Another barrister trying to steal other people's sh*t.
Second Amendment absolutists complain that gun control advocates are an out-of-touch elite seeking to destroy the way of life of real men
And women, and children. Check your privilege, O Editorial Writer -- we'll have no sexism or ageism here. This is a family website!
who pack heat. At the National Rifle Association's convention in Indianapolis last weekend, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre warned his members that their lifestyle was under assault. I didn't know keeping and bearing arms was a lifestyle. I thought it was a right.
"I have never seen it on edge the way it is now," he said. "If it's going to be saved, it's in our hands. It's in your hands."
There's no better venue than this gathering to experience the pain and joy of gun owners. To those not steeped in guns, the exhibition hall with weapons arrayed as far as the eye can see is a frightening display. It is also a place where the young and female are pursued. Kids are encouraged to fondle semi-automatics and take virtual target practice. Women have their own events, including one that features the latest fashions for heat-packing ladies.
Where do you conceal your carry if you're wearing a fashionable miniskirt and brief summer top? It turns out someone has given this considerable thought.
As you watch the lobbying group at play, you swing between thinking its members own the world because the $250 million budget allows the NRA to put on a Las Vegas-worthy show, and the feeling that Big Government is about to burst in and confiscate their guns. Triumphalism punctuated by doomsday scenarios keeps the membership on its toes. Government is confiscating guns. In New York and California. It is easy to dismiss the intent of laws when your stuff isn't being taken from you. I can well imagine your reaction if you lost access to your bank accounts because of "currency controls". You'd be screaming too, and demanding to be armed.
The NRA's 4 million members don't seem to feel a corresponding obligation to understand the 90 percent of Americans who say in polls they would like to see universal background checks for gun buyers. If 99 percent demanded universal background checks, I would still oppose them, Marge. Whatever "obligation" gun owners are s'posed to "feel" is countered by the fact that the right to bear arms is a protected right. That means if you choose to send government goons to confiscate arms, you become a target yourself. In such as case, I'd advise you to buy a gun.
"It's a cultural thing," Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., told me. He said his A rating from the NRA helped the background check legislation he introduced last year with Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., get as far as it did.
One wonders if he still has that A rating...
Manchin is still using that crossover cred to try to find the five Senate allies he needs to get the bill up for a vote again. He can't explain to me those gun owners who will listen only to Ted Nugent (who gave a speech), or those who cheer stand-your-ground laws (there was a session on how not to have any post-traumatic stress should you shoot someone).
Politicians were well represented at the convention. Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Gov. Sarah Palin, among others, came to pay homage. They can't envision the day when the 90 percent might defeat them, only of past elections when single-issue voters stirred up by the NRA could defeat them. In the last three elections presidencies and congressional seats were won by coalitions, not by single issue voters. The left and right split the voter base into male and female and both poach voters from the other. Guns may be an issue in some settings and the republican war on women (most vigorously pressed and won against women by the left) may be an issue in another. That you suggest that one day the 90 percent will rise up to vote for tyranny and disarmament as a monolithic block does not change the fact that the other ten percent still get another vote, with their guns. Keep that in mind as you continue to push for more fascism. And Marge, being a socialist you should know that the only way voters vote in such a block is if they have no other choices, like in a fascist state. You know, the kind you are happily pushing us towards.
Since Manchin's background checks went down in Congress last year, about 1,500 state gun bills have been introduced, 178 passed at least one chamber and 109 have become law, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Almost two-thirds of those that passed expand the rights of gun owners; only 39, largely in Democratic-controlled states, tighten controls.
This suggests that 90% statistic tossed out at the top of the editorial is, well, what statistics so often are. Politicians do not vote against the will of their voters for long.
Last week in Georgia, Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law a bill that would allow concealed weapons in airports -- this after we've spent billions trying to keep even nail clippers out. Funny how that works. You try to bone a constituency, they bone back!
For the NRA, part of the cultural divide is between real Americans (its members) and those other Americans who would leave you and your family defenseless.
This is the mentality that briefly made Cliven Bundy a hero, as an armed mob trained their guns on federal agents who were trying to enforce a court order to collect 20 years of unpaid grazing fees. One of the militia leaders was Richard Mack, the NRA's 1994 Enforcement Officer of the Year and head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, who was "strategizing to put all the women up at the front." Had Bundy not imploded in a fit of racism, there may well have been a shrine to him in Indianapolis. Kewt. Marge, the militias are still there. Bundy isn't a hero.
It would be a valuable cross-cultural field trip for LaPierre to take a look outside the hall, where representatives of the 90 percent were gathered. The moms at the gates gladly would have pointed out to him that 82 people die every day because guns fall into the hands of non-law-abiding citizens, curious children, the mentally ill and the suicidal. (Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Everytown for Gun Safety and Mayors Against Illegal Guns are backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.) The purpose of the law isn't prevention but custodial. When it is used to prevent ills such as violence, we have a mass of unenforceable laws that no one obeys, but only society's fascists will lament aren't being enforced. And you should drop the term "law abiding". It's just a term for the word serf, and anytime anyone uses it, it just means the user is another fascist, and a "law abiding" citizen who wants to set the country's security apparatus against its own people. You have a duty to break unjust laws, and resist the notion of being a law abiding citizen serf. Free people break unjust laws and misbehave. Serfs are law abiding.
These groups just put up a series of gripping ads showing the murderous downside of readily available firearms and have issued a report titled "Not Your Grandparents' NRA." It traces the gun rights lobby's move away from hunting and marksmanship to defending the rights of felons and terrorism suspects to buy firearms and take them everywhere. They moved where Threepers and Patriots have gone. If the NRA loses them, well, they may as well join you, Marge.
The NRA spends $20 million a year to scare lawmakers into doing their bidding. For the first time, the other side will be spending more. What a great day it will be when LaPierre has to understand that.
It isn't really about spending, Marge dear. But y'all go ahead -- the more you spend bootlessly on this cause, the less you'll have to spend on other things.
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/05/2014 11:50 Comments ||
Top||
#2
I can well imagine your reaction if you lost access to your bank accounts because of "currency controls". You'd be screaming too, and demanding to be armed.
That is already happening if you are in a profession the IRS deems objectionable.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
05/05/2014 12:20 Comments ||
Top||
#3
First Amendment absolutists complain that speech control advocates are an out-of-touch elite seeking to control the thought of ordinary men
[Dhaka Tribune] The overnight rise of the fundamentalist Islamist organization Hefajat-e-Islam ...a madrassa-based false nose and mustache of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, formed in 2010 to protest against secular education. In 2011 demonstrated violentyly against women's rights and in 2013 held large rallies demanding capital punishment of Shahbag Square protesters and banning women working outside the home... is a frightening tale.
The outfit's fanatic face became clear after it staged atrocities in the capital on May 5 last year during a rally that was organised to press home its 13-point demands.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
05/05/2014 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[2 views]
Top|| File under: Jamaat-e-Islami
#1
Theres no way in hell India is going to tolerate a full-blown Islamist-Jihadis insurgency in Bangladesh.
h/t Gates of Vienna
...There is one scenario, however, that could prompt Russian military intervention in Eastern Ukraine. This might happen if NATO forces move toward Western Ukraine, or even to Ukraine's border with Poland, as the usual suspects in Washington have demanded. The consensus among my interlocutors in Moscow was that this is not what Putin wants, and that the West will refrain from that kind of escalation because the prudence of "Old Europe" will prevail over the adventurism of former Soviet satellites.
...None of that will change the status of the Crimea as a republic in the Russian federation. Even among Moscow's Western-leaning liberals there is a grudging acceptance that a forceful response should have been anticipated. It is noteworthy that Mikhail Gorbachev expressed his support for Putin in this crisis, no doubt remembering his own credulity when James Baker assured him that "there would be no extension of NATO's jurisdiction one inch to the east."
As Stephen F. Cohen noted in an excellent essay in The Nation on April 1, beginning with the Clinton administration, and supported by every subsequent Republican and Democratic president and Congress, the U.S.-led West has unrelentingly moved its military, political, and economic power ever closer to post-Soviet Russia:
...As was obvious from Putin's speech in the Kremlin on March 18, the contours of a new Russian security doctrine are in place. Its pillars are "Russia's historical heritage"--i.e., an active interest in the affairs of former Soviet republics--and an explicit rejection of the Western demand for the selective application of international legal norms. Since you have set your own double standards in Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, he was effectively saying, I'll set mine. Putin's red line is NATO. My friend Oleg Bondarenko is certain that he will risk a major crisis rather than accept any further NATO expansion (or Western military bases) in the former Soviet republics: Touchy fellows these Russkies---don't they understand they lost?
The commentariat in Washington is still unaware of the new mood in Moscow. IMO, "Washington is unaware" would've sufficed
#1
Touchy fellows these Russkies---don't they understand they lost?
I'd like to see Champ tell Putin, "You lost - get over it."...but somehow, I think Champ knows better.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
05/05/2014 21:40 Comments ||
Top||
#2
The problem is NOT that they lost, but thy will not see they lost, they keep fighting the old war, that's already lost, like a sailor desperately trying to refloat the Titanic.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
05/05/2014 21:59 Comments ||
Top||
#3
It's already unfolded. The Spetznaz intimidate some people, if it goes their way, fine, if it doesn't, the civilian ride-alongs die and get to be martyrs on television. Win-win. No big set battle, just slicing the salami. In the old days it would be called 'creeping communism,' but now that it's more like the mafia... capotalism, maybe?
h/t Jerry Pournelle
...This is simply because we are WEIRD. That's social science shorthand for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic -- and nobody is WEIRDer than Americans. In the last several decades many Americans, and essentially all our elites, have internalized a worldview based on affluence, individualism, and secularism that makes us unique, globally speaking. So much so that we seem unable to comprehend that there actually are opposing viewpoints out there.
...Simply put, Vladimir Putin is the stuff of Western progressive nightmares because he's what they thought they'd gotten past. He's a traditional male with "outmoded" views on, well, everything: gender relations, race, sexual identity, faith, the use of violence, the whole retrograde package. Putin at some level is the Old White Guy that post-moderns fear and loathe, except this one happens to control the largest country on earth plus several thousand nuclear weapons -- and he hates us. Cliven Bundy ("my family used this land for 300 years") with nukes
#1
I would not say he hates us. Rather he sees a country doing so many things wrong. With the right people here we could have been a good team. Now with no respect or influence what can we bring to the table. Now at this time our leadership is outclassed.
A republic depends on the press.
The numbers are bad. Really bad.
Owning a newspaper these days is like owning a white elephant. Except white elephants don't have their own unions. The AEI numbers tell the tale. Read more at the link
#1
What the article doesn't say out loud is the major problem for newspapers is not the medium or the unions. Its the message. The majority of their readers rejected decades ago, but that the editorial boards and Journalism schools cling ever more desperately to.
#2
America itself may have peaked in 2000. But the newspaper has been useful to wrap glassware, line bird cages and to be mocked by the objective reader.
They newspaper editor made a poor choice between his responsibility (and commercial success) and becoming the propaganda arm of the leftist progressive movement.
#3
Never confuse the institution of the 'press' with the technology of disseminating information. "Freedom of the Press" was about the free flow of information when the technology of the time was the printing press. The modern institution is just as much about the suppression and corruption of information has any flow of it. This medium is now supplanting the corruption in that flow and the laziness of those who prefer others to do their thinking for them (see Sheeple).
#4
Oddly enough, reporters aren't sending in stories via telegraph or telephone anymore, either.
We've got a vibrant press whose numbers, if not necessarily profits aren't sucking wind. It's just that it's all on-line, mocked for writing articles at home in pyjamas. News junkies don't get their information from the New York Times, et al anymore, they get it from The Blaze, PJ Media, Breitbart, the Drudge Report, Huffington Post, and even Daily Kos, God bless 'em, among others. And what perhaps no one has noticed is that a lot of their staff -- just like Fox News, not coincidentally -- are professionally trained journalists downsized from the paper'n'ink organizations. The major British newspapers' biggest source of clicks these days comes through Drudge, and they've altered their reporting focus accordingly, to the benefit of all involved. We've even got a startling number of the formerly ink-stained among Rantburg's readers, and therefore among the moderators.
Our lordly, Columbia-trained journalists are being out-competed by the nimble, electron-stained reporters of the internet. Darwin always wins.
#5
Plus the "Paper' Is 3/4 size, in short it's shrunk.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
05/05/2014 12:40 Comments ||
Top||
#6
Dead of a self inflicted wound. It didn't have to be that way if only they had maintained the objectivity that is, I think, still taught or at least still given lip service in most colleges' Journalism 101. These days I don't see how anybody with any moral integrity could work at most newspapers.
#7
Craigslist and online adverts took away their lifeblood. Check out how much your local rag charges to run a couple-inch obit. Screw them
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/05/2014 14:52 Comments ||
Top||
#8
Not just Craigslist.
Realtor.com and like-minded real estate web sites have sucked away the real estate ads. Various auto websites have sucked away the car ads. Help wanted? You don't look in a newspaper. Stock quotes? You certainly don't look in a newspaper.
Newspapers worked for 400 years as aggregators -- news, sports, fashion, local, international, politics, 'style', etc, all in one package supported by ads. The problem is that they've been dis-aggregated. What they have left I can get elsewhere. So why bother with them?
I do think that at some point the new news, as TW lists them, will be charging for their news. They have to; ads won't support their operations given the abysmally low click-through rates. That by the way demonstrates the real value of advertising -- low -- and should make everyone on Madison Street shudder.
Posted by: Steve White ||
05/05/2014 15:30 Comments ||
Top||
#9
Yep classifieds were a gold mine. But even before the interwebs, small locals were starting to eat up the classified cash with free 4 liners with a business build on display ads. Worked well. Still does to a certain extent. Of course I still hang around washaterias from time to time, especially in NOLA where you can have a shooter while you watcher your pants rotate.
#11
I find the only utility of the local newspaper is local news and as a delivery system for coupons. Large newspapers have been, as the article suggests, permanently supplanted by other sources.
I disagree with the author that MSNBC is a canary-in-the-coalmine for cable news. MSNBC is a lousy product, and the market is voting with what we used to call "the clicker."
#12
Newspapers are already dead, now what can e do about the waste paper that clogs the Mail?
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
05/05/2014 21:52 Comments ||
Top||
#13
The only thing I will miss are the "funnies" (comic strips I used to love as a kid). Kids loved Grit because they could make money selling Grit on Saturday and people loved Grit because they got the big Sunday Funnies on Saturday.
It takes a big man to make fun of himself, to take his failures, hold them up for everyone to see, and say, as Chandler Bing might: "Could I BE any more ridiculous?"
So when the president of the United States -- the most powerful man in the world, used to always getting his way, always being the smartest guy in the room, and always the one who gets the last word -- does it, we take note. It's a lesson in self-deprecation all Americans can learn from; Hey, the president mocks himself, so maybe I should just lighten up a little bit on myself, too.
Once a year, at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the president drops in to deliver a short comedy bit heavy on self deprecation. President Reagan was a master, goofing on himself as a slow-witted Hollywood rube; George H.W. Bush stepped out of his stiff patrician bearing to hit himself with a few zingers; Bill Clinton singed himself badly after his affair with a White House intern ("How was your week?").
And George W. Bush was, frankly, a master. Derided like Reagan, a slow witted rube, but this time from Texas, Bush once brought an impersonator on stage to mock him nonstop, for everything from his marble-mouthed delivery to his low approval rating. Mastery.
But President Obama each year proves he just isn't man enough to point his super-intellectual humor at himself. Sure, he almost always delivers a burn or two at himself, but he always goes on a scorched-earth campaign after that, viciously ripping any and all critics who have taken him on.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
05/05/2014 7:18 Comments ||
Top||
#2
The Permanent Party Propaganda Machine just doing in one night and in one place what they do all year long anyway only just in their office huddles and on twitter. It's their annual jamboree, not to be confused with the rare if now passe entmoot.
#3
The Champ requires no Hollywood impersonator to showcase his slow wittedness. His increasingly less frequent press conferences and public statements clearly display his lack of both wit and credibility. The only thing left for him is the spiteful, demeaning of others. He must remain not only the constant victim, but the hero of victims. It's all he knows.
#6
Oh wait. You were referring to the typo in the title. Ok, I've fixed that. Next time please provide a little more than a single word for guidance -- the other moderators can be counted on to be deep and perceptive and stuff, but there are no guarantees if I happen along first. Still, I did get there in the end, so thank you for the heads up, no mo uro.
#3
Pirro answers quite succinctly the should he be impeached question, it's the can he be impeached and removed question that presents the greatest dilemma. The second order effects of further fracturing an already divided nation or creating another national martyr should also be examined.
Taking his facilitators and co-conspirators to task and whipping the mule while leaving the emperor with no clothes might be a better, long-term solution. History will be rewritten in his behalf anyway. Let the true back story be one of a presidency of indolence, ignorance, narcissistic over indulgence, and failure. He's young enough to provide a convenient political reminder for many decades to come. Use him wisely, his arrogance will surely not let us down.
If might be worth mentioning, there are no long lines outside the Carter Center here in Atlanta.
#4
But the day there is a a Carter expo in Calfornia there will be long lines and Reagan's former state gets a looot more electoral votes than Georgia.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
It takes a big man to make fun of himself, to take his failures, hold them up for everyone to see, and say, as Chandler Bing might: "Could I BE any more ridiculous?"
