NEON GODS

Republicans and science are like children and sex: "...they don't have a clue what it's actually about."

Andrew Sullivan posted some comments about last night's debate that he received from his readers.  I thought some of them were pretty good.

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Another reader:

Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don't have a clue what it's actually about.

Another:

I don't understand this. The government doesn't have the power to vaccinate but it has the power to kill its own citizens? What?

Another:

Perry lost in my eyes. In the eyes of the in-laws, however, he won it big time. They like the idea of executions and hate the idea of Social Security. Perry's their guy. Thing is, they're both on Social Security and Medicare.

--Trakker

And the loser was....

No, I didn't watch the Republican debate last night. 

Really, it doesn't matter which of these embarrassments ends up running against Obama, we know they will favor the rich, the stupid, the Bible-thumpers, and will happily gut any and all safety nets for the poor...so why care?

Richard Cohen did watch them (I guess someone in the media has to) and here is part of his summary:

So who lost? If I am right, it was Barack Obama. Perry would be the opponent he’d most like to face. The Texas governor showed he is not quick on his feet and likes to smile rather than think. His position on Social Security is not only wrong and reckless, it’s political poison. But when the audience at the Reagan library broke into applause for the 234 people executed under Perry  — a hideous moment as antediluvian as Perry’s rejection of the theory of evolution — it reminded me that the Republican Party, like the past, is another country.

But if Romney was the winner, then Obama has a problem. Romney is the one Republican who runs even with Obama in recent polls. It’s possible that Republican primary voters will embrace Perry for the very qualities that made me tremble, but I think the party wants a winner. Last night, that looked like Romney. [Bolding is mine.]

Richard Cohen isn't a liberal in any sense.  He's a centrist villager through and through, so when he dumps on Perry I think we can assume that Perry has crossed some invisible line between comical and dangerously insane. 

Perry is probably the ultimate right-wing fundamentalist Christian candidate who insists evolution and climate change are hoaxes perpetrated by liberal scientists, that prayer is all you need in any catastrophe (that and federal dollars), and violence is the best response to diplomatic conflicts and crime (who can help but be repulsed by a party that applauds Perry's pride in executing 234 prisoners - one of whom was almost certainly innocent as Digby reminds us?)  Best of all for the fundies, he's a swaggering, gun-totin' Texan.  Obviously, today's fundamentalist Christians have happily thrown Jesus under the bus and run him over repeatedly.

Update: here is the video of the Republican crowd's reaction to Gov. Perry executing 234 prisoners.

--Trakker

Why did this man have an AK-47 and two 30-round magazines?

An AK-47 is an assault rifle, designed about 65 years ago for use by the Soviet Union's military.  It was designed to kill people.  To do this it can be used as a semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull), or fully automatic where pulling the trigger and holding it shoots rounds until the magazine is empty or the trigger is released. It has a maximum effective range of 1,300 ft (about a quarter of a mile).

Tuesday morning, gun owner Eduardo Sencion, 32, walked into an IHOP in Carson City, Nevada, carrying a fully-loaded AK-47 and shot 3 National Guardsman to death.  No one knows why he picked that restaurant or why he shot at the National Guardsmen (he also shot and killed a civilian).  All in all, he shot 5 National Guardsmen and 7 civilians before walking outside and firing into another restaurant, an H&R block, and a casino across the street.  Then he turned the weapon on himself and fired.  He died at the hospital.  so in just a few minutes a gun owner killed five and wounded seven, not to mention the hundreds he terrorized by the shooting.

We don't know exactly how many shots he fired, but witnesses say he emptied a 30-round magazine and inserted another 30-round magazine.  He also had another rifle and a pistol in his van.

The shooter's family admits that Sencion has a history of mental illness, in fact The Nevada Appeal reports that he had been committed to a South Lake Tahoe mental facility in 2000.

If the shooter was in fact committed to a mental facility, why did he have three guns?  In fact why does any civilian have the right to own a military assault rifle, designed to kill people, and only kill people?  The Second Amendment?  Does that mean civilians also have the right to own GP-30 grenade-launcher attachments for their rifles complete with grenade, or FIM-92 Stinger missiles, too?  Really, why does a civilian need a military weapon designed to kill people?

Do you know what really pisses me off?  The gun zealots in this country go ballistic whenever someone proposes a law to make it harder for criminals to get their hands on a firearm.  They tell us we already have too many guns laws, and that if those laws were just enforced there wouldn't be all these shootings. 

So what does the NRA do to encourage better enforcement?  Evidently nothing.  Look at their list of important issues posted on their website.  Do you see anything about enforcement of existing laws?  Of course not, because frankly it's just a smoke screen.

Oh yeah, and the other thing they tell Americans that the best answer to gun violence and crime in general is to allow gun nuts,  zealots, er, owners to be armed in public.  At the hint of any crime, gun owners will quickly whip out their firearm and shoot the bad guy if necessary.

Um, here's the reality folks:

Ralph Swagler, the owner of a nearby barbecue restaurant, told The A.P. that he saw the gunman pull up outside the restaurant, where he first shot a man on a motorcycle and then headed inside.

“I wish I had shot at him, but he was going in the IHOP,” Mr. Swagler said. “But when he came at me — when somebody is pointing an automatic weapon at you, you can’t believe the firepower, the kind of rounds coming out of that weapon.”

Yes, just what you would expect, the bad guy had more firepower and had the drop on the gun-packing citizen.  Duh! I just want to go on record here as saying Ralph Swagler is no dummy.  He surveyed the situation and decided not to commit suicide.

How many of these gut-wrenching multiple shootings do we read about every year?  Hundreds?  How many of these shooters are brought down by armed citizens? Um, about zero?  How many are ended by the bad guy shooting himself to death?  Yeah, just about all of them.

Look, the NRA and all their clones are bullies and liars, in fact they are the prototype for Fox News.  They used to be a group primarily dedicated to gun safety.  Now they are the lobby for criminals, thugs, the paranoid, and the mentally unhinged. Threaten to pass a gun law and they will come down on you like an asteroid from space, but shoot a bunch of National Guardsmen in a restaurant and they'll blame the citizens nearby for not being armed.

We'll know America is once again the shining city on a hill again when we can seriously discuss abolishing or amending the Second Amendment. 

--Trakker

Can he turn it around?

I think it is becoming increasingly obvious that President Barack Obama is now wallowing in deep political doo-doo. Check out Richard Cohen today,

... The Hamptons is where the Democratic energy, money and intellectual firepower of Manhattan goes for R&R. It’s just not another beach.

Over the Labor Day weekend, I went to a number of events in the Hamptons. At all of them, Obama was discussed. At none of them — that’s none — was he defended. That was remarkable. After all, sitting around various lunch and dinner tables were mostly Democrats. Not only that, some of them had been vociferous Obama supporters, giving time and money to his election effort. They were all disillusioned.

Let me call the roll. I am talking about are writers and editors, lawyers and shrinks, Wall Street tycoons and freelance photographers, hedge funders and academics, run-of-the-mill Democrats and Democratic activists. They were all politically sophisticated, and just a year ago some of them were still vociferous Obama supporters. No more.

Frankly, I was surprised. The Hamptons are a redoubt of New York liberalism. It is to campaign money what the Outer Banks are to fishermen. I expected more than a few people to defend the president. No one did. Everyone — and I do mean everyone — expressed disappointment in him as a leader. In that area, they thought he was a bust. Some articulated detailed critiques — the nature of his stimulus program, for instance. They argued that more money should have gone into long-term infrastructure programs. Most, though, skipped the details and just registered dismay: Where had their “change” agent gone?

Granted, some of this disappointment is due to the ridiculously high expectations we had of him after the ugly, disastrous eight years of George Bush.  Some of it is due to the nature of the Internet and blogs which have the tendency to pass judgment quickly on every move a politician makes, making it hard for politicians to engage in long-term strategies or complex compromises, which is the way democratic governments get things done.

We've heard these excuses and I think most of us have cut the President a lot of slack because we believe he is very smart, smarter than most of us.  But he's been in office for well over two years now and his batting average on progressive issues is well below the Mendoza line (forgive the sports metaphor).  Yes, good things for his progressive base have happened on his watch, but I can't think of a single progressive idea that he fought for from the very start.  He's one of the few Presidents that doesn't seem to have some pet issues which he pursues passionately.  He doesn't really seem to stand for anything.

At this point, 14 months from the 2012 election, I'd say this country is in deep shit, with one political party weak, demoralized, and lacking strong leadership, and the other political party braying at the moon, giddily anticipating taking America back to the 19th century.  Our economy is in shambles while the Republicans are cheering the dismantling of our governments and the impoverishment of the middle class. 

The only hope for Obama, and our country, is for him to turn into a FDR, propose an ambitious, exciting program for getting the country back to work, reminding Americans about the amazing accomplishments we've achieved in the past and how we've invented and built, faced depression and fought our way out, etc.  He needs to present us with a plan whose benefits are obvious, something that will put millions of Americans back to work again, something that will excite our imagination and rebuild our confidence.  He must put his whole political future on the line and reach for something grand, something the Republicans would be hooted down for opposing.  I sure hope he's got something in mind...

--Trakker

Why are conservatives angry?

Why are conservatives so angry and the tea party so active?  I've alluded to it before: because for the past 80 years liberals/progressives have been the prime movers of our society (from Social Security to Medicare to civil rights to environmental regulations, and now the growing acceptance of gay marriage).  These have all been bitter losses for conservatives and with each new liberal triumph they get angrier and more desperate.

Ezra Klein agrees.

...Liberals tend to underestimate how much they have accomplished, and how much ground conservatives have ceded, over the course of the 20th century, and even into the beginning of the 21st.  Liberals tell themselves a narrative in which the last few decades have been dominated by conservatives, but conservatives look around and see a state that has been substantially shaped by liberals. Social Security was joined by Medicare was joined by Medicaid was joined by disability insurance was joined by the Environmental Protection Agency was joined by the Americans with Disabilities Act was joined by the Children's Health Insurance Program was joined by the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit was joined by No Child Left Behind was joined by the Affordable Care Act and so on. 

Right now, the liberal dream, as embodied by ideas like the public option and universal early childhood education, is to push a bit further in the direction we're already going. The big conservative dream, as embodied by Rick Perry, is to somehow turn back the clock and undo almost a century of social-policy legislation. Where it was once the liberals who had radical ideas for what we should do with the state, it's now conservatives who are waging war on behalf of transformative policy change. That's an important shift.

Yes, we are now the (ugh!) establishment and it is the conservatives who are pushing for big changes (actually, they aren't. They just want to repeal the 20th century and roll us back to the Gilded Age where the rich had all the power, there was almost no middle class, and the workers were poor and desperate for jobs even if they paid little).

This is why the left needs to break away from the Democratic party and once again be the ones who work to move the country forward to: single payer health care, direct government hiring workers when the unemployment figures exceed 5%, stronger environmental regulations, free higher education/job training/language/GED classes, and stronger regulations and oversight on businesses and financial institutions, etc.  Nanny state?  No a state where people can pursue their dreams without fear of catastrophic setbacks.  A state that trusts it's people and helps those who need it without question and criticism.  A worthy, if fully unattainable, goal I believe.

--Trakker 

The new MLK Memorial

Last night I went down to the national mall to get my first glimpse of the new Martin Luther King Memorial.  It was nicely lit and quite impresive, lots of people there making it hard to take pictures, but I thought I'd post a close up of his relief:

-Trakker

Why America should be worried

James Downy writes in the WaPost today that the Obama administration needlessly bungled the scheduling of Obama's address of both houses of Congress, and that Democrats should be worried.  As usual, the White House tried to get tricky in a very juvenile way, and the Republicans exploited it and forced Obama to back down (Really?  Again?).  I couldn't help it, I had to respond:

No, it's not the Democrats who should be worried, it's the American people who should be worried - and I am! One of our two political parties has truly drunk the kool-ade believing that starving the beast (government at all levels) will make America great. Right. Just look at every other wealthy nation in the world and note how many have a teeny tiny government. NONE! 
 
Our only hope is the other political party, right? And they have shown us time and time again they have no idea what they stand for anymore (except trying to get re-elected), and now we see they are not even competent to schedule an address of Congress. 
 
The Democrats should have one of the easiest elections known to man given all the ammunition the Republicans have given them (ending Medicare?!!) and yet they are going to blow it. This would great theater if I lived elsewhere, but damnit, I've got to live with the consequences. Grow a brain Democrats!

I'm rather proud of my first paragraph.  Why would any sane person look at the evidence (all wealthy nations have large governments - and higher taxes than us) and believe the path to prosperity in America is to keep cutting and cutting and cutting our government?  Are our brains really that addled?  Maybe we should have kept the lead in our paint and fluoride out of our water because something strange has happened to America since I was young, and it's not for the better...

--Trakker