The Worm Turns

Eight years ago, after Hillary Clinton had run against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, and John McCain had selected Sarah Palin as his running mate, I had a discussion with a woman who is reliably conservative. She wasn't having any of this female empowerment nonsense. "Women are too emotional to be president," she told me. 

I disagreed: men can be just as emotional; they are particularly vulnerable to the emotions of lust, anger and the thirst for vengeance, especially when their masculinity is threatened.

Now the worm has turned. And that worm is Donald Trump:

In a striking series of defections, high-profile Republican women are abandoning decades of party loyalty and vowing to oppose Mr. Trump, calling him emotionally unfit for the presidency and a menace to national security.

In this election, there's absolutely no question that Hillary Clinton is more emotionally stable than Donald Trump.

Throughout his candidacy Trump has persisted in throwing out petty insults in debates. He is always angry, peevish, jealous and prideful. He constantly brags about nonexistent accomplishments, like some insecure teenaged boy trying to impress a girl.

He constantly insulted the appearance of other candidates, including Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie. This is particularly ironic, since he's a fat old man with orange skin, tiny porcine eyes and a ridiculous-looking hairpiece that he still insists is his real hair -- which, if true, is even crazier than if it were a toupee: he actually wants his hair to look like a clown's fright wig?

He tweets outrageous nonsense at all hours of the night or day, like a catty thirteen-year-old girl with ADD. He pouts and whines about how unfair everyone has been to him, how they keep saying such mean things about him.

Trump is so emotionally needy and unstable that he insults the parents of a man who sacrificed his life to save the lives of the men in his unit.

Why is Trump so emotional and flighty? Is it his incipient senile dementia? His psychopathy? His overprivileged upbringing? Has an excess of testosterone curdled his 70-year-old brain?
Lots of Republicans, especially Republican women, are increasingly turned off by Trump's antics. He was funny in the beginning. Now the act is wearing thin.

Many conservative women were especially turned off when Trump told them that they should just suck it when they're sexually harassed at work. He defended Roger Ailes, a pervert who ogled and pinched and touched and patted and petted and grabbed and slobbered over his female subordinates.

They were disgusted when Trump said women should be forced to quit their jobs to escape men who abuse their positions of power to extort sexual favors from female employees who have husbands they love and families they have to support.

They were shocked when Trump said that he would have his own daughter, Ivanka, just quit her job if her boss treated her the way Ailes treated his employees, instead of fighting back against what in the final analysis is attempted rape.

Apparently Trump believes that CEOs should enjoy a modern form of prima nocta, a medieval practice which feudal lords could have sex with female subjects on their wedding nights. Only in Trump's mind all female employees are fair game all the time.

You have to wonder how many of Trump's employees he treated this way: sadly, we can't find out because he makes everyone sign non-disclosure agreements.

Or maybe they were turned off when they heard draft-dodging Trump's interview with Howard Stern in which he compared his sleeping around to the dangers soldiers face in war:

“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

How can any conservative evangelical Christian woman possibly vote for such an emotionally self-involved twit? The man is bragging about countless acts of fornication and adultery, while dismissing all the women he's slept with as diseased sex toys, comparing them to torture in Viet Cong prisons, land mines, Agent Orange and ceaseless machine-gun fire.

In Trump's mind John McCain is no hero for getting captured in Vietnam: Trump was the real deal, spending the Vietnam War banging busty bimbos in New York, while McCain lazed about as a prisoner of war in the posh Hanoi Hilton.

This was all fine and dandy when Trump was just some dorky fat guy in a phony reality show. But when he's president he'll have real power. He's already promised to change the laws to allow an orgy of lawsuits against news outlets who he thinks have insulted him.

Is eliminating laws against sexual harassment is on his agenda as well?

It's The Media's Fault!!

For years, conservatives have foamed at the mouth about victims. They caterwaul about how too few Americans don't take responsibility for their individual actions. Even the Gun Cult will tell you that if someone shoots someone else, it's not their fault. We have to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the individual.

Yet when it comes to their candidates for office or even their pundits, they are not responsible for their words or actions. It's the liberal media, twisting their words and making it seem like they said something they didn't. Rather than own it, they wriggle away with scapegoating an institution that merely calls them on their bullshit.

Take the latest call from Donald Trump to commit violence in the name of liberty. I say "latest" because he's done this before with protesters at his events. Yesterday, he said the following.

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.

Conservatives have tried to spin this as Trump talking about taking political action to prevent Hillary from getting into office but let's keep in mind that his phrasing suggests that she has already won. That's when the Second Amendment people can step in and it will be horrible. It's pretty clear as to what he is referring. Check out this guy's reaction in the audience.



Rather than apologize for what he suggested and own it, Trump has blamed the media and its bias. Let me make this very, very simple.

No, Donald (and Cult members), it's YOUR fault because YOU said it.

Trump Calls For Second Amendment People To Deal With Clinton

I've said many, many times that the biggest danger to our country is the fucking Gun Cult. Their nominee just confirmed it. A not so thinly veiled call to assassinate the Democratic nominee...wow...

If Hillary ever does start taking away peoples' guns, she should start with every gun blogger and commenter. And then put them in Gitmo since we can't seem to close it:)

An Epidemic of Pinheads

The epidemic has started. A few days after Marco Rubio declared that women who are pregnant with Zika-infected babies should not be allowed to have abortions, one such baby was born to a woman in Texas. The infant died:

The girl, born in Harris County, Texas, had several Zika-related birth defects, including microcephaly, which leaves the head and brain underdeveloped. Unlike the recent cases of Zika in Florida, where local mosquitoes are spreading the virus, the mother in Texas likely contracted it in Latin America, according to a statement from Harris County health officials.

Meanwhile, Zika is starting to take hold in the United States: 

Four cases of Zika infection in Florida are very likely to have been caused by mosquitoes there, the State Department of Health said Friday — the first documented instances of local transmission in the continental United States.

“Zika is now here,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news briefing.

Republicans in Congress torpedoed attempts to stop the spread of the disease by littering legislation with special-interest gimmicks and divisive policy changes that invited a Democratic filibuster and a veto threat from the White House:

Democrats said they blocked the bill because Republicans were using the must-pass legislation to score political points, jam through unpalatable policy changes and cut money from other programs, including provisions that would hinder access to contraception for women [emphasis added] and weaken environmental restrictions on pesticide use.

Republicans, in turn, accused Democrats of manufacturing excuses for blocking the bill, but they did not dispute that some of the provisions favored Republican policy positions.

Democrats and the White House have been pushing since February for the Republican majorities in Congress to approve $1.9 billion in emergency financing to fight Zika, which can cause brain damage and other serious defects in infants born to infected mothers.

Republican religious zealots are intentionally increasing the likelihood that women will become pregnant and infected with Zika and be forced to bear microcephalic infants to term.

It's kind of ironic that Republicans are doing everything possible to increase the number of microcephalic infants, commonly called "pinheads." Pinhead is a derogatory term favored by Republican blowhard Bill O'Reilly. But the epidemic of pinheads we're suffering right now isn't caused by Zika -- it's caused by intolerant conservative racist and religious rhetoric spewed by the likes of Trump, Hannity, O'Reilly, Rubio and Limbaugh.

Rubio's stand is typically hypocritical:

"I understand a lot of people disagree with my view – but I believe that all human life is worthy of protection of our laws. And when you present it in the context of Zika or any prenatal condition, it’s a difficult question and a hard one," Rubio told POLITICO.

"But if I’m going to err, I’m going to err on the side of life."

Republicans like Rubio talk a big game about being "on the side of life," but he, like the vast majority of Republicans, favors the death penalty and complains that we're not killing people fast enough. They demand death even in cases of offenders who are mentally disabled or were juveniles when they committed their crimes. They favor starting unilateral wars of convenience that kill tens of thousands of innocent civilians (as well as American soldiers). Republicans like Trump even favor assassinating the wives and children of suspected terrorists. So much for the sanctity of human life.

But this really begs the question: what is human life?

The courts have decided that a brain-dead person can be taken off life support, though many Republicans still oppose this. In 2005 Republicans fought to prevent Terry Schiavo's husband from removing her feeding tube, although she had been stuck in an irreversible persistent vegetative state for 15 years. When she was autopsied the pathologist found she literally had only half a brain.

Republicans bitch about welfare queens not pulling their own weight: why -- in their own terms -- do they want society to support a bunch of pinheads who will never amount to anything, and can't even feed themselves or use the toilet?

This is the kind of "human life" Marco Rubio wants to prolong. Infants born with severe microcephaly will never be normal. They will never laugh, talk, or play, or go to kindergarten. They will never be able to feed themselves, or walk or take care of their own basic physical needs. They often suffer seizures. Many cannot swallow, see or hear. Most of them will never be able to recognize their own parents. Many will die after a few short months or years.

In other words, such children will suffer interminable torture until their disability ultimately kills them.

Yes, there are people with severe disabilities who still have lives and contribute to society: Stephen Hawking cannot walk or feed himself. Yet, because he has a functioning human brain, he has been able to communicate and accomplish amazing things.

Children born with severe microcephaly will never do that, because they are not, in the most important sense, human beings.

Our brains are what make us human. It's not opposable thumbs, or upright bipedal locomotion, or (mostly) hairless bodies. With today's technology children born without feet can become Olympic caliber runners like Oscar Pistorius (that technology, sadly, will not necessarily make them decent people, however).

But children born with severe microcephaly do not have human brains: they will never really be human.

Microcephaly can be detected in utero with ultrasound, and there's no mistaking the symptoms. If a woman wants to accept the burden of caring for a severely disabled infant until its disease finally kills it, that's fine. That should be her choice. But such children require constant medical attention for a condition that will never be cured.

Now multiply this by the potential for thousands and thousands of microcephalic infants if the Zika epidemic becomes widespread, and you have a recipe for a tsunami of medical bankruptcies and escalating health insurance costs, all to keep tiny-brained children alive for a few short years.

Republicans constantly bitch about the tyranny of political correctness. Forcing women to bear severely disabled babies whose lives will consist of unending agony is the height of conservative political correctness and religious orthodoxy carried to preposterous lengths.

So I'll be politically incorrect and call a spade a spade. Fetuses with such severe mental handicaps are not really human: they have not been born yet, they have no experiences, or emotional attachments. Nor will they ever be able to form them. They cannot survive on their own and most would die without extensive and expensive medical intervention.

Mothers have to consider the consequences of carrying a deformed Zika baby to term and make their own decisions. Bearing such a child will be an expensive, time-consuming and thankless task that will steal the love and attention from their other children and their spouses, as well as drain their financial resources, and ultimately the resources of American society. Does it make any sense to have thousands of microcephalic infants on life support who are only going to die in a few years, at a cost of billions of dollars?

When the precepts behind the religious absolutism on contraception and abortion were forged centuries ago, these were all moot points. Women died in childbirth all the time, miscarriages were extremely common, and child mortality was extremely high. Birth defects were thought to be the result of sin or curse. Infants with severe birth defects would die within hours or days. Those that didn't die were frequently abandoned in the wild.

It is our advanced technology that has made these questions of birth control and abortion such controversial topics. Absent our advanced health care system we wouldn't be having this discussion -- our Christian forebears just let deformed infants die.

This country should be doing everything it can to prevent the spread of Zika in the first place. We should be doing everything to ensure that women don't get pregnant in areas where Zika is prevalent. Birth control should be freely available everywhere, but most especially when women are at risk of bearing children with birth defects.

And we should never prevent a woman from terminating a pregnancy that will ultimately result in only misery and death.

Dressing More Conservatively

Will They Even Listen To One Of Their Own?

If GOP strategist Rick Wilson and I sat down for a beer to discuss ideology, we'd like find very little with which to agree upon. He's a conservative which means he pushes policies that, for the most part, simply don't work in reality.

But his recent column on Donald Trump and how he has to be beaten badly in November in order to save the party is completely accurate. Let's take a look at a few choice cuts, shall we?

A growing number of Americans are coming to the realization that Trump is more than just a political train wreck; he's a real threat to the nation, what with the fear of nuclear weapons and the sweeping power of the federal government in his tiny paws.

I've seen this from the beginning and it's certainly a reflection of where the party has gone. It gives me a great deal of hope for this country that the adults, regardless of their political stripe, see this too.

Those of us who believe, who know, that Trump is dangerous can't just settle for him being beaten in November. We need to ensure that he is on the business end of a decisive, humiliating defeat — so that the terribly divisive forces he has unleashed are delivered a death blow.

Those divisive forces can be defined specifically as the right wing blogger/commenter crowd, formerly the short wave radio folks followed by the email forward peeps. These are the moonbats that honestly define the party today and begin their "expert" analysis with the words, "I'm hearing some things from some people..."

Wilson correctly identifies the key to this election's results. Let's bury these fuckers forever. They are a danger to our country and its progress.

The second reason Trump needs to fall hard in November is that the Party of Lincoln needs a complete, top-to-bottom reset — one that completely purges the Trumpkins who believe racial animus is a governing philosophy and that their ignorant and angry primal screams can ever build a Republican majority. After a pretty decisive loss to Obama in 2012, the Republican Party produced an exhaustive, detailed post-mortem pointing the way forward, focused largely on how to better connect with the growing Latino vote. None of the lessons were actually learned. All the recommendations about fixing the posture of the party have been treated as though they had been printed on toilet paper.

Yeah, what happened to that all improved and reflecting GOP? Well, they realized their base is made of racist assholes who don't want to change. As I have stated previously, it's time to leave them behind. Wilson has a different idea...sort of....

Well, Trump voters, it's your turn. Go get a switch. I'm not going to coddle you and say you're really smart and good people and this is just a misunderstanding. That's just what the PC crowd does on the left. Trumpkins don't deserve a participation trophy for wrecking the party and saddling the nation with Hillary. They made the crazy the enemy of the good, and centered an entire campaign on rage, fear and an eternally shrinking spiral of cult-worship and fanaticism.

I laughed out loud when I saw the PC reference. And "rage, fear?" Hmm...where have I heard that before?:)

So when it's over, Trumpkins, remember: You're not purging us. We're purging you. No more hate and reckless group blame. No more fact-free fearmongering. No more feeding the obese ego of a man who's transparently unfit for the job.

Can they actually do it? Given this...

While Donald Trump was retweeting "White Genocide 1488 Ovenmaster," Clinton's campaign was building data files and contacting swing voters. While Trump was tweeting about "Crooked Hillary," she was having precisely targeted television ads aimed at swing voters in the suburbs of key cities in battleground states appearing at just the right moments. While Trump was depending on red hats and WWE rallies, her people have been going door-to-door by the thousands, knocking, talking, winning hearts and winning votes.

...I'm not sure it's possible.

Really Fucking Bad

Remember a few months back when some pundits were hand wringing over how Hillary Clinton could get Donald Trump? After all, the guy was impervious, right? He bested a "strong" GOP field of 16 other candidates and was all set to take down the Hilz in similar fashion. There was no earthly way she could stop him.

Except she did.

And it was magnificent.

We're still three months away from the election and a lot could happen. In fact, I'm expecting a few bad things to happen to Hillary along the way. Maybe even a really bad one or two. That's politics and no doubt her team is expecting it now that we have the revelation that Julian Assange wants to be the teenager who burns the house down just for kicks. But one thing has became very clear in the last week.

Like any right wing blogger or commenter, it's mere child's play to get to a guy like Trump.

The trap she laid for him with Khans was beautiful. It totally threw him off his game and he spent the week pitching a fit that has now put Georgia, Arizona and possibly Missouri in play for the Dems. Down ballot, GOP candidates are scrambling to saw themselves loose of the dead hooker (Trump) to which they are handcuffed. Consider this handy checklist of Trump's behavior as a result of being pwned by the Khans.

-Foamed at the mouth about fire marshals from Colorado to Ohio.

-Kicked a baby out of an event after saying the baby was OK to stay.

-Took a purple heart from a veteran that he said was real but wasn't and made jokes about it.

-Said that if a woman was being sexually harassed in the workplace, she should get a different job.

-Refused to endorse Paul Ryan or John McCain and then grudgingly did so.

-Called Hillary Clinton the devil (ah, that ol' chesnut..:))

-Called the election rigged (see also: taking ball, going home after ass whupping)

-Claimed that a video existed of the US paying off Iran. He later retracted this statement.

-Claimed that the NFL sent him a letter complaining of the debate schedule. The NFL said they never did so.

Given all of this, here's my latest map...

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Now that we have all seen how easy it is to get a guy like Trump, Hillary's debate strategy should be pretty clear. The guy can't resist taking the bait and then making shit up based on the insanity in his head. So, give him the bait.

More importantly, though, I think we are finally seeing just how well the mentality, emotional balance and ideology of right wing bloggers and commenters would do under the spotlight.

Really fucking bad.

Buddies!

Thankfully Chipping Away

Does Trump's Draft Dodging Disqualify Him?

As Donald Trump continues his insane tirades against the parents of a soldier who was killed in Iraq, the question of Trump's draft dodging has come up again. It surfaced a while back, when Trump criticized John McCain for having been a POW in Vietnam.

Trump received five deferments to avoid the draft in the 1960s. Four were for college, and one was for "bone spurs" in his heels. This was clearly bogus, but Trump was not alone in buying his way out of the draft. A lot of politicians of Trump's age took advantage of their social station to avoid serving in war: Dan Quayle, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

Should avoiding the draft disqualify you from serving as president? It depends: people like Bush, Cheney and Rove were all gung-ho for the war, but weaseled their way out of Vietnam.

War is hell, the old saying goes. But some wars are "better" than others. US involvement in the two world wars was inescapable. The Korean and Persian Gulf Wars were waged to assist allies against aggressors.  The Afghan war, while justified, was completely screwed up: it should have been a police action targeted specifically to destroy bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but Bush turned it into a unwinnable war against an entire country.

The Vietnam and Iraq wars were wrong from the get-go. Both were ginned up to gain political advantage. Opposition to both these wars was justified, and draft evasion during the Vietnam War for moral and political reasons was justified to "starve the beast." It is completely moral to avoid participating in the killing in an elective war of aggression like those in Vietnam and Iraq, waged to bolster the reelection chances of a sitting president.

But avoiding service in Vietnam while clamoring for other Americans to be sent off to die in the jungle was the height of hypocrisy. Dozens of Republican chickenhawks in Congress and the Bush administration (I'm looking at you, Dick Cheney) were guilty of this when they invaded Iraq on false pretenses. At the same time they demonized Democrats like John Kerry who actually served in Vietnam.

Some people think that military service should be a prerequisite to be commander in chief. These people are wrong. Some people in the military (I'm looking at you, John McCain) think of military action as the answer to every problem. McCain has called for war against more than a dozen different countries, and had he been president it's completely possible we would be at war with Russia at this moment over the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and Crimea.

What is required to serve as commander in chief, however, is the ability to understand what the consequences of your actions will be, and what the effects of those actions will be on the people who serve, their families, and the country as a whole. That requires knowledge, foresight and empathy.

Donald Trump has none of these. He has no idea what's going on the world: last week he didn't know that Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014. He doesn't know the difference between Iran's Quds force and the Kurds in Iraq.

Trump's lack of foresight is even worse: he has said that the United States should let South Korea and Japan should go hang, and develop their own nuclear weapons. He has said that the US should stand by and do nothing if Russia invades NATO allies that don't spend enough on their military.

It's no wonder that North Korea, Russia and China are all rooting for Trump to be president.

Trump's total lack of empathy has been amply displayed time and again, most recently in his attacks on the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan. And lest we forget, his snarky demand that a crying baby be ejected from his rally.

Besides, Trump's bone spurs prevent him from being commander in chief.

What he's saying and what he's thinking...

Good Words

As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

---Jill Abramson, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.

And here's another piece which explains why the Hillary pile on continues to happen.

The Continued Adolescent Tantrum

Over the last few months of this campaign, I've note how Donald Trump is exactly the candidate that conservatives deserve. They have gone from the party of Reagan and his shining city on the hill to the party of anger, hate, fear, and darkness. As clearly reflected by their politicians, pundits and supporters (especially the right wing bloggers/commenters), their behavior is that of an adolescent having a temper tantrum, stomping down the hall, slamming the door, and shouting, "You can't make me!!! I don't wanna!!!!"

Witness this latest tantrum from their candidate.


And this wasn't the first time he's called those fat headed fire marshals with all their poopey headed rules and stuff...



So, now we can add fire marshals to the list of people who are against Donald Trump...this on top of Gold Star families.

All of this ranting, raving, and lunacy sure does remind me of many a blog discussion...:)

The Real Email Scandal

Hillary Clinton gave an interview on Fox News on Sunday in which she once again apologized and admitted fault for using a personal email server during her tenure as Secretary of State. The media went ballistic today (natch) over her "lying" about classified material being sent on this server. It's been explained so many times now that I really don't get why everyone is still talking about her emails.

What they should be talking about is the real scandal. Hillary Clinton doesn't understand basic technology and clearly has trouble on the line with the computer machine. Sure, it's not as sexy as her lying and going to jail (nothing gives a conservative a boner like imagining a Clinton in jail), but it is a fact. She set up the private server because she didn't have the multi-tasking capability to toggle between two different emails on her Blackberry. When she was asked about her hard drive being scrubbed, she said, "What do you mean, with a cloth?" She seemed to not understand reading the code on three emails that had a "c" classification.

All of this tells me that she doesn't understand something the leader of the free world should get. I have several emails accounts on my phone along with a variety of apps that I use all the time. Granted, I may be a bit ahead of the game in terms of tech but the president should have basic level knowledge of this stuff.

I highly doubt the media, particularly the conservative media, will go after on this but they should. It's a valid criticism and it should be concerning to voters.

Leave Them Behind

The presidential election of 2016 can really be summed up in one way: it's the last stand of the white non college educated male voter. 

Consider that in less than four years, white people in this country will be in the minority. For the white non college educated male voter, this is the fucking apocalypse. And it really explains the appeal of Donald Trump. His talk of walls and bans are a direct appeal to the fear that white males feel when they see the world changing around them. His anti-trade rhetoric and stated reluctance to help other countries fits perfectly into the mindset of this demographic. After all, these are the people who have lost jobs and are being left behind in the age of globalization.

In this election cycle, pundits have declared that the Democrats have to reach out to this voter and connect with them. They have to show the non college educated white male that Trump is a charlatan who would actually be worse for them. They've been hammering Trump on his failure to pay contractors and his fraud with outfits like Trump University. Hillary herself implored an audience just yesterday to talk to their friends and relatives about just how bad Trump would be for the middle class.

None of this will help. Why?

The Trump voter is a lost fucking cause. Consider that they are supporting a man who by all rational thought in reality is a total disaster of a person. Is there anything even redeeming about him at all? The simple fact that they are supporting him says to me that there is no hope of changing their minds. They are lost to all that anger, hate and fear.

So, leave them behind. History is filled with demographic groups that the march of time waved buh-bye too. I haven't seen any significant numbers in the Egyptian Gods demographic of late. Nor have I seen the Roman emperor followers clamoring for a return to that empire. In our own country, the Whigs and their supporters never made it out of the 19th century. Progress and new ways of thinking left all of these groups and their ultimate failures behind.

The attention should be focused on getting out the vote from all other demographic groups. This is where the election is going to be ultimately won or lost for the Democrats. White college educated voters (male and female) and minority voters need to make a statement this election.

It's their country now and we're not going back.

If Trump Can't Run an Elevator, How Can He Run a Country?

Donald Trump just got himself trapped in an elevator:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump had to be rescued from an elevator that was stuck between the first and second floors of a resort Friday, the Colorado Springs Fire Department said.

In a statement released Saturday, the department says that it was called at 1:30 p.m. Friday to rescue about 10 people, including Trump, trapped inside the elevator at The Mining Exchange, A Wyndham Grand Hotel & Spa resort.

The department says the firefighters opened the top elevator hatch and lowered a ladder into the elevator. Trump and the others used the ladder to climb out of the elevator to the second floor. The department says no injuries were reported.

I'm impressed that Trump was able to waddle up a ladder and fit through the trap door of an elevator.

How did this happen?

“The parties that lease the hotel also wanted to control of the elevators and I assume that happens when you get to a certain level of security, and so they were given a key to actually control the elevators and the elevator apparently in the course of being controlled by somebody other than in the course of the normal operations, the elevator stopped and consequently Mr. Trump was, I understand rescued by the fire department from that within a matter of five minutes or less,” Sanders said.

Trump insisted that the hotel give him the key to the elevator, and he somehow managed to screw up pressing a button to go to another floor. After the fire department rescued Trump, the Republican cry baby blasted the fire marshal for trying to enforce crowd capacity limits at his rally. Because nothing could possibly go wrong at a Trump event, right?

And some people think Trump can be trusted with the codes to America's nuclear arsenal?

Examine the Parallels

The Hilz Brings It Home

The speech that Hillary Clinton gave on Thursday night was the finest one of her career. Let's remember that she's not a natural orator like Barack Obama or her husband. This is tough for her and the television audience sure noticed it in the first few minutes of the speech. She was a little overly cautious.

But then she got into the groove and never looked back. She outlined her plan and vision for our country in the next four years and it was magnificent...that is, of course, if you are someone who lives in the real world, not the made up one. Offering a stark contrast to the darkness dispatched a week ago at the GOP convention, the Hilz reminded us all that there isn't one person that can solve all of our nation's problems. This is especially true if that one person is a mentally deranged psychopath suffering from narcissistic personality disorder.

The systematic take down of Donald Trump was truly a beautiful thing to behold all week and Hillary put an exclamation point on all of it. Her best line was this...

A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man you can trust with nuclear weapons.

No shit. We're not electing a right wing blogger to run our country. We're electing a president.

Here is her full speech.

Do You Understand The Constitution?

Before I get to Hillary, I want to turn the spotlight on this guy. Mr. Khan represents what our country is all about. This was the ultimate mic drop moment to the people who are now running the GOP. Their hatred looks more ugly now than it ever has...

 

DNC Stars Shine Brightly

The first two days of the Democratic National Convention were pretty darn good. Michelle Obama was extraordinary. Bill Clinton was uncharacteristically humble. There also wasn't much mentioned about Donald Trump and his various problems. Clearly, they were saving that for last night.

Beginning with Joe Biden, then Michael Bloomberg, then Tim Kaine, and finally the president, the Democratic stars shined brilliantly last night. Joe Biden's speech spoke directly to white working class, non college educated voter and, man oh man, was he brilliant.


This was the beginning of the evisceration of Donald Trump. "He doesn't have a clue about anything." was most certainly the best line of Biden's speech. He went on detailing just how poorly qualified Donald Trump is to be president.

Michael Bloomberg spoke to the independent voter and described how Donald Trump was a fraud.


Unlike Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg is an actual billionaire.

Next up was Tim Kaine, who was more or less ripped on Twitter for being that awkward dad that no one wants around. Being an awkward dad, I thought Kaine was fantastic and you can bet Hillary and her people did as well. They can use that boring and awkward whiteness to resonate with a voting demographic they need. And, yeah, his Trump impression was kinda bad but he completed the trifecta on the Trump take down. Trump is a liar.



The president the arrived for his prime time spot and reminded everyone just how fucking awesome he is and what a great job he has done as president.


I am really going to miss this guy.

Tonight, the attention turns to Hillary. It seems damn near impossible to top all of the speakers before her. This is especially true considering that she isn't as talented of an orator as all that have gone before her, self admittedly. But does it really matter? I think the USA needs to finally see President Grandma come out and talk about her life that has been dedicated to helping people. We've had far too much of the "made up" Hillary in the news these last few weeks. It's time to see the real one.

Russia's Hacking Department

Trump Wants Russia's Help

Donald Trump just called on Russia to help out with Hillary's missing emails.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Mr. Trump said, staring directly into the cameras. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Wow...

Big Dog Nails It

Bill Clinton could have talked a lot about himself last night but he didn't. Pundits complained that he didn't mention any of the various #Clintonscandals in a sort of mea culpa. But that would have been the same thing as making the speech about himself.

Instead, he spent 42 minutes talking about why the Hilz is the right person for the job. He focused quite a bit on her early career which not many people know about. And he had the line of the convention in which he stated that there are two Hillary Clintons. "One is real, the other is made up."

Brilliant. Here is the full speech.

My United States of America

Compare this speech and its theme and content with what conservatives have said over the last couple of decades. What country do you want to live in?

Good Words

From Frank Foer at Slate....

The DNC dump may not have revealed a conspiracy that could end a candidacy, but it succeeded in casting a pall of anxiety over this election. We know that the Russians have a further stash of documents from the DNC and another set of document purloined from the Clinton Foundation. 

In other words, Vladimir Putin is now treating American democracy with the same respect he accords his own. The best retaliation isn’t a military one, or to respond in kind. It’s to defeat his pet candidate and to force him to watch the inauguration of the woman he so abhors.

Conservatives Heart Russia

Conservatives like to foam at the mouth when it comes to big government and how we are becoming like Russia. Right wing bloggers, especially the gun bloggers, are constantly referring to the liberals leading us into a Soviet style autocracy, still seeing that commie boogieman just around the corner. Remember this?

Given all this, their rush to support Trump, even as a hold your nose candidate, deeply perplexes me. Because it's becoming quite clear that Vladimir Putin wants Donald Trump to be president.

Franklin Foer has been writing about their relationship for several months now. Trump's continued call to not necessarily back NATO allies  seems very suspicious indeed given this information. More interesting is the recent evidence that the release of DNC emails was perpetrated by Russian intelligence.

Given all of this, we can now develop a working theory and must proceed in gathering more evidence. Donald Trump is basically in league with Vladimir Putin, likely through various business dealings (hence the reason why he won't release his tax returns), and would like to model his presidency on the Russian leader's reign. He has continually praised Putin in various interviews, calling him "very bright" and a "strong leader."

In short, he wants to be the US Putin and conservatives are helping him achieve this goal. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that we see how incredibly hypocritical these dickehads are but this seems far more d baggy. They continually caterwaul and fear monger about our country becoming Russia and they are mindlessly flocking to the guy who is going to do just that.

Wow...

The Most Powerful VP in History

Over the course of the last week or so there have been some seriously disturbing reports that Trump's vetting process for VP essentially boiled down to one question.

How would you like to be the most powerful VP in history?

Essentially, Mike Pence took the job knowing that he would run all foreign and domestic affairs while Trump's job would be to make America great again (see below for the meaning of this). This gibes with the larger story that has been gaining a great deal of traction in which Trump doesn't really want to be president. He just wants to win and then let someone else do all the work. He gets to be the authoritarian figure and spew edicts but not actually do any work.

Of course this raises another issue that has been bothering me for the last few weeks. Donald Trump has managed to become the candidate that has captured the dark heart of American nationalism. The people that support him want an authoritarian leader who is going to bring us back to the time when the blacks knew their place, the gays were in jail, and women had dinner ready on time. That's what "Make America Great Again" really means and it's surprising to me that the same people who fret over Nazi like takeovers of the government are cheering for this one to happen.

That's what I saw on display all last week at the GOP convention and this latest story about who will actually run the country pretty much nails what Trump is all about.

The National Enquirer?

Less than one day after delivering a fairly normal for Donald Trump speech accepting the GOP nomination, Trump reverted to his old ways with renewed comments about how Ted Cruz's dad was involved in the JFK assassination.

“I don't know his father. I met him once. I think he's a lovely guy,” Trump said at a morning-after rally in Cleveland. “All I did is point out the fact that on the cover of the National Enquirer there was a picture of him and crazy Lee Harvey Oswald having breakfast.”

But here's the kicker...

“This was a magazine that, in many respects, should be well respected,” Trump said. “I mean if that was The New York Times, they would have gotten Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting.” 

This explains so much, doesn't it? Think about the demographic that reads the National Enquirer and fucking believes it. That's the Trump voter to a tee! Zero facts, anger-hate-fear, innuendo, gossip, childish tittering, and bizarre conspiracies heard from "somebody."

In fact, now that I think about it, isn't that the right wing blogger to a tee as well? :)

The Safe Bet

As many political pundits predicted, Hillary Clinton chose Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. A collective yawn went up around the country but the pick is a lot more exciting than people think. It tells me that she thinks she has the election in the bag.

If the Hilz were worried at all, she would have picked Sherrod Brown or Tom Vilsack to shore up support in two states that I currently rank as dead nut even. The choice of Kaine shows me that she thinks she has those states more or less locked up and wants to take Virginia off the board for Trump. It more or less already is but with Kaine now in the VP slot, Trump won't win there now given demographic reality. She has basically forced him into a path where he has to run the table in the Rust Belt. Kaine also helps her in Florida where their first event will be held today. Kaine is fluent in Spanish and that will go over very, very well in this Sunshine State.

The Times has a predictor model that shows that if Virginia is taken off the board for Trump, along with the likely Dem win of Nevada, he only has 5 ways to win and Hillary has 251 ways to win the presidency. If Hillary wins Florida, it's over and that's even if Trump wins Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, and New Hampshire (along with the likely Trump wins now in Arizona and Georgia which were in play briefly).

The other big thing about the Kaine pick is that it shows how conscientious Hillary Clinton is. Tim Kaine is the best choice of all of them if she is incapacitated to be president. He has the most experience and the right temperament to serve as commander in chief.

So, I think Kaine is a great choice and will help her out tremendously going forward in this election.

Just Fun

It's Boring (And Dark) In America

Donald Trump's acceptance speech at the 2016 GOP convention somehow managed to be both boring and dark at the same time. It also completed the picture of a man who views himself as the one man solution to all the "problems" we face as a nation.

I put those quotation marks around the word problems because most of what he said last night in terms of the state of our country was just flat out lies. Of course, that doesn't really matter to the folks in the GOP. It's all about feelings right now and it's the same three we've seen for the last two decades: anger, hate, and fear. These feelings, combined with Trump's narcissism, make the perfect mix for fascism.

As Trump went on and on (and on and on) last night, his dark vision of our country. All the fear that was ginned about over the last four days struck me as terribly frightening. People out in our country actually think this stuff? Why? What kind of a place do US citizens have to be in to think any of this stuff is true? If the world is such a scary place for them, that would at least explain the need for guns, I guess.

Even with all of this, I found his speech to be way too long and quite dull. 70 minutes? I truly hope that Hillary Clinton doesn't go that long. 30-40 minutes is just fine. More importantly, the Hilz needs to take the lessons from this week and focus on getting the vote out in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and possibly Wisconsin. Florida is also of paramount importance. The white vote in the rust belt is going to decide this election. She is not going to change the feelings of these folks who are firmly buying into Trump's vision of a white and authoritarian America. She needs all the Obama voters to turn out as massively as they did in 2012.

Here's my map as of today given both Nate Silver's data and the Times' model.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

Note how her lead has softened or moved to pure tossup. She has to have a good convention and do more than present herself as a clear alternative to Trump. The key is the Rust Belt because that's the focal point of Trump's fear peddling.

Can she do it?

A Firing Squad

Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire representative who serves on Trump's veterans' coalition and as a Trump delegate at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, said in an interview with a Boston talk radio host that Clinton should pay for the 2012 Benghazi attack.

"She is a disgrace for any, the lies she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi," he said on the Jeff Kuhner Show Tuesday. "She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting back up security. Something's wrong there."

"Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason," he continued.

As I have been saying all along, these people are an acute threat to our national security. They need to be put in jail now.

Profile in Courage: Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz stands for everything that I am against. He's truly a frightening man whose religious like devotion to conservative ideology borders on pure evil. He's such an asshole that most Republicans don't like him. In fact, they fucking hate him. But what he did last night at the GOP convention was a profile in courage and I have to admit it. He refused to endorse Donald Trump and rolled the dice for 2020.

Cruz is betting that Trump is going to lose and lose big. If this indeed comes to pass, Cruz will look like a conservative hero, a genius even, who stayed pure to conservative values (because Trump surely hasn't) and will have laid the groundwork perfectly for his next presidential bid. If not, however, his career may be over.

Suppose Trump loses but by a small margin. It's still Trump's party and his supporters will be running the party for years. Indeed, that may well be the case anyway because the people that support Donald Trump, like many conservatives, have no regard for reality.

Regardless, Cruz did something that the people want politicians to do all the time and often fail to do. Take a risk and stand your ground.

Arms up, laying down, no gun...still shot by police.

Oh, yeah...and he was trying to help an autistic patient from the home where HE WORKED HELPING PEOPLE.

Paul Ryan Only Hires White Interns?

Why does House Speaker Paul Ryan only hire white interns? The above photo was taken by the Speaker of the House himself recently and left me wondering...where is America? Cuz this ain't it!

I'm sure it has nothing to do with racism and the anger over this is reverse racism and race baiting being perpetrated by the gun grabbers.

Two Days of Insanity

The first two days of the GOP convention in Cleveland have been completely insane. Monday we had a plagiarized speech.

 

Then we had chants of "Lock her up" regarding Hillary Clinton.





The plagiarism is illustrative of the massive incompetence in the Trump campaign. They don't really know what they are doing and have no real GOP operatives supporting their candidate. It's completely obvious now that the Trump family is running the campaign which speaks volumes on how they would run the country.

The "lock her up" chants initially reminded me of this...


As I watched these hypocritical assholes mouth foam about Hillary Clinton, I wondered where their due process beliefs went. I believe it was out the fucking window. These people claim to be Constitution supporters and want rule of law but their emotions betray them. They are little different than the totalitarians they claim to hate.

By nominating Donald Trump has their standard bearer, they show the whole country that they want an authoritarian leader not unlike those of the early 20th century...with all the xenophobia and racism that the world saw back then...

Chaos!

Chaos erupts on GOP convention floor after voice vote shuts down Never Trump forces 

AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!!!!!!

Anger, Hate, Fear

OMG...the Polls!!!!!!

The massive freak out about the recent presidential polls has amused me immensely. Trump is even with Hillary! AAAAAAAHHHHHH!!! Look out!!! The reality is much more complex.

For those of you who are still pooping themselves, please make Nate Silver's 538 site a regular stop every day and take some time to examine the variety of polls as well as the "polls plus" predictors. Hillary is still the favorite to win despite having a terrible couple of weeks. Make it a point to focus on the state polls, in particular, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. These are the most important states in this year's election. This is true for both candidates and each represents a microcasm of the 2016 presidential election overall.

Recent polling suggests that the electorate has shifted slightly since the 2012 presidential election. States like Nevada, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina are skewing bluer this election cycle than previous ones. This is largely due to shifting demographics in the state to a less white populace. Given Donald Trump’s comments about Mexicans and Muslims, its no wonder that he is polling so badly in these states. If Hillary Clinton wins 3 of these 4 states, and it looks like she will, Trump has to win Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Trump has appeal to many voters in the whiter states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Some traditional Democratic voters who feel like they are being left behind by the progression of our country are voting for Trump. This is making him competitive in these states. Florida has many voters like this as well but it also has many non white voters so what’s happening on a national level in terms of a battle between two demographic groups (older, white voters and non white voters).

So, it really comes down to these three states and the pressure is more on Trump, electorally, than Hillary. If she wins just one of the three, it’s over. In fact, if she wins Nevada, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina, along with Wisconsin and all the other states she is slated to win, she wins the election without Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. And, while Ohio and Florida have flip flopped back and forth over the last few election cycles, Pennsylvania has not gone red since 1988. Even with the shifting electoral demographic, it’s going to be tough for Trump to win the state as the Democratic voter machine is very well organized and funded there.

This is the time when it's going to be toughest for Hillary. The FBI report on her email mistake has taken its toll. The GOP convention is next week and Trump will likely get a bump, although that may end up not being true since so many high profile and well known GOPers are skipping the convention. Add in the not ready for prime time kids of Donald Trump and it could very well be a disaster. The contrast of the Democratic convention with all of its star power (President Obama, President Clinton, Vice President Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren etc) will be stunning. Look for the Hilz numbers to go up after the Democratic convention and likely return to her greater lead.

Personally, I'm glad the polls are more even. People need to get out there and be more motivated. I don't want a mere victory in November. I want an ass kicking. And that happens if people think that Trump could win.

Not Just The Same (Part One)

In this year's presidential election, a theme is emerging which is an out and out lie. The media is playing it up but its origins are sadly with American citizens. One need only look at social media for it and it won't take very long to find it. Somehow, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are being lumped together as being equally disliked and deeply flawed. I find this to be completely erroneous on a number of levels. Starting today, I'm going to be highlighting the stark differences between the two candidates and with each segment, I'll focus on a particular theme.

Let's begin with the issue of race. How does a guy who has the total support of white supremacists even get put in the same ballpark as Hillary Clinton?

“The discussion that white Americans never want to have is this question of identity — who are we?” said Richard Spencer, 38, a writer and activist whose Montana-based nonprofit is dedicated to “the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent” in the United States. “He is bringing identity politics for white people into the public sphere in a way no one has.” 

Mr. Spencer, a popular figure in the white nationalist world, said he did not believe that Mr. Trump subscribed to his entire worldview. But he was struck that Mr. Trump seemed to understand and echo many of his group’s ideas intuitively, and take them to a broader audience. “I don’t think he has thought through this issue in a way that I and a number of people have,” Mr. Spencer said. “I think he is reacting to the feeling that he has lost his country.”

And...

In June 2015, two weeks after Mr. Trump entered the presidential race, he received an endorsement that would end most campaigns: The Daily Stormer embraced his candidacy. Founded in 2013 by a 32-year-old neo-Nazi named Andrew Anglin, The Daily Stormer is among the most prominent online gathering places for white nationalists and anti-Semites, with sections devoted to “The Jewish Problem” and “Race War.” Mr. Anglin explained that although he had some disagreements with him, Mr. Trump was the only candidate willing to speak the truth about Mexicans. “Trump is willing to say what most Americans think: It’s time to deport these people,” Mr. Anglin wrote. “He is also willing to call them out as criminal rapists, murderers and drug dealers.”

And...

This year, for the first time in decades, overt white nationalism re-entered national politics. In Iowa, a new “super PAC” paid for pro-Trump robocalls featuring Jared Taylor, a self-described race realist, and William Johnson, a white nationalist and the chairman of the American Freedom Party. (“We don’t need Muslims,” Mr. Taylor urged recipients of the calls. “We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”) David Duke, the Louisiana lawmaker turned anti-Semitic radio host, encouraged listeners to vote for Mr. Trump.

And...

Mr. Taylor, who has written that blacks “left entirely to their own devices” are incapable of civilization, and whose magazine, American Renaissance, once published an essay arguing that blacks were genetically more prone to crime, wrote on his blog that Mr. Trump had handled the attacks on him “in the nicest way.” Like others in his world, Mr. Taylor does not know if Mr. Trump agrees with him on everything. In an interview, he suggested that it did not really matter, and that Mr. Trump was expressing the discomfort many white people felt about other races. 

“Ordinary white people don’t want the neighborhood to turn Mexican,” Mr. Taylor said, adding, “They just realize that large numbers of Mexicans will change the neighborhood in ways they don’t like.”

Trump gets this sort of support because he calls Mexicans rapists, wants to ban Muslims from entering the US and likes to say things like this...



Contrast this with Hillary Clinton..



Given this clear distinction on race, Hillary Clinton is not "just the same" as Trump.

Another Dire Prediction That Did Not Come To Pass

Remember all that mouth foaming a year ago about how the Iran nuclear deal was a bad idea and that Iran wouldn't stick to the terms of the accord? Yeah, that never happened. They've given up 98 percent of their nuclear material, thousands of centrifuges and filled the core of a major plutonium reactor with cement. Inspectors roam freely around the country's various facilities. Even Israel's top military adviser is impressed.

“The deal has actually removed the most serious danger to Israel’s existence for the foreseeable future,” Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, told a conference in Tel Aviv, “and greatly reduced the threat over the longer term.”

The article goes on to discuss how Iran is still a pain the ass in other ways but we always knew this would be the case. For this particular deal and threat, the Obama administration, specifically Secretary Kerry, did a superb job. Thus, the sound of crickets we hear coming from conservatives:)

No, I Won't Carry A Gun

Good Words (2016 Election Edition)

"Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs."

---Thomas Friedman, in his recent Op-Ed, "The (G.O.P) Party's Over."

I am completely with him in terms of the sentiment of the whole column. Hillary Clinton can't merely win. She has to crush him with the Democrats taking back both the Senate and the House. The latter will likely not happen given the reality of congressional districts but even a shift to put the Dems over 200 in the House would be symbolically significant.

The anger, hate filled mouth foamers that are afraid of their own shadow (aka the Trump voter) need to be sent a message. Fuck your guns, bigotry, racism, ignorance of science and economics, and desire to return to the Antebellum South.

We are moving on without you.

Difficult At Best

The advent of open carrying a gun (see also: anger, hate, fear, paranoia, insecurity, inferiority, adolescent power fantasies) has caused a great number of problems for law enforcement. Two recent stories, one from the Times and one from AP, illustrate just how awful it is for them.

...city and county leaders said the presence of armed protesters openly carrying rifles on Thursday through downtown Dallas had created confusion for the police as the attack unfolded, and in its immediate aftermath made it more difficult for officers to distinguish between suspects and marchers. Two men who were armed and a woman who was with them were detained, fueling an early, errant theory by the police that there was more than one gunman.

Yep. Pretty much what I have been saying all along. It's very difficult to tell who is who when the bullets start flying. The idea that you can tell who the bad guys are because they are the ones shooting at everyone is complete nonsense. Even trained professionals couldn't tell and wouldn't have been very thorough as police officers if they didn't question anyone with a gun.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown estimated that 20 to 30 open-carry activists attended the rally. He said some wore gas masks, bulletproof vests and fatigues. They ran when the shots rang out, but the presence of so many armed individuals at the scene of a sniper attack caused instant confusion.

Gas masks and bulletproof vests? Really? Wonderful. These assholes want to play make believe like it's The Walking Dead while the adults are trying to figure out who is shooting people.

I've said this many times and will repeat it constantly until the problem is solved. These people are an absolute menace to society and need to be treated as a threat to national security.

"Guns Are This Era's Slavery"

I was recently asked to answer a question with prize money on Quora. There have been many interesting answers but the best one so far is from famed programmer, Ernest W. Adams. I am reprinting it here in its entirety.

The root cause (as opposed to the proximate cause) of the large quantity of gun violence¹ in the United States can be traced precisely to April 19, 1775.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

At the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the rebellious Massachusetts militia, composed of farmers and other local people, fired on British regulars who had come from Boston to search for weapons. The detachment was forced to retreat.

The opening battle of the American Revolution has been romanticized in story and song for nearly two and a half centuries. The story contains two elements that have directly influenced the culture of the United States from that day to this: first, the authority of the state (the British troops) being used to search for and confiscate guns; second, citizen ownership of firearms being used to oppose this action. Thus began the Great American Gun Myth—using myth in the sense of a body of cultural belief.

As the new nation spread westward, firearms were needed on the frontier to hunt, to protect people from wild animals, and to fight native Americans. They were also used in lawless regions by lawless people, which meant that peaceful people were obliged to keep them too. The idea began to grow up that the guns created the nation itself.

It did not take long for the Gun Myth to find expression in stories of adventure and daring. The Indian Wars were a particularly fertile source of excitement, and Buffalo Bill was adding to the legends in his Wild West show before the Indian Wars completely over, rather as we now make war movies before the war is even over. The mythologizing begins early. His shows often of featured sharpshooting skills of Annie Oakley and others.

The first Western novel, The Virginian, was written in 1901, and the first Western movie was made in 1903. There followed a flood of others. Gunsmoke began as a radio series in 1952 and ran continuously until 1975. Movies like Falling Down and God Bless Americapresent us with heroes who took up arms when “pushed too far.” Even if the film’s intention is satirical or fantasy-fulfillment, it nevertheless presents shooting people as appropriate, fun, and consequence-free. It’s impossible not to internalize some of this. People with poor judgment or intelligence want to actually make those fantasies come true.

We have now arrived at a point at which it is part of our national ethos that guns are a legitimate resort with which to solve a problem. They’re not even a last resort. Armed people don’t seek alternative resolutions to conflict; they just pull out their guns. The United States is no longer oppressed by Britain, nor is it the Wild West, but we continue to act as if it were.

The short answer to the question is this: Americans shoot people in disproportionate numbers compared to other populations because they have been taught ever since April 19, 1775 that it is an acceptable thing to do.

Many other nations—Canada, Finland—have a fairly high number of firearms in the population, but they aren’t used for homicide. Other former British colonies—Australia, India—achieved independence without warfare. They don’t have the Great American Gun Myth.

Nations that do treat gun ownership as an aspect of manhood and personal identity and a legitimate solution to problems (Pakistan, Afghanistan) have even greater rates of firearms abuse than the USA does.

The Myth has made it impossible to create a sensible firearms policy that restricts guns to the hands of those who are responsible users. The nation is awash in weapons and too many of those weapons are owned by people who should under no circumstances own them. But make the slightest effort to restrict them and the Gun Myth gets invoked: we need guns to make us free; we need them to fight tyranny; they are part of who we are as Americans and it is unpatriotic even to question this.

So many people now have a vested interest in guns that even without the cultural argument it is very difficult to reduce their numbers. The firearms manufacturing industry is worth $13.5 billion annually, and retail gun stores another $3.1 billion. There are four times as many federally licensed gun dealers as there are grocery stores in the United States, which gives you an idea of the absurdity of the situation.

Guns are this era’s slavery. They are America’s “peculiar institution.” The justifications for them are poor, yet a vociferous minority continues to announce that firearms are an inseparable part of their “way of life,” and threaten violence to anyone who would take them away.

I hope that it will not be necessary to fight a civil war over them, but ultimately I think the growing damage that firearms do in the wrong hands will lead to enough political support for controlling them properly that the gun control voters will outnumber the gun enthusiast voters. It will be solved, in answer to your final question, by political action.

Until that day, expect the deaths to continue.

What Bias Looks Like

Sunday Reflections

The racially charged violence that has taken place over the last week has me wondering about a few things. First, why hasn't the NRA and other gun rights leaders blown a bowel about the shooting of concealed carry permit holder, Philando Castile? Here was a guy who was merely exercising his 2nd amendment rights, even warning the police officer that he had a gun, and yet he still got shot. Where is all the mouth foaming about the state abusing the rights of freedom lovers everywhere?

I'll tell you exactly where it is. Castile was black and the NRA knows who butters their bread...angry old white men who love it when the police gun down niggers. Conservatives may be "rugged individuals" (I can barely type that without laughing) but they love themselfs white authority over the coloreds who are running all over the place asking for their damn rights. After all, recall how these folks profile from a psychological standpoint. They are hierarchical-individualists which more or less puts them at loggerheads with themselves.

So I call bullshit. The Gun Cult doesn't give two shits about the 2nd amendment. Once again we see how they really only want to make sure certain people are still able to cock ride their guns. That's why they are also silent on this steaming pile of bullshit.

Dallas Gunman Learned Tactics at Texas Self-Defense School

The gunman who killed five police officers at a protest march had practiced military-style drills in his yard and trained at a private self-defense school that teaches special tactics, including "shooting on the move," a maneuver in which an attacker fires and changes position before firing again.

Great...it's nice to know that gun cult hang outs are now officially training spree shooters to be able to kill people more effectively. These people are an absolute menace to civilized society. How many more people have to die before we act to stop them?

Peace

Star Trek's Sulu: Straight Arrow or Gay Blade?

Star Trek was a show ahead of its time. It portrayed a world in which human racism and sexism were long dead: the crew was made up of men, women, Americans, Russians, Britons, Africans, Japanese, who all got along without any racial friction. It featured the first interracial kiss on television (though it was coerced by a third party).

People were still people, however: racism persists in Star Trek. For example, in the episode "The Balance of Terror," a crewman suggests that Spock is not loyal to Star Fleet because his physical appearance is similar to the Romulans.

One thing that was never mentioned in the original series was homosexuality. Director Justin Lin and writer Simon Pegg have addressed this in Star Trek Beyond, the third installment of "new Trek," the alternate future version of the original series.

In the upcoming film, Hikaru Sulu is depicted raising a child with another man. Pegg and Lin made Sulu gay in part to honor George Takei, the actor who originally played Sulu.

But Takei is not pleased. He came out as gay more than a decade ago, but he thinks this artistic choice is unfortunate. He feels that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, wrote Sulu as a straight man and that this choice should be honored. I can buy that.

Simon Pegg respectfully disagrees. Homosexuality was never addressed on television in the Sixties. Even if Roddenberry had wanted a gay character, it would never have happened -- the network censors would have crushed it. But Pegg's Sulu is not Roddenberry's:

Our Trek is an alternate timeline with alternate details. Whatever magic ingredient determines our sexuality was different for Sulu in our timeline. I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere.

I can also buy that.

But I don't think you need to go there: the Sulu who appeared on the screen in the original series could easily have been gay, from a continuity point of view. I've seen all the episodes, and they're sufficiently ambiguous to argue that the original Sulu could be gay.

Sexuality was addressed for most of the main characters: Kirk and Spock had several entanglements with women. McCoy and Scotty had similar dalliances. Nurse Chapel was hung up on Spock and had an old boyfriend in "What Are Little Girls Made of?". Chekov fell for a girl in "Spectre of the Gun." In the new continuity, Uhura is Spock's lover.

Sulu never really had his own episode, so we never knew his orientation; he mostly set courses, fired weapons, did countdowns, shot revolvers or froze off his ass. However, with 2016 hindsight looking back at the aired episodes, you can make a reasonable argument that Sulu was intentionally written as gay.

There are no episodes where the real Sulu is romantically involved with a woman. In "Man Trap" Sulu and Yeoman Janice Rand are shown as friends. Sulu is in the arboretum and she brings him some food. The interaction is not romantic in any way. This could easily be interpreted as Rand doing a favor for her gay botanist friend.

In "The Naked Time," the crew's inhibitions are stripped when they are infected by some weird pathogen. Spock gets all teary, Kirk loses his cool, O'Riley shuts down the engines and starts singing. But Sulu takes off his shirt, picks up a rapier and runs flamboyantly around the ship like a French swashbuckler, a gay blade.

In "Mirror, Mirror," a transporter accident sends Kirk and Uhura to a universe where the crew are Bizarro opposite versions of their normal Enterprise selves. There, the Mirror Sulu does show some interest in Uhura.

However, since it's the Mirror universe, Mirror Sulu's attraction to Uhura could be viewed as diametrically opposed to the real Sulu's true feelings about women. Alternately, even if Mirror Sulu is gay, given the Mirror Universe's misogynistic treatment of women (they are underlings and mistresses), Mirror Sulu is merely following societal norms of the male-female power dynamic. He had to go after Uhura on the bridge to "prove" he was regular tough guy to the other misogynistic tough guys the inhabited the Mirror Enterprise. Just like all the gay football and basketball players who have to prove to team mates they're not gay...

Roddenberry's dead, so we can't ask him. But if you were to pick a character from the original series who could be gay, it would have to be Sulu. And is it just a coincidence that Roddenberry cast a gay man in that role? And you can see why Takei wouldn't want to think that Roddenberry picked him because he was gay: actors hate being pigeonholed -- they want to believe they can play anyone.

And even if Roddenberry did originally conceive of Sulu as straight, it's very common for writers to reconsider and change the direction of characters and plots years later when they think of something better: their fervent fans are frequently more enamored of the status quo than they are!

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3 Dallas Officers Killed at Protest Over Police Shootings

Three Dallas police officers were killed and seven others were wounded Thursday night during a demonstration protesting the police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana this week, according to Chief David O. Brown of the Dallas police.

Aren't guns wonderful? Isn't it great how cops use them to shoot dozens of unarmed civilians a year and terrorists and assassins can buy them anywhere without background checks and then use them to murder cops and innocent people at protests and in nightclubs, schools, churches, movie theaters and malls?

I feel so much safer knowing that any moron can go to a gun show or the Internet and load up on tons of weapons and ammo.