What We Know About Sandy Hook

The official police investigation into the killer behind the Sandy Hook massacre has closed and the final report offer frustratingly few answers. Authorities found no evidence that he'd ever spoken about any plans to commit the crime to anyone else, but that this crime was committed for reasons we'll never know. He'd had no contact with anyone at the school, so it couldn't have been some argument or feud. And the "violent video games" theory? Adam Lanza seemed obsessed with only one video game in particular, according to CNN.


But while many of his video games were violent, others were not. For months before the killings at Sandy Hook, he would go to a movie theater on weekends to play the dance game "Dance Dance Revolution" for hours, the report recounts.


Maybe he was playing violent video games at home. But so do plenty of other people. Only one went out and committed an unimaginably horrific crime. If a video game drove him to a murderous state of mind, there's more evidence that video game was "Dance Dance Revolution" than "Call of Duty."

However, much of what we do know is damning. Lanza was isolated by his own mental health issues. And those issues could not have been helped by the fact that his mother was a gun-obsessed survivalist. For a young man with mental health issues, having the only person who was really in his day to day life be so far removed in her world view from anything resembling reality can't possibly have been helpful. And the presence of an arsenal of real guns proved far more deadly than any games involving imaginary ones. CNN again:


On December 14, 2012, the morning after Nancy Lanza had returned from a trip to New Hampshire, her son shot her four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle. Then it was off to the school where he once had been a relatively happy child, packing four other guns and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition. He fired more than 150 shots from a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle before turning a 10mm Glock pistol on himself once police arrived, according to the report.


That's what we know. Anything about video games or mental illness or parenting is speculation. The one thing we know about the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School is that it was carried out by someone with more ammo than any responsible person could possibly need, fired from the barrel of a gun designed to shoot that ammunition into human bodies at the fastest rate possible without being fully automatic. Lanza's ability to fire bullets into kids and teachers was limited only by the speed at which he could pull the trigger and the capacity of his magazine. Those meager limitations proved to be no impediment.

That's what we know. When Lanza went from classroom to classroom, gunning down kids, we know he didn't use a video game. He used a .223-caliber Bushmaster assault rifle. That's what we know. That's pretty much all we know.

You'd think that this knowledge would be enough to do drive us to something. But that would be discounting the bottomless cowardice of people like Lanza's mother who collect ridiculously dangerous guns under the impression --now tragically proven inaccurate-- that each one she owned enhanced her safety. And it would be discounting the tremendous evil of gun manufacturers and lobbyists who, like Big Tobacco before them, are completely comfortable with profit margins being inflated by death tolls. And it would be discounting the mendacity of rightwing media trolls, whose only real argument is "liberals are always wrong," which forces them to oppose even the most common sense solutions to gun violence -- or anything else, for that matter.

That's what we know. We know Adam Lanza was able to carry out the massacre because he was able to gain access to weapons which by no stretch of even the most inventive spinmeister's imagination enhanced anyone's safety that day. And we know that there are people, whether through greed or cowardice or plain stupidity, who are more than willing to leave that as the status quo. And because of them, something like this will happen again.

That's what we know.

-Wisco

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

What Happens When GOP Economic Fairy Tales are Applied to the Real World

A piece in the New York Times this weekend compared the economic fates of Wisconsin and Minnesota, two states that were in roughly similar economic condition in 2012. Minnesota elected a Democratic government, while Wisconsin chose Republicans. And it was with this choice that the two neighboring states' fortunes began to diverge.


Three years into Mr. Walker’s term, Wisconsin lags behind Minnesota in job creation and economic growth. As a candidate, Mr. Walker promised to produce 250,000 private-sector jobs in his first term, but a year before the next election that number is less than 90,000. Wisconsin ranks 34th for job growth. Mr. Walker’s defenders blame the higher spending and taxes of his Democratic predecessor for these disappointments, but according to Forbes’s annual list of best states for business, Wisconsin continues to rank in the bottom half.

Along with California, Minnesota is the fifth fastest growing state economy, with private-sector job growth exceeding pre-recession levels. Forbes rates Minnesota as the eighth best state for business. Republicans deserve some of the credit, particularly for their commitment to education reform. They also argue that Minnesota’s new growth stems from the low taxes and reduced spending under Mr. Dayton’s Republican predecessor, Tim Pawlenty. But Minnesota’s job growth was subpar during Mr. Pawlenty’s eight-year tenure and recovered only under Mr. Dayton.


Trust me, it sucks when your state is used as an example of economic failure. While Walker complains that previous higher taxes and spending are dragging the state down (a tough argument to make -- the mechanics are so bad he doesn't even bother to explain them), Minnesota has raised taxes and spending to great success. And that spending has been distinctly Keynesian. NYT reports that the "lion’s share of Minnesota’s new tax revenue was sunk into human capital." Wisconsin, of course, has been anti-Keynesian, reaching into workers' pockets to take pay and benefits away.

And that's where conservative economic policies fail. One way of looking at Republican economic theories is to say that any government involvement in the economy is bad. Why? Well, I actually haven't heard a good explanation of that. It just is. It seems to be less of a logical argument and more of a moral one -- i.e., progressive taxation is unfair, as is providing some sort of even minimal safety net. Where they used to argue that taxation was metaphorical theft, they now argue that it's literal theft. Taxation and social programs have been lifted out of the "good or bad for society" argument, because conservative can't win that argument. History proves again and again that progressive taxation and social spending are to the common good. They "promote general the welfare," to use a phrase from the preamble -- i.e., the mission statement --  of the Constitution.

If it's "unfair" to tax the wealthy and corporations at a higher rate, in order to at least try to guarantee a bearable level of existence for those in need, then cry me a freakin' river, moneybags. If the right were really as objective as they claim to be, they'd argue that fair and unfair are irrelevant. What matters is "works" or "doesn't work."

Of course, if they really were that objective, conservative economics would've died the first time Reagan raised taxes.

But Reaganomics lumbers, zombie-like, on -- both dead and brainless. And it's because the argument isn't so much a recipe for a healthy economy -- or even for basic fairness -- but a rationalization for allowing a small number of very fortunate people to transfer wealth from the bottom to the top. In Wisconsin, that means cutting benefits for workers and the poor to pay for new goodies for the wealthy. What's that gotten us? An economy in a downward spiral, as workers no longer have any money to spend and demand drops. And of course, cutting spending while you've made certain consumer demand will plummet is like drilling holes in an already sinking boat; you've already poked a hole in the hull by taking money away from workers and now you're further reducing demand by cutting government spending.

In short, what Walker has done is a recipe for destroying an economy and -- lo and behold -- it's working. We need to be more like those crazy lefties across the Mississippi, who care less about what whiny one-percenters think is "unfair" and more about what works for everybody

-Wisco.

[photo by Nick Ares]

Murder as a By-Product of Rightwing Fearmongering

Josh Marshall writes that the BS storm surrounding Obamacare right now has become a "white noise of derp and mendacity" -- i.e., there's so much spin and propaganda here that it all sort of cancels itself out, at least in terms of specificity. There's a lot of criticism out there, but there isn't any single line of attack. Apparently, piling on over the rocky rollout hasn't seemed to have been enough to do much of anything. More is needed. The volume mut be increase. The anger must be red-hot. The rightwing herd must be driven to  panic.The derp must peg the stupidometer.

And that's just what Republicans are planning to do -- if they can manage to settle on one single messaging strategy. Marshall warns us of one narrative that seems to be forming on the right: "Top Republicans are now making a concerted effort to convince the public that Obamacare 'navigators', people trained to help people navigate the new system, will steal their identities and private personal information."

They're diving on testimony from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and -- surprise! -- taking it out of context to induce hysteria. On Nov. 6, Sebelius was asked whether it was a requirement that the Obamacare "navigators" undergo a criminal background check. She said there wasn't a federal requirement, but that they were farming the job out to private contractors. Those entities have "the responsibility to screen their individual navigators and make sure that they are sufficiently trained for the job."

Who are these fly-by-night organizations filled with unchecked felons? According to the report, "local United Way chapters, higher education institutions and the like."

But hey, if slandering the United Way gets people to think Obamacare is a massive ripoff, then that's fine. Because there is nothing on this Earth more important that getting Republicans elected. If you trick people into staying with lousy insurance -- or no insurance at all -- who cares? Not the self-serving nihilists who make up the current GOP. Besides, if everyone starts believing crazy, made up BS about Obamacare navigators, what's the worst that could happen?

Oh yeah, some teabagging nutjob could use his Sacred Second Amendment Freedoms to put down some tyrants. You know, like Paul Anthony Ciancia, who shot and killed a TSA agent at LAX. He reportedly had anti-government 'patriot' writings on him at the time. Remember why Ciancia assassinated a TSA agent? Allow me to remind you.


Southern Poverty Law Center: The TSA, short for the Transportation Security Administration, is an agency of the DHS charged with ensuring the security of transportation, most notably air transportation. Although it has not been widely singled out by Patriots, it has been subjected to criticism by far-right homophobes, among others, who have alleged that TSA agents engaging in hand searches are really sexually groping travelers.

One witness told MSNBC that Ciancia asked people at the airport if they were TSA and, if they said they were not, moved on without trying to harm them.


So rightwing propagandists told Ciancia that TSA agents were sexually molesting passengers at airports and, being a typical empty-vessel 'bagger, he believed every word of it. And he can't possibly be the only one. If he was moved to terrorism by the lie, how many others are planning -- or on the brink of planning -- similar "strikes"?

And now Republicans, having learned absolutely nothing about the politics of smear from the death of an innocent public servant, are at it again. They're portraying people who are only trying to help as criminals, intent on stealing your identity -- just one of the many evil tentacles of Obamacare.

Or maybe instead of saying they haven't learned anything, it would be more accurate to say they just don't care. Have I used the word "nihilist" yet? I see I have. We don't even need to get into anti-abortion terrorism, do we? Republicans clearly don't care about the consequences of their hysteria-inducing, over-the-top rhetoric. If they did, the years of bombings and murder would've made them more cautious and less prone to apocalyptic hyperbole.

So if some United Way employee takes one in the chest from a gullible, terrified nutjob with an AR-15 and a gross misunderstand of his Second Amendment rights (a misunderstanding that Republicans promote, BTW), so what? All that matters is that Republicans get elected.

Any other consequence is irrelevant.

-Wisco

[photo by bixentro]

A 'Fix' for Obamacare -- Do Nothing

We can probably stop worrying about Republican Rep. Fred Upton's (R-Blue Cross) "Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013" now.

Buzzfeed: President Obama threatened Thursday to veto a House bill that would allow insurance companies to continue offering existing health plans after millions received cancelation notices due to the Affordable Care Act.

The threat came hours after the president asked health insurance companies to allow individuals to keep their existing, canceled plans for a year.

The “Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013,” sponsored by Republican Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, would allow insurance companies to continue to offer plans that were available before the new Obamacare rules took effect. The House is scheduled to vote on the bill Friday and a handful of Democrats were expected to support it.

Obama’s fix allows only individuals whose policies were canceled in 2013 to re-enroll in their plans next year, while the Upton bill would allow insurers to sell the plans to new customers and would not be limited to just one year.


Overriding a presidential veto is an uphill battle in even the best of circumstances, but the idea that enough Democrats would defect to create a two-thirds majority in both houses here doesn't seem at all likely. You can pass a bill in a hurried panic, but the president can sit on it a while and wait for everyone to cool off before he vetoes it. Seriously, this may get a lot of press because of a House vote on the bill today, but it is most probably dead.

And this veto threat throws some cold water on serial turncoat dem Mary Landrieu's companion bill in the Senate. If the votes aren't there to override, Harry Reid may not even bring it to the floor.

So this is how this could pan out: everyone freaks out over something that's a lot simpler than they're making it and backs an insane plan that can only make everything worse. This plan then falls apart and some people turn serious -- in the best case scenario, enough get serious to get something halfway constructive done.

And if they don't? Well, then you've got the status quo. Obamacare and the White House take a few political hits for the team (the President's done getting reelected, he can afford to be a political scapegoat), everyone argues over how terrible everything is, and eventually the whole problem resolves itself as the exchanges start working, people get better insurance, and the clamor fades away. This is the sort of problem that'll eventually fix itself if everyone stops poking at it.

Of course, that's not the best scenario. Those few who actually are having their policies canceled will remain uninsured through no fault of their own and someone really needs to cook up some sort of a Plan B, even if only to help this relative handful of people for a few weeks.

But that aside, this problem is a political one, not a logistical one. This dust up has a built-in shelf life. This is one issue where gridlock would actually work out well for everyone -- except Republicans, of course, who want to sabotage Obamacare at every opportunity. For them, the chance to "fix" Obamacare is a chance to break it. So they shouldn't be given the chance.

If we just sit right were we are, trapped in the stalemate of a broken political system, that's to the Democrat's advantage. Obamacare's rocky rollout won't be an issue in the 2014 elections, because by then everything will be working fine.

All Democrats have to do is to resist the urge to pick at it.

-Wisco

[image by DonkeyHotey]

Saving Obamacare from Democrats

For the most part, the insurance cancellation controversy is not firmly grounded in reality. Of course, there are the horror stories that don't stand up to scrutiny, but there is also the mostly unreported fact that those who are losing their insurance are doing so because the Affordable Care Act makes terrible insurance coverage illegal. It's not so much a story about Obamacare cancelling coverage, as it is one of insurance companies scrapping policies rather than fixing them to make them less of a rip off. This became apparent when the subject of one such ObamaScare story was presented with the sort of plan she would qualify for under the ACA; "I would jump at it," said Florida resident Dianne Barrette.

The problem isn't so much that people are finding their coverage plans canceled, the problem is that the website where they can shop for new insurance isn't working at the moment. For people like Barrette, the fact that better and more affordable insurance exists is cold comfort, since she can't actually apply for it. In other words, it's not the cancellations that is the problem demanding a fix, it's the website -- or, at least, the mechanism for shopping for insurance. Allowing people to continue to get insurance coverage that's highway robbery is no fix at all, since that was one of the big problems in the first place.

Still, that fact isn't keeping some panicky Democrats from threatening to buckle under the weight of the story.


The Hill: House Democrats on Wednesday expressed increasing frustration at the Obama administration’s inability to improve the rollout of ObamaCare.

Democrats said they’re worried about "being dragged into this non-stop cycle" of bad news about the ObamaCare rollout, rather than celebrating the successes of the law they helped to pass, a Democratic aide said.

"They're voicing those frustrations with the administration," the aide said following a Democratic Caucus meeting where administration officials got an earful from exasperated lawmakers.

With the House vote just two days away, many Democrats are urging the White House to come up with an administrative alternative to legislation sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) that would allow insurance companies to offer their old insurance plans.


Upton's bill would allow insurers to continue to offer this crap insurance until 2015 -- and this is supposedly a fix for a problem that will most likely be resolved in a matter of weeks. It is insane. And it would be bad for consumers. The ACA keeps costs down by getting nearly everyone into the risk pool with something at least approaching comprehensive coverage. By allowing insurers to continue to offer these cut rate plans that cover almost nothing, congress would be guaranteeing higher insurance premiums and screwing consumers by allowing insurers to screw other consumers. In the insurance economy, someone else's lousy or nonexistent coverage really is every one's problem.

And the politics. My God, the brainless and lousy politics...


Jonathon Chait: Undermining Obamacare in order to placate angry individual insurance holders makes no sense even on narrow political terms. People losing individual insurance they like are angry right now, but they’re a tiny minority of the market, and their anger will fade over time as the exchanges come online. Higher premiums would affect far more people, and their impact would be felt much closer to the midterm elections. Imagine it's next year, insurers are pulling out of the exchanges, rates are rising, all because of a law Congress hastily passed the year before — is that a better situation?


No, it's not a better situation. It's a boneheaded move that actually makes everything worse in the long run. Despite what the media is saying, Obamacare is not in a tailspin. Only congressional Democrats can put it into a tailspin. And fear of a plane crash is a really lousy reason to crash the damned plane deliberately.

What's needed is a fix for the purchasing problem. And that can't possibly be insurmountable. Computers haven't been around forever, you know, and people were buying things in exchanges long before the word "website" stopped being complete gibberish. If you want to fix the problem, then fix the real problem -- i.e., that of getting better and more affordable coverage to people who need it -- rather than address the pretend problem that the sensationalist media and Republicans want everyone to freak out over.

Congressional Democrats are going to need an alternative and they're turning out to be very bad at coming up with one themselves -- or of even recognizing a lousy one when they see it. The White House is going to have to step forward and provide some leadership. Otherwise panicked Democratic buffalo are in danger of stampeding themselves straight over a cliff.

-Wisco

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

2014 and the Virginian Microcosm

The President is facing record low approvals -- which makes him the most popular man in Washington. Observe:


NBC News' First Read: How low can President Obama and Congress go? We’re watching both continue to sink in polls. A Quinnipiac survey released yesterday found that Obama’s approval rating had dropped to 39%, which is his lowest point in that poll (we’re in Bush territory, folks). More ominously, just 44% said the president was honest and trustworthy -- yet another all-time low -- compared with 52% who disagreed.  Meanwhile, Gallup showed that Congress’ job-approval rating had declined to a mere 9%, which is the lowest mark in the poll’s 39-year history of asking that question. This race to the bottom isn’t new, of course. Our NBC/WSJ poll released late last month -- after the government shutdown, after the standoff over the debt limit, and after a month’s worth of reported problems with the federal health-care website -- also found Obama (42% approval) and the Republican Party (22%-53% fav/unfav) reaching all-time lows. But what these new polls show is that the slides don’t appear to be stopping.


So free falling Republican of free falling Obama? I think most thinking people would rather be in the President's position right now.  There's usually a second term slump, when the president becomes emblematic of the status quo -- and this is probably one of the more extreme examples of that -- but congress doesn't have that excuse. First Read speculates on what this means for the midterms and largely ends with a shrug, but there's a really good small scale experiment out there that's just concluded and is nearly a perfect representation of what many 2014 voters will face; i.e., given a choice between two candidates who suck and who voters hate, which would they choose?


USA Today: Top campaign aides to Virginia Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe and his GOP opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, agreed Wednesday on two things about the just-concluded bitter campaign: that the federal government shutdown was a critical factor in Cuccinelli's defeat, and that political fact-checking has become so prevalent it is in danger of become irrelevant.

Chris LaCivita, who served as Cuccinelli's chief political strategist, and Ellen Qualls, McAuliffe's senior adviser, shared their insights on the race at a post-election forum organized by George Mason University and the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.

LaCivita said that the shutdown "more than anything ... is what cost us the race" because it knocked the campaign completely off-message at a critical moment.


"We launched our first TV ad Sept. 25 leading up to Oct. 1 because we had everything geared toward Oct. 1," he went on. "That that was going to be the launch pad and then — boom — shutdown."

Cuccinelli tried to distance himself from the shutdown, but his close relationship to the Tea Party nuts responsible for it pretty much made that impossible. As Governor of Virginia, he would've been in no position to contribute to the gridlock in Washington and he wouldn't be shutting government down or crashing the economy with the debt ceiling or any of the other all-out assaults on the American economy that Tea Party Republicans have become so hated for. It wasn't that people were afraid he'd be a DC 'bagger -- because he couldn't be. But the endorsements by fruitpies told voters who he was. And who he was was someone that voters liked even less than gladhanding used car salesman Terry McAuliffe. Behind all the talk about liberty and freedom and how the Tea Party is all about what the founders had in mind, there's a closet full of molotov cocktails, ready to be thrown at anything or anyone they disagree with -- consequences be damned.

Now imagine it's 2014 and you're a Tea Party fruitpie running for reelection. How do you think that's going to work out? McAuliffe adviser Ellen Qualls said that internal polling showed a close race throughout, but that "we spiked during the shutdown. If the election had happened during the shutdown we would have had a bigger win."

Will the shutdown be a big issue with voters come November 2014? Maybe not. But how they behaved during the shutdown, which side they took, speaks to their character. If the government shutdown isn't going to be first and foremost in people's minds next year, they aren't going to like the shutdown any more than they do now, either. And, like Cuccinelli, it won't be so much about what they did as it will be about what kind of politician they are. Whether that's enough to give Democrats a good election night remains to be seen, but it won't hurt Democrats to remind people who these Republican Tea Party types are.

It won't hurt them at all.

-Wisco

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

2014 and the Virginian Microcosm

The President is facing record low approvals -- which makes him the most popular man in Washington. Observe:


NBC News' First Read: How low can President Obama and Congress go? We’re watching both continue to sink in polls. A Quinnipiac survey released yesterday found that Obama’s approval rating had dropped to 39%, which is his lowest point in that poll (we’re in Bush territory, folks). More ominously, just 44% said the president was honest and trustworthy -- yet another all-time low -- compared with 52% who disagreed.  Meanwhile, Gallup showed that Congress’ job-approval rating had declined to a mere 9%, which is the lowest mark in the poll’s 39-year history of asking that question. This race to the bottom isn’t new, of course. Our NBC/WSJ poll released late last month -- after the government shutdown, after the standoff over the debt limit, and after a month’s worth of reported problems with the federal health-care website -- also found Obama (42% approval) and the Republican Party (22%-53% fav/unfav) reaching all-time lows. But what these new polls show is that the slides don’t appear to be stopping.


So free falling Republican of free falling Obama? I think most thinking people would rather be in the President's position right now.  There's usually a second term slump, when the president becomes emblematic of the status quo -- and this is probably one of the more extreme examples of that -- but congress doesn't have that excuse. First Read speculates on what this means for the midterms and largely ends with a shrug, but there's a really good small scale experiment out there that's just concluded and is nearly a perfect representation of what many 2014 voters will face; i.e., given a choice between two candidates who suck and who voters hate, which would they choose?


USA Today: Top campaign aides to Virginia Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe and his GOP opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, agreed Wednesday on two things about the just-concluded bitter campaign: that the federal government shutdown was a critical factor in Cuccinelli's defeat, and that political fact-checking has become so prevalent it is in danger of become irrelevant.

Chris LaCivita, who served as Cuccinelli's chief political strategist, and Ellen Qualls, McAuliffe's senior adviser, shared their insights on the race at a post-election forum organized by George Mason University and the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project.

LaCivita said that the shutdown "more than anything ... is what cost us the race" because it knocked the campaign completely off-message at a critical moment.


"We launched our first TV ad Sept. 25 leading up to Oct. 1 because we had everything geared toward Oct. 1," he went on. "That that was going to be the launch pad and then — boom — shutdown."

Cuccinelli tried to distance himself from the shutdown, but his close relationship to the Tea Party nuts responsible for it pretty much made that impossible. As Governor of Virginia, he would've been in no position to contribute to the gridlock in Washington and he wouldn't be shutting government down or crashing the economy with the debt ceiling or any of the other all-out assaults on the American economy that Tea Party Republicans have become so hated for. It wasn't that people were afraid he'd be a DC 'bagger -- because he couldn't be. But the endorsements by fruitpies told voters who he was. And who he was was someone that voters liked even less than gladhanding used car salesman Terry McAuliffe. Behind all the talk about liberty and freedom and how the Tea Party is all about what the founders had in mind, there's a closet full of molotov cocktails, ready to be thrown at anything or anyone they disagree with -- consequences be damned.

Now imagine it's 2014 and you're a Tea Party fruitpie running for reelection. How do you think that's going to work out? McAuliffe adviser Ellen Qualls said that internal polling showed a close race throughout, but that "we spiked during the shutdown. If the election had happened during the shutdown we would have had a bigger win."

Will the shutdown be a big issue with voters come November 2014? Maybe not. But how they behaved during the shutdown, which side they took, speaks to their character. If the government shutdown isn't going to be first and foremost in people's minds next year, they aren't going to like the shutdown any more than they do now, either. And, like Cuccinelli, it won't be so much about what they did as it will be about what kind of politician they are. Whether that's enough to give Democrats a good election night remains to be seen, but it won't hurt Democrats to remind people who these Republican Tea Party types are.

It won't hurt them at all.

-Wisco

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

Shutting Down Debate at Gunpoint

Here's a fun item from over the weekend. While you were doing whatever it was you were doing yesterday, a fine and not at all cowardly group of Texans who are not at all lunatics were busy doing this:


ThinkProgress: On Saturday, nearly 40 armed men, women, and children waited outside a Dallas, Texas area restaurant to protest a membership meeting for the state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun safety advocacy group formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

According to a spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action (MDA), the moms were inside the Blue Mesa Grill when members of Open Carry Texas (OCT) — an open carry advocacy group — “pull[ed] up in the parking lot and start[ed] getting guns out of their trunks.” The group then waited in the parking lot for the four MDA members to come out. The spokeswoman said that the restaurant manager did not want to call 911, for fear of “inciting a riot” and waited for the gun advocates to leave. The group moved to a nearby Hooters after approximately two hours.

MDA later released a statement calling OCT “gun bullies” who “disagree[d] with our goal of changing America’s gun laws and policies to protect our children and families.” The statement added that the members and restaurant customers were “terrified by what appeared to be an armed ambush.” A member of OCT responded by tweeting, “I guess I’m a #gunbullies #Comeandtakeit.”


So, on learning that they'd panicked innocent people, Mr. Second Amendment Hero here thought, "Good!" Clearly, that was the intent. There are two words to describe someone like that -- a thug or a prick. One does not rule out the other.

On further thought, there are three words. You'll need to add "criminal." "Licensed gun owners are allowed to carry concealed weapons," the report continues, "but Texas is one of six states that prohibits open carry of firearms."

Being members of an open carry advocacy group, these people knew they were breaking the law. After all, they exist to change that law. They made a conscious choice to engage in criminal behavior. Just as they made the choice to carry all outward appearances of an angry lynch mob, come to punish some moms for the unforgivable crime of discussing ways to reduce gun violence. The Second Amendment Heroes from OCT weren't interested in discussing anything. They were interested in shutting down discussion literally at gun point. Because nothing says freedom like an armed goon putting a gun in your face and saying, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!"

But they won't succeed in shutting down discussion -- mostly because the average American is not so cowardly as they are. When one group of people feels the need to armed constantly and one thinks there are better, less stupid, and less insane solutions to violence, it's not hard to identify the more courageous of the two.

What's bothering me though is this, which happened just the day before:


KHOU: A massive house party advertised on Twitter turned violent when two teenagers were shot to death and 19 others were injured late Saturday in northwest Harris County [Texas], deputies said.

According to Harris County Sheriff's Office, the mass shooting happened just before 11 p.m. at a birthday party for 18-year-old Mariah Boulden in the 7300 block of Enchanted Creek Drive.

Sheriff Adrian Garcia described the scene from Saturday night as a “birthday party gone wild.”


"Two high school students, 18-year-old male and 16-year-old female, were killed, while 19 others were injured during the shooting," the report tells us. Just one of the mass shootings that have become such a daily occurrence in the US that they don't even make national news. The blood-soaked and bullet hole-ridden wallpaper of our daily lives -- so constant and ubiquitous that we don't even see it anymore.

There were no armed protesters at the scene the next day, demanding that people use their firearms responsibly -- no unspoken threat to gun down anyone who didn't. No, they were too busy getting ready to go harass a handful of unarmed moms who met to talk about the sort of things that Second Amendment Heroes would rather you just ignore. Things that constant repetition makes so easy for the media to ignore. Another day, another senseless mass shooting -- *yawn* are you sure there isn't some celebrity nip-slip out there someplace to report on?

So a group of armed psychopaths went to menace people who wanted to regulate firearms. In other words, the day after a mass shooting, a bunch of gun-toting cowards went to make sure that people like the shooters would always have easy access to plenty of firearms with plenty of ammo, so they could get hammered at a kegger and start using guns the way other people use firecrackers. And, if some kids are shot and some others are trampled? Tough luck.

That's clearly what the Founders intended. So sleep well, gun fetishists of America. Open Carry Texas is out there making sure your guns are safe.

Your children, not so much. But you've got to have your priorities.

-Wisco

[photo distributed by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America]

Rightwing Homophobes Going the Way of the Dinosaurs

If you were to ask any homophobic Christian right nutjob, the US Senate is Gaytopia. As the Employee Non-Discrimination Act, it faced almost no vocal opposition on the chamber floor. Sure, most Republicans voted against ENDA -- only ten finally voted to pass the bill -- but only one, Dan Coats, gave a floor speech trying to whip up votes against it. There was virtually no active opposition from Senators.

Needless to say, the religious right isn't taking this very well.


Buzzfeed: The silence from the Senate Republican caucus stunned social conservatives, who have been arguing that the legislation, which provides workplace protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees, will undermine religious liberty.

“I’m mystified and deeply disappointed, because there are profound constitutional issues at stake here,” said the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer. “The entire First Amendment is being put up for auction by this bill and it’s inexcusable that no Republican senators are willing to stand up and defend the Constitution.”

“I believe they have been intimidated into silence by the bullies and bigots of Big Gay,” Fischer added. “They know if they speak out … they will be the target of vitriol, the target of animosity, and very likely, the target of hate."


There's plenty more where that came from, if you really want to wallow through the piece, but suffice it to say that the anti-gay hate industry would very much like to know why Senate Republicans can't be more like their brethren in the House, where ENDA is likely headed to die.

The honest answer to that question would be something those terrified of the ever-progressing march of the Homosexual Menace are not going to want to hear; the Senate represents the opinions of the American people, while the House of Representatives does not. The current House majority is the product of snaky, wandering, gerrymandered district borders drawn around the craziest voters in many states. In other words, gerrymandering is a process wherein Republicans choose their voters, not where voters choose Republicans.

The House of Representatives has become a talk radio fantasyland, where Republicans represent a "real" America that is, in fact, manufactured entirely by unfairly drawn congressional districts. In the last election cycle, more people voted for Democrats, yet Republicans retained their house majority. Had those districts been drawn more honestly, the make up of the House would look a lot more like the voter turnout -- i.e., nowhere near as Republican.

And, as a result, nowhere near as crazy.

If people like Bryan Fischer want to know why the Senate isn't more like the House, there's the answer: A Senate seat is a statewide election that can't be gerrymandered. So the Senate isn't more like the House because Republicans weren't able to thwart democracy and steal that chamber.

And that's the bad news for the nutcases. People didn't speak out against ENDA because it wasn't safe to do so. The Senate represents America far, far better that the lunatic asylum of the lower chamber. If Republican Senators were "intimidated into silence by the bullies and bigots of Big Gay," as Fischer put it, it's because the average American voter is one of those bullies.

Outside of the entirely artificial environment of the gerrymandered district, institutional homophobia cannot survive. It's like an endangered creature, kept from extinction only by the population that still exists in zoos -- but in this case, there's only one zoo and voters are going to shut down the House Republican exhibit eventually. Eventually, their bones will be displayed next to other nearly extinct ideologies in museums, like segregationists and opponents of women's suffrage. Exhibit viewers will shake their heads and wonder how such absurd creatures ever existed at all.

The Senate looks like Gaytopia to the religious nutjobs because it reflects American reality. As Fischer and House Republicans fight against history, it seems they don't understand that history always wins and that they're already nearly extinct.

-Wisco

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]

No, the Libertarian Candidate Did Not Cost Cuccinelli Virginia

Last night was not a good night for the Republican base. Sure, Chris Christie won big, but the base hates Christie. He signed a gun control bill into law (yeah, it was extremely limited, but any regulation at all is considered sacrilegious treason to the 'baggers). He's open to the idea that global warming is real and that humans are driving it. And, the very worst sin, he basically betrayed Mitt Romney right before the election -- getting plenty of photo ops with Barack Obama after Hurricane Sandy. He even praised the President in a way that would be very easy to misunderstand as an endorsement. And he dissed Romney along the way, saying he "didn't give a damn" about getting a photo op with him. Tea Partiers will not celebrate Christie's win, because they don't consider him to be an actual conservative.

Another high-profile race was down in Virginia, where the media narrative has Democrat  Terry McAuliffe "barely" defeating Republican Ken Cuccinelli. It was closer than the polls had predicted, but with a nearly 3 point difference between the two candidates, the race is not remotely close enough for a recount under Virginia law. McAuliffe's win is solid and decisive. He put this thing to bed.

Immediately following Cuccinelli's loss, 'baggers took to Twitter to pile on Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis for stealing votes from Cuccinelli and costing him the race. But this particular bit of sore loserism is BS and is based on teabaggers' conception of Libertarianism. They think Libertarians are the Ron and Rand Paul types, who worry only about white, straight, evangelical male liberty and not so much about female, minority, and LGBT liberties. When actual, honest-to-goodness Libertarians got a look at Ken Cuccinelli -- who wants to make abortion illegal, ban certain sexual activities, and crack down on the Homosexual Menace -- they found they weren't exactly fans. Actual Libertarians vote against authoritarianism -- in fact, being against authoritarianism is what they're all about. According to CNN, "[I]f Sarvis had not been in the race, exit polls indicate McAuliffe would have beaten Cuccinelli by 7 points (50%-43%)." Those Libertarians, being the real deal and not just Republicans playing dress up, wouldn't have voted Cuccinelli in a million years.

The third party candidate didn't fracture the conservative vote as much as he divided the liberal vote. Instead of blaming Sarvis for their loss, wingnuts should be applauding him for coming within shouting distance of handing Cuccinelli an upset victory.

But of course, that little factoid doesn't explain why Cuccinelli lost, so it's of little use to the 'baggers. I expect to see some BS stories of voter fraud in the coming weeks and a continuation of the factually-challenged argument that Sarvis is to blame. But if you want someone to blame for Cuccinelli's loss and you want to be right, blame women.


Raw Story: During MSNBC’s election coverage on Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow of “The Rachel Maddow Show” talked about the deciding factor that handed the governorship of Virginia to the Democratic Party: women voters.

After the state elected one of its most far-right governors ever in the previous election, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R), the Republican administration did everything within its power to restrict women’s access to abortion services and even contraception. In the gubernatorial election, Maddow said, women spoke back in the voting booth.

“You know, when you read the Beltway press about this race all along there’s been this kind of gauzy wonder,” Maddow said, “about how it is that Terry McAuliffe is doing so disproportionately well among women.”


The fact is that under current Governor Bob McDonnell, women's rights have been under direct and blatant assault. It was McDonnell, after all, who earned the nickname "Gov. Ultrasound," by virtue of his wanting to jam a wand into every woman seeking an abortion. And Cuccinelli was right there with him, every step of the way -- and not just as extreme as McDonnell, but more so. As a result, McAuliffe won women by nine points over all -- and unmarried women by an astonishing 42 points.

This is a real trend; Barack Obama won unmarried women by 36 points. There is a demographic crisis for the GOP as great or greater than that of Latino voters. Women -- unmarried women especially -- are not especially fond of being the subject of extra government. And they're voting against Republicans for the same reason that those Virginia Libertarians voted for Sarvis.

The Republicans are going to have to get serious about reforming their party -- not just pretending to change things with a "rebranding effort." They're going to have to get serious about liberty when they grandstand on the word; recognizing that liberty only for some isn't liberty at all, but a form a tyranny by a favored class, religion, gender, or other identity. They need to recognize that the era of wedge politics is over, that all the wedges work against them now, and that they're actually going to have to mean the things they say when they talk about freedom, rights, equality, and opportunity.

Frankly, I don't see that happening any time soon. And until they do, the Christie elections will be rare (he's still riding a wave of post-Sandy high approvals -- i.e., it's luck) and the Cuccinelli elections will be the norm.

If the 'baggers want to blame someone, they can go ahead and blame themselves. Which, of course, they won't -- meaning the problem will just perpetuate itself over and over for the foreseeable future.

-Wisco

[photo by domesticat]

Virginia, Democrats, the Tea Party, and Reality

Something's going on in Virginia that I think is worth taking note of. The gubernatorial race there is all over but the voting and Democrats make one final push for their candidate, Terry McAuliffe.


Reuters: President Barack Obama and fellow Democrats attempted on Sunday to tap into voter anger about a 16-day U.S. government shutdown and turn Virginia's upcoming governor's election into a referendum on Tea Party conservatives.

With Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe leading polls over Republican Ken Cuccinelli before Tuesday's vote, Obama and Democratic speakers at a rally in the Washington suburb of Arlington pressed party activists to focus on turning out the vote.

Northern Virginia's Washington suburbs, where many government employees and contractors live, was hit particularly hard by the government shutdown last month that resulted from a stalemate over the U.S. budget and debt ceiling that Americans for the most part blamed on Republicans.


Although Virginia's proximity to Washington DC made the government shutdown particularly painful there, the strategy of making it a referendum on the Tea Party would probably be as effective nationwide, if a Pew Poll on Tea Party favorability is any indication. Nationally, the Tea Party has taken a nose dive in polling, with favorables dropping 7-points during the shutdown to an all time low. At this particular moment in time, 'baggers are about as popular as a fart in an elevator.

And that seems unlikely to change, since pigheadedness and a complete disregard for reality has become hallmarks of TP thinking. Trapped in their Breitbart.com, FreeRepublic, Hot Air echo chamber, many 'baggers may be completely unaware just how widely hated they really are. In fact, since these propaganda sites only repeat happy news about their movement, some may even believe they're the most popular people in America.

Remember, when Mitt Romney lost, many in that Tea Party base were genuinely surprised, despite poll after poll showing that Mittens was so going to lose. Their echo chamber told them all the polls were wrong, that Romney was rocketing to glorious victory, and that America had finally had enough of this commie-socialist-nazi secret Muslim terr'ist from Kenya. Similar delusions may be rampant in Virginia.

The final Public Policy Polling survey on the race in Virginia shows McAuliffe heading into a pretty convincing win over Ken Cuccinelli, 7 points ahead as people make their way to the polls. As has been the case throughout the race, both candidates are unpopular. This is definitely a "lesser of two evils" race, where votes won't be cast so much for a candidate as against the opponent.

And polling shows that all those votes stacked up against Cuccinelli will be something of a mystery to Republican voters there. "Whether Republicans will learn any lessons if they lose on Tuesday is unclear," PPP reports. "Overall voters in the state think the GOP would have been better off nominating Lieutenant Governor Bill Bolling than Cuccinelli by a 49/22 margin. But among Republican voters, they still think Cuccinelli was the right candidate to put forth by a 40/36 margin."

Bolling dropped out after polling showed him running 30 points behind Cuccinelli in the Republican primary. "What might've been" might be a fun exercise in supposition, but it was never going to happen. Republicans lined up behind Cuccinelli, the most extremist candidate their party was offering, because of Tea Party purity and that echo chamber assurance that their ideas and positions were so awesome that no one could ever seriously disagree with them. You wonder how many know how badly he's actually losing and how many are lost in the fact-free delusion caused by listening to talk radio and reading the rightwing blogosphere. How many will be standing there stunned, watching the final vote tallies on their TV screens, like Romney voters a year before?

And that's the Tea Party's greatest weakness -- their self-inflicted ignorance. As their poll numbers crash, as Democrats use "Tea Party" the way Republicans used the word "liberal" back in the '80s and 90s, as their political brand becomes ballot box poison, they tell each other that they're the bestest and smartest and most popular kids in school. Which means that as Democrats begin to launch an attack on that very weak brand, they're more likely to laugh at the "libtards" getting everything wrong than they are to defend their crumbling ramparts.

Unless Republicans can convince the 'baggers to have some sort of regard for reality, Virginia 2013 is a glimpse of their party's future.

-Wisco

[photo Vox Efx]
 

Getting Healthcare News from People Who Told You Second Hand Smoke was Harmless

Back in the '90s, one of Rush Limbaugh's big issues was the "junk science" that held that second hand tobacco smoke was bad for you. Never mind the obvious; that if first hand smoke was bad for you, the idea that second hand smoke was not is absurd. But Limbaugh was and is an expert in making endless gullible people believe patently ridiculous things, which made him the perfect propagandist to rile up dopes into thinking you had some sort of a right to smoke around the baby and that the liberal nanny state was taking that right away -- not because of health concerns, but because they're all commies who hate big business. Limbaugh continued the fight long after the battle was lost, insisting as recently as 2010 that "second hand smoke is harmless."

This campaign wasn't exactly Limbaugh's idea. Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds enlisted him and others in a big PR push that included the arguments that nicotine was "NOT addictive,"  to "point out 'victimhood' of smokers--outside in wind and cold--as pariahs." The idea was to "create fear of loss of liberty" and to "incite smokers to rebel and spread that rebellion to nonsmokers now!" Who would be more perfect than Limbaugh's audience of "dittoheads"  -- a group of constantly whining conservatives completely convinced of their perpetual victimhood? Always quick to reactionary rage and never prone to deep thinking, the far right talk radio base has always been a herd of buffalo that corporations could panic into a stampede and send to trample (or try to anyway) anyone they wanted. They became the "town hall mobs," which in turn became the Tea Party.

This, I believe, is essential background in understand the furor around this:


Talking Points Memo: Donna received the letter canceling her insurance plan on Sept. 16. Her insurance company, LifeWise of Washington, told her that they'd identified a new plan for her. If she did nothing, she'd be covered.

A 56-year-old Seattle resident with a 57-year-old husband and 15-year-old daughter, Donna had been looking forward to the savings that the Affordable Care Act had to offer.

But that's not what she found. Instead, she'd be paying an additional $300 a month for coverage. The letter made no mention of the health insurance marketplace that would soon open in Washington, where she could shop for competitive plans, and only an oblique reference to financial help that she might qualify for, if she made the effort to call and find out.

Otherwise, she'd be automatically rolled over to a new plan -- and, as the letter said, "If you're happy with this plan, do nothing."

If Donna had done nothing, she would have ended up spending about $1,000 more a month for insurance than she will now that she went to the marketplace, picked the best plan for her family and accessed tax credits at the heart of the health care reform law.


"The info that we were sent by LifeWise was totally bogus. Why the heck did they try to screw us?" Donna told TPM's Dylan Scott. "People who are afraid of the ACA should be much more afraid of the insurance companies who will exploit their fear and end up overcharging them."

Bingo.

The outrage over these letters isn't that corporations are lying to customers in an attempt to rip them off (i.e., anger directed at the right people), the outrage is from the gullible chumps who are falling for this con. And they're the same people who always fall for corporate cons, who believed Limbaugh when he told them that burning a pack a day around the kids was fine, who believe that the jury's still out on asbestos and global warming and nuclear waste. They actually are perpetual victims, just not victims to the people they believe they are. They're victims to corporate lies and they rarely learn anything from this recurring mistake.

So as the rightwing media reports half the story -- and a carefully selected, edited, and redacted half at that -- the base eats it up. You take a story of insurance policies canceled because they're so lousy that they're now illegal, you cut out a few facts here and there, add a little outrage and stridency, and presto -- a story about pretty much everyone in America seeing their insurance situation worsen under Obamacare. These are the same people who'd tell you it's fine to keep an ashtray by the crib and we're supposed to take them seriously.

Personally, I don't trust them any farther than I can throw them -- and, as a former smoker, that's probably not very far. They've shown over and over again how untrustworthy they are; as have the corporations who fax them their talking points every morning.

-Wisco

[photo by Eli Duke]

Poll: Obamacare Beats the GOP Alternative

There's a reason that Republicans took a beating from the public over the government shutdown. Yes, Obamacare remains unpopular, but the fact is that people don't see it as bad enough to scrap. The latest Kaiser Health Tracking Poll show us that, although the law is approved of by only 44% of respondents, 47% want to keep the law as is or expand it, opposed to 37% who want to repeal it.

And if Republicans vastly overestimated American's desire to scrap Obamacare, they're currently making a similar over calculation of outrage over a buggy website. Kaiser finds that while 75% of Americans fallowed the shutdown story closely, only 51% say the same of the online exchange's rollout. Those who say they've followed the stories very closely show the starkest difference -- 44% followed the shutdown very closely, compared to only 22% who are as interested in the website story.

Writing for the Washington Post political blog The Fix, Sean Sullivan and Aaron Blake explain that Republican grandstanding over Obamacare was counterproductive for them:


It’s especially stinging for Republicans because Obamacare was at the center of the House GOP strategy that led to the shutdown. Republicans’ repeated refusal to pass a clean stopgap spending bill was rooted in an unyielding desire to use the budget debate to pick apart the health-care law. They talked over and over again about the negative impact of the law, and how it needed to be stopped.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s unsteady unveiling of HealthCare.gov during the same period gave rise to widely publicized causes for concern. But instead of allowing those issues to dominate the conversation, Republicans elbowed them to the side with their fight against the health-care law in Congress, which dealt the party a big-time political blow, even before taking into account the missed opportunity to spotlight the rollout woes. The party’s image plunged to an all-time low in the wake of the shutdown, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed.


"[P]olitics is all about moments," they say. "When an opportunity arises, if you’re not there to seize it, you lose, even if the other side doesn’t win. The GOP just learned that the hard way."

Normally, I'd say I don't think the GOP has learned anything. Republicans don't do learning lessons. But this is a "fire hot" lesson. Even the most obstinate, headstrong child will not touch the pretty red glowing spirally element on the stove twice. They're currently trying to undermine confidence in the law, but talk of repeal died almost as soon as the shutdown started.

Greg Sargent points out that part of the Republican Party's problem here is that they don't have any alternative. This puts them in the position of being the party of the status quo. And no matter how bad people think Obamacare may be, they believe that the unsustainable non-system of healthcare delivery we had was worse. By offering nothing other than repeal, Republicans are selling a crap sandwich that everyone's already said they didn't want -- and that's working out for them about as well as they really should've expected.

And no, health savings accounts aren't going to save them. It was never a popular idea and is likely even less so now, as people find themselves stretched so far they can't put anything in their regular accounts. Health savings accounts were never a solution or an alternative. They were just a different payment plan on the lousy and inefficient system that we finally scrapped. So even the old Republican ideas aren't actually anything like a plan, they're all simpleminded bandaids that don't address the underlying structural problems. Healthcare would've been just as unaffordable.

Until Republicans get it together and come up with some sort of alternative, it's hard to see how their position on the Obamacare issue is going to improve their standing with the public. They're standing on a loser, offering a loser -- and that's just not going to catapult them to popularity the way they seem to think.

-Wisco