ACA Update

We've seen a flurry of news regarding the Affordable Care Act recently with the most hilarious being that 74% of Republicans of newly insured Republicans like their plan. We also have the graphic below from Gallup.

So, the uninsured rate is now the lowest it's ever been since Gallup started polling six years ago.

Of course, it can't all be good news. House Speaker John Boehner recently stated that the impetus behind suing President Obama is his delaying of the employer mandate in the ACA. The ACA...hmm...that would be the law that House Republicans have tried to repeal how many times now?

Also worthy of note...zombie lies about the ACA that still aren't true

No one will sign up
People won't pay the premiums
Young people haven't signed up
Death panels
It will ruin our economy
We will all be thrown into a boiling pit of sewage

Seems to me like that bubble is contracting just a wee bit more than they would like:)

Zombie Lies!

Bill Maher has done it again. Check out the video below, specifically the last new rule which starts about two minutes in...



How much longer will people believe the Zombie lies?

Do What They Say, Not What They Do...

The standard line from conservatives is that government should meet its obligations and live within its means. Take, for example, this section of the web page for Minnesota state senator Sean Nienow (emphasis added):

Fiscal responsibility with the tax payers money is a high priority for Senator Nienow. The same common sense money management used by families and businesses is also necessary with the state budget. Senator Nienow is committed to being thoughtful, prudent and disciplined with your tax dollars to ensure the state meets its obligations, provides appropriate help to those in need, and fosters a vibrant economic climate for Minnesota business.

This self-proclaimed "fiscally conservative Republican" has just filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. He owes the government almost a million bucks for a small business loan he took out in 2009 that he started to default on within 18 months. He has been screwing over his business associates now for years.

While yapping Republican dog whistles on his web page, Nienow hypocritically took my tax dollars in the form of an SBA loan, blew it on some imprudent scheme and is now skipping out on his obligations.

Now we can understand why Republicans are so bad at running government: they use the same wishful thinking, trickle-down, self-dealing, weaselly financial management in government that they use in their personal lives.

What was Nienow's business? A "free online summer camp referral service." What the hell was the SBA thinking when they gave him a loan for over half a million bucks? Oh, wait. The loan was issued in January, 2009, just as George W. Bush was leaving office. Now I get it... The rats were cleaning out the cookie jar.

Among the assets that Senator Nienow wants to be exempted from bankruptcy proceedings are his home, four guns, a broken boat and a Nintendo Gamecube system (!).

Minnesota had been having serious budget troubles under Republican governor Tim Pawlenty for eight years. But since a Democrat was elected governor and both houses of the legislature went Democratic in 2012, Minnesota's state budget has been turned around. Democrats passed a tax relief bill earlier this year, undoing some of the tax increases that were no longer needed (Democrats shrank the government!). The unemployment rate has dropped significantly, to one of the lowest in the nation. In some sectors of the Minnesota economy (IT) there is essentially zero unemployment.

Republicans have been aching for years to turn Minnesota into a cold Alabama by hacking the state government to bits, cutting income taxes and services to the bone while maxing out sales taxes and fees that hurt low-income folks.

But Minnesotans have turned many of these ideologues and charlatans out of office. There's still at least one more to go. Sadly, I doubt Senator Nienow will do the right thing and resign. He seems to need that $31K salary and $100 per-diem he gets for working in the legislature.

Is it unseemly to take such glee in Nienow's personal calamity? Yes. But his fellow Republicans take every chance they can to attack immigrants, teachers, and minimum-wage workers who have been suffering for years with lousy working condition, stagnant wages and a sleep-walking economy. Why should we exhibit compassion for these compassionless people who exult in the misery of the poorest among us? The only way they seem to be able to empathize with the less fortunate is to have misfortune befall them.

Nienow isn't up for reelection until 2016. Here's hoping his constituents have good memories.

The President Lets It Rip

I've waited a long time to see the Barack Obama we saw yesterday in Austin, Texas, and holy crap did he deliver. Take a look...



Quite possibly the most accurate summation of the intransigence he faces from the Republicans in Congress.

Gun Safety

How A TSM Commenter Fairs Outside of the Bubble

From a gun question on Quora...

You're selectively integrating information and stimuli that reinforces this bizarre victim mentality that fosters a paranoia void of context and logic. Simply put, you're searching for and finding the information that allows you to continue doing what you want to do. 

Similar to a child, you want what you want, in this case a gun or many guns, and you will unconsciously seek out biased information, or incomplete information, to reinforce this desire. In fact, your immediate, conditioned response will be to do exactly that as you formulate a response to this comment. You're not even reading this, your mind is instantly attaching to the information you've inundated yourself with, information that screams at you, while these words I write are but a whisper. Before I spoke, your conditioned response was guaranteed. 

But, the path to enlightenment, however shrouded in the darkness of the controlled mind, is not lost. You can remove the fears and biases that keep you hidden. You can overcome the conditioned response. You can grow and metamorphasize and unfurl. But first you must understand that you know nothing. First you must admit that you know nothing. Only then can your journey begin.

A gun humper admitting they know nothing? With their level of insecurity? I wouldn't hold your breath.

Time for ol' Matt to head back into the bubble where he want be shouted at with all that negativity and truth and stuff...

Compassionate Conservatism

The current situation at our borders that involves unaccompanied children crossing our border has its roots in two US laws passed under George W. Bush. The first is the Homeland Security Act of 2002 which transferred the power to care for these individuals from INS to ORR (the Office of  in the Department of Health and Human Services). So, it became an issue of public health as opposed to immigration.

The second law was the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 which was passed to combat human trafficking. The New York Times has a great piece on this legislation that honestly makes conservative criticism and calls to boot children out look, at best, silly and worst, inhumane. I would imagine that very few conservatives realized that these laws were passed under Republican administrations and were passed with good reason.

Many of these children are in great distress and if we are to be the beacon of liberty and freedom in the world, we must help them. This was indeed the compassionate conservatism of George W Bush seen also in his direct aid to Africa which honestly shifted disease and lifespan on that continent to considerably high degree.

Perhaps it is this compassion that has the conservatives of today apoplectic. They shriek about how "it's the law" and that illegals should deported immediately but the law as it stands today says something much different than their howls and imperial declarations. Perhaps the next time they open their mouths and accuse someone of only following the law when it suits them, they should stop and go look in the mirror.

More importantly, they should recognize that the problem of immigration is the deepest shade of gray of pretty much all of the issues we face today. Their simplistic and xenophobic solution needs to be ejected from the capsule (along with the adolescent insecurity of wanting the other side to always lose) and replaced with reality based initiatives that actually solve the problem. Of course, that's being kind in even saying that they have a solution because it's all still just empty criticism.

I wonder if we will ever see a return to compassionate conservatism.

Autism and the False Equivalence of Science Denial

In recent years autism has been on the rise. There have been a lot of explanations: overdiagnosis, vaccines, the age of the father, the age of the mother, pesticides, etc., etc.

More and more, it's looking like pesticides are the problem. 

The study by the University of California, Davis, MIND Institute found mothers exposed to organophosphates had a two-thirds increased risk of having a child with autism. And the risk was strongest when exposures occurred during the second and third trimesters of pregnancies, the research showed. 

It makes a lot of sense. Many pesticides are neurotoxins, just like chemical warfare agents. Certain pesticides (neonicotinoids) have been banned in Europe because of their contribution to the colony collapse disorder that has been devastating bee populations across the world. The nerve toxins make it difficult for bees to find their way back to the hive, which makes the other problems the hives face that much worse.

It's clear that autism is linked to something in the environment. The rate of autism in Somalia is low, but Somali immigrants to the United States have an even higher rate of autism than white Americans. Some have tried to blame it on vaccines, which started in the 1990s when a British researcher published a fraudulent article linking vaccines to autism. At that time it made a certain amount of sense, because thimerosal was used as a preservative (it contains mercury, a known neurotoxin).

It's not just the young that who are affected by pesticides. There are strong links between pesticides and Parkinson's disease: people exposed to pesticides have a 70% higher incidence of the disease.

When conservatives get slammed for being anti-science with their stands on climate change and evolution, the false-equivalencers insist that liberals are just as anti-science with their opposition to vaccines, pesticides, herbicides and genetically-modified (GMO) crops.

But the charge doesn't stand up. Even the most virulent and well-known anti-vaccine celebrity, Jenny McCarthy, insists (at least most of the time) that she's not against vaccines: she's against bad vaccines. When vaccines contained thimerosal there was very good reason to demand they be changed: it's toxic, especially for developing brains. That's why vaccines for children no longer contain mercury.

(For the record, everyone should be vaccinated. It's essential for "herd immunity," and the risk of death or other dire consequences from actually contracting these diseases is much higher than getting vaccinated.)

Pesticides and herbicides, on the other hand, are powerful poisons, extremely toxic and often lethal to humans in even relatively small doses. This is a scientific fact, not some liberal talking point. Although plant, insect and human biology are vastly different, many of the same underlying processes are identical -- all life shares the same basic DNA, cells utilize many of the same basic proteins.

Since we know pesticides and herbicides are toxic, the only question is what level of exposure is safe for humans? And that depends on many things: fetuses are extremely sensitive to environmental insults; even the tiniest dose of a hormone or chemical at the wrong point in development can screw up brain development, causing autism or a host of other birth defects. Different people have different genetics, live in different places, eat different things. For example, it could be that the Somali genetic makeup is much more susceptible to neurotoxins, or they eat a diet which has higher levels of pesticides.

Similarly, much of the opposition to GMO crops is that the genetic modification makes the plants immune to pesticides like Roundup, which allows farmers to more of these toxins, which means that people will get more of them in their food. Furthermore, these modified genes are spreading to weeds, which then pick up Roundup resistance. Half of all US farms now have glyphosate-resistant weeds. Other engineered genetic traits could be spread to other plants; it's debatable whether we have spent enough time and conducted enough research to ensure that these are completely harmless.

These are real problems that real scientists acknowledge; opposing GMO crops because of these problems is not unscientific: it might ignore the economic realities of farming, putting the well-being of children ahead of the profits of multinational corporations like ConAgra and Cargill, but it doesn't deny basic science.

So, when a conservative insists that climate change is hoax, and evolution is the work of the devil, it is nothing like liberals who prefer organic food. Liberals who oppose herbicides don't think they come from the pit of hell, they think that the EPA's maximum contaminant level goal (MCLG) of glyphosate in food and drinking water is far too high, especially for developing fetuses.

Why don't liberals trust the EPA's numbers on these toxins? For pretty much the same reason that conservatives don't like the regulations the EPA places on the companies that make these poisons. Government agencies don't set these numbers in a vacuum. They are pressured by politicians, lobbyists, manufacturers and farmers to make contaminant levels as high as possible. Many of these numbers were set during Republican administrations, when political interference in regulatory agencies was inherent to the "get the government off my back" ideology.

But even absent political interference, setting these values is very tricky. Since they can't experiment on living human beings, they can't really know what safe levels are. Using animal studies and other research, the EPA tries to pick levels that should be harmless for most people. But they know full well that some individuals will become one of those unfortunate statistics that is harmed by these poisons, either because their individual genetic makeup is particularly vulnerable to the toxins, or because the toxins will be concentrated in some individuals due to diet, habit or accident.

Is it unreasonable for someone to want to avoid having their children or spouse become one of those unfortunate statistics?

Again, With The Adolescent Behavior

Man, you really have to love conservatives these days.

"The feeling around here is that everyone who drives a small car is a liberal," a roller named Ryan told Vocativ. "I rolled coal on a Prius once just because they were tailing me." 

Weigel spoke to a seller of coal rolling customization equipment who described why some drivers see spewing smoke as a political protest. 

"I run into a lot of people that really don’t like Obama at all," the salesperson said. "If he’s into the environment, if he’s into this or that, we’re not. I hear a lot of that. To get a single stack on my truck—that’s my way of giving them the finger. You want clean air and a tiny carbon footprint? Well, screw you."

As I have been saying, 12 year old boys...

Hypocritical To The Core

Good Words

From one of my recent Quora questions...

I'm sure they would tell you that there is nothing in the Constitution that says they have to grow up. It's their right to be as childish as they want for as long as they want. We just need to learn to live with it.

No shit.

Republican: "My Party Is Full of Racists"

Republicans Should Close For Repairs

I missed this interview with Bob Dole but recently discovered it on Quora. It's a year later and he's still 100 percent right.

The Original Immigrants

The Hypocrisy of Hobby Lobby

In what has to be a textbook definition of hypocrisy, Hobby Lobby invests money in the very companies they take exception to for religious reasons.

Hobby Lobby's founders have made it clear that any abortion and certain contraceptives are unacceptable in their eyes, yet the company's 401(k) plan has millions of dollars invested in funds that own the companies that make birth control methods including Plan B, the so-called "morning after" drug. Like many companies, Hobby Lobby offers its employees a 401(k) plan. 

Over 13,000 past and present employees have taken advantage of that plan, according to the latest documents filed with the Department of Labor. Employees have the option to put their retirement dollars -- and the money that Hobby Lobby contributes on their behalf -- into over a dozen different mutual funds. 

At least eight of those funds have been invested in companies that produce contraceptives such as Teva Pharmaceutical (TEVA), Bayer (BAYRY), and Pfizer (PFE), according to a CNNMoney analysis. Teva makes Plan B. At least one fund also held Forest Laboratories, which makes a drug that is used to induce abortions.

Clearly, their reluctance to pay for women's birth control was not motivated by religious objections. It was motivated by financial objections.

They were simply being cheap.

Billionaire Once Again Warns The One Percent

Nick Hanauer has done it again. His recent open memo to his fellow zillionaires is exceptional. Here are a few great pulls...

At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind. The divide between the haves and have-nots is getting worse really, really fast. In 1980, the top 1 percent controlled about 8 percent of U.S. national income. The bottom 50 percent shared about 18 percent. Today the top 1 percent share about 20 percent; the bottom 50 percent, just 12 percent. 

But the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution. 

And so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.

Of course, it's not just his fellow zillionaires that need to wake up. It's the 30 percent or so of voters who still buy into supply side economics. These are the people who believe that our nation is divided into two parts: the haves and the soon to haves. It's also no coincidence that these same people would like to see a return to the Antebellum South and its aristocratic framework. That's why the are fighting so hard to maintain the status quo. As Hanauer notes, however, it never works.

If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when. 

When, indeed. I challenge anyone to find an historical example that refutes Hanauer.

The most ironic thing about rising inequality is how completely unnecessary and self-defeating it is. If we do something about it, if we adjust our policies in the way that, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression—so that we help the 99 percent and preempt the revolutionaries and crazies, the ones with the pitchforks—that will be the best thing possible for us rich folks, too. It’s not just that we’ll escape with our lives; it’s that we’ll most certainly get even richer.

This is where the whole issue of hubris comes into play. Conservatives just don't want to admit that liberal policies will make wealthy people wealthier. They ignore how a minimum wage hike will give people more money to spend in the economy which will, in turn, lead to more hiring and more wealthy for the wealthy. It's as if the word "demand" has been excised from their brain stems.

I wanted to try to change the conversation with ideas—by advancing what my co-author, Eric Liu, and I call “middle-out” economics. It’s the long-overdue rebuttal to the trickle-down economics worldview that has become economic orthodoxy across party lines—and has so screwed the American middle class and our economy generally. 

Middle-out economics rejects the old misconception that an economy is a perfectly efficient, mechanistic system and embraces the much more accurate idea of an economy as a complex ecosystem made up of real people who are dependent on one another. Which is why the fundamental law of capitalism must be: If workers have more money, businesses have more customers. Which makes middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us, the true job creators. Which means a thriving middle class is the source of American prosperity, not a consequence of it. The middle class creates us rich people, not the other way around. 

Exactly right and props to him for coining middle out economics. It's exactly the kind of focus we need on demand.

So, Hanauer asserts that we need to dramatically raise the minimum wage.

The standard response in the minimum-wage debate, made by Republicans and their business backers and plenty of Democrats as well, is that raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Businesses will have to lay off workers. This argument reflects the orthodox economics that most people had in college. If you took Econ 101, then you literally were taught that if wages go up, employment must go down. The law of supply and demand and all that. That’s why you’ve got John Boehner and other Republicans in Congress insisting that if you price employment higher, you get less of it. Really?

Because here’s an odd thing. During the past three decades, compensation for CEOs grew 127 times faster than it did for workers. Since 1950, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has increased 1,000 percent, and that is not a typo. CEOs used to earn 30 times the median wage; now they rake in 500 times. Yet no company I know of has eliminated its senior managers, or outsourced them to China or automated their jobs. Instead, we now have more CEOs and senior executives than ever before. So, too, for financial services workers and technology workers. These folks earn multiples of the median wage, yet we somehow have more and more of them. 

Fucking. Brilliant.

Next, Hanauer turns to the size of government and, again, makes a brilliant point.

I’d ask my Republican friends to get real about reducing the size of government. Yes, yes and yes, you guys are all correct: The federal government is too big in some ways. But no way can you cut government substantially, not the way things are now. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush each had eight years to do it, and they failed miserably. 

Republicans and Democrats in Congress can’t shrink government with wishful thinking. The only way to slash government for real is to go back to basic economic principles: You have to reduce the demand for government. If people are getting $15 an hour or more, they don’t need food stamps. They don’t need rent assistance. They don’t need you and me to pay for their medical care. If the consumer middle class is back, buying and shopping, then it stands to reason you won’t need as large a welfare state. And at the same time, revenues from payroll and sales taxes would rise, reducing the deficit. 

This may seem hard to grasp for those individuals who have a pathological hatred of the federal government but we can make laws that actually reduce the size and influence of our national governing body.

Hanauer closes with an argument I have made many times.

Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter. That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people like us don’t. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for capitalism. It’s an indispensable tool smart capitalists use to make capitalism stable and sustainable.  

Amen. Let's get started!!

Details of the Latest Jobs Report

An even brighter spot in June's jobs report is that fewer Americans are giving up on the job search because they are discouraged by their prospects. Adam Belz notes the fine print.

The fine print of Thursday’s cheery U.S. jobs report revealed that the number of people who are not looking for a job because they don’t think they can find one has fallen by 351,000 in the past 12 months. 

Those who aren’t actively looking for a job don’t count as unemployed in government labor statistics. As the unemployment rate has fallen, a common concern has been that the number misrepresents the reality of the job market, because the ranks of discouraged workers rose as high as 1.3 million in 2010. That figure has fallen to 676,000.

Thursday’s numbers, which show the ranks of discouraged workers falling by 21,000 in June and declining steadily over the past year, indicate that retirement — not a weak job market — is increasingly the biggest reason people are leaving the workforce.

Very good news indeed!

Give Us Your Tired, Poor, and Hungry (unless they are brown women and children in which case...FUCK OFF!)

Happy Birthday, America. Sorry you still have to deal with people like this...

When the three busloads of immigrant mothers and children rolled into town for processing at a Border Patrol station this week, they were met by protesters carrying American flags and signs proclaiming “return to sender” as they screamed “go home” and chanted “U.S.A.” Fearing for the safety of the migrants and federal officers, immigration officials decided to reroute the buses to San Diego, an hour south.

After a Border Patrol official explained that more buses would probably arrive in Murrieta in the coming weeks as part of an attempt to relieve processing centers near the Texas border, one man took to the microphone and demanded to know: “Why do we have to put them on a bus to Murrieta? Why can’t we just transport them on a bus to Tijuana?” 

The crowd responded with thunderous applause.

I'm feeling pretty ashamed of some of my fellow Americans today. These are children who fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and this is what they get? Anger and hate?  What would Jesus Christ think of this? Christian nation my ass.

The one thing that gives me hope, though, is Steve Schmidt's prediction contained in the video below. It starts at the 4 minute mark.



Take note, Republicans. Keep up the hate and intolerance and you will end up like the California Republican party.

A regional party with zero fucking power.

How We'll Adapt to Climate Change

For years many conservatives have been denying climate change even exists, and when they finally break down and admit it does, they say it'll cost too much to do anything about it and, as Rex Tillerson of ExxonMobil (and Putin buddy) says, we'll find some way to adapt.

What form will adaptation take? Let's look at an example. The American Southwest has been hammered by drought for years, a condition that has been worsened by higher temperatures due to climate change. We're already beginning to see the fallout across the country:

[Minnesota-based] Dakota Premium Foods said Wednesday that it will temporarily cease production at its South St. Paul beef processing plant due to “extremely short cattle supply.”

The shutdown is effective immediately and will idle 300 workers. Dakota Premium said it does not know how long the plant will remain closed.

The U.S. beef processing industry has wrestled for the past two years with a shortage of cattle, due primarily to drought conditions in the Southwest. As drought burned out pasture lands, ranchers greatly cut back on their herds.

“We regret that the current limited cattle supplies, the smallest numbers since the early 1950s, [have] forced us to make this very difficult decision,” Dan Mehesan, president of Dakota parent ­American Foods Group’s fresh meat division, said in a statement.

A recent report on climate change (Risky Business) from businessmen and former Secretaries of the Treasury, both Republicans and Democrats, outlined many of the economic woes climate change will wreak.

It won't be long before cattle production will become impossible in many parts of the Southwest because the rivers are drying up (due to lack of snowpack in the Rockies) and the aquifers are running dry (due to excessive pumping to irrigate crops, water golf courses in Phoenix and Tucson and run the fountains in Las Vegas). A single beef animal requires 2,000-7,000 gallons of water a year (more the hotter it gets). Putting them in expensive air-conditioned barns won't help; hay shortages have plagued ranchers for years now.

How will we adapt? Ranchers will declare bankruptcy. The price of beef will go up. Meat packers will go out of business. Americans will eat fewer hamburgers. Some cattle ranching will move to areas that are currently productive farmland, but which will become more arid and become fit only for pastureland. The communities in the stricken areas will become ghost towns. Agricultural production and American exports will decline.

So, even if cattle production is eventually relocated elsewhere, the economic disruption and dislocation will figure in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and the human misery caused is incalculable.

But it's not just cattle ranching that will be affected. California's Central Valley has been stricken by the same drought. That's an even greater problem:

[California's] $45bn (£26bn) farming industry produces almost half the fruits, vegetables and nuts grown in the US, and to do that it uses 80 per cent of California’s water. Almonds alone account for 10 per cent of the state’s water use – not surprising, given that California produces 80 per cent of the world’s almonds.

And it isn't just California. The plains states are also suffering from a years-long drought. In other words, the United States is losing the most productive farmland in the world.

Adapting to climate change will mean millions of people will lose their jobs and millions of acres of land will become unproductive deserts. The people affected will have to look for work in other states, mainly the north, because the South and Southwest will become unbearably and dangerously hot in the summer.
The "adaptation" that wealthy oil executives and their conservative apologists speak so blithely about will leave millions Americans out of work, forced to abandon their homes for other states, falling into bankruptcy and poverty.

Wouldn't it make more sense for us to adapt by having Mr. Tillerson's company help pay for the damage that his company's product is causing?

And that's why we need a carbon tax and/or a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. It's a far more efficient way for us to adapt than throwing every other sector of the economy out of whack and rendering our most productive farmlands infertile.

Kindly Do Not Bring Your Guns

Target Corporation has kindly asked the Gun Cult to leave their guns outside their stores.

Target's interim CEO, John Mulligan, in a memo posted on the chain's website Wednesday, said: "This is a complicated issue, but it boils down to a simple belief: Bringing firearms to Target creates an environment that is at odds with the family-friendly shopping and work experience we strive to create."

It's not a ban but they are asking nicely which makes Mulligan a very brilliant man. Not only is he saying no open carry but he's also asking even concealed carry to keep their guns out of the store. So, if gun humpers still do it, how will that make them look?

As I have stated previously, the biggest threat to the Gun Cult is themselves. They seem to be undoing their years of progress by acting like sex starved adolescents with their firearms. All gun safety folks need to do right now is sit back and let them self destruct:)