart Muslim kids kill three people and injure hundreds it's time for a witch hunt. But when crazies like Adam Lanza mow down dozens of kids in a school, or illiterate white supremacist militiamen like Bucky Rogers plan to murder police with pipe bombs, there's absolutely no cause for alarm.

The right in America has a double standard on terrorism. If you're a Muslim or a lefty and you plot mass murder in Boston or New York you're a terrorist. But if you're a Christian, or a right-wing white supremacist, or a tax protestor who parrots everything Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh say, and then plot to blow up a Martin Luther King day parade, an abortion clinic, an IRS office or a police station in Montevideo or Spokane, you're a "wacko bird," as John McCain is wont to say.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked more than one hundred incidents of right-wing terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism between 1995 and 2012. These include attacks on temples, the police, judges, abortion clinics, race-based murders, murders of co-conspirators, IEDs planted along parade routes, and so on.

Much has been made of the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers watched videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, ostensibly motivating them to plan the Boston bombing. But, by the numbers, we should be more worried about the people who are watching Internet videos of Glenn Beck and the president of the NRA.

How Do We See Ourselves?

Take a look at this video from Dove...



It's truly amazing to me how so many women look upon themselves so negatively. What is it about culture that drives them to do this? It's not just advertising or Hollywood.

Nor is it just women. The next time you are in a group of people try this experiment. Tell a story about how you fucked something up and watch everyone laugh along with you. Then tell a story about how great you are at something and listen for the crickets. Maybe you might get one person that gives you some props but for the most part, we cheer self deprecation and jeer self affirmation.

I don't get it.

Great Tweets!

Perfect For A Saturday Night

This is one of the most deranged and hilarious things I have ever read. Apparently, things are just as bad in sororities as we thought they were. Here is an excerpt:

I will fucking cunt punt the next person I hear about doing something like that, and I don't give a fuck if you SOR me, I WILL FUCKING ASSAULT YOU.

Since authoring this email, she has resigned from Delta Gamma. She should take heart, though. There is a place for her on the inter webs...the right wing blogsphere.

She'd fit right in!

Come Again?

Poll: Gun vote boosts Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu 

TUCSON SHOOTING SURVIVORS GAVE JOHN MCCAIN 19 ROSES TO THANK HIM FOR HIS GUN VOTE

What was all that business again about senators being afraid to vote in favor of Manchin-Toomey?

Yep

Begin The Spin

U.S. Adds 165,000 Jobs, Unemployment Rate Dips

 The headline unemployment rate ticked lower to 7.5% from 7.6%, the lowest in four years. Economists had predicted an increase of 145,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate would remain unchanged.

Perhaps the best news out of the jobs report was that highly disappointing March numbers were revised upward to 138,000 non-farm jobs created, up from the 88,000 originally reported. In total, revisions added 114,000 jobs to the workforce in February and March. 

Get ready for the new spin which will shift from "Obama is ruining the economy" to "it should have happened sooner and would have if a conservative was in charge!"

Meanwhile, check out the revised February numbers...wow!

Tragic

We currently live in a society that goes to great lengths not to offend people for their way of life. Schools teach children to be kind to one another and try to understand what it's like to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. Yet, I do not get this.

And I never will.

Truly, this is a foreign country to me and yet it's just a few states away from me. We have young hunters up here in the North Woods but there aren't any ads in the paper for "my first rifle" or an abundance of photos that show children with guns. People in my state take gun safety a lot more seriously. Apparently, they don't in states like Kentucky.

How could this mother be so fucking stupid? I really don't care if I offend anyone with this but what a class A moron! Even though this tragedy resulted in one death, it's still the same thing as Newtown...idiot mom allows child access to guns...results in loss of young life.

Oh well, accidents happen, I guess. There's nothing to be done whatsoever. Anyone who tries to do something or prevent something like this is Hilter.

The Greatest Nation, Impotent Before Madmen....

Proving Me Wrong Every Single Time

Take a look at this new ad from the GOP.



Note the photo at the 19 second mark. That's President Obama consoling Nicole Hockley, mother of Newtown shooting victim, 6 year old Dylan Hockley. I didn't think it was possible for conservatives to get any lower. They continue to prove me wrong every single time.

I'm wondering what kind of people do a victory dance by showing the mother of a 6 year old shooting victim in a campaign ad. Senator Toomey was right. This was all about stopping Obama, not about protecting 2nd amendment rights.

Great Blog

I was having a discussion with Nikto the other day about how informative it would be if someone started a web site that illustrated the regularity of gun violence in this country. Well, guess what? There already is one and it's great.

Joe Nocera is doing every American a service with his daily updates. This needs to be expanded on a larger scale so people can see how truly awful this problem is and work to prevent further injuries and deaths. As of right now, the federal government is not doing anything to stop this so it has to be up to us.

What should we do?

President Juice

At the press conference on Tuesday, ABC's Jonathan Karl asked the president whether or not he had "the juice" to get things done in Congress. Mr. Obama smiled and quoted Mark Twain about premature demises but the question made the rest of the nation wonder...does he?

It's fairly obvious that the president has a great deal of disdain for Congress. This would include his own party as well as the Republicans. He doesn't have the patience for the schmooze game and he lacks assholeishness of Lyndon Johnson to make people's lives a living hell until they pass what he wants passed. So, he opts to play the long game and that means that in the short term, he looks weak and ineffective. Hence, the comment about juice.

But reporters like Karl should take note of what the president has accomplished thus far. That's pretty impressive, if you ask me. It demonstrates that his opting for longer term victories is a much more effective strategies. Besides, the political media is locked in the 48 hour news cycle and has the emotional intelligence of Kim Kardashian so what do they really know?

What many also fail to note is that conservatives simply don't want to allow the president to win...anything. Senator Pat Toomey, co-author of the Manchin-Toomey gun safety bill, summed it perfectly.

"In the end it didn’t pass because we’re so politicized," Toomey told editors from Digital First Media in an interview published Wednesday by the Norristown Times Herald. "There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it."

There's a word for that...what is it?....I can't quite seem to remember what it is...hmm...:)

David Firestone echoes this sentiment.

It doesn’t really matter how many business groups say the immigration system has to change, or how many suburban voters are disgusted by the easy access to guns for criminals. For these Republicans, the visceral hatred of the president is their only guiding star, and they are absolutely convinced the voters in their districts feel the same way.

I call it Obama Mental Meltdown Syndrome (OMMS). Not to be outdone by the Bush Haters and still stung by the fact that at least they had a reason to loathe our 43rd president, OMMS sufferers remind of children. They stomp their feet, foam at the mouth, and just can't stand the fact that "the other side" is, in reality, winning. President Obama is transforming this country to a center left one just as Ronald Reagan moved it to the center right. They know this is happening and that's why they are doing precisely what they are doing.

The problem for them, however, is that voters are not on their side. Further, the president and the Democrats have learned that they need to be more aggressive in an ongoing way in rallying support. 2014 is not going to be 2010, hence the transformation of the president's campaign machine into Organizing For America.. If conservatives continue the way they are now and don't pass immigration reform, for example, 2014 is going to be very kind to the president. 2016 will be even kinder.

Moreover, if Hillary runs and wins, which she likely will given all of this and the very weak GOP field, you can say buh-bye to the politeness and soft peddling of Congress by the White House. Heck, she'll make Lyndon Johnson look like Mother Teresa!

WTF??!!

PART FOUND NEAR WTC FROM TYPE OF JET HIJACKED 9/11

What I find interesting about this story is the rope they found that was possibly used to lower it in to the crevice. Is this a message? Or has it just been stuck there since 9-11-01?

Filthy Gun Grabber!

Not On Display

With the recent dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library, I think it is only fitting that I reprint, in its entirety, Tomas Young's letter to our 43rd president and vice president. No doubt, this will not appear on display in Dallas.


To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From: Tomas Young 

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care. 

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. 

I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief. I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. 

I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole. Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage. I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. 

I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences. I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. 

I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire. I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? 

I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul. My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

Sweet!

Good news on the economic front.

U.S. economic growth accelerated from January through March, buoyed by the strongest consumer spending in more than two years. The strength offset further declines in government spending that are expected to drag on growth throughout the year. 

Despite the sequester and the tax increases, I think this year is going to be fantastic, economically. We've certainly started it off right!

Good Words

If only Americans reacted the same way to the actual threats that exist in their country. There's something quite fitting and ironic about the fact that the Boston freak-out happened in the same week the Senate blocked consideration of a gun control bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential buyers. Even though this reform is supported by more than 90% of Americans, and even though 56 out of 100 senators voted in favour of it, the Republican minority prevented even a vote from being held on the bill because it would have allegedly violated the second amendment rights of "law-abiding Americans". 

So for those of you keeping score at home – locking down an American city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties. All of this would be almost darkly comic if not for the fact that more Americans will die needlessly as a result. Already, more than 30,000 Americans die in gun violence every year (compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks). 

What makes US gun violence so particularly horrifying is how routine and mundane it has become. After the massacre of 20 kindergartners in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, millions of Americans began to take greater notice of the threat from gun violence. Yet since then, the daily carnage that guns produce has continued unabated and often unnoticed.

People are noticing, though, and I don't think the gun community is going to be happy in the next couple of elections. Kelly Ayotte isn't faring well after her vote. Pat Toomey, however, is faring well. Once again, I don't think the Right cares about winning elections anymore. Just arguments.

Where Are YOU on the Chart

Busted!

Over the course of the last few months, we've seen that austerity measures in Europe aren't working. One would think that they learned their lesson after the worldwide economic depression in the 1930s but they haven't. Neither have conservatives in this country who are so emotionally obsessed with the government spending less money that they really can't see how cuts in spending are harmful. Now we have the proof that not only are they harmful, they are decidedly not beneficial. In short, high public debt does not consistently stifle economic growth.

Thank you, Thomas Herndon!

Whither Syria...

President Obama has some tough choices to consider over the next few days as he considers whether or not Syria has crossed the red line of chemical weapons use. Assuming they have used them on the rebels (and that's a big "if," at this point), is it really our business to get involved in another country's civil war? The Assad regime is terrible for its people and awful for the world. They are a state sponsor of violent extremism and have a penchant for targeting Israel, one of our closest allies in the world. So, there's no doubt we'd all be better off if he was gone.

But what would be put in his place? We've seen that slippery slope with the Arab Spring in Egypt. The rebels that are fighting in Syria right now are jihadi extremists who very well could impose a theocracy complete with Sharia law in place of the Assad government. Clearly, this would be worse and likely destabilizing to the region. Israel would be at even greater risk. We also have to consider Russia's stake in all of this as they are a staunch ally of Syria.

If I were the president, I would tread cautiously and, if it is confirmed that chemical weapons were used, any action that is taken should be done so with a broad consensus starting with the Arab League. While this decision is being made, we need solid intelligence on what the Syrian rebels plan to do if they assume power. Are they going to be part of the world community and participate in open elections and democracy? Or will they be worse than Bashar Assad?

Football, Boxing, Boston and Three Unsolved Murders on 9/11/11

A couple of weeks ago the NFL moved to dismiss over 200 cases brought by thousands of football players suing the NFL for brain damage caused by concussions they received while playing football. In many cases players who had just suffered severe brain trauma were immediately sent back out on the field.

Repeated concussions, or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, can cause dementia and Parkinson's Syndrome. There have been numerous documented cases where individuals suffering from CTE committed assaults, murder and suicide. The problem is that CTE is almost impossible to diagnose until an autopsy is conducted.

So when Time Magazine ran an article that asked whether brain damage that Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev suffered as an amateur boxer contributed to his rage against the United States, imagine the outrage among conservatives, as reported by Fox News:

“TIME should be ashamed and embarrassed by this article. It is just beyond absurd, and is another silly and infantile attempt to deny the obvious,” AmericanThinker.com columnist C. Edmund Wright told FOX411. “Boxing, and football, have been related to brain damage in the past, but none of the boxers or NFL players who committed suicide did so by killing innocent eight-year-olds in a crowded public square. The analogy doesn’t pass elementary school logic.”

No, football players haven't killed eight-year-olds in public. But victims of CTE have killed girl friends, spouses and their own children. 

Media critic John Ziegler concurred. “It is hilarious to watch the media do mental gymnastics to try to avoid concluding that radical Islam was what motivated the bombings,” he said. “If the fake Onion paper tried to parody this, they simply could not.”

John Conway, CEO of Astonish Media Group, found the article “sensationalized and grasping at straws,” while Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business and Culture and the Media Research Institute, noted: “Every time there is another act of terror linked to radical Islam, journalists go out of their way to excuse it or rationalize it. There was a time when news magazines had gravitas, now they only way they get attention is by acting like your crazy uncle.”

Of course, none of these media pundits knows anything at all about CTE. Nor do they seem to have read the Time article, which includes the following paragraph:

That points to the difficulty of establishing any link between the condition of a brain and actions that may or may not result from it. Cantu points to the case of the late pro wrestler Chris Benoit, who killed his wife and son and then himself in 2007. When his brain was studied after he died, it showed signs of CTE—but here too it might have had little to do with his murderous behavior. “In Benoit’s case the behavior was again premeditated. It took place slowly, over the course of a weekend. He even sedated his son first so he wouldn’t suffer,” Cantu says. Criminally pathological? Certainly. But triggered by CTE? Probably not.

Time asked an obvious question, consulted experts and printed their conclusions. The experts thought that the bombing was a premeditated act that lacked the impulsiveness usually associated with behaviors caused by CTE.

Conservatives and FOX News were confused because they thought Time was using their tried and true trick of "just asking a question" and guilt by association to link boxing and the bombers. They had to attack because they didn't want their simplistic narrative of radical Islam being the sole cause of the Boston bombing to be confused by inconvenient facts or mitigating circumstances.

In their rush to condemn all of Islam for the actions of two disturbed individuals (or "losers" as their own uncle describes them), conservatives are doing exactly the same thing they accuse liberals of when they demand restrictions on all gun owners because a few (well, it's actually dozens at this point) crazed individuals like Adam Lanza and James Holmes committed mass murder.

The NRA insists that mental illness is the cause of mass murder, not access to guns or explosives. We know that repeated brain injury is a cause of mental illness. So it's only logical to ask whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev suffered brain trauma that would cause murderous behavior.

Which brings us to those murders on 9/11/11. Authorities are now wondering whether Tamerlan murdered his best friend and two other men on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. If those murders were the kind of impulsive act of enraged violence typical of CTE, brain damage may well have sent Tamerlan on a downward spiral of guilt, anger, depression and despair that ultimately resulted in the senseless bombing in Boston and suicidal behavior afterwards.

We should also ask the following questions: did brain damage play a role in Tamerlan's arrest in 2009 for assaulting his girl friend? Could brain damage have made Tamerlan more receptive to a violent and radical interpretation of Islam in the first place? Did brain damage make it harder for Tamerlan to concentrate and therefore study, ultimately forcing him to drop out of college?

The authorities should look closely at Tamerlan's brain. If it has the lesions indicative of CTE he's no less guilty. But if brain damage was partially responsible for the tragedy in Boston, it raises questions about the potential risk from sports where concussions are routine.

Just because you're a boxer or a Muslim doesn't mean you're going to blow people up. Muhammad Ali was both. But all that brain damage did leave Ali trembling with Parkinson's at the age of 42.

So you might think long and hard before signing your kid up for football, boxing or martial arts.

Internet Sales Taxes: a Chance to Fix a Broken System

The Internet is going insane now that the Internet sales tax bill has passed a test vote in the Senate. The bill would require companies with sales of more than a million dollars worth of out-of-state sales to collect sales tax for the states where their customers live.

Why is this needed? When people buy things from out-of-state companies through mail order or the Internet they're supposed to pay sales tax to their state. But no one does. This means that the states, most of which are really strapped for cash these days, are not getting funds needed to pay for the services used by the freeloaders who actually live there. We're talking tens of billions of dollars here.

Thus, Internet companies that don't pay sales tax have a huge advantage over local businesses. Retailers watch helplessly as people stroll down the aisles of their stores looking at merchandise, trying it out and asking clerks questions, only to place an order on Amazon with their cellphone while they're still in the store.

The Senate bill, once opposed by Amazon, now enjoys the Internet pioneer's backing. The reason is that Amazon will soon be paying sales taxes anyway, because it's planning to build warehouses near large cities to achieve same-day delivery, allowing them to compete directly with brick and mortar retailers.

But some people are attributing a more sinister motive: they think Amazon wants to crush any upstart competitors by making them collect onerous sales taxes. This, everyone fears, will stifle innovation and snuff out the entrepreneurial spirit forever more.

Typical reactions to the bill are like Megan McArdle's, of The Daily Beast. They argue that small businesses won't be able to handle paying sales tax to all those jurisdictions. However, opponents of the bill keep forgetting that this will only affect companies with at least one million dollars in out-of-state sales. Small businesses will never have to bother with collecting out-of-state sales taxes.

All this outrage is misplaced. The real problem is that the sales tax system is broken and this is the perfect opportunity to fix it.  

The thing is, many small businesses already have to collect out-of-state sales taxes. For example, if you're a small vendor who sells stuffed animals, or comic books, or Star Wars light-sabers at out-of-state at conventions like Comic-Con or Gen-Con you have to collect sales tax for anything you sell there. And then you often have to continue to file with those states for years afterwards, even though you may never make another sale there again.

Selling things on the Internet is exactly the same thing: the customer brings your virtual sales floor directly onto their computer screen, and they make the purchase in their home.

Computing sales tax on such purchases is not difficult. This is the Internet, after all, and there are computers. Computers can take an address and calculate exactly how much sales tax is due and who should get it. PayPal already does this on behalf of small businesses, though it's up to the businesses to do the necessary filings and payments to the state.

And that's where the magic of entrepreneurship comes in. This is a perfect opportunity for an someone to start up a new Internet business to make collecting sales taxes painless for everyone.

When this bill becomes law state legislatures will have a huge incentive to streamline their sales-tax filing systems, which are predicated on the idea that only in-state businesses collect sales taxes. They will rush to provide mechanisms for direct computerized payment of sales taxes, and eliminate  onerous filing requirements.

That will also make it easier for in-state companies to collect sales taxes. And that's a win for everyone.

Standardized Testing: Do It Right or Not At All

There's been a lot of wailing and moaning about high-stakes testing in the schools lately. An article by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post caught my attention because it criticizes a company I used to work for. Strauss has a long litany of delays, errors committed, and fines paid by Pearson for problems with the administration of tests in schools. Another recent article discusses Pearson's role in jacking up the price of the GED. I even know the president of GED Testing Service; I worked with him 20 years ago.

I didn't work with high-stakes testing for kids; I worked for the companies that grew out of Control Data's PLATO division. They provided computerized certification exams for IT professionals who supported software products from companies like Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, etc. They also provided FAA pilot and mechanic exams, stock broker compliance testing, insurance and real estate sales exams, and so on. When I retired a dozen years ago, the business was quickly morphing into computerized delivery of certification testing for medical professionals and was about to enter the SAT/ACT market.

So I have a bit of inside knowledge about the testing business. I was on the software end of things, and wrote the code that delivered and scored computerized tests. I worked with a lot of exam developers and customers to get their exams into our delivery system and the results out of the back end. But the real work in testing is on the front end: the development of the exams themselves.

There were basically two kinds of customers. The first kind was the testing professional, who insisted on doing things the right way. That involves writing a large bank of test questions ("items") and then testing the items' performance in several series of exams to a large number (hundreds, if not thousands) of target candidates who demonstrate the expected range of knowledge of the subject matter. The quality of the items is then statistically determined by how well they predict the ability level of the candidate (which has be assessed separately).

A good item is one that someone with a firm grasp of the subject material gets right and someone who doesn't know the material gets wrong. A bad item has no correlation with subject matter expertise and a terrible one has a negative correlation. Bad items have factual errors, or are poorly written, unclear, misleading or "trick" questions.

Another consideration in writing an exam is the number of "forms" you deliver: in many testing regimes people take the exams on different days, so you have to write many different forms of the exam in order to avoid exposing all the items to the public at once. This is a serious concern because there are quite well-organized cheating efforts that involve people who've just taken an exam doing a memory dump of a few questions they are assigned to remember. With a relatively small crew you can completely reconstruct the exam: within a day your test -- and all the answers -- can be out on the Internet.

When you have multiple forms of an exam, it's critical that the forms be equivalent. That is, each form has to be statistically balanced to have the same degree of difficulty, even though not all items on the form are the same. Otherwise the test wouldn't be fair to all takers.

This means that if you want to give several alternate forms of a 50-question test to millions of kids across a state or a country, you're going to wind up writing thousands of items, many of which will be discarded because they do not accurately predict ability level.

This is extremely expensive and time-consuming. And it's a never-ending process because of the exposure problem and constantly changing curricula. Companies like Pearson manage item banks with millions of items whose statistical performance is monitored and are aged out over time.

That brings us to the second kind of customer: the average guy. The average guy thinks you can just jot down some questions and be done with it. That's probably true for teachers who know the kids in their class, where quizzes plus class participation plus daily homework provide a complete picture for the teacher to assign a grade. But you can't write a standardized test that way.

The problem with developing good exams, in my experience, is that people just don't want to pay for it. Their eyes glaze over as you explain that it'll require subject matter experts writing thousands of items, and months of testing and retesting the items' performance (you can't change a word of an item -- or even its formatting -- without affecting its stats), and analysis of the statistics, and careful construction of equivalent forms.  And then things like content balancing  (making sure subdisciplines of the exam subject matter aren't under- or overrepresented on a particular form) make the exam developer's job that much harder.

Not surprisingly, school districts are particularly concerned about costs and schedules. They never have enough money, and by the time the legislature appropriates it, the company that's supposed to develop and deliver the test may not have the time to do it right.

In my experience, corporate customers constantly changed their minds and added new requirements, but the schedule never changed. With state-wide tests and requirements coming from dozens of school districts, administrators and meddlesome politicians, the software developer in me would imagine the deadline at the end of the school year to be an all-consuming bottomless pit.

Thus, I'm sure that many of the problems Valerie Strauss cited with Pearson's performance are due to changes their customers demanded at the last minute, or customers skipping necessary quality control steps that they didn't want to pay for or have time for due to schedule constraints. From personal experience I'm absolutely certain that many of Pearson's alleged problems are really the fault of politicians, school boards, state education commissions and educators themselves.

I'm equally certain that many of the problems are due to sales guys who promised things Pearson didn't have, management who agreed to schedules their technical people told them outright were impossible, not to mention hardware problems, mistakes in coding and data entry, faulty statistical analysis, mismatching items and their statistics and/or answer keys, and simple cut/paste errors in item text.

Given the constantly shifting educational priorities and curricula, perennially tight school budgets and incessant political bickering I don't see how we'll ever be able to do large-scale standardized testing right, especially not with every state and local jurisdiction trying to reinvent the wheel themselves, and everyone insisting that we do it several times a year.

If we can't spend the time and the money to do standardized testing right, we shouldn't do it at all. With all due respect to my former colleagues, I think we should take the money out of the hands of companies like Pearson and put it back into the schools where it'll do the most good.

Voices In My Head (Blaming The Victim Edition)

I have something I want to say to the victims of Newtown or any other shooting, I don’t care if it’s here in Minneapolis or anyplace else: Just because a bad thing happened to you doesn’t mean that you get to put a king in charge of my life. I’m sorry that you suffered a tragedy, but you know what? Deal with it, and don’t force me to lose my liberty, which is a greater tragedy than your loss. I’m sick and tired of seeing these victims trotted out, given rides on Air Force One, hauled into the Senate well, and everyone is … terrified of these victims. I would stand in front of them and tell them, ‘Go to hell'

This is what happens when you come out of the bubble. You get smacked squarely in the head with your bullshit.

Several things amaze me about this very illustrative incident. We have the usual adolescent temper tantrum that is all too familiar. This stomp down the hallway precedes the equally familiar DARVO, a truly despicable  practice which seems to happen when the mouth foamer knows that he or she is completely wrong.

But the element that really stuns me is just how much of a fucking coward the Bob Davies' are of the world. If he truly has the courage of his convictions, he should go to Newtown and say those things in front of the victim's families. That goes for anyone else out there who hides behind a mic or a blog who thinks that victim's families or frightened children are being used as props or "human shields."

Go say that shit right to their face, fuckos. If you can't muster the sack to do it, then you obviously don't believe what you are saying and just being an immature ass hat.

Heed His Warning

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Is Joe channeling me?:)

Earth Day +1

Yesterday was Earth Day and Nikto and I were too busy talking about the gun debate and Boston so I thought I would put this wonderful documentary up today. It's an American Experience film, in its entirety, about the history of the modern environmental movement. Interesting how it started with Republicans...

Enjoy!

Well, This is Fantastic!