More On Gun Control: Blow Darts Don’t Kill People, Blow Darts With Poisonous Tips Kill People

Going medieval on everybody’s ass

Here is the single dumbest argument against banning high capacity magazines:

Set aside the fact that criminals don’t obey any law. Set aside too the fact that even if all firearms could be magically disintegrated by appropriate legislation, the murderous would simply use other more time-tested methods of killing. It should not be forgotten that some 7000 were killed in a single day at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 using the available hand weapons, which did not include firearms. At the Civil War battle of Gettysburg in 1863, both sides suffered approximately 51,000 casualties in three days of fighting using primarily single shot, breech loading rifles and muzzle loading cannon quite crude by contemporary standards. Some 5000 horses were also killed. The problem, in 1066, 1863 and today is human nature, not the tools employed.

I, for one, think that high capacity magazines should be banned so that I can start killing people with my trusty blow dart without fear of high capacity reprisal.

[Silliness after the jump] (click here [unless you hate silliness or something...])

We as a country need gun control; we also need Sarah Palin to STFU.

Plain and simple: Gun Control and Shut Up, Sarah¹

Remember that dude who shot his TV because, among other reasons, he doesn’t like Palin, Bristol? (I wrote about him here.) Well, Palin, Sarah mentioned that dude in passing in remarks before Safari Club International in Reno, NV this weekend.

Sarah blathered on to the Safari Club: Non-real Americans are gunning for your guns; and you better keep your eye on the White House because librulz are totally taking your guns while you sleep gunless; and Tucson really sucked because librulz took all your guns and burned them at a gun(bon)fire while a bunch of hippy onlookers played drums. Although, the discussion seems to be focused on getting assault weapons with high capacity magazines off the street, and therefore of little relevance to the muckity mucks at the Safari Club, that didn’t stop Sarah from putting the fear of a Gunless Existence in them. (If any of you Safarians are hunting big game with assault weapons, I’m pretty sure UR DOIN IT RONG. )

After fearmongering for a while, Sarah Palin brought it home with some of her Wasilla-style folksiness:

“Here’s how I figure it. Remember that weird guy in Wisconsin was so angry, so upset, watching a Palin win slot after slot each week on Dancing with the Stars that he shot Bristol through his TV? He blasted his Panasonic? Well, I’m thinking, ‘Imagine more gun control. Then he’d have to attack his Panasonic with a butter knife.’”

Ha ha ha! Ho ho ho! It’s hilarious! Yes, let us imagine more gun control! What would that world look like? Weird right? You betcha! More alive people! Less not alive people! Unpossible! And besides, how will people shoot their TVs when they don’t like reality show results? Clearly, we need more guns (preferably with TV-monitor-piercing bullets).

Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg’s latest sting operation (Gunshow Undercover) demonstrates just how easy it is to purchase a gun in Arizona without a background check:

An undercover investigation at an Arizona gun show found that private sellers didn’t always require background checks of buyers, Mayor Bloomberg announced today.

The investigation came just weeks after a Tucson shooting that killed six people and injured 13 others.

Bloomberg, at a news conference at City Hall, showed several undercover videos of illegal gun sales — including one that showed a “buyer” purchasing an extended magazines like the one allegedly used by Jared Lee Loughner — an at the Phoenix gun show last week.

Loughner, 22, is the man arrested for shooting and injuring Rep. Gabrielle Giffords during a meet-and-greet with voters three weeks ago outside a Tuscon supermarket.

“We have demonstrated how easy it is for anyone to buy a semiautomatic handgun and a high capacity magazine, no questions asked,” said Bloomberg. “This country must take two simple steps to stop more of the 34 murders that occur with guns every day — make every gun sale subject to a background check, and make sure the background check system has all the required records in it.”

So, to sum up: While folks are trying to figure out a way to keep high capacity automatic weapons off the street in order to curb gun violence, Sarah Palin and Tall is cracking jokes about guns and people with mental health issues using guns to do crazy shit (the dude in Wisconsin was bipolar), and all of this less than a month after the Tucson shootings. Klassy.

She needs to fire her handlers and speechwriters. She’s sounding more and more like a fool with each passing media appearance.

[Video after the jump] More »

Open Thread

And I forgot about Chuck again and will have to watch it On Demand.

I really need to start thinking about more than the Steelers.

Electric cars: worse than Hitler

Among the very oddest things about the Washington Post editorial page is Charles Lane’s obsessive hatred of electric cars. The Washington Post search feature only lets you go back 60 days, but I estimate he’s complained about them at least five times out of his past 12 blog posts and opinion pieces (the others were bashing Seymour Hersh, arguing that HCR is unconstitutional, and bashing unions, etc.). The latest contains such authoritative pronouncements as this:

Plenty of motorists ran out of fuel in Wednesday night’s mega-jam. But my hunch is that electrics would faced similar problems or worse.

Are electric cars such a threat that the Washington Post editorial board should assign one of its members to write exclusively about and against them?

Animal Rescue Open Thread

All animals should be living large like this:

Not like this:

Click here to donate directly to Charlie’s Angels Animal Rescue (they accept paypal!), or visit the Balloon Juice store and pick out an item or two- all proceeds go to Charlie’s Angels. Your help saves animals, and unlike a lot of charities, I can assure you that every single penny these ladies at CAAR get is spent on the animals.

Republican judges will kill health care reform

I’ve been saying this for a while, here’s more evidence:

A federal district court judge in Florida ruled today that a key provision in the new health care law is unconstitutional, and that the entire law must be voided.

Roger Vinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, agreed with the 26 state-government plaintiffs that Congress exceeded its authority by passing a law penalizing individuals who do not have health insurance.

“I must reluctantly conclude that Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority in passing the Act with the individual mandate,” Vinson writes. “Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire Act must be declared void.”

Reluctantly!

They’ll Do Anything

Long report on Manning’s mental and physical state that included this nugget:

Manning had seen Harold Ford’s appearance on Meet the Press and thought that his observations were compelling.

Can we all at least agree that forcing Manning to watch Meet the Press with Harold Ford constitutes a form of torture?

Get Well Soon

I honestly thought people stopped getting dengue fever in the 1900′s, but what do you know, Glenn got it.

First, They Came For The Gas Meter

Obviously, the goal is to have real time information so ensure smooth supplies of power, but the installation of smart meters are causing some concerns:

The health concerns about the smart meters focus on the phenomenon known as “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” or E.H.S., in which people claim that radiation from cellphones, WiFi systems or smart meters causes them to suffer dizziness, fatigue, headaches, sleeplessness or heart palpitations. (At a recent Public Utilities Commission hearing on smart meters, an audience member requested that all cellphones be turned off as a gesture to the electrosensitive people in the audience.)

The two most recent government reviews of available research found no link between health problems and common levels of electromagnetic radiation. Both reports indicated that more research would be welcome; on that basis, opponents say the meters should not be installed until they are proved safe.

Although there is scientific data on the health concerns, the privacy worries can be answered only by assurances from the utility. And the groups most concerned about privacy — like the local Tea Party affiliate, the North Bay Patriots — tend to have little faith in corporate assurances.

At a meeting of the North Bay Patriots this month, Jed Gladstein, a 64-year-old lawyer, called the devices “the sharp end of a very long spear pointed at your freedoms.” Others have raised concern about how the utility would use the information about individuals’ home appliance use.

David K. Owens, the executive vice president for business operations at the Edison Electric Institute, the national association of utilities, has tried to allay such concerns. “We’ve always gotten information about customers’ usage and always kept it confidential,” he said, adding, “We’re going to honor their privacy.”

Protests related to health and privacy concerns have also blossomed elsewhere in the country. In Maine, for example, residents have waged e-mail campaigns and some towns have adopted moratoriums on installations.

I have no idea what electromagnetic hypersensitivity is, but I think it is reasonably fair to say if it is a real thing, and people really suffer from it, in this day and age, they are just screwed. We’re not talking about something as simple as putting up “microwave in use” signs, because the devices they claim cause problems are just pervasive and not going away. Hell, in my town of 300, I can pick up 6 wi-fi networks in my living room.

And while the tea party is for now probably over-reacting with their typical crazy, I would not be surprised to see the drug warriors trying to get at this information to determine who is using grow lights at home.

*** Update ***

Folks, I’m well aware that they use traditional meters to track pot growers- we’ve discussed it multiple times. I’m saying it might become much more widespread with the new instant meters.

Buy the world, a Koch

I’m all for demonizing the Kochs as much as possible, the same way the right did with George Soros (though preferably without an analog of the overt-Antisemitism):

[H]ere at home, over a thousand activists gathered outside the gates of a exclusive resort where the Koch brothers were hosting one of their periodic con-cons. These invitation only events where the rich and powerful scheme to take over the world have formerly operated under the radar, but no more.

David Dayen in an eye-witness account reports 25 were intentionally arrested but overall it was a peaceful protest. The LAT and NYT has more coverage and quotes from the crowd, who were chanting “this is only the beginning.”

I think the Kochs will get bored with funding teatardism and go back to just paying Ayn Rand fans to create glibertarian propaganda via think tanks. But in the meantime, their activities should get more attention.

This Guy Could Win

Fallows on Hunstman:

Various sources — notably Jake Tapper here, and Politico here — are reporting that “White House officials” expect Jon Huntsman (right, with one of his daughters) to leave his job as ambassador to China “in the coming months,” to consider running against Barack Obama next year.

The “in the coming months” part strikes me as non-news. I believe it was generally understood that the Huntsmans had made a two-year commitment to the job, which would take them through this summer.

The “assumed to be considering a run” part is quite different. I really like Jon Huntsman personally and respect him politically. I continue to think that he was an inspired choice for the job in Beijing. I believe he represents a tenable national future for the Republicans when they are past the Tea Party stage.

But these reports, which he now quite notably has not knocked down, create an impossible situation. If he is seriously planning a run to take the White House away from Obama, how can he continue to serve in the Administration?* How can Obama keep him? Unless, for clever sandbagging purposes, Obama is driving home his closeness to Huntsman, and also delaying the (already late) start to his campaign, to handicap him in the Republican primaries.

When the reports first came up, I laughed them off. But it’s striking now that Huntsman has failed to do the same. What I’d like to see — for the nation’s interest, and (in my view, but what do I know?) for Huntsman’s — is for him clearly to put them to rest. Says that of course he’s a Republican, and of course he’ll support the GOP ticket in 2012. But he’s doing the nation’s business now in Beijing, and doesn’t want to complicate that with all this political gossip. To me as armchair strategist, staying out of the 2012 fray would seem to save him a lot of heartache. Avoiding a primary fight in this bitter season, when he’s fresh off Team Obama; and, if he survived that, avoiding a general election battle when — one assumes — the economic cycle should be improving. If that economic assumption is wrong, everything else changes. But if that were the case and Obama seemed gravely weakened, I am not sure that makes a moderate, rather than a red-meat conservative, the most likely Republican candidate.

Huntsman is pretty much the last man standing in the non-crazy wing of the GOP, and assuming the teahadist wing of the GOP (the majority) comes to their senses and realizes that the entire country gets to vote for President, not just Republicans, so nominating batshit insane people might be a bad idea, I think he could win. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him as the next President, whether it be 2012 or 2016.

I’m curious to see if he, too, gets co-opted by the crazy.

Wealth Transfer

Here’s Atrios:

Just because I’m petty and George Bush was very proud of the increase the home ownership rate under his presidency, latest census figures out today have the home ownership rate at 66.5%. It peaked at 69.2% in 2004, falling to 67.5% as Bush was about to leave office.

66.5% brings us back to 1998 levels. While this is a bad thing to some extent due to the fact that it’s in part a symptom of other bad things, there really isn’t any reason that everyone should feel inclined to own a home.

What this amounts to, really, is a vast transfer of wealth from the working poor and the middle class to the bankers and financial elites. Not only were these huge, risky institutions bailed out by the government and shielded from the worst consequences of their recklessness, they also made a ton of money selling and re-selling mortgages that people never should have been able to afford in the first place. Then, when all was said and done, they were able to come back in and foreclose on the very people they’d already made so much money swindling – and whose tax dollars went in part to bailing the banks out in the first place. This doesn’t even take into account the mismanagement of pension funds and other investments which, inexplicably, have made a lot of the financial folks very rich while ruining the retirement prospects of countless ordinary Americans.

We should be looking at ways to reform the bankruptcy process – to give homeowners the same benefit of doubt we gave to struggling banks:

We could easily pass a streamlined, modified version of bankruptcy just for this crisis. Adam Levitin has proposed this with his Chapter M for Mortgage bankruptcy. It would remove foreclosure actions from state court to federal bankruptcy court. Successful petitions can be offered a standardized pre-packaged bankruptcy plan. The plan would be based on HAMP modification guidelines (interest rate reduction to achieve 31% DTI goal, but without federal funding) plus cramdown to address negative equity.

We can make this fair on the backend. If the homeowner redefaults we can speed up the foreclosure process. It wouldn’t affect non-mortgage lenders. It is fast-tracked relative to traditional Chapter 13. It can have clawback mechanisms to address potential future appreciation.

And going through the process can give the lender clean title. Because there’s this whole issue of who owns what in the securitization chain which is a few court cases away from putting our financial system over a cliff. And the best feature is that it has no cost to the federal government. Like other smart policy, it builds off already existing infrastructure, so it can be started immediately using existing courts and Chapter 7 panel trustees for sales.

This makes a lot more sense to me than giving people tax credits for new home purchases, or allowing the current system of home foreclosures to go on indefinitely. The point isn’t to get the housing market back to the good ol’ days of the mid oughts, or to punish people for getting in over their heads (often at the insistence of ethically dubious lenders and a real estate industry drunk on the delusion of a housing market that could never possibly implode). We don’t want, and couldn’t sustain anyway, a return to the inflated prices of 2003 – 2006. But we don’t need the adjustment to happen in the most painful way possible either. With unemployment in the double digits, anything we can do to keep people in their homes without impossible debt sheets is a good thing – not just for the homeowners, but for the economy at large.

Open Thread

Enjoy.

Meanwhile, Back In the Real World

I’m heading out the door. If you’re looking for something to read, I suggest Atul Gawande’s latest New Yorker article on “hot spotting”, which has been posted for non-subscribers.

Early Morning Open Thread: Full House

From commentor IlsaLund:

This is Clary, AKA Miss Pants. She was originally adopted as a kitten by a neighbor. The neighbor died suddenly and Clary was trapped in her apartment for four days before being freed. No one wanted her and I’d already said no because we had two 17 yr olds at the time and I thought bringing in a young cat would be too traumatic for them. But when my husband heard the sad tale, he insisted that we adopt her. When he went to take her home, he and Clary took one look at each other and they both fell madly in love. She’s been with us for four years now. I love her madly, too, but she will always be Daddy’s Girl.

Luci was adopted 2 yrs ago, along with her companion, Princess. I found them on Petfinders after the two elderly cats died in 2008. Clary was devastated to lose them and miserable being an only cat. Plus, Clary was so attached to my husband that I sort of felt l needed a cat for me. I wanted one young cat and I got two seniors, now about 11 years old. Luci is the tiniest, but she is Top Cat. She spends most of her time sleeping in my closet, but when she feels like it, she runs and plays like a kitten.

More »