**The subject of this video is the kind of thing DC bipartisanship gets you

There is no word in the English language that allows the sun to poke through the clouds, inspires cherubic song and makes lobbyists high five while lording over a beer-joint urinal on in official Washington than "bipartisan". Bipartisan is just so darn cool. It's hip! It's now! It's Rand Paul's talking filibuster and Charlie Krauthammer's sardonic wit and Justice John Robert's dreamy blue eyes all rolled up into one big pig in a blanket!

Or, and I'm just thinking aloud here, perhaps when that word is uttered in Washington there is only once choice to be made: Run.

Because you see, there is actually bipartisanship that makes sense. It is all over the US. It will tell you that over 90 percent of the American public thinks there should be a 3-minute background checks before you purchase a combat weapon that can dismember kindergarten-aged kids, that the minimum wage should surpass that of Heilongjiang Province and that marriage equality is a concept long overdue.

But that is not the bipartisanship that exists in Washington. This brand of bipartisanship is based on Beltway "wisdom" and the status of who happens to be presenting the case. It's the variety that just gave us the 10-year anniversary of the tragedy in Iraq and rewarded Condoleezza Rice of the "smoking gun", "mushroom cloud" and "what does 'Bin Laden determined to attack in US' mean" with a new role as a political analyst on CBS - as if she can figure out day in and day out how to tie her shoes.

That's bipartisanship DC style. It ignored Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Trayvon Martin and finally got around to thinking we have a gun problem after grotesque inaction reached its logical conclusion, with 20 six and seven year olds mowed down like cattle in their classroom. Even so, while there is much support for gun safety measures, there is still some "bipartisan" opposition.

This kind of Washington bipartisanship looks at this war-of-choice that's now estimated to have cost in the trillions (yes, that's with a T), out-of-control health care costs via a crony-capitalism protection racket and a Pentagon so bloated with fat it's a surprise Rush Limbaugh doesn't eat it with a side of his happy pills for dinner, and concludes (behind the leadership of our very own ostensibly Democratic President) "let's rob the old moochers of their earned benefits!"

Continue reading »

Check out the allotted speaking times at CPAC that Conor Friedersdorf spotted.

Ted Cruz: 33-minute keynote speech
Sarah Palin: 16 minutes
Donald Trump: 14 minutes
Bobby Jindal: 13 minutes
Rand Paul: 13 minutes
Rick Perry: 13 minutes
Scott Walker: 13 minutes
Marco Rubio: 11 minutes
Paul Ryan: 11 minutes
Rick Santorum: 7 minutes

So, the first speech is by a guy who claims that Harvard Law School is crawling with "Communists" and dabbles in nutty UN conspiracy theories. Next up, the wildly unpopular former reality show star, half-term governor and loser of the 2008 election. After her, another wildly unpopular reality show star, birther, and failed presidential candidate.

Other speakers include the toxic NRA chief Wayne LaPierre, Teabagger Allen West, who just got bounced out of Congress for his own McCarthyism, and Fox clown Steven Crowder.

Elevating unpopular crazies doesn't seem like a great way to build political movements and win elections, but maybe that's just me.

If the National Rifle Association (NRA) were not so dangerous to the physical health and general welfare of the people of the United States, they'd probably qualify as some of the most unintentionally hilarious people on the planet. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up.

Take executive vice-president of the NRA, (the suspiciously French sounding) Wayne LaPierre. If you started from scratch and constructed an (at least theoretical in his case) human being, you couldn't find a better movie villain. A man who foams at the mouth when fetishising about guns on national TV, attacks sitting Presidents in terms usually reserved for dictators and inaugural-lip syncers and has the look of a howling mad member of Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice's gang from Dick Tracy - replete with the beady eyes, vestigial rage and bad posture.

That Lapierre's little gaggle of government-fearing, 1970s-Death-Wish-obsessing miscreants actually claim they're trying to increase people's safety can almost make your sides hurt from the hysterics, as it carries with it the legitimacy of Manti T'eo giving lectures on Nigerian bank swindles.

These are the guys who released an iPhone app for kids as young as four to shoot at coffin-shaped targets on the one-month anniversary of the Newtown Massacre. That little high-capacity-magazine of brilliance has probably jetted them right past Applebee's on the sliding scale of public-relations brilliance, up next to Alex Rodriguez.

Continue reading »

It takes a special kind of imagination to think of things like these three conservative gun nuts did on the air last week.

First, there is Stan Solomon, conservative radio host and paranoiac, worrying over the private black army Barack Obama will raise to kill white folks with guns.

Right Wing Watch:

But Solomon wasn’t finished: “I believe they will put together a racial force to go against an opposite race resistance, basically a black force to go against a white resistance, and then they will claim anyone resisting the black force they are doing it because they are racist.”

They. Who is they, do you think? "They" is black people, armed to the teeth and commanded by President Obama.

And from there, it just spirals into some kind of dystopian middle-school fantasy, guided by wingnut and Twitter denizen Greg W. Howard, who first claims that race relations were "healing" before Obama was elected. Yes, sure they were. This is how well they were healing. Greg W. Howard, in his own words:

Howard agreed: “You may be right because he has been sowing the seeds of racial hatred; we were healing quite well as a nation on racial issues until Obama came along and now we have a lot of racial discord.”

After arguing that Obama is “not American” and not a natural born citizen, Howard maintained that Obama may begin “wiping out a few hundred people who own guns, pull a large scale Waco or a Ruby Ridge type incident” and have it “tinged it with racial overtones.” But just in case Obama goes through with his plans to “take down” the Internet, “people are setting up phone-trees all over the place” to stop Obama in his tracks.

Yes, that whole racial hatred thing was healing quite nicely until Howard and his ilk decided to attack the African-American president with accusations that he's not really a citizen, right? See, that's how their minds work. They're the ones sowing all the hatred, setting up phone trees to make sure the black dude doesn't kill their internet after he takes away all their guns, and yet it's all President Obama's fault.

They weren't even close to done with the paranoid gnashing of teeth and wailing from the rafters:

“If Obama can take your guns away he can take your car, he can take your home, he can take your bank account, he can take your very life,” Howard said.

Unsurprisingly, Pratt agreed with their insane ramblings: “I do agree that the Obama administration would definitely be capable of something as evil as you were suggesting.”

However, Pratt warned that “a lot of people resolved, ‘no more free Wacos,’” and that if Obama “starts playing the massacre game the way you did at Waco, well, you’re going to get surrounded, you won’t be able to go home safely, your family won’t be safe.”

Larry Pratt and his sidekick Howard make Wayne LaPierre seem almost sane. Almost. These are people who resent the president's Secret Service protection, and why not? I'm amazed they haven't likened that detail to the commanders of Obama's Secret Black Army.

This is why race relations suck in this country. It has nothing to do with Obama, and everything to do with deranged lunatics who have weapons and don't take their meds regularly. People like Solomon and Howard are a dime a dozen. They're the reason mental health services need beefing up in this country. The sad part is that Pratt and LaPierre use them and their paranoia to whip up some profits for their gun manufacturer keepers. Being paranoid is bad enough. Being a paranoid puppet is just pathetic.

I know it's Rush Limbaugh, but he isn't the only one to go in this direction. If there's a Frank Luntz for extreme wingnut talking points, that person has invokec Stalin, Hitler, and the devil himself.

Rush claims here that all "great dictators" are beloved by their people, including Mao, Fidel, and of course, Stalin. Rush bemoans Stalin starving farmers by sending them "either to the Gulag or to the grave." Rush goes on to say that "[Stalin] literally found ways to get rid of all the farmers."

The reason for Stalin's success? According to Rush, he had a "compliant press," while killing off farmers in order to "punish the rich."

Aha! I see. The problem here is that the press is looking away while rich folks kill off the poor working folks. Am I right? Oh, I guess not, because the crux of Rush's argument is that Obama is just like Stalin, punishing rich people while maintaining the proper optics so the press will remain compliant.

Really? Between Rush Limbaugh, Judson Phillips, and Wayne LaPierre, I think beefing up mental health services for blowhard right wing media lobbyist types might be a top priority.

Take another Oxy, Rush, and calm down. Pre-K for all is nothing like Stalin's reign of terror, and normal people know that.

From where I sit, when you have victims of gun violence before you (one of them a former sitting member of Congress, who owned guns herself), including the parents of those innocent children massacred in Newtown, CT, imploring you and your fellow Congressional Critters to pass comprehensive gun control legislation, and your response to that testimony is that the guvmint will pry your gun from your "cold, dead hands", you have no right to hold hearings on the issue because, according to the Rude Pundit, you are mentally ill. You are basically telling these suffering families to go "Cheney" themselves, because dammit, you're going to do what needs to be done to ensure that irresponsible morons can keep their guns.

His Rudeness broke it down (Warning - if you can't stand indelicate language, the Rude Pundit's blog is not for you):

If you wanted to make a case for mental illness as a primary cause of gun violence, you could pretty much get all the evidence you wanted from yesterday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on possible solutions to the mass shooting epidemic in the U.S. There were so many episodes of batsh*t paranoia and outright delusion from the anti-gun law speakers that diagnosed schizophrenics bowed their heads in honor. Honestly, if at some point the NRA's Wayne LaPierre had started scrawling a manifesto in his own sh*t on the walls of the hearing room, the Rude Pundit would have thought, "Well, that was not unexpected."

Let's just lay out the argument quickly. On one side, you have people who want to close a loophole in background checks on gun buyers and who want to ban some semiautomatic weapons and all high-volume magazines, all while making sure that law-abiding citizens and legal immigrants can purchase most every other kind of rifle and handgun, under the idea that some safeguards and minor limitations are not unreasonable. On the other side, you have "I dare you p*ssies to try to pry my right to buy a dozen AR-15s from my cold, dead hands, motherf*uckers."

So you can see how we might be at loggerheads here.

They seemed to turn up the crazy when reports of Hadiya Pendleton's murder and a mass shooting that occurred during former Rep. Gabby Giffords' testimony flowed in.

Honestly, how much more has to happen before the NRA releases that stranglehold they have on our Congress Critters regarding comprehensive gun control legislation? The Second Amendment (which the NRA vociferously makes the basis of their defense) never included the right to pop a cap in someone's ass just because they were Cuban immigrants who got the wrong directions on their GPS and made a wrong turn into your driveway.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (115)

PLAYS: (604)

Embed

Wednesday was a day of shame for Fox News and Megyn Kelly because they found an even darker shade of Goebbel-esque propaganda to paint their airwaves. Yesterday was also a day of gun control hearings which featured talk of background checks, assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Gabby Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly led the way, trying to bring sanity to the proceeding and they managed to offset the lunatic ramblings of Wayne LaPierre.

"Too many children are dying," she said. "We must do something."

Giffords, who survived a gunshot to the head two years ago during an assassination attempt that left six people dead, read slowly but forcefully from prepared remarks, and acknowledged that "speaking is difficult."

"But I need to say something important. Violence is a big problem," she said. "It will be hard. But the time is now. You must act. Be bold. Be courageous. Americans are counting on you."

That didn't stop Wayne from utterly embarrassing himself. And it also set the stage for another embarrassment; this time from FOX who used another tragic shooting to promote their pro-gun agenda:

Kelly: Well, a big hearing today in Washington DC as witnesses both for and against testified about firearms the second amendment and ways to keep our children safe.

But as we watched this debate about assault weapons and high capacity magazines, we are hearing a growing number of people suggesting that adding a ban on those will not address America's gun violence. That point illustrated in part today in a heartbreaking story out of Chicago. A fifteen-year-old honor student was shot and killed near her school. Just last week this woman had taken part in events surrounding president Obama's inauguration in DC and now she is dead, thanks to a senseless act. Trace Gallagher has the story.

Megyn Kelly and Fox News are trying to make the case against putting in actual regulations on an out-of-control gun culture in this country by using the tragic death of Hadiya Pendleton, the girl who had just attended President Obama's second inauguration, to make a point. They argue that, since she got killed by a handgun in Chicago, which has very strict gun laws, a ban on high-capacity mags and Bushmasters would be useless. I mean, this is sick.

Continue reading »

I have to admit it. I've gotten so used to Meet The Press's Dancin' Dave slobbering over his Villager guests that I didn't expect much from his Wayne LaPierre interview yesterday. (You can argue that news orgs keep giving credibility to Wacky Wayne by virtue of inviting him on in the first place, but still.) Gregory clearly did his homework and called out the NRA exec on virtually every single point. Well, most of them: I do find it deeply offensive that LaPierre keeps referring to mentally ill people as "monsters,"

DAVID GREGORY: So here's something you said on Friday that struck me. Because I think this is really the nub of the argument about armed security.

(Videotape)

WAYNE LAPIERRE: What if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday, he had been confronted by qualified, armed security? Will you at least admit it's possible that 26 innocent lives might have been spared? Is that so abhorrent to you that you would rather continue to risk the alternative?

DAVID GREGORY: Because that's your standard is that fewer people should be killed. That's the goal here. And the standard is, if it's possible, your words, if it's possible that lives could be spared, shouldn't we try that? That's your standard, isn't it?

WAYNE LAPIERRE: I tell you, my standard is this. You can't legislate morality. Legislation works on the sane. Legislation works on the law abiding.

DAVID GREGORY: Fairness--

WAYNE LAPIERRE: It doesn't work on criminals. It doesn't work on the--

DAVID GREGORY: If it's possible to reduce the loss of life--

WAYNE LAPIERRE: There are--

DAVID GREGORY: --you're up for trying it.

WAYNE LAPIERRE: There are monsters out there every day, and we need to do something to stop them. And they're not--

DAVID GREGORY: If it's possible to reduce the loss of life, you're worth trying it, correct?

WAYNE LAPIERRE: If it's possible to reduce the loss of life--

DAVID GREGORY: That's what you say.

WAYNE LAPIERRE: Yeah, I want it. That's what I'm proposing.

DAVID GREGORY: Okay. So let me widen the argument. Let's stipulate that you're right. Let's say armed guards might work. Let's widen the argument out a little bit. So here is a magazine for ammunition that carries 30 bullets. Now isn't it possible that, if we got rid of these, if we replaced them in said, "Well, you could only have a magazine that carries five bullets or ten bullets," isn't it just possible that we can reduce the carnage in a situation like Newtown?

WAYNE LAPIERRE: I don't believe that's going to make one difference. There are so many different ways to evade that, even if you had that. You had that for ten years when Dianne Feinstein passed that ban in '94. It was on the books. Columbine occurred right in the middle of it. It didn't make any difference. I know everybody-- that this town wants to argue about gun control. I don't think it's what will work. What will work is this. I'll tell you this.

DAVID GREGORY: But (INAUDIBLE PHRASE) this a matter of logic, Mr. LaPierre. Because anybody watching this is going to say, "Hey, wait a minute. I just heard Mr. LaPierre say that the standard is we should try anything that might reduce the violence." Are you telling me it's not a matter of common sense that, if you don't have an ability to shoot off 30 rounds without reloading that just possibly you could reduce the loss of life?

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (141)

PLAYS: (2426)

Embed

While Wayne LaPierre was holding what has to be one of the most bizarre and otherworldly press conferences ever, a crazed man was roving up and down a rural road in Pennsylvania shooting people.

Via WJACtv.com:

The Blair County district attorney said that four people, including the alleged gunman, are dead after a series of shootings along a rural road on Friday.

The district attorney said the victims are one woman and three men, including the gunman.

Three Pennsylvania state troopers were injured. One was shot in the chest and had a bulletproof vest on; one was injured in a crash; and one was injured by flying debris. All three troopers are expected to be OK.

The scene covers several miles and happened on Juniata Valley Road just outside Geeseytown.

Courtney Brennan of WPXI-TV in Pittsburgh reported that the suspected gunman was “mobile” at one point and went up and down a rural road and shot victims.

Now I suppose we could all just attribute this to another murder-suicide and blame the gunman, not the gun, because that's what the NRA wants us to do. My problem with that is that it happens too often to too many innocent bystanders. In this case, we seem to have someone who decided he could just roll up the road and pick off anyone he could catch in his sight. At this point, the reason for it doesn't really matter as much as the fact that it was easy for him to do. He had the means, motive and opportunity.

Here's what Mayor Bloomberg had to say about the NRA press conference, and this tragedy places an exclamation point on it:

Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.

Whatever this gunman's reason was for hunting people down on a rural road and shooting them, it fits the vision of a world LaPierre wants to create. I believe more of us want a different world, where we're not hunting down neighbors and killing them, or fearing a world where we're think we have to make war on a government of, by and for the people.

As a surviving family member of a victim of a rampage shooting back in the 70s when they didn't happen as often as they do now, I am raising my voice along with many, many others to call for some sanity in this debate.

Let's start with the Sunday shows. David Gregory needs to step up and get real on Meet the Press this weekend. No softball interview for LaPierre. Make him answer the hard questions, like why gun dealers get immunity and why LaPierre thinks we should turn our schools into prisons instead of simply enacting some sane gun laws.

This is a complex problem. It won't be solved overnight and it won't ever go away completely. But there are things that can be done to mitigate it and turn the tide away from senseless acts of violence wrought on innocent victims with vile weapons.

DOWNLOADS: (118)

PLAYS: (1205)

Embed

[UPDATE: Transcript up now.]

So Wayne LaPierre, the batsh*t crazy face of the NRA, held the Washington press corps hostage for a half-hour this morning, rambling, excusing and blaming video games, liberals and gun-free school zones for the 27 deaths in Newtown last week.

The crazy train was only briefly derailed twice, when Code Pink protesters interrupted the press conference (which was really a speech). God bless 'em, they only said what everyone in the room was thinking -- and what real leaders would have been saying all along.

As this mess unfolded, I found I was as angry at the media as I was at the NRA. Is there any wingnut so crazy that the librul media will refuse them a national platform? Of course not! LaPierre will be Dancing Dave Gregory's guest on Press the Meat this weekend, and he will be accorded the same respect and thoughtful consideration as a Bishop Desmond Tutu.

In a way, though, Wayne may have done us all a favor. Normal people, anyone except the dyed-in-the-wool gun worshippers, will be repulsed by his rationalizations, and appalled by his "School Shield" program to put ARMED VOLUNTEERS IN EVERY SCHOOL.

As my mother would have said, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he's just plain crazy."

(I'll link to the transcript when it's available. You can watch the whole thing here.)