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January 11, 2013

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Crissa

Isn't it... Cold and wet there this time of year?

Of course, who am I to talk, I'm in the rainy redwoods experiencing our coldest week yet. It won't make it to 60F until next week!

oddjob

The weather in the Northeast this weekend is truly, freakishly warm. Believe it or not, here in the Boston area the temp. on Sunday is forecast to approach or maybe even exceed 60F.

kathy a.

west coast is cold. not by east or north standards, but still.

Sir Charles

l-t c,

Harper's Ferry is a great place for kids. Have a great time.

The return to civilization has been a whirlwind of work and socializing -- out to dinner on school nights with friends a couple of nights in a row. Not something I do that much of in my old age.

Joe S

LTC, Don't forget your broadswords if you're going to Harper's Ferry. It's a tradition for American leftists.

nancy

Winter wonderland here.

I much regret skipping a flu shot this year. Bad, bad, my bad. This season's version sounds darn dangerous. So, I'm hibernating for the time being. With books, Netflix, the post-holiday larder, and a yarn stash. (If I venture out for a shot now, I may bump into the kiddies whose parents think all vacs are suspect and optional. No MMR schedule for these kids -- possible shingles for me. No thank you.)

The ranting gun-crazed, 'ready-to-kill-if-necessary', now gone-viral youTube guy, James Yaeger, has had his license to carry revoked in Tennesee, according to TPM. He looks to me like the least of our problems. The interview at his kitchen table, utterly tidy background countertop set with blender, coffee maker, microwave, etc. is surreal. The setting is so positively American suburban middle-class. His advice: "pack your backpack and fill your mags." Yeah.

paula

We went to hear Cheryl Wheeler sing in Northampton last night, and heard a song that seems appropriate to the week, although she wrote it about 15 years ago:
text version:
http://youtu.be/Op7agdIFOGY

or for a more graphic if not nauseating version, go to
http://youtu.be/_S5CabGWsv4

paula

Re: flu, Harper's Ferry and open thread
It's great for a kid to be able to run loose, and that's such a beautiful area. He doesn't need to know what it's famous for.
Looking back, I may have had the flu before Christmas, two days after i go the shot. At least, I had a virus that came and went abruptly. Unfortunately, when it died down, it left me with a full-blown bacterial infx in my left ear, one I'm still doctoring. I've been careful to get a flu shot every year since I had to take 3 weeks off work, then drag myself through another three, thanks to the flu. Nothing like experience to drive home a good idea.
Apparently, a lot has happened to Yeager since his disgusting video went viral. He's not what he claims to be, for one thing. For another, HS and FBI are looking at him for possible charge of making threats on president. I don't see how that video is much different from yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, but I'm not a a lawyer. If it had been made against George I, Ronald Reagan or even Bill Clinton, I bet it would have been taken seriously.

nancy

Re Yeager, former security contractor in Iraq, and his pals who earn their livings through the gun industry: Gun questions, left and right. We've landed about here. "Insisting on an Unalienable Right to Have Fun No Matter What".

I wasted some time in an on-line exchange with some local Second Amendment claimants. There is no civil discussion possible. I'm a *libtard*, pure and simple, ready to undo the Constitution and deny them God-given rights.

Nuttery. Of the dangerous sort. Sad. Sigh. But these folks believe they're Righteously Angry. How many of them buried a dead child riddled with gunfire recently? Impasse for now maybe. But I don't see this fight fading. NRA might meet its match finally. Or return to its original mission of gun safety training. There's a naive thought. On-line, they freely describe anyone who seeks gun control measures of any sort as 'the enemy,' which is chilling. As is the endless energy devoted to thinking of guns and their 'Patriotic' accumulation. So puzzling.

Crissa

I'm working on computers for a convention next weekend. We're bracing for the flu, since everyone out here pretty much apparently was a different version than what they're having back east and out of the several thousand who are attending, someone will carry it.

kathy a.

i wrote something tiresome about guns, and it got lost. so see this about negligent discharge, and this about how the NRA kicked out the sportsmen and became a gun lobby in the late 1970's. fuck them.

also, when you hear about hitler taking guns, that's not even true. not that people with gun-crushes have any use for facts.

kathy a.

oh, yeah -- one part that got lost was today's news that the NRA thinks it owns enough votes to kill any gun legislation. on how many levels is that wrong?

kathy a.

also, sheriff joe and his merry posse, posted outside schools whether or not the schools want 'em; with volunteer posse members sporting uniforms they buy themselves, PLUS a number of questionable points in their collective backgrounds: felonies, substances, domestic violence, and reportedly at least one with sex crimes against children.

nancy

Thanks kathy. All your links now gone a' twittering. No more patience for this phony and loud NRA drama. Even Scalia is under fire for undermining the Second Amendment! WTF.

kathy a.

dear lord, nancy. i never thought i'd see scalia attacked as being insufficiently conservative, on any point. maybe scalia does not think the 2d A extends to letting completely insane people with firearms patrol wherever they see fit?

i'm pretty sure nobody would let those people patrol scotus. being a complete nerd, i dragged my daughter over to scotus first thing the morning after landing in DC. and you know, it is glorious and special. but i was really struck by the level of security, even though it was a slow day, nothing going on. we were just checking out the public areas, looking at displays and so on, but there were several friendly guards and/or employees watching us at all times. just a tad creepy. but i can say without equivocation that if scotus takes up something about gun rights, all those NRA gun-toters are never getting in the building.

Prup (aka Jim Benton)

Whew, trying desperately to carve out spare moments between starting a business -- filed for incorporation over the weekend, starting to write to make contacts, and am calling the lawyer I most want for the corporation and see if he is as interested as I think he will be -- and, literally simultaneously, working with Em on the move from the ground floor to the second floor as we turn over the house. (Ironically, it actually feels more like our house -- or at least our apartment -- now that we've sold it than it did when we owned it jointly with my brother-in-law. We had little say about the decorations or even the painting when we moved in here, and Em was much worse and having to deal with returning to the house she spent her first 18 years in. This time we are hiring the painters and designing it ourselves, and are doing a pretty damn good job of it. If only the timing were better, but both halves have deadlines, two months for the move, product roll-out in November.

Anyway, on gun questions, I had an admittedly evil thought earlier. Imagine if we were like the pregnancy forcers. We could out together a video of real gun deaths -- not just Hollywood creations that don't show the blood spurting, the life vanishing from the face, the effect of one bullet or a hailstorm from a semi-sutomatic, etc. Mix those shots with recreations of actual events:

the child finding Mommy's gun and 'playing with his friends until one of them, or an infant sibling, gets killed -- or even a parent walking in on them;
the burglar, 'I didn't wanna shoot the guy, hey I rob people, I don't kill them, the gun was just meant to scare them. But when he pulled out his own, I didn't have no choice.'
The bartender, 'I shoulda knew better than to let him buy one more drink, wavin that gun around the way he was, talking crazy stuff about his wife. But I didn't think he meant it, I mean the two of them used to come in, they looked like a great couple.'
The high school student, 'yeah, we used to tease Mr. Mulligan a lot. He was such a jerk, an easy target, and yeah, Jacko was probably the worst on him, but nobdy figured he'd got that nuts on the kid'
and other scenes, each played out against a background of police investigating a totally realistic-looking corpse, or medical examiners carrying body bags

And behind the whole video is the sound of weeping, different voices sometimes overwhelming the on-screen voice, all crying "I didn't mean it, oh god I'm sorry."

I'd love to show a video like that to anyone wanting to buy a gun. The problem is that anyone who sat throught it and still wanted to go through with it would be, ipso facto, demonstrably psychologically so disturbed he shouldn't be allowed to buy any sort of weapon, even a box cutter.

low-tech cyclist

The kid and I had a great time in the mountains. We were here, ostensibly for the dome-raising, but really just to get away and spend whatever time with my old buddy Keith (he's the one at right in the pic at the second link) that he could spare from dome construction.

I knew that the kid could handle a good bit of walking, but he did even better than I was expecting. We did a decent hike in the morning, but he wanted to climb a mountain, by gosh, so I took him up a pretty steep trail to a nearby ridge in the afternoon, and he ate it right up. He wasn't even tired that evening, when I could have used a little rest myself.

The weather was balmy for this time of year - sunny, highs in the 60s - which made for a great weekend to be in the mountains.

FWIW, we weren't anywhere near the historical areas of Harper's Ferry, though we did pass a street sign for John Brown Farm Rd. on the way there.

paula

Prup---You must not have watched the second You Tube video I recommended. See above.
Lt-c---Sounds like a perfect weekend! I wish I could do things like that with my grandkids, but they are so far away and their parents are insanely busy, we never get beyond family dinners and such. Enjoy that little guy every chance you get. I miss my grandkids (ages 1-6) so much it hurts.

oddjob

The Two Sentences That Should Be Part of All Discussion of the Debt Ceiling

A short, pithy piece by James Fallows that gets all of it right.

low-tech cyclist

paula - it was a very, very good weekend. Sorry you're so far away from the grandkids. And I do enjoy the rascal at every opportunity. I've got a great kid, and I never forget how lucky I am.

low-tech cyclist

Getting back to the debt ceiling, there's been a bunch of chatter lately (Steve Benen, Josh Marshall) that it's better that Obama doesn't have an ace in the hole, because that puts the pressure (and blame) firmly on the Republicans. This is on top of people like Kevin Drum and Ezra Klein saying that workarounds like the trillion-dollar coin should be rejected because they don't deal with the real problem, which is Republican intransigence and radicalism.

I can't repeat enough how abhorrent I find this. Sure, the Republicans are the real problem; they're the ones who keep creating all these artificial problems.

But the idea that the American people are acceptable collateral damage in this high-stakes game of chicken is an abomination. The point is to make people's lives better, and making their lives worse in order to (hopefully) win an election to (hopefully) do good things for them later, is a gamble I'm not cynical enough to take. I emphatically reject all forms of "make things worse to make things better"-ism.

oddjob

As an example of what I indicated some days ago about the weather, the temp. in Boston right now is just about one-half degree under 60F.

On Jan. 14 that is a freaky thing.

kathy a.

oddjob, that really is the best piece anywhere about the debt ceiling.

ltc -- i do not think anyone but the jutnobs thinks that the results of failing to pay the nation's debts are acceptable collateral damage.

but the hostage-taking analogy is *very* apt here. how many times do the same set of jokers get to yell, "we'll shoot the baby unless we get a helicopter and an offshore bank account and season passes and a pony"?

so is the deadbeat analogy. congress voted for all of the expenses already incurred. the jutnobs claim fiscal responsibility as their mantra, but apparently the debt ceiling means they get to play "opposites day" with the world economy, as well as the full faith and credit of the nation they took an oath to protect.

i don't think the executive branch should be saying "oh, honey -- go have some ice cream, and we'll just tank everything you don't like while you calm down" in response to the jutnob temper fit.

low-tech cyclist

kathy - maybe, but I find it hard to understand the rejection of the platinum coin by Marshall, Benen, Drum, and Ezra in any other way, other than perhaps a belief that the GOP will be the ones to blink.

But one thing that the Dems should be pointing out at every opportunity is that this negotiation is more like the GOP saying, "we'll shoot the baby unless we get...well, we won't tell you - you'll have to guess." and that the Dems aren't going to guess; the GOP is going to have to say what it wants in return for increasing the debt ceiling.

Because that's where the GOP chickens out. They don't want to publicly say what budget cuts they want.

So "what's their ask?" should be something every Dem says, anytime s/he's in front of a TV camera. "Oh, they want spending cuts? Which ones?" and "Then how can we compromise with them? They don't have a position to compromise with" should be on their list of stock phrases.

Even if they've got the brains of Nuke Laloosh, they can master these. And maybe some reporters will start asking the GOP (with tape rolling, ideally), "hey, just what are you asking for, in return for the debt ceiling increase? Just what do you want?"

Because it would be so much fun to watch them squirm.

oddjob

So "what's their ask?" should be something every Dem says, anytime s/he's in front of a TV camera. "Oh, they want spending cuts? Which ones?" and "Then how can we compromise with them? They don't have a position to compromise with" should be on their list of stock phrases.

I can see why there's logic to this, but on camera I suspect it would be more likely to come across as the usual Beltway inanity that the public tunes out. Obama's using a much more blunt approach. It is riskier, but it also states very loudly to the GOP, "BE GROWN-UPS FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIVES!"

kathy a.

ltc, you are correct on the 20 questions "guess what i want" aspect of it. but i'm with oddjob, that trying to engage in that crap at this point only feeds the insane -- and nobody who isn't paying close attention will get it. besides which, spending cuts for the future have not one damned thing to do with expenses already racked up. zero, zip, nada.

i like the BE A GROWNUP approach. plain and simple. works for sound-bites. has the advantage of actually making sense.

~~~~~~~~
i do not like the coin, even if it might be workable and legal, because [a] it is a gimmick. and [b] coming up with an escape hatch FOR the crazy only FEEDS the crazy.

i'm really liking the business interests squirming and applying pressure -- as any reasonable citizen and business entity should. "crash the car" is not in the national interest, in any rational respect.

kathy a.

my kids and i had these bizarre jokes, when they were little. sometimes i would play "meanest mommy in the whole wide world," with a growly voice, and i'd say something like, "whatever you do, DO NOT GO TAKE A BATH AND BRUSH YOUR TEETH!" and the kids would scramble to do the opposite, laughing hard.

so naturally, they came up with "MOMMY, MOMMY -- CRASH THE CAR!" on road trips, also hilarious (because, never in a million gazillion years would i drive dangerously or let the car crash, if there was anything i could do about it).

i mean, this was very funny stuff with the ages 4-9 crowd. so not funny when the house GOP considers this a serious set of bargaining tools for the nation.

oddjob

i do not like the coin, even if it might be workable and legal, because [a] it is a gimmick. and [b] coming up with an escape hatch FOR the crazy only FEEDS the crazy.

Agreed.

kathy a.

oh, that's PERFECT, oddjob! and since they are all libertarian and pioneers and everything, they can just live off the land and not use anything that tax dollars helped create, because that would detract from the rugged self-made-man image that beck always projects, right?

oddjob

I'm sure Beck'll make a mint from it, too.......

paula

I hope he's expecting to pay local, state and federal taxes. No, wait, I'm too disgusted to even talk about it. It had to happen. If not Beckton, Limbaughville or O'Reillyburgh.

nancy

Well, I had something to add about what happens when the right wing media takes one's wingnuttery seriously and puts it out for all to inspect -- scams and felonies and aliases tend to surface. Citadel III, (pre-Beckville press release) survivalist-patriot paradise *planned* for north Idaho, got all the best attention from Fox and Drudge. Most amusing. A felon hard at work in his basement in Alexandria. Send in your app fee/buy a gun. Either/or will do.

But Stanley's now up in a post. What a pup Sir C. :)

Crissa

My home town is an example that there are dozens of such Beck-like tv-star leads investors to doom:
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19911212&slug=1322499

Crissa

Oh, this is a better article:
http://thedailyworld.com/sections/news/local/city-ocean-shores-becomes-reluctant-owner-nrpi-lots.html

It talks about how this isn't the first time someone has done this. And this is a real town, not one of those lots-in-Arizona developments which are just lines in the dirt without water or even roads.

kathy a.

well, this is kind of hilarious. dana milbank complains that the problem in DC is that obama does not schmooze enough, revealing some kind of memory block for how the GOP's one goal the last 4 years was to defeat obama. the link is to benen, who 'splains about the radicalization of the GOP with charts and links and examples.

naturally, i agree with benen -- we all saw this playing out, day after day. but there is another element to the current GOP and obama that he does not touch. this GOP has constantly and brutally attacked obama's legitimacy -- even his legitimacy as a citizen of this country. they have lied about his education, his religion, and about socialist takeovers. they have intentionally fanned the flames of racism. some of them have advocated violence against our own president -- sure, those are the fringier ones, but there has not been a serious effort within the party to marginalize the nuts. there has instead been a disciplined effort to embrace nuts, and to punish those who stray from the party line.

kathy a.

nancy, great link about the citadel (not the military academy; the gunsville). there is something over on balloon juice about this, too -- the special nugget there is that the author's son, who is into combat gaming, took a glance at the artist's conception of the citadel compound and remarked, “have these folks never heard of cannon?” ha!

assuming it ever gets beyond the drawing board + give-us-money stage, crissa is probably correct about the grifters making off with money and the "patriots" being left with nothing.

oddjob

the grifters making off with money and the "patriots" being left with nothing

Somewhere, P. T. Barnum is smiling.

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