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

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

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

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

More Good Words

Good Words

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

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

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

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

How This Came to Pass

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

How did this come to pass?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adolescent Temper Tantrums

Well, it looks like the GOP is in a complete state of disaster. Kevin McCarthy has withdrawn his bid for House Speaker. John Boehner will stay on until a replacement is found. The Tea Party and far right conservatives have thrown their tantrum, tearing down the house (literally:)) that gives them a home...just like the teenager rebelling against mom and dad who thinks that their adolescent dreams of anarchy are preferable to the status quo.

Does the conservative base, who has nothing but hate and bile for their leadership, understand exactly what they are doing?

The Myth of the Good Guy With A Gun

Looks like someone else is spreading the good word...

Speaking Friday on CNN Newsroom with Carol Costello, perennial gun rights advocate John Lott said, “My solution for these mass shootings is to look at the fact that every single time, these attacks occur where guns are banned. Every single time.” 

That’s neither true in general nor true in this instance. The FBI tells us that active-shooter scenarios occur in all sorts of environments where guns are allowed—homes, businesses, outdoor spaces. (In fact, there was another mass shooting the same day as the Oregon massacre, leaving three dead and one severely wounded in a home in North Florida.) And Umpqua Community College itself wasn’t a gun-free zone. Oregon is one of seven states that allow guns on college campuses—the consequence of a 2011 court decision that overturned a longstanding ban. In 2012, the state board of education introduced several limitations on campus carry, but those were not widely enforced. 

And yet they keep believing all this shit....

A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths

Nicholas Kristof has a great piece up about how we need to start thinking outside of the box on tackling gun deaths in this country. The stark reality of more Americans dying from gun deaths since 1970 than in all the wars we have ever fought in needs to be addressed and his ideas are sound.

The best one is engaging the CDC more to deal with this problem. They do on a whole host of other major causes of death so why not guns? If Americans were being killed at the average of 92 a day by ISIL or Al Qaeda, we would be acting immediately.

The fact that we aren't makes this problem a national disgrace.

Yet Another Gun Cult Member Responsible For Murder

Looks like we have another Gun Cult member directly responsible for murder. Laurel Mercer cared deeply about guns and wrote a series of online posts about them. In the link above she complains about the "lame" limits imposed on her regarding lock and loaded weapons in her house. She also indicated that her son was well versed in gun training and usage.

Yes, he was.

How many more Nancy Lanzas and Laurel Mercers are there out there? These people are no different than the extremists that want to kill US citizens. They are clearly a threat to our nation.

Pass The Popcorn, Please...

At Least He Admits It

Check out Kevin McCarthy, currently in the running for Speaker of the House....



At least he admits what the Benghazi hearing is all about...

End The Love Affair

Until the United States ends its love affair with guns (and the belief that they solve problems), we will continue to see regular mass shootings and thousands dead from gun violence.

How Many More?

How Many More Mass Shootings Will It Take For Us to Act?
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Posted by Occupy Democrats on Friday, October 2, 2015

Kim Davis Is Not So Special

Conservatives have been crowing that Kim Davis met with the infamously liberal Pope Francis when he was in the United States spreading the gospel about our duties to protect the planet and the poor.

The reality is that the visit was arranged by the pope's political operatives in Washington (the nunciature), who usually set up papal meetings for "benefactors and donors." That is, if you pay the nuncio some money, you get to see the pope.

The Vatican has clarified the situation:

"The brief meeting between Mrs. Kim Davis and Pope Francis at the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, DC has continued to provoke comments and discussion. In order to contribute to an objective understanding of what transpired I am able to clarify the following points:

"Pope Francis met with several dozen persons who had been invited by the Nunciature to greet him as he prepared to leave Washington for New York City. Such brief greetings occur on all papal visits and are due to the Pope's characteristic kindness and availability. The only real audience granted by the Pope at the Nunciature was with one of his former students and his family. [Emphasis added]

"The Pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects." 

Who was that former student? A gay man, whose spouse and family the pope met with the day before Kim Davis.

Does that mean the pope endorses gay marriage?

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap...

The man currently in charge of the Umpqua Community College shooting massacre, Douglas County, Oregon, Sheriff John Hanlin, is a proud member of the Gun Cult. CNN has a story about how Hanlin wrote a letter to Vice President Biden saying he would never comply with any gun control law coming from the Obama administration. He also posted a conspiracy video to his Facebook page about Sandy Hook in early January 2013.

Hanlin is going to be a great example of what happens when a human being experiences cognitive dissonance. He is supposed to be a leader of safety and law in his community. Now his ideology has come home to roost. Will he change?

"We Are Answerable..."

"We are all answerable..."

The president summed up, in this one line, why I am not a conservative. We are indeed responsible for things that happen in our culture....ALL of us...especially something as horrendous as the now regular mass shootings.

Pretending that it's not our problem is incredibly adolescent.

Yes, We Are.

We're Sick of the Pro-Gun Arguments

Internet Ads, Part II: How Internet Ad Servers Screw Companies

In a previous post I described why Internet ad servers are evil from the perspective of the end user: they are all too frequently vectors for spam, malware and invading user privacy.

Now the other side of the coin: Internet ad serving companies intentionally screw the customers whose ads they are paid to show to users. According to an article from Bloomberg:

[In l]ate [2013 Ron Amram, a marketing exec for Heineken,] and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”

These ad serving companies pull all kinds of dirty tricks to make it look like ads are being seen by human beings. They'll bring up an ad in a popup behind real content and count that as a click. They hire botnets that take over computers, bring up virtual browsers that don't appear on the screens of unsuspecting users and "click" links to their ads, which get counted as real hits even though they're never seen.

Then there are the click-bait links that appear on so many websites: stories about Scarlett Johansson or Kim Kardashian or those idiotic "One Weird Weight Loss Trick" headlines. When people accidentally on purpose click those links the companies whose ads appear with those bogus stories get charged for a page view, even though real users will never look at those ads.

However, not all Internet ads are fraudulent: ads hosted by the content providers' web servers directly are usually honest. As with everything on the Net, it's shady third parties who commit most of the fraud.

And, Once Again, Another Fucking Mass Shooting

How much longer are we going to have to put up with this shit? Same bullshit, different day. The president has now delivered his 15TH address to the media on a mass shooting. For the general public, it's become routine. For the families who have lost loved ones, they get the to join the really, super special club of devastated people who got shit on by the Gun Cult.

There is one thing that is different about this case, though. Oregon has conceal carry and Umpqua Community College allows conceal carry on campus. MSNBC just interviewed a gentlemen by the name of John Parker Jr. who had a gun and did not draw it. So, plenty of good guys with guns and they didn't stop him. And the bad guy wasn't deterred. At the very least, we can now fully dispense with that bullshit lie.

I love my country but the fact that nothing is done while people are being slaughtered regularly makes me pretty fucking ashamed of it.

Another Bullshit Gun Cult Lie Exposed

Anyone seen this graphic making the rounds?

Yeah, it's a giant pile of shit.

I'm wondering why they continue to feel the need to lie.