A Sharp Rise

Take a look at the mass shootings in this country over the last 50 years.

When the Gun Cult flaps their yaps about decrease gun violence, the above numbers show just how fucking tone deaf they are. No other country in the civilized world has problems like this.

We have these problems because domestic terrorists are holding our country hostage. If you support looser gun laws, you are offering aid and comfort to the enemies of national security. Gitmo is getting mighty empty these days and, considering we can't seem to close it, perhaps we should start putting some people in it who represent more of a threat than ISIL or Al Qaeda.

How about the gun bloggers first? :)

Memo To Next President: Tougher Gun Laws

With the United States now accounting for 82 percent of all gun deaths among 23 high income countries, I was please to note that a new Reuters poll regarding gun safety had this to say.

Sixty-three percent of Americans overall said they would like to see the next president push for stricter gun laws.

Even better...

Respondents from both parties support more research into the causes of gun violence, the poll showed. Nearly 80 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of Republicans said they would support the next president, who takes office next January after the Nov. 8 election, pushing for more research.

Even Republicans are shifting...

Republicans are split on efforts to tighten gun control more broadly. Forty-four percent of those polled said the next president should work to tighten federal gun control laws, while 49 percent were opposed.

44 percent? Wow! I had no idea the number was that high. This is fantastic news and gives me a great deal of hope!!

How The Clown Car Will Doom Republicans

Most of the US has laughed at the clown car that is the GOP primary field. How can anyone keep track of all the candidates? It has whittled down a little bit since the campaign season started but there are still 12 candidates running for the GOP nomination.

Donald Trump has been the consistent leader in the field much to the chagrin of many conservatives. A big reason for this is the conservative base is filled with adolescents who love Trump's now daily tantrums. Yet, as James Pindell of the Boston Globe notes, the reason for that is very simple.

There are too many fucking people running for the GOP nomination.

There are at least four candidates that are splitting up the "establishment" vote that would likely be ahead of Trump if it was only one candidate. Many thought that having a big field was great. It's always good to have more people to choose from, right?

Probably not:)

The NRA Rules!!!

The Greatest Response Ever

I've never been a fan of the "response" to the president after his SOTU...even when it was my party that did it. But Nikki Haley's speech last night in response to President Obama's final state of the union address was fucking fantastic.



What should be the future of the Republican party....

Victims of Background Checks

Emotional Wayne LaPierre Honors Victims Of Background Checks

“Because of our nation’s senseless gun control laws, this poor man with a known history of domestic violence was unable to procure an assault-style weapon, despite his desperate wishes to own and operate such a weapon,” said the visibly distraught lobbyist while gesturing towards a framed portrait of a middle-aged man, one of dozens of photos of victims displayed around the conference room.

Farewell, Starman...

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Aw, Maa...

For a long time I advanced the theory that the Republican Party wasn't a real party, but a coalition of special interest groups. It included the money-bag bankers and CEOs, anti-abortion evangelicals, gun nuts and racists. The wealthy Republicans didn't give a damn about abortion, guns or race. The anti-abortion activists didn't give a damn about tax policy, guns or race. The gun nuts didn't give a damn about business, abortion or race. And the racists didn't give a damn about anything. Yes, there was some crossover between the groups (especially the last two), but each group didn't care what the other groups did as long as each one got their hot button pressed.

That would work as long as these interests didn't come into conflict. But after the Great Recession, the fault lines in the Republican Party really started to show. The Tea Party was formed in response to the pain that the recession caused average white middle-aged Americans (AWMAAs), who were now losing their jobs left and right.

The policies that big business advanced had finally caused average white middle-aged Americans a lot of pain. Big business had always wanted free trade and lax immigration policies so they could keep labor costs down. For decades, businesses have been moved jobs overseas, mainly to Asia, and many that stayed in the US relocated to the South, where antipathy to labor unions further depressed wages of AWMAAs.

At this point many people fear the Republican Party is about to self-destruct:

The strains on Republicanism are driven home by scenes like the 1,500 people who waited two hours in 10-degree weather on Tuesday night to see Mr. Trump campaign in Claremont, N.H. And the 700 who jammed the student center of an Iowa Christian college the same evening to hear Mr. Cruz. These crowds were full of lunch-bucket conservatives who expressed frustration with the Republican gentry.

“The Republican Party has never done anything for the working man like me, even though we’ve voted Republican for years,” said Leo Martin, a 62-year-old machinist from Newport, N.H., who attended Mr. Trump’s Claremont rally. “This election is the first in my life where we can change what it means to be a Republican.”

The economic problems AWMAAs face are the same ones that their ancestors faced back in 1890s, the Roaring Twenties and the Depression, which were caused by corporate robber barons, income inequality, and economic malfeasance by the banking world.

These problems precipitated the formation of labor unions in the first half of the 20th century and the creation of a national social safety net in Social Security and Medicare. These paved the way to one of the most prosperous times in history: America in 1950s and '60s.

But starting in the late 1970s a lot of those advances were turned back. Big business, helped by well-intentioned Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, pushed the deregulation of various industries (trucking and airlines) and trade agreements (NAFTA), and Reagan waged all-out war on labor unions. AWMAAs started to lose their jobs to the Japanese, then the Mexicans, then the Chinese, then the Indians.

Some of these job losses were inevitable because of globalization. But American manufacturers took special glee in destroying unions and sending jobs overseas to cut costs. Businesses that couldn't export jobs looked to hiring foreigners who would accept lower wages, especially in the tech sector.

AWMAAs are now complaining that the Republican Party hasn't done anything for them. What they're really saying is that the Republican Party is an oligarchy run by CEOs, bankers and casino moguls who think the American public exists only to be milked for money.

Yet who do these angry AWMAAs think represents them? Donald Trump: a wealthy, money-grubbing casino mogul and real estate tycoon who got millions of dollars from his daddy. Exactly the kind of guy who caused their problems in the first place.

Wealthy elites like Trump and Ted Cruz (whose wife Heidi is one of the Wall Street bankers the Tea Party loves to hate) are pulling the same old tired bait and switch game wealthy fat cats always play. "Those rapists from Mexico and those terrorists from ISIS are the source of all your problems. Vote for me and I'll make you safe and get you a job."

Trump and Cruz are turning attention away from the real source of AWMAAs' problems -- rising income inequality -- and are goading AWMAAs into a jihad against immigrants. Trump is using poor immigrants as the scapegoats for the problems caused by wealthy elites like Trump. I'd use the Hitler/Jews analogy, but that's passe these days.

AWMAAs are mad because they feel they have no power and no say in the political process or in the economic discussion. Donald Trump, using his experience on reality TV, recognized this and is riling people up by mouthing their frustration.

Republicans always like to say that prosperity won't come from taking something from one person and give it to another. When they say this they usually mean taxing the rich won't help AWMAAs.

If that's the case, then taking jobs like picking strawberries and cleaning hotel rooms away from poor immigrants really won't help AWMAAs, who don't want those jobs in the first place.

Donald Trump is just a reality TV huckster. He doesn't represent anyone's interests but his own. Putting him in the White House will only exacerbate income inequality and make the lives of AWMAAs worse.

Because, once we kick out all the immigrants, who's going to pick the strawberries and clean the hotel rooms for slave wages?

Aw, maa... I don't want to clean that room.

Bigotry, Anger, Hate, Fear

As I have been saying for years, a political party filled with anger, hate, bigotry and fear.

Acting Out, Demanding Attention, Rejecting Curbs On Desires

The best summation of the Gun Cult I have seen thus far...and, honestly, conservatives in general...

Town Hall Frustrations

My initial thoughts on the president's town hall on gun violence are ones of frustration. While I am pleased that the issue is getting more attention and it appears that it's going to be a center piece to the 2016 presidential campaign, there are two core points that are not being addressed.

The first is illustrated in Taya Kyle's portion of this video. As Chris Mooney noted in his book "The Republican Brain," people let emotion drive their reasoning process and this was never more true than with the gun issue. I was hoping that Ms. Kyle would have learned the lesson that her husband and Nancy Lanza did not learn and that is that the gun culture creates a myopia. Neither Mr. Kyle nor Ms. Lanza used reason in their judgement regarding gun safety and allowed mentally ill people to operate firearms. The ideology of the gun rights activist (one devoid of reason and more rooted in paranoia and chest thumping emotion) is a chief cause of mass shootings and gun violence in this country.

Instead, Ms. Kyle spoke of needing a gun for protection and spoke of the hope of declining gun violence. The former is, of course, ridiculous as has been proven time and again by study after study. If you own a gun, you are more likely to kill/injure yourself or a loved one than protect yourself or a loved one. Believing the latter is, again, an emotional response driven by some sort of need for empowerment. The latter I found to be incredibly insulting to the families of the now weekly victims of mass shooting. How can anyone say it's getting better? This is especially befuddling behavior of someone who lost their own loved one to the myopia of gun rights ideology.

I think the president knows this because he's obviously an intelligent man. I get that saying something like this would be a bad PR move but it is the truth and we have to face the fact that this ideology is a threat to our national security.

My second frustration is that the NRA and other gun rights supporters are essentially getting what they want here: enforcement of current laws. Despite their faux protestations, they have successfully shifted the argument so far to the right, that "compromise" is something they've actually supported for years. They've been employing a political tactic that needs to be countered immediately.

Instead of allowing them to set the table with talk of totalitarian governments and dystopic futures (see: appeal to fear), gun safety advocates like the president should be talking about mandatory, minimum training, liability insurance, registration, and even altering the 2nd amendment so that only people who want to devote a considerable portion of their lives to community protection own firearms. These things may seem like a pipe dream now but gun safety advocates need to cease starting from a point of capitulation.

It's clear that the gun issue is going to have ongoing prevalence. I only wish that it wasn't due to the regularity of gun violence and our inability to accept what we need to do to solve the problem.

Here is the full town hall...

The Porn Theory of Guns

Conservatives have long rampaged against pornography, claiming that it causes "unnatural" urges in those who view it, warps young minds and forces them to commit unspeakable acts. The Duggar family claims sexual predator Josh Duggar was a porn addict, and porn caused him to molest his sisters and have an affair. In the minds of conservatives, it's not the suffocating and repressive conservative attitude that made sex a totally seductive taboo that caused Josh Duggar to obsess about it; it was porn.

Conservatives generally subscribe to the video game theory of mass shootings. In their minds, kids who play violent first-person-shooter video games are training to be mass murderers. They also claim that watching violent movies and TV shows are creating killers in droves. Despite the fact that the violence in most video games and movies is very unrealistic.

If that's the case, then simply owning a gun predisposes a person to committing gun violence. Gun owners regularly practice shooting targets with human figures depicted on them. They constantly think about killing people with guns. A person who buys a gun has already decided that they will kill someone. Many people say they feel a rush of power when they handle guns; some wax rhapsodic about how it feels to cut loose with a machine gun, spraying bullets across a target. (Watch most any episode of Mythbusters to watch the joyous fascination some people have with shooting up the scenery. Are endorphins being released in the brains of these people, in the same way that drugs release endorphins?)

One cannot deny that there's a connection between having a gun and shooting someone with it: no gunless person has ever shot someone. People are shot by people with guns 100% of the time. There's no question that having a gun makes you much more likely to shoot someone. The question is, does having a gun make a person more likely to want to shoot someone?

It certainly increases a person's bravado, if what people say on social media is any indication. How many times have you seen people respond to insults or threats on Twitter with something to the effect of, "Oh yeah? Say that to my face when I've got my .45" or "I'm not afraid of him, I'm a Second Amendment guy."

The statistics indicate it's likely the mere presence of guns increases the number of shootings, as was demonstrated when Australia passed stringent gun laws and the number of gun deaths plummeted. Corroborating data also comes from the United States:

Republican presidential candidates should look at the natural experiment that occurred when Missouri eased restrictions on buying handguns. The result was a 25 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate, according to a study in the Journal of Urban Health.

In contrast, Connecticut tightened regulations on buying handguns, and gun homicides there fell by 40 percent, according to the American Journal of Public Health.

This is something that scientists could research. Statistical studies could be first and easiest, looking into whether people who own guns commit more non-gun acts of aggression (though one could argue that this would merely prove that people who want guns are more violent in the first place). Behavioral studies could create social experiments to measure whether possession of gun increases aggression. Functional MRI brain scans could see whether guns activate the parts of the brain associated with aggression. Blood samples could be take from people who handle guns to test whether hormone levels associated with aggression have increased.

Many conservatives have long demanded we throw out the First Amendment and ban certain movies, video games and porn because they rot people's minds or induce them violence. If guns have the same effect, will they want to ban them too?

Nah. That's why they passed a law banning government research on guns. Because they already know what the data will show.

Wholesale Defeat

Looks like EJ Dionne is echoing yours truly.

Bullies are intimidating until someone calls their bluff. By ruling out any reasonable steps toward containing the killing in our nation and by offering ever more preposterous arguments, the gun worshipers are setting themselves up for wholesale defeat. It will take time. 

But it will happen.

The best part about it is they don't see it yet...:)

Time To Arrest the NRA for Domestic Terrorism

Check out this image recently tweeted from the NRA.

Bullets next to elected officials...fantastic. I'd say it's way past time we started rounding up these fuckers and putting them in jail. Isn't Gitmo still open?

Exactly Why I Voted For Him

I voted twice for Barack Obama for two basic reasons. The first reason was to fix problems that we already knew we had. He's certainly done some of that. Getting bin Laden and literally saving American lives by making health care available to everyone are two of the biggest accomplishments.

But I also voted for him because he'd work to fix the problems that we didn't know about yet. The main problem I have with conservatives is they are very limp when it comes to new problems, especially if it's domestic issues. A great example of this is the gun issue. When the president took office, guns weren't really a top priority. We didn't have mass shootings every week and violence was on a downward trend. We did have the ongoing issues of gang violence and suicides but guns aren't necessarily at the root of those problems.

Then came Aurora and Sandy Hook and everything changed after that.

It certainly did for me. The chief cause of Sandy Hook was the Gun Cult. Nancy Lanza bought into their bullshit, armed herself to the teeth, and, like most "responsible" gun owners, allowed someone access to guns that should not have had them. As a result, first graders were shot in the face. Nothing was done to change our insanely loose gun laws and look what has happened since. Can anyone really remember all the mass shootings? I can't because they happen all the fucking time now.

Today, the president issued executive orders that are going to expand universal background checks and allow doctors to report some mentally ill patients to the FBI to prevent them from getting guns. His speech was extraordinary and made me proud to be an American and have this man stand up for what is right. Here is an excerpt.

President Obama, tearing up about the Sandy Hook shooting: "Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad." http://cnb.cx/1UtHVET
Posted by CNBC on Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Military Man

Arrest The Communists!

When you embolden terrorists, they continue to take advantage of you.

That's a line we here all the time from conservatives and I actually agree with it, taking a harder line against those who would do us harm because of stark differences in ideology. Where conservatives and I part ways, however, is the definition of what is terrorism. For example, I view people that actively support gun rights and people who vote for candidates who actively support gun rights as aiding and abetting the murders of thousands of Americans. A stark example of this is domestic terrorist Robert Dear. Dear is another example of where I part ways with conservatives. No doubt many of them view him as a freedom fighter, crusading against the evil that is abortion.

Similar to their support of Dear is their support of Cliven Bundy. Recall that Bundy is the guy who thinks that all land belongs to the people, not the federal government (see also: communism) and has still not been arrested for grazing his cattle on federal lands. This inaction by the federal government has led to another incident in Oregon where similar minded people, including Bundy's son, Ammon Bundy, have now seized a federal government wildlife facility with no intention to leave.

The federal response to both of these incidents has been lackluster at best. They need to arrest all of these people and remove them by force, if necessary. I get they don't want another Waco but these people are in direct violation of the Constitution. They are committing and overt act of sedition and need to go to jail.

In the final analysis, they are honestly communists. Property, whether owned by a person or an entity, isn't owned by the people. How that works out to be conservative in their pea brains, we'll never know. Yet we do know that they are dangerous and it's way past time to take them down several notches.

I think a tank ought to do quite nicely:)

Trump's New Reality TV Show

A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton claimed that terrorists were using Donald Trump in their recruiting videos. At an event she said:

"You know, people around the world pay close attention to our elections. And if you go on Arabic television, as we have, and you look at what is being blasted out with video of Mr. Trump being translated into Arabic, 'No Muslims coming into the United States,' other kinds of derogatory, defamatory statements, it is playing into the hands of the violent jihadists," she said. "There is nothing they want more than to be able to claim that the United States is against Islam and against Muslims and that then lights an even bigger fire for them to make their propaganda claims through social media and other ways."

At the time various organizations investigated this and found that Clinton was exaggerating, and rating her claim false. Well, no more. Trump is now starring in a different kind of reality TV show:

Al Qaeda’s branch in Somalia released a recruitment video on Friday that criticized racism and anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and contained footage of the Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump announcing his proposal to bar Muslims from entering the country.

The video, released by the militant group Shabab, appeared to be the first time that Mr. Trump was featured in jihadist recruitment material. During a Democratic presidential debate last month, Hillary Clinton said that Mr. Trump had been used in a recruitment video for the Islamic State, a claim that was later debunked.

Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are rival jihadist groups that compete for recruits and money among radicalized Muslims.

Representatives for the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

The video was part of a series dedicated to Somali-American jihadists from Minnesota and one Canadian who died on the battlefield in Somalia. The video was authenticated by the SITE Intelligence Group, which studies jihadist propaganda, and it appeared to be aimed at the African-American community.

This is especially concerning because there are thousands of Somalis living in the United States, in my state. But the answer isn't to treat Muslim Americans as if they're terrorists and traitors as Trump is doing; that plays directly into the terrorists' hands.

The physicist Lawrence Krauss puts the whole terrorism panic currently gripping the United States into perspective:

As far as the U.S. is concerned, it has been pointed out already—by the President, in fact—that about thirty-three thousand people die each year from gunshot wounds. That’s about four hundred thousand people since 2001. By contrast, setting aside 9/11, and even including the San Bernardino shootings, only fifty-four deaths have occurred because of domestic acts of terrorism during that time. Even if you include 9/11, the total death toll from terrorism amounts to less than one per cent of the death toll from gun violence. Just before San Bernardino, the Washington Post reported that, in the first three hundred and thirty-four days of 2015, there had been three hundred and fifty-one mass shootings in the United States—that is, shootings in which four or more people were killed or injured by gunfire. That is more than one per day. It is sobering to recognize that this month’s attack in California, as horrific as it was, does not skew the statistics at all; sadly, December 2nd in San Bernardino was just another average day in the United States. In fact, with over a hundred and eighty people shot each day in this country, even a mass killing like that which occurred in Paris would not significantly affect the death toll from guns in the U.S.

For some mysterious reason Americans go nuts when a tiny percentage of Americans are killed by foreign nutjobs trying to bring about the apocalypse, but simply shrug when Americans slaughter each other annually by the tens of thousands.

Krauss makes an observation:

A cynical individual might wonder who benefits more from the terror induced by terrorism: the terrorists themselves or the politicians and governments who use the public reaction to acts of terror for political gain? Hermann Göring, interviewed during the Nuremberg Trials, said, “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” We need to be vigilant against those who seek to manipulate us—whoever they are.

To put it bluntly: ISIS and Al Shabab are the Hermann Görings of the Muslim world. Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump are the Hermann Görings of the Western world.

Extremist conservative elements in both the West and the Islamic world are taking cues from the Nazi playbook, using their opposing counterparts as bogeymen to frighten moderates in their own societies and incite hatred against "the other" to cynically bolster their own power grabs.

The recent defeat of ISIS in Ramadi by US airpower and Iraqi ground forces shows how ridiculous the notion that ISIS is an "existential" threat to the United States. If countries like Russia and the US, Saudi Arabia and Iran, India and Pakistan, would put aside their differences and turf wars for a year or two, we could wipe out the current scourge of international terrorism.

But as long as the people of the world give into their fears and give power to demagogues and tyrants like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad in Syria, the king of Saudi Arabia, the grand ayatollah of Iran, Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Hamas in Gaza, and all the others of their ilk, we will be their pawns and the victims of their cynical, double-dealing machinations.

A Matter of Survival

If I were a conservative, here are some numbers that should concern me.

In 2012, Democrats made up 44.7 percent of party-affiliated likely voters, compared to 39.1 percent Republicans, a difference of about 6 percentage points, according to the analysis of 87,778 likely presidential voters polled leading up to the 2012 presidential election. The results have a credibility interval of plus or minus 0.3 percentage points.

Three years later, that lead had grown to nine points, 45.9 percent to 36.9 percent, according to the analysis of 93,181 likely presidential voters polled in 2015. The results in 2015 have the same credibility interval as 2012.

Among Hispanics who are likely presidential voters, the percentage affiliated with the Republican Party has slipped nearly five points, from 30.6 percent in 2012 to 26 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, Hispanic Democrats grew by six percentage points to 59.6 percent.

Among whites under 40, the shift is even more dramatic. In 2012, they were more likely to identify with the Republican Party by about 5 percentage points. In 2015, the advantage flipped: Young whites are now more likely to identify with the Democratic Party by about 8 percentage points.

Meanwhile, black likely voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic, at about 80 percent. 

All of this data roughly translates into one thing: the electoral math doesn't add up in any way for them to win the presidency. Further...

Looking Back At A Great Year

At least 265 people were accidentally shot by children in 2015.

That works out to be an average of about 5 a week. Here's how most of the stories go...

On Monday, three days after Christmas, the four-year-old son of an Alaska state trooper had just returned home from sledding. He was playing by himself in the living room. His mom and grandmother were not far away, in the kitchen, the Alaska Dispatch News reports. But somehow the boy, William Anderson, found a gun belonging to his father. 

The gun went off and killed William.

What the Gun Cult fails to grasp is that society is filled with irresponsible people who end up falling through the cracks of loose gun laws. That's why we need the entire country to adopt the law that is already in effect in 28 states and hold gun owners criminally liable if children have access to their guns.

Research shows that these laws work. A 2005 study found that child access prevention (CAP) laws in 10 states prevented 829 injuries in 2001, saving $37 million in medical costs. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004 found that CAP laws prevented 333 teen suicides between 1989 and 2001. Clearly, this should be a federal law.

I have a great deal of hope for 2016 in terms of gun safety. The president is going to be issuing an executive order on background checks next week. We'll find get to see how well open carry works in Texas...not that any facts or data will change the mind of the Gun Cult but at least the rest of America will. The NRA is raising their membership fee for the first time in 20 years which tells me that they are hurting for cash and expect a tougher than usual fight in this year's election.

And every single time there is a mass shooting, the levee continues to erode for the Gun Cult. We've given them a long leash (largely due to fear and emotions) but its clear that leash is shrinking.

A Preview of Things to Come

On Christmas Eve it was 73 degrees in New York City. On Christmas Day people were playing beach volleyball in Central Park, wearing a Santa hat and no shirt.

But elsewhere the weather was much worse. Since Dec. 21st, tornadoes have struck Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Dozens of people died.

On New Years Eve the Mississippi and Merrimac rivers are flooding, flooding large areas of Illinois and Missouri. Dozens more died. Thousands have fled their homes for higher ground.

This past summer Asia and the Pacific were hammered by 16 hurricanes (cyclones), including the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western hemisphere (Patricia).

On Wednesday the same weather system that brought flooding and tornadoes to the United States brought temperatures 50 degrees hotter than normal to the North Pole. At the end of December the temperature at the North Pole was above freezing, reaching 35 degrees.

Why is this happening? Because ocean temperatures in the Pacific are extremely warm. The warmer Pacific air holds more water. When all that hot air and water vapor coming from the west meets more humid air coming from the Gulf of Mexico over the American plains and southeast, it causes extreme weather: tornadoes, thunderstorms and floods.

This has happened before. A few years ago we had tornadoes in January and February, but this year is particularly bad because it's an "El Niño" year. El Niño years also occurred in 1953 and 1980, causing a string of tornadoes in December. The combination of El Niño and climate change made 2015 the hottest year on record.

The people who have been hardest hit by tornadoes and floods come from states whose Republican representatives in Congress say that climate change is a hoax, that temperatures aren't rising: politicians like Ted Cruz of Texas and James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

Last year Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate to "prove" that climate change isn't happening. It was stupid stunt, because one snowfall doesn't prove climate change isn't happening (the large snowfalls that year were caused by a weakening of the polar vortex, when warm air intruded on the North Pole and pushed cold air into the Northeast). But long-term trends do, and beach volleyball weather on Christmas in New York is the culmination of trend that has been occurring for the past 50 years. We've seen it here in Minnesota: in the 1990s the beach volleyball season started in May and ended in August. In the past few years we've regularly started as soon as early to late March and played until late October and mid-November.

The tornadoes and floods hitting the Bible belt aren't God's wrath, or Nature's wrath, or the planet wreaking revenge on us for killing polar bears and whales. It's thermodynamics, plain and simple. Hot air has more energy and holds more water, causing more extreme storms.

This year's weather is worse than previous El Niño years because it's being exacerbated by global warming. As carbon dioxide from the burning of oil, gas and coal continues to build up in the atmosphere, the Pacific will continue to warm to the point where this year's high ocean temperatures will become the norm.

Before long every year will be an El Niño year.

Best Political Moment of 2015

Looking back on this year, I suppose I could note the various accomplishments that the president helped to achieve (Iran, final legality of the ACA, gay marriage legal in all states, ISIL long term strategy drives group out of Ramadi... among others).

Honestly, though, the best political moment of this year was all thanks to Donald Trump. He has singlehandedly laid bare the neo-fascist, ultra-nationalism that permeates a substantial portion of the conservative base. There can be no more denials of racism when the leading candidate for the GOP (now five months running) calls for no Muslims to be allowed in the country AND THE PEOPLE CHEER.

If you want to know how totalitarians take over a country, this is it. They use anger, hate and fear as a fuel to drive nationalism and pick a scapegoat. With the Nazis, it was the Jews. With the Soviets, it was capitalists. With the Italian fascists, it was socialists. With the Japanese, it was the imperialists...even though they themselves were imperialists.

It's this last example that makes me crack up the most. The conservative base bemoans state control and authoritarianism. Yet, that is EXACTLY what they want. They want a return to the aristocracy of the Antebellum South where the non whites remained at their lower station. Donald Trump is their perfect king, even using the word "reign" instead of presidency.

He is their hero and the Best Political Moment of 2015.

Getting What They Deserve

Paul Krugman put it best recently when he noted that Republicans are getting the candidate they deserve in Donald Trump.

Donald Trump as a political phenomenon is very much in a line of succession that runs from W. through Mrs. Palin, and in many ways he’s entirely representative of the Republican mainstream. For example, were you shocked when Mr. Trump revealed his admiration for Vladimir Putin? He was only articulating a feeling that was already widespread in his party…

What is consistently felt, Krugman notes, is bluster and belligerence as substitutes for analysis, disdain for any kind of measure response, and the continued dismissal of inconvenient facts related by the "liberal media." This isn't anything new. This is what the GOP has been training their followers with for the last 15+ years.

Why on earth do they seem surprised now that Trump is the likely nominee?

The Obama team has it right when they say that the GOP is getting what they deserve. I've been saying all along that being an adolescent is what they party is all about these days and they are incapable of behaving like rational adults. Hilariously, many pundits and prognosticators are saying that when the GOP gets their ass kicked (again) this year, they'll finally see the light.

No, they won't:)

This Week in Gun Tropes

In the last week three stories hit the news that illustrate the silliness of the notion that more guns are more better:

1) In Chicago, cops killed a 55-year-old woman by accident when responding to a domestic violence call. Some mentally disturbed college engineering student with a baseball bat was also shot to death. They just happened to be black...

Cops are supposed to be trained to respond to these situations. If good guys with guns can't distinguish between dangerous nut cases and grandmothers, how can anyone expect a random dufus with a concealed pistol in his waistband or purse to be able to make snap decisions and avoid "collateral damage?"

2) The grand jury declined to file charges against the cop who killed Tamir Rice. A year ago two Cleveland cops pulled into a park where a 12-year-old black boy was playing with a pellet gun and shot him dead within three seconds.

It's an outrage that cops just whacked this black kid without first figuring out what the hell was going on.

But what should really worry gun nuts is that the cops whacked this kid without first figuring out what the hell was going on. Suppose this kid was carrying a real gun, like so many of those open-carry idiots roaming fast-food joints in Texas. People wouldn't be quite so outraged if the kid actually posed a real danger. This grand jury decision justifies cops just driving up and blowing away anyone who's carrying a gun, if they feel threatened.

And gun lovers shouldn't think that being white is going to save their hides. The vast majority of shooters in murder sprees are disaffected, gun-loving white guys, so few people will shed tears when cops shoot guys who are just one step away from becoming Dylan Klebold or Dylann Roof.

If you have a gun when something bad goes down, the cops are going to target you because you're not wearing a uniform. They can't tell good guys from bad guys who are carrying guns. After the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in Tucson an innocent man was very nearly shot because he'd taken the gun away from the shooter, but wasn't because a man carrying a concealed weapon paused to figure out what the hell was going on. Maybe he should hold a training session for the cops in Cleveland and Chicago.

3) When Republican state lawmaker David Ramadan responded to one of Donald Trump's moronic tweets with the disdain it deserved, Trump's followers accused him being a Muslim, demanded his citizenship be revoked, told him to "go back home" to Lebanon and made not-so-subtle threats of violence against him. He responded with typical conservative bravado:

“I think I can protect myself,” he said, chuckling. “Second Amendment guy here.”

Ha ha. Good one.

The thing is, neither the Second Amendment nor a handgun will protect you like a flak jacket and a ballistic helmet can. Guns are pretty worthless "protection" because you can't shoot what you don't see coming.

The guys threatening him aren't going to meet him at high noon in front of the saloon on Main Street. They're going to throw a brick through the window of his office, or a Molotov cocktail through the front window of his house, or terrorize his children at the bus stop, or ambush him with a passel of their punk-ass pals, or shoot him from a safe distance with a rifle, the way other political figures such as JFK and Martin Luther King were assassinated.

As long as guns are everywhere, bad guys will always have the upper hand: when a trained shooter picks the time and place for an attack he can unload a full magazine (6, 7, 10, 17, 20, 30 or more rounds) into a person or a crowd long before anyone can possibly react. Even if you've got your weapon in your hand and a round in the chamber, people will be dead on the floor before you can get a single shot off.

The only way to reduce the carnage wrought by guns is to reduce the number of guns in the hands of nitwits who shoot people when they get scared or pissed off.

Trump is...Colbert?

Check this out...

Seriously!!

America Is Already Great

Weak and Paranoid

This piece from The Trace is the best gift I've received this holiday season. I had no idea that there was this much progress on the issue of guns in this country. Take some time to look through each of the stories on the 10 Americans and how they are helping shift our nation's attitude about guns.

I think my favorite was Chris Lane's fantastic post entitled "3 Reasons I Went From Being A Gun Nut To Supporting Gun Control." Choice cuts...

Americans aren't completely free in many ways, and most gun owners don't seem to worry about the many laws and social customs that place limits on other aspects of their lives. I'm not free to walk down the city street completely naked (have no fear folks, that's not something I want to do), yet there are open carry advocates walking around stores with AR15s on their backs.

People willingly submit to rules and limits on their personal freedom in countless ways; it's the price of living in a civilized society without being a huge nuisance to other people. One day I realized that nudity is controlled more tightly than ownership of deadly weapons, and that seemed absurd to me. 

Indeed. It is absurd. But one has to understand that people that feel this way aren't really rational. They feel powerless without their guns. It's pretty fucking sad when you think about it. Worse...

They seem to believe that the reason a lot of people are in favor of gun control measures is because they don't value freedom and are "Sheeple," somehow rejecting the fact that more and more mass shootings and gun crimes seem to be happening and worry the rest of us. 

Some of the hardcore gun owners I met were convinced that America is heading towards an Orwellian future where no one is free and the government controls every aspect of our lives. To many of them, the only thing standing in our evil government's way is their personal stockpile of AR15s. They seem to ignore the fact that if the government went to such an authoritarian extreme, it would have the resources to effectively vaporize any suburban "patriots" who decided to raise an armed resistance against it. 

Thinking the government is out to get them is a very simple and fairly stupid way of looking at things, and not something the majority of responsible gun owners buy into, but once I found myself encountering a bunch of those characters, I decided I didn't want to be part of that culture anymore.

Bravo! Way to deprogram yourself and wake the fuck up. Why would anyone want live their life that way? Gun bloggers and the commenters that post on such sites seem to lack the capacity to reason at all. They are so overcome with emotion that it astounds me they can even function in society at all.

Too often guns are shown to be totems of power, the only way to deal with a conflict, and as a symbol of masculinity. It's stupid. I personally began to feel less powerful whenever I carried a gun. Living in fear while going about my business just made me feel weak and paranoid.

Exactly right. And it's self feeding as long as they are armed.

I challenge all gun owners to stop living in fear and being weak and paranoid. It's no way to go though life.

Here's a much better idea.

Good Guy With A Gun

Panic!

Politico has a piece up about the whole boiling pit of sewage message from the GOP and how easily they can fall into disseminating it.

For a moment, it looked like the fever that had burned since the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 had broken. But then came the Mexican rapists, and Benghazi, and the plot to “Islamize” America, and Planned Parenthood acting as an agent of holocaust. We heard endless dark warnings about Obama the Nazi, Obama the ISIS apologist. We learned that the Affordable Care Act is tantamount to slavery and the Holocaust could have been averted if the Jews just had guns, and that the Iran deal will trigger the second Holocaust (so many holocausts!). 

Once the Paris attacks happened, the panic tightened its grip, with two leading Republican presidential candidates suddenly possessed by dueling hallucinations of celebratory Muslims in Jersey on 9/11. Then came San Bernardino. Donald Trump, who had previously contented himself with talk of an authoritarian state in which Muslims were made to register and neighbor spied upon neighbor, doubled down, calling for a ban of all Muslims trying to come to the United States. The rest of the field, while not quite scaling such rhetorical heights, hardly distinguished itself with steely Churchillian reserve, opting instead for a flurry of muppet arms. 

When Obama gave a speech emphasizing calm and fortitude, Marco Rubio responded by saying that, on the contrary, Americans are “really scared,” John Kasich said “our way of life is at stake,” Chris Christie proclaimed that World War III had begun, and Jeb Bush said ISIS is “organizing to destroy Western Civilization.” 

They seem to have real difficulty calming down, don't they? Do we really want people with this much fear and panic running our country?

Dedicated to Conservative Christians Everywhere...

A Message of Peace

Reprinted in its entirety...

To our Christian brothers and sisters:

Out of our shared love for the Messiah, Jesus, Son of Mary, Peace Be Upon Him, we greet you with peace and joy during your celebration of his life.

The Bible refers to him as the Messiah and describes the annunciation, his miraculous birth and his numerous miracles.

The Qur’an refers to him as the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary. It teaches about his miraculous birth and how his mother Mary was honored above all the worlds. Muslims are instructed to invoke peace upon him whenever his name is mentioned.

The Qur’an narrates the story of the angel who visited Mary, saying “O Mary, indeed God has chosen you and purified you and chosen you above the women of all the worlds.” (Qur’an 3:42)

The angel said, “O Mary, indeed God gives you good news of a word from Him, whose name will be the Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary. He will be honored in this world and the Hereafter and he will be among those closest to God. He will speak to the people in the cradle and in maturity and he will be of the righteous.” (Qur’an 3:44-45)

She said, “My Lord, how will I have a child when no man has touched me?” The angel said, “Such is God; He creates what He wills. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.” (3:47)

The Qur’an describes how the baby Jesus, immediately upon birth, looked up to his mother and comforted her: “Do not be sad; your Lord has provided beneath you a stream. And shake toward you the trunk of the palm tree; it will drop upon you ripe, fresh dates. So eat and drink and be contented.” (Qur’an 19:24-26)

The Qur’an describes many instances in the life of Jesus: how he preached the worship of God and compassion to people, how he healed the leper, how he healed the blind, and even how he brought the dead back to life.

Our two religions, Christianity and Islam, which both profess love and reverence for Jesus as a central figure in each of our religions, constitute over half of the population of the world.

Mercy and compassion, charity and love are the divine attributes that the Christmas season evokes among Christians. A mother’s devotion, a child’s love, and the promise of God’s mercy and grace in the coming of Jesus to us are sentiments that Muslims can share and appreciate.

In the Bible, we are told that Jesus, in response to a question about the most important commandment, is said to have answered: “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is similar. You should love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:35-40) Jesus added that those whose hearts are filled with such love of God and neighbor live not far from the kingdom of God. (Mark 12:34)

Similarly, the Qur’an teaches us that to “worship God being sincere to Him in faith, to incline towards the truth, to establish prayer and to give alms to the poor is the essence of the religion.” (Qur’an 98:5) “ … And you should forgive and overlook: Do you not like God to forgive you? And God is The Merciful Forgiving.”  (Qur’an 24:22)

The Prophet Mohammad, Peace Be Upon Him, taught: “None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother that which he loves for himself.” (Bukhari & Muslim)

In the words of St. Paul, let us put on the armor of light which is the teaching of God that we are to love one another that we might together better confront the dark that lies within some human hearts which are far from God. (Romans 13:12)

As Jesus taught so movingly, let our lights so shine together before all people that they may see our good works which glorify our God in Heaven. (Matthew 5:16)

Jesus taught us that we should not live by bread alone but by every word of God. (Matthew 4:4)

Thus, we applaud the good hearts and loving deeds seeking to please God in His mercy and compassion that are befitting for us not only during this Christmas season but also every day of every year. Let all people, Christians and Muslims, who love Jesus, peace be upon him, come together to practice what he preached. Let peace and goodwill spread among us all.

We invite all our Muslim brothers and sisters of goodwill to join us in this open letter at this Christmas season and throughout the year as peace and joy, love of God and neighbor, are to be with us always.

This article was submitted by Imam Asad Zaman, Muslim American Society of Minnesota; Dr. Odeh Muhawesh, Imam Hussain Islamic Center; Shaykha Tamara Gray, Rabata/Daybreak Bookstore; Dr. Tamim Saidi, Masjid Al Kareem; Fedwa Wazwaz, Engage Minnesota; Dr. Shah Khan, Islamic Center of Minnesota; Dr. Onder Uluyol, Islamic Resource Group; Zafar Siddiqui, Al Amal School; Imam Sharif Mohamed, Islamic Civic Society of America — Masjid Dar Al-Hijrah, and Owais Bayunus, Islamic Center of Minnesota.

A Child's Christmas In Wales

In what has become an annual tradition here at Zombie Politics,  we turn to Dylan Thomas' "A Child's Christmas in Wales." (full text here).

There are so many elements that I love to this story that they are just too numerous to count. I suppose my personal story is the one that resonates the most. I was part of a dramatic ensemble that read it a church on Christmas Eve, 1984. I had never heard the story before and was sort of dragged into doing it by our drama teacher. I even forgot to read a line!

Yet, by the end of the reading, something magical happened to me. "All the Christmases rolled down" in a wonderfully warm bundle of memories and, as I left the church, the words cemented themselves in my soul. I realized this story would be with me forever...especially at Christmas.

Cruz Against Political Correctness Except When He's for It

Last week Ted Cruz released a video in which he pimped his daughters to make a political point ("How Obamacare Stole Christmas").

But when Ann Telnaes of the Washington Post ridiculed him for bringing his young daughters into the tawdry business of politics with a cartoon that depicted him as a Santa Claus organgrinder with a pair of dancing monkeys, that was beyond the pale for the tough-talking Texan.

Cruz whined that the cartoon attacked the girls, but it's really attacking him for forcing his children to parrot his partisan lies. The cartoon is really about children being the victims of a father who will stoop to anything to get elected president.

The Post withdrew the cartoon, but it shouldn't have. The Telnaes cartoon wasn't an unmotivated attack on the Cruz girls; it was a parody of a political ad that Cruz himself put out there. That makes it fair game. It's Cruz's fault for exposing his own daughters to this; this is on him, not Telnaes and the Post.

What makes it doubly ridiculous is that nearly every parent refers to their children as monkeys: it's a term of endearment. I'm sure Cruz and his wife are no different. If you could stomach watching the 15 hours of excruciating Cruz family videos his campaign shat on YouTube, you could probably find multiple instances of Cruz calling his children monkeys. Perhaps there should be a Senate hearing to look into the matter of whether Cruz now calls, or has ever called, his daughters monkeys.

The real subtext here is that for years Republicans have been circulating cartoons depicting President Obama as a monkey. By carping about the cartoon Cruz is underlining the "injustice" of his minions getting called for portraying the president of the United States as a monkey, while "liberals" do the same thing to his children.

The difference, of course, is that Republican portrayals of Obama as an ape are motivated by racism, while Telnaes is using the common organgrinder trope that is completely inoffensive when applied to white children.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are always the first ones to start screaming about the tyranny of political correctness every time they spout derogatory nonsense about Mexicans, Muslims, women, the disabled, and every other group they insult to get elected. Yet they're the first ones to pretend they're the victim when they talk trash and prostitute their children to further their own political goals.

These guys are such whiny little bitches...

Moving Left

The main reason why the Right are so out of their minds right now is this.

Why America Is Moving Left

It means that on domestic policy—foreign policy is following a different trajectory, as it often does—the terms of the national debate will continue tilting to the left. The next Democratic president will be more liberal than Barack Obama. The next Republican president will be more liberal than George W. Bush.

Yep.

The Deadly Trap of Opioid Painkillers

In the Democratic debate one of the questions dealt with the epidemic of heroin overdoses that has hit the country in recent years. But it's not just heroin: a lot of it is other opioids such as OxyContin and Vicodin and Percocet. Heroin use is way up because people addicted to those prescription drugs turn to street when their pusher doctor stops handing out scrips like candy.

Last year more than 47,000 people died of drug overdose; almost 30,000 of those deaths were from opioids -- as many people as were killed by guns and car accidents. The three candidates in the debate all agreed that more has to be done to prevent doctors from overprescribing addictive drugs. But it's not just doctors: patients have to stop asking for them.

And doctors do hand these drugs out like candy. About 10 years ago I came down with pneumonia. I didn't even know I had it -- I just had a terrible headache and couldn't sleep, but had no congestion or even a cough. After a false start with the wrong antibiotic, they finally gave me the right stuff -- Zithromax -- and without my asking for it, a prescription for Percocet.

I don't generally bother with drugs to treat headaches -- they never work anyway. But I hadn't slept for days, so I took the antibiotic and one tablet of Percocet. However, as soon as I started to drift asleep I stopped breathing: I'd overdosed on a single pill. So now I had to force myself to stay awake and concentrate on each breath, and the headache was still killing me. Fortunately the Zithromax worked almost immediately and I was better the next day.

And it's just getting worse: every time I or my wife have even the most minor surgery, the doctors are always eager to push some more Vicodin or OxyContin on us.

My system is probably hypersensitive to the effects of opioids, but these drugs -- Percocet, OxyContin and Vicodin -- are inherently dangerous. The difference between a useful therapeutic dose and an overdose is fairly small. People who rely on them to alleviate severe pain for years on end build up an addiction and a tolerance to opioids. They have to take larger and larger doses, inching over the years toward an eventual deadly overdose.

When their doctors finally cut them off they turn to the street to buy prescription meds illegally, like Rush Limbaugh did, or they buy heroin. The quality of street drugs is extremely uneven, increasing the likelihood of an overdose.

The CDC has now recognized opioid overdoses as an epidemic, and has been working to revamp the guidelines for prescribing these drugs. But drug companies are fighting this tooth and nail. CDC has now delayed a plan to issue new guidelines. Big Pharma doesn't want their opioid cash cow gored.

People who have severe pain feel they have no alternative but to take drugs. But opioids like oxycodone were originally intended as a temporary stopgap for cancer patients; people in acute pain who were either being cured of their disease or dying from it. These drugs were not intended to be taken for years on end for chronic pain from mundane conditions such as ruptured discs or diabetic nerve damage.

Now, I'm not saying that people plagued by severe back pain should just suffer. But painkillers can only ameliorate pain temporarily -- they cure absolutely nothing. If patients have severe neuropathy, the goal should be to remedy the underlying physical condition. Not dope them into a stupor for the rest of their lives.

Real cures require expensive and/or risky surgery, or extensive changes in behavior or ongoing physical therapy and exercise. Health insurance companies don't like the former and patients don't like the latter. And in some cases we don't have any viable cures yet.

So the cheap, easy and lazy thing to do is hand out painkillers as if they were M&Ms.

Taking painkillers will never fix what's really wrong when people suffer from pain. But drug companies like that. They have no incentive to find real cures for the underlying causes of chronic pain, because their business model depends on hooking more and more people on opioids and milking their pain for the rest of their lives. Just like any pusher on the street.

Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who was recently arrested for securities fraud, became infamous for jacking up the price of a sixty-year-old life-saving drug by 5,000 percent, from $13.50 to $750 dollars per pill. He saw nothing wrong with telling AIDS patients and mothers of sick newborns, "Your money or your life!"

Shkreli is a disgusting imitation of a human being, but at least he was being honest. The CEOs of drug companies hawking opioids are doing the same thing, saying, "Pay us or suffer the fires of hell for the rest of your miserable life!"

This is the problem when capitalism intersects with medicine. Corporations, as Shkreli told us, aren't in the business of making people healthy. They're solely in the business of making money. More money. More quickly.

Americans should stop putting up with expensive, half-assed solutions to medical problems: painkillers are not the answer to chronic pain. The medical-industrial complex is making trillions of dollars off our suffering.

We should be getting real cures for all the money we're spending. Not a temporary fix that addicts us to dangerous drugs that will eventually kill us.

Why Aren't You Working On White Men With Guns?

Yeah, why aren't we?

And Then There Were 13....

Well, Lindsey Graham is out of the GOP race. Does anyone really care? I for one will miss his little seen performances in the undercard debates:)

That leaves the following candidates:

Jim Gilmore: Who? Or, more appropriately, why?

George Pataki: He must be looking in horror at what his party has become. See also: extinct species, Northeast Republican

Rick Santorum: The evangelical vote is no more
Mike Huckabee: see Rick Santorum

Carly Fiorina: She has her 15 minutes. Now she's trying to repeat them over and over again.
Rand Paul: There aren't enough sensible libertarians out there.
John Kasich: Probably the most qualified and reasonable GOP candidate in the mix which is why he'll never get above 2 percent.

Jeb Bush: He does indeed remind the entire nation of your awkward father.

Ben Carson: When he finally showed some energy, he was just...weird.

Chris Christie: I think this guy could surprise some people in New Hampshire.

Marco Rubio: Currently down or flat lining but still in the top three. If he can win an early primary, he might catch fire.
Ted Cruz: He will win Iowa. After that, it depends on his organization to get out the vote in the Southern states.
Donald Trump: Still the front runner and proof positive of maturity of the conservative base.

Note how I ordered and grouped each of the candidates. One of the last three will likely be the nominee, At this point, I'm hoping that it's Cruz. "Real" conservatives have assured me that if a true, deep red Republican were nominated, magic will happen and the silent majority will turn out to vote.

I can't wait.

Old Dixie Hwy. renamed for President Obama

I'd say this is a metaphor for about eight zillion things...:)

Racism and Bigotry on Full Display

Rip Donald Trump all you want but I think his "block all Muslims" comment was the best thing that ever happened. Why? Check out his poll numbers. What we see here is fantastic proof that conservatives are fucking bigots. Examples.





Rather than being pissed off about these view, I'm actually pretty happy that it's out there now on full display so we can now deal with it.

And deal with it we will. There simply aren't enough bigots out there to win a national election. When you add this stuff in with the anti-immigrant garbage, how can any GOP nominee possibly win?

Thoughts on the New Star Wars Film

Here are my thoughts on the new Star Wars film The Force Awakens 

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)

I give it an 8 out of 10. I gave the other films as follows:

Episode IV: 10. The first one is still the best. I'll never forget that feeling of wonder I got my first time I saw it. 
Episode V: 8. I realize I'll lose my fan boy cred by not giving a blowjob to Empire every other minute but I hated that I had to wait to find out what happened to Han. And it was such a downbeat film.
Episode VI: 9. Only one point off for the stupid Ewoks. The space battles at the end just blew me away.
Episode I: 7. I realize the prequels get a lot of shit but this movie was really great. It had been years since Star Wars had come out and it was so amazing to come back to this universe again.
Episode II: 2. Barf. Really fucking bad rehash of Titanic. Multiple plot points vague and silly.
Episode III: 4. Mildly better but still lacking plot wise in many ways.

Force Awakens gets an 8 overall for several reasons...the complaints first.

-I realize JJ Abrams means lingering questions (see: Lost) but I was mildly irritated about the mystery around Rey. They don't need to hook anyone to stick around.

-Too much happened in the 35 years since VI to gloss over in just a few lines of dialog. The whole Kylo son gone bad with Leia and Han lamenting felt too light. It needed another scene or two.

-Han dying sucked. I realize why they did it but it still was hard to take.

Other than those very minor issues, the film was great. The three new characters are incredibly fascinating. Give me some more Poe Dameron, baby!! Finn was really cool and Rey is just a fucking boss. And what about Snoke? I think he's actually really small in real life (Wizard of Oz dealio).

I'm very excited to see the future films!!.

Happy Star Wars Day!!!

We're Exceptional!