NEON GODS

Don't hold your breath waiting for the NRA to demand answers and punishment

 More gun violence in the news. 

INDIANAPOLIS — Police found a handgun like the one used to kill five people in rural Indiana in the car of a man linked to the deaths, and bloodstained clothes and a victim's cell phone were found in the home where he stayed, authorities told a Thursday court hearing. ...

Authorities said in court that a .380 caliber handgun like the one used in the slayings was found in Ison's car when he was arrested early Wednesday, as was an AK-47 assault rifle. Officers who searched a home where he was staying found the clothes and cell phone, along with a pair of shoes with imprints that matched those found at the crime scene, authorities told the judge. ...

Murphy said Ison has an "extensive" criminal record that includes armed robbery, burglary, forgery and counterfeiting. ...

Does any of this surprise anyone?  A good 'ol boy with an extensive criminal record is arrested and found in possession of a .380 caliber handgun apparently used to kill five people, and an AK-47 assault rifle. 

I'm sure the NRA will be all over law enforcement demanding to know why this man, with an extensive criminal record, found a way to get possession of a handgun and an assault rifle.  Hahahahahahaha!  Yeah, that will never happen.  The NRA loves these shootings because it's the kind of violence that convinces people they need a gun for protection.

Do you think the law enforcement is going to spend a lot of time trying to find out where the system broke down and allowed this thug to get his guns?  Yeah, right.  They might not like what they find.

I just find it ironic that when a stage  blew over recently in Indianapolis, killing 5 people, the state went berserk, setting up studies and investigations to find out what went wrong.  But when 5 citizens are shot by a thug with an extensive criminal record and caught with firearms in his possession, the sounds of silence are stunning.  Just another day in America.

The gun lobby has convinced Americans that this is the price of freedom in America.  Don't question it, just arm yourself and you will be okay.  The almighty gun is the answer to all our crime problems.  How stupid are we?

--Trakker

Is Jeff Bezos the new Steve Jobs?

The new Kindle Fire.  It's not a phone.  It's not a tablet.  What the hell is it?  It's a huge gamble.  If this was an HP product I'd snicker, but it's from Amazon, one of the two most innovative, forward thinking companies around.  The other is Apple, of course.  

For years we've read all about the genius of Steve Jobs and the products he's shepherded out of Apple, products that have changed our culture: the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.  The question is, what will become of Apple now that Steve Jobs is gone?

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994, and has toiled in the shadow of Steve Jobs, but his success has been pretty impressive as well.  Amazon.com pretty much leads the way in online retailing.  While Jobs concentrates on the design and simplicity of his products, Bezos concentrates on efficiency and a powerful website to make Amazon successful. 

Back in 2007, Bezos took a big gamble by introducing the Kindle ebook reader.  It wasn't the first ebook reader, but what made the Kindle different was what was behind it, a wireless phone link to Amazon's online store of inexpensive digital books that could be ordered and dowloaded in just seconds.  You could also subscribe to digital copies of newspapers which would delivered to the Kindle each morning before the hard copies could be delivered. 

The Kindle was greeted with much skepticism, but Bezos had done his homework and the Kindles sold well from the start.  Book lovers quickly noted that the Kindle could hold hundreds of books in a very portable device.  It could be read on the subway or bus, or pulled from the pocket if you were in line for tickets or waiting for a performance or lecture to begin. 

That was in 2007.  Now the market has powerful color Nooks, smart phones with ebook reader apps, and Apple's iPad, all with the convenience of touch screen menus and color screens (but all also have LCD screens which are harder on the eyes for long reading sessions than the e-ink screen that the Kindle uses, plus they drain batteries much faster).  We all knew Amazon wouldn't concede the field to these upstarts, so we've been anticipating a new Kindle for months - but what would it look like?  What would it do better than the competition?

Most of us expected a new super Kindle that would (try to) blow away the Nook and have the functionality of an iPad, but no one was expecting FOUR new Kindles!  Amazon just introduced a cheap, no-frills Kindle for $99 ($79 if you are willing to let the Kindle display ads and special offers when you put it to sleep), a touch screen with wi-fi for $139 ($99 with ads), and the same model with the addition of 3G cellphone downloads for $189 ($149 with ads).  All three have the same 6" b&w e-ink screen that the current Kindle has, but are smaller and more portable (just 6.5" x 4.5" for the no-frills model!) because they don't have a keyboard.

The big news is the fourth new model, the Kindle Fire, with a 7" color screen (same technology as the iPad), and the Android operating system with an Amazon Silk browser (Silk is described as "a revolutionary, cloud-accelerated browser that uses a "split browser" architecture to leverage the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud. Supports Adobe® Flash® Player.").  So in many ways it's like a Kindle mated with a smart phone, but without the phone (and camera).

I've had a Kindle since they first came out and I recently purchased my first smart phone, a Samsung Infuse with a 4.5" screen (I make or receive about 5 phone calls a week and could live without the camera), so I can easily imagine what the Kindle Fire is like.  When I first heard the announcement this morning I was bewildered by the Kindle Fire, but now I realize Amazon is not putting all their eggs in one new basket.  The 6" e-ink black and white screen is excellent for reading most books, and Amazon now has three reasonably priced models that should make them affordable for teens and twenty-somethings who are just starting their careers (if they're lucky).  Kindle books can now be borrowed from libraries. 

The Kindle Fire shows that Amazon knows they are not going to win going head to head with Apple by coming out with a tablet like the iPad.  The iPad is designed as a productivity tool and priced accordingly.  Businesses are buying them for their employees.  The Kindle is designed for entertainment and information.  The iPad is small but not what I would call portable.  The Fire is 7.5" by 4.7" and weighs less than 15 ounces (The iPad 2 is 9.5"x 7.3" and weighs 1.3 lbs).  For reference, my phone has a 4.5" screen and I'm amazed at how clear streaming video is and how legible my Kindle books are on it.  I'm pretty sure that a 7" screen will be fine for 99% of the uses the average owner will buy it for.  Oh yeah, and did I mention the Fire's $200 price?  How much does the cheapest iPad cost?

I haven't read any revues of the new Kindles or articles about Amazon's strategy, but just 8 hours after the initial announcement, my first impression is that Amazon has hit at least a triple with their overall strategy for keeping up with the fast changing market for readers/tablets.  My only concern is that smart phones are ubiquitous and offer many of the same features as the Fire.  Will people with smart phones shell out $200 more for the Fire?  I wonder.  It looks like Amazon is planning to market this as something the family shares, emphasizing the children's books and videos that can be downloaded or borrowed from the library to keep the kids entertained while someone cooks dinner.

--Trakker

Liberal bashing defines the hard right.

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos has a post this morning that says what I've touched on a lot here: pissing off liberals is so embedded in the right's psychology that they are more than willing to willing to screw our environment, and the earth, if it will bitch slap liberals.

If you are so unlucky as to have seen an episode [of Rush Limbaugh's TV show], you may remember a charming segment devoted to cutting down trees. Not harvesting timber or splitting firewood, mind you, just knocking over trees. In this repeating bit, cameras focused on some little pine or oak, often bearing a sign with a message to "tree huggers" or a personal note for Al Gore. Then, with a roar of chain saws and a nice cloud of two-stroke smoke, the tree was dispatched.

Killing a tree for no visible purpose never failed to generate guffaws from Limbaugh and his audience. Perhaps they pictured liberals as shivering in front of their televisions, biting their lips in horror as the poor-widdle-twee went boom. Perhaps they thought it made Al cry. Whatever they visualized, the point of the nightly tree-felling was clear: they ran the bit not because they thought it helped anyone, but because they thought it would be painful to those who cared about the environment. it was the video equivalent of pulling the wings off flies.

There have been many moments since then where Republians have demonstrated their addiction to despoiling, but it was those clips on Limbaugh that made me understand the hard right. They don't shout "drill, baby, drill" because they think it will make gas cheaper. They don't create signs in which cap and trade (a program designed by Republicans of a different era) is bracketed by a hammer and sickle because they think capturing carbon will cost jobs. They do it because they think it will piss you off. They do it even when they know what they're doing is causing real and lasting damage. They do it because hurting liberals is more important than doing the right thing. Hell, as far as today's GOP is concerned, hurting liberals is the definition of doing the right thing. If you like it, they're again' it, even if "it" is breathable air, clean water, or a climate not racing toward irrevocable harm. They've generalized the idea that liberals are pro-livable planet. So Republicans have given screwing the Earth a priority position on their to-do list. [emphasis mine]

It should be noted that Limbaugh and his lemmings are generally life's losers who abhor thinking, are insecure, and are scared of change.  They know they are looked down on by sane, open-minded, smarter people - especially those in universities and the cities.  However, opportunistic GOP politicians have found that they can get elected in the fly-over states by assuring these insecure voters that THEY are the ones with all the wisdom, that THEY are the REAL Americans. 

The problem for those politicians is that once these voters are convinced they are the wise ones, they get ever more loony, and they begin lurching further and further to the right, rejecting science (evolution, climate change), hugely successful programs and practices (social security, medicare, and popular elections of Senators), and even common sense (failure to raise the debt ceiling would have no adverse affect on our economy!).

Someday they will finally go completely off the rails and the Republican party will be seen by all as the party of lunatics.  If Barack Obama had recognized his election for what it was, a huge repudiation of the Republican party, and had pushed Democratic values rather than treat the adolescent Republicans as adults, this wouldn't be happening today.  In late 2008 the Republican party was on the ropes and America was eager for change.  [Letting the defeated Republicans get back up and even get the upper hand again (in less than two years!) will turn out to be Obama's biggest failure as President.  He might even lose the Presidency in 2012 because of it.]

--Trakker

Republicans: shameful adolescents

This is how low the Republican party has fallen.

FEMA is almost out of disaster relief money because of the unusual number of natural disasters we've experienced this year.  So what do the House Republicans do?  They devise a spending bill they know will be totally unacceptable to the Democrats in the Senate.  It includes less money for disaster relief than the Democrats want. But that's not all.  They made it even more unacceptable by offsetting part of these relief funds by cutting a program popular with the Democrats, and it creates jobs!  Stupid. 

But even that wasn't enough to get the nuttiest House Republicans on-board, so the bill got voted down.  To get more support from the loons, John Boehner then added "...and all mothers of Democratic Senators are whores" (or something to that effect) to the bill and that got enough Republicans on board to pass it. 

Then the House left town on vacation.  Again.

Now the Democrats in the Senate have a choice: pass a totally stupid, unacceptable bill and provide SOME relief to disaster victims, or let FEMA run out of money while waiting for the Republicans to return to Washington.  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that if this spending bill isn't passed by October 1, the entire government will shut down (sound familiar?)!  The trouble is, the House Republicans aren't scheduled to return to work until AFTER the deadline.

This is not governing.  This is shameful adolescent behavior.  But isn't that the Republican party has become, a bunch of spoiled adolescents who believe they are not only smarter than everyone else, they are also the only REAL Americans, and those who oppose them do so because they hate America.

It's obvious Republicans despise Democracy.  They believe the only people qualified to make our decisions is them.  Either they get to make all the rules to this game or they will shut down the government, take their ball, and go home.  True adolescent behavior.

--Trakker

"The urge for justice and its close relative, revenge, is human, which is by definition also to err."

It's a rare and joyous day when I approvingly post the words of a conservative writer on this blog, but this is just such a day.  So let this serve as my standing ovation for Kathleen Parker:

I stayed up late Wednesday night in the hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court would call off the execution of Troy Davis. Instead, at 11:08 p.m., he was pronounced dead.

One minute he was lifting his head from the death gurney, pleading his innocence in the killing of a Georgia police officer 22 years ago and beseeching God to bless the souls of his executioners. Then the drugs entered his veins, he blinked a few times, appeared to yawn, according to witnesses, and entered the sleep from which there is no waking. ...

That we grant the state the power to end a citizen’s life is a harrowing-enough thought. That we do so even when we know with certainty that sometimes innocents are killed is beyond comprehension.

In Davis’s case, opinions clearly differed. Seven of the nine witnesses who identified him as the shooter have since recanted. Even so, a federal judge ruled last year that the recantation testimony cast “minimal doubt” on Davis’s conviction.

Minimal? Isn’t any level of doubt enough?

Apparently, even the Supreme Court didn’t think so. After delaying Davis’s execution for four hours Wednesday, the court allowed the execution to proceed.

Those recantations surely should create sufficient doubt, not to exonerate Davis but at least not to kill him — even if you support the death penalty, as many sane and lovely Americans do. That said, I’m not so sure a sane and lovely person would or should cheer the death penalty, as some audience members did recently upon Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s expression of pride in his administration of ultimate justice. More convicted individuals have died in Texas under Perry’s watch than in any other state. ...

I don’t judge those for whom the ultimate justice brings solace or that most prosaic of catharsis — closure. Everyone understands the reflex to destroy the destroyer. But I do judge us. This nation. This society. This culture. The urge for justice and its close relative, revenge, is human, which is by definition also to err. ...

Thanks to DNA testing, we know that scores have been on death row who should not have been. Extrapolating, we can safely conclude that some innocents have been wrongfully executed. These facts alone should be all we need to retire the guillotine, in the hopes that we might yet evolve to a higher level of humanity. Never mind the other factual arguments — that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent and that, given our appeals process, executing someone is more expensive than keeping him in prison for life.

When we join together to administer death, we become something other than a civilized community of men and women. No matter how we frame the arguments or justifications, we become executioners. Where there is doubt, as there seems to have been in Davis’s case, we become murderers.

No one is recommending that Davis should have been given a free pass. Life without parole is no picnic. But we might sleep easier had we not participated in killing a man without the moral certainty that he was guilty. [emphasis mine]

I posted Ms. Parker's words here, not just because I agree with her, but because she expressed this horror so eloquently.  I don't do eloquence, my forte is angry ranting, and last night I was very angry that no one had the guts to say, "We might have erred here so we're not going to kill Troy Davis." No one.

Oh yes, America is exceptional alright.  Even Mexico, that "backward" country to our south, has abolished the death penalty.

--Trakker

 

The circus is coming. Send in the clowns.

Politics for the next few months is likely to resemble a circus than a nation trying to solve it's problems. 

The Republican field of Presidential aspirants will be shaking out and those falling behind will become more shrill and crazy hoping to say or do something to get the attention of the Republican base.  

And who knows what Obama will be doing.  If the past is any predictor he will thrash around hoping he can light a fire under his base in time for the 2012 election, and my gut feeling is that it's too late for that.  However, if it looks like a true loon like Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann is going to get the nod to oppose him, we will see more lefties get involved despite our disgust at his Republican-lite policies.  No one wants more corporatists on the Supreme Court.

I don't watch any of Obama's speeches anymore.  He is not a leader.  He reacts. He has no vision, no long term plan for America and even if he did he wouldn't fright for it.  All he does is try to keep the Republicans from pulling us over the cliff of ruin.  There is nothing inspiring about him.

Our country is on the verge of economic disaster.  This is one of those times when America needs a strong, visionary leader.  Obama is not that leader, and it's sadly obvious that the 2012 election will not produce one either.  Our best hope is that the Dems take back the House and Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker again.  She's probably the most able leader in Washington right now.

--Trakker

10 years later...we had the chance to be a better country but we blew it

I didn't write anything about the 9/11 anniversary because personaly I'm embarrassed to admit that Osama bin Laden achieved a much larger victory than he ever imagined.   He knew what many of us have still not figured out: killing 3,000 innocent people doesn't really upset Washington, more Americans than that die each year because they don't have adequate health insurance.  What scared Washington and their wealthy corporatist sponsors was losing those two huge very expensive buildings in downtown New York City, and the wealth it represents.  THAT's what Washington is willing to spend Billions of our tax dollars to insure doesn't happen again. (and Yes, I know I'm overstating this a bit).

I guess this post at Daily Kos pretty much says all I want to say, because I'm too depressed by the way the right has exploited this disaster for the past ten years to think about it right now.

--Trakker

At least the gun was made in America...

Hahahaha!  Of all the embarrassing things Rick Perry has written in his book "Fed Up,"  Gail Collins might have found the weirdest of them all.  Referring to the Republican Presidential candidate's recent debate, she wrote:

I was sorry that no one asked Perry more of the really critical questions. For instance, is it true that he saved his daughter’s puppy from being eaten by a coyote? This allegedly happened when Perry went jogging “packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow-point bullets.” Because, as he says, he is “that kind of guy.” His puppy-rescue is a stirring picture, especially considering that Perry’s chief competitor is the man who drove to Canada with the family dog Seamus strapped to the roof of the car.

But the more I think about it, the more I wonder. Where were his bodyguards? How did the puppy keep up with him if he was running? And where exactly was he carrying the Ruger? Many joggers I know have trouble hanging on to a water bottle.

Fishermen have a reputation for exaggerating their exploits, but I think the real prize should go to gun owners.  I've heard so many stories from gun owners about how their guns saved them from all kinds of threats that never seem to happen to non-gun owners, I think they make up or seriously embellish most of their gun stories, but at least this one is amusing.

--Trakker

 

I'm so embarrassed...

I bought a smart phone.  I said I would never get one, that I didn't need all those bells and whistles.  Just give me a small phone I can stick in my pocket for emergencies.

I was not an early adopter of the cell phone, but when travelling on business I saw how handy it would be to have one with me.  Still, I make or receive only about 20 calls a month, hardly worth carrying the damn thing around with me. 

So why did I pay $100 plus commit to a 2 year contract to get a fancy phone?  Because I finally realized it's not a phone, but a small, fast, pocket-sized computer, easily connected to the Internet, that you can also make phone calls with.

Within an hour of taking it out of the box I knew I had hit home run with this decision.  The technology is stunning to someone like me who remembers using outhouses and hand-cranked phones with a central operator at my grandmother's house as a kid!  So add one more marvel to my list of marvels which contains laptops, Kindles, and now smart phones.  What's scary is that 3 years from now this marvel will be a quaint dinosaur, ridiculed by the young.  Sigh.

--Trakker

"...the modern Republican party is not only intellectually bankrupt, but morally bankrupt as well"

More on the current state of the modern Republican party from E.D. Kain writing at The League of Ordinary Gentleman:

I only caught the end of [last night's] debate, but that was enough. It was enough to remind me that the Republican Party boils down to three things: tax cuts, “What Would Reagan Do?” and violence. For every problem there is a tax cut that will fix it. For every dodged question, the ghost of Reagan looms like a smiling, beneficent prophet. All you need to do is rub his tummy and Republican boilerplate comes dribbling out to fill in whatever gaping crevice is left unfilled by any actual ideas. And when Perry is asked about the two-hundred and thirty some people he’s executed on death row during his governorship, the audience bursts into applause. Torture, war, and death, and this is the “pro-life” party.

I submit to you that this moment is perhaps the most telling since George W. Bush left office; that the modern Republican party is not only intellectually bankrupt, but morally bankrupt as well. The conservative movement and the Fox News and talk radio media empire it has built up around itself is not only ethically decrepit but morally atrophied. As Andrew Sullivan noted, “any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join. This is the crowd that believes in torture and executions.” ...

...Yes, I get a bit sick to my stomach having to hear first Bachmann, then Santorum, then Romney toss Reagan around like that, twisting his every word and deed to fit the current political climate, but I felt a real chill when I heard that audience applaud. It takes balls to execute an innocent man alright. It takes something anyways. And it takes the same sort of thing to applaud.

USA! USA! USA!

This is the "pro-life" party.  This is a party totally without compassion or empathy.  They are people who suspect they are ignorant and that the educated urbanites in the cities are living better than them, and having more fun, and they hate it!  Thus they hate Harvard-educated, Chicago-dwelling, urbane, Barack Obama, and the Democratic party that embraces science, logic, and religious skepticism.  They hate the Democrats who are comfortable living in large cities with it's scary people of color and it's multi-cultural flavors.

--Trakker