;)
Tuesday
Apr232013
The Commentariat -- April 24, 2013
People, through their elected officials, clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight. -- Gov. Rick Perry, justifying lax regulation in the State of Texas ...
... Texas -- State of Denial. Paul Weber & Sophia Tareen of the AP: "Gov. Rick Perry said Monday that spending more state money on inspections would not have prevented the deadly explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. plant that was last investigated by Texas environmental regulators in 2006. Perry told The Associated Press that he remains comfortable with the state's level of oversight following last week's massive blast in the rural farming town of West that killed 14 people and injured 200.... Perry was in Illinois on Monday on a trip intended to lure companies to relocate to Texas. Among his selling points: Texas' low regulatory climate.... Bills in the Republican-controlled Legislature ... include one that would restrict the public's ability to research a company's environmental compliance history. Another would eliminate, in some cases, the ability of groups to contest permits issued by state environmental regulators. On Monday, a Senate committee cleared the proposal for a full chamber vote." ...
... Todd Robberson of the Dallas Morning News: "Perry made up, out of whole cloth, a supposed preference among Texans for freedom from regulation over being safe from industrial explosions and other disasters.... Never mind that the company had stored 540,000 pounds of highly explosive ammonium nitrate on the site without informing residents of the extreme danger and without informing the Department of Homeland Security -- as required."
No, It Is Not All Obama's Fault. Steve Benen: "For many, especially in media, there's an assumption that there are two major, mainstream political parties -- one center-left, the other center-right -- and an effective president can govern through competent bipartisan outreach. Those assumptions are wrong.... Outreach doesn't work because Republicans have reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It's a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one.... There may have been a time a president could cajole rivals, but until recent years, presidents didn't have to deal with an entire political party that, statistically speaking, is the most ideologically extreme since the dawn of the modern American party system." ...
... BUT, But, but, Steve! Why can't President Obama be more like this? --
... (CW: Also, all presidential speeches should have musical accompaniments.) ...
... Exhibit A in New York Times reporters Michael Shear & Peter Baker's "Obama Is a Wuss" story was this: Democratic Sen. Mark Begich voted against the background checks bill, yet ...
Mr. Begich's defiance and that of other Democrats who voted against Mr. Obama appear to have come with little cost. Sally Jewell, the interior secretary, is still planning a trip to Alaska -- to let Mr. Begich show his constituents that he is pushing the government to approve the road.
... BUT as Oliver Knox of Yahoo! News reveals, the Alaska road is actually an excellent example of presidential deal-cutting: "... the real reason for [Jewell's] visit -- and the reason Obama agreed to give the road project a second look despite fierce opposition from environmentalists (and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)-- was a deal last month between the administration and Alaska's Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski." Knox provides the details. ...
... ** Jonathan Chait of New York takes down MoDo, the Times reporters & others who compare President Obama to Lyndon Johnson (who "enjoyed huge majorities in both houses, along with a majority-rule Senate") & movie presidents. ...
... ASIDE. Speaking of MoDo, there was an interesting discussion in yesterday's Comments about bodice-ripping. "How to Undress a Victorian Lady in Your Next Historical Romance" by Alexandra Alter of the Wall Street Journal is helpful, too:
NEW. Jeff Toobin of the New Yorker provides a guide to the case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev....
... Travis Waldron of Think Progress: Tamerlan Tsarnaev's boxing career "has led Drs. Robert Cantu and Robert Stern to urge examiners to study his brain for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease found in boxers since the 1920s...." ...
... Guess how much the scientists at the Daily Caller like this theory. Now, in case you mistrust your own intuition, check it out. ...
... Rand Paul, in case you were wondering, is still appearing on the teevee. Kevin Robillard of Politico: "Sen. Rand Paul on Monday made clear that in his view, the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings should be tried through normal means, rather than as an enemy combatant." ...
... Eli Lake of Newsweek: "... there were good reasons that the [Russians'] tip [about Tamerlan Tsarnaev] didn't trigger a more aggressive American investigation, current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials tell The Daily Beast. Those officials pointed to the FSB's habit of treating much behavior by Chechens as suspicious, and nearly all such behavior as terror-related. The Tsarnaev request, they speculated, was likely triggered by the FSB's concern that he would participate in or provide support to Chechen insurrectionists in Russia, rather that by any sense of a threat to American interests." ...
... David Henneberry, the man who found Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hiding in his boat, talks to WCVB Boston. With video. Via Adam Martin of New York.
Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times: "The Securities and Exchange Commission may soon make publicly traded corporations disclose all of their political donations, and business groups are already preparing a counterattack."
Congressional Races
Buh-Bye, Baucus. Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times: "Under friendly fire in the Capitol and squeezed politically at home, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a man often at odds with fellow Democrats, announced Tuesday that he would retire in 2014 after almost four decades in Congress.... In Montana, the former Democratic governor Brian Schweitzer -- still a popular and formidable politician -- was making unsubtle suggestions that he might want Mr. Baucus's seat. Expectations among senior Democrats that Mr. Schweitzer was waiting in the wings relieved some of the pressure to keep Mr. Baucus in the re-election hunt." ...
... A Bad Day for Baucus's Former Aides:
... ** Matt Miller of the Washington Post: "Never has a politician done so much to lift the prospects of the republic simply by saying goodbye." ...
... Howard Dean is already circulating a Draft Schweitzer petition. He doesn't seem all sad about Max's move.
Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling: "PPP's newest poll on the special election in South Carolina finds Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch expanding her lead to 9 points over Mark Sanford at 50/41. Green Party candidate Eugene Platt polls at 3%." ...
It's All About Mark. Nick Wing of the Huffington Post: "GOP congressional candidate Mark Sanford picked an inopportune time to release a newspaper ad complaining about his 'rough week.' After a six-day stretch that included a bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, a catastrophic explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, and a daylong lockdown of an entire city, Sanford ran a full-page ad in the Charleston Post and Courier on Sunday lamenting recent negative developments in his campaign for South Carolina's 1st Congressional District." ...
... Forget the Alamo. Texas pundits are pretty pissed at Sanford's misremembering the Alamo. This Houston Chronicle post is a case on point. ...
... Oh, P.S. Gina Smith of the Beaufort, South Carolina, Island Packet: "First Congressional District candidate Mark Sanford, who previously has said he was in his ex-wife's home Feb. 3 because he didn't want his youngest son to watch the Super Bowl alone, said Tuesday that a second son was at the home, too."
Local News
Anjeannette Damon of the Las Vegas Sun: "... the Nevada Senate voted 12-9 to begin the process of repealing the gay marriage ban from the state constitution. Only one Republican, Sen. Ben Kieckhefer, joined with Democrats to vote in favor of Senate Joint Resolution 13, which would repeal the ban on gay marriage and replace it with a requirement that the state recognize all marriages regardless of gender." ...
... Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed: "The bill will now go to the state Assembly. If it passes there, it will have to be passed by the next legislature, which meets in 2015, and then by the people the following year." ...
... Erik Eckholm of the New York Times: "By a vote of 7 to 4, the [Rhode Island State] Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would allow gay and lesbian couples to marry, while allowing religious leaders who oppose such marriages to refuse to perform them. The landmark vote by the full Senate could come on Wednesday. Gay rights advocates said that they think they have the votes to prevail, all but ensuring adoption of same-sex marriage by the only state in New England that does not already allow it." ...
... French News ...
Laura Smith-Spark of CNN: "French lawmakers voted to legalize same-sex marriage Tuesday, despite vocal protests from some conservatives opposed to the step. The nation's lower house approved a marriage bill, which would also give same-sex couples the right to adopt, in a 331-to-225 final vote.... President Francois Hollande, who pledged his support for same-sex marriage on the campaign trail last year, will have to sign the bill before it becomes law."
Dubya News
As Akhilleus warned us in yesterday's Commentariat, we're coming up on George W. Bush Week. To prime us for Falling in Love with George, one of the Washington Post's resident wingers -- Jennifer Rubin -- has typed out her love letter & published it in the newspaper Unofficially Known as Fox on Fifteenth, an appellation that is about to become obsolete as the Post looks to fold the set of "All the President's Men" & move its HQ to the burbs or beyond....
... John Amato of Crooks & Liars, with an assist from Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns & Money, is helpful here. ...
... Ass. Exposed. Steve Benen: "... though the right likes to pretend otherwise, there were terrorist attacks during Bush/Cheney's tenure -- after 9/11.... It's a little tiresome to hear Republicans argue in effect, 'Other than the deadly anthrax attacks, the attack against El Al ticket counter at LAX, the terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's inability to capture those responsible for 9/11, waging an unnecessary war that inspired more terrorists, and the success terrorists had in exploiting Bush's international unpopularity, the former president's record on counter-terrorism was awesome.' And finally, I'm not sure Republican pundits have fully thought through the wisdom of the 'other than 9/11' argument. Bush received an intelligence briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, at which he was handed a memo with an important headline: 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' Bush, however, was on a month-long vacation at the time. He heard the briefer out and replied, 'All right. You've covered your ass, now.'" ...
... MEANWHILE, over at the National Journal, Ron Fournier, former AP Washington bureau chief and occasional head cheerleader at Karl Rove U., has written a piece titled, "Go Ahead, Admit It; George W. Bush Is a Good Man." Fournier's evidence is that Bush has been nice to him; fer instance, one time Dubya sent Fournier a thank-you note after Fournier stood when Dubya entered a press conference in Germany while the German press remained seated....
... Best not to read Fournier's Ode to a Bush without having an antidote at the ready: in this case, a swell point-by-point rebuttal by Stefan BC of Wonkette: "Yes unlike those contemptuous krauts AMERICAN journalists know how to show respect for their authoritarian father figure. Fournier wants you people to remember that politeness is always measured by the thank you notes that a person sends, not the people that one indiscriminately bombs without provocation."
CW: FINALLY, if -- like me -- you thought that nothing funny could be said about the Rogoff-Reinhart clusterfuck, then you don't know Stephen Colbert:
... Later, Colbert interviewed Thomas Herndon, the UMass grad student who discovered the errors in the Rogoff-Reinhart paper:
News Ledes
New York Times: "In what appeared to be a new phase in an intensifying conflict that has raised fears of greater bloodshed and a wider sectarian war, Iraqi soldiers opened fire from helicopters on Sunni gunmen hiding in a northern village on Wednesday, officials said."
Politico: "U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice on Tuesday demanded the United Nations fire a human rights advocate who blamed the American 'global domination project' for the Boston Marathon bombings. 'Outraged by Richard Falk's highly offensive Boston comments,' Rice wrote on Twitter late Tuesday. 'Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN. Past time for him to go.'"
AP: "The nephew of a small-town Illinois mayor shot and killed five people, including two boys, before leading police on a chase that ended in an exchange of gunfire that left him dead, authorities said Wednesday. Illinois State Police said they believe Rick O. Smith, 43, entered a Manchester home through the back door and shot the victims at close range with a shotgun, leaving two women, one man and the boys dead.... Scott County State's Attorney Michael Hill said Smith, of rural Morgan County, had previous convictions for reckless homicide, drugs and bad checks."
Politico: "Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that Tamerlan Tsarnaev returned from Russia last year 'with a willingness to kill people.'" ...
... Politico: "The brothers suspected in last week's fatal Boston Marathon attacks used a remote-control device from a toy car to set off the bombs, a key lawmaker said Wednesday. Maryland Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, confirmed the details after a closed-door briefing with three senior national security officials on Capitol Hill." ...
... AP: "Two U.S. officials say the surviving suspect in the Boston bombings was unarmed when police captured him hiding inside a boat in a neighborhood back yard.... The officials tell The Associated Press that no gun was found in the boat. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said earlier that shots were fired from inside the boat." CW: also kinda deep-sixes the theory that Dzhokhar shot himself in the neck. A more extensive report by the Washington Post is here. ...
... Reuters: " The security planning for last week's Boston Marathon, where two bombs went off killing three people and wounding 264, included preparation for such an emergency, a top Massachusetts public safety official said on Wednesday." ...
... Boston Globe: "Russian officials alerted the Central Intelligence Agency about their concerns over the potential radicalization of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in late September 2011, and a US intelligence official says the agency nominated Tsarnaev for inclusion on a government terror watchlist." ...
... New York Times: "Information about one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, [Tamerlan Tsarnaev,] was entered into two different government watch lists in 2011, but no action was taken after an F.B.I. review concluded that he had no links to extremist groups, American officials said Wednesday." ...
... Boston Globe: "The brother of slain MIT Police Officer Sean A. Collier today remembered him as a person born to be a lawman, a person with a compassionate heart that drove him to help others, and a country music fan with two left feet who still managed to learn how to square dance. 'People ask me if Sean were here, what would he think? Are you kidding me? He would love this,' Rob Rogers told Vice President Joseph Biden, top officials of the elite college, and thousands of others gathered at Briggs Field in Collier's memory." ...
... New York: Tsarnaev brothers may have experimented with explosives using fireworks powder before making the bombs they set at the Boston Marathon. ...
... Boston Globe: "Russian authorities contacted the US government with concerns about Tamerlan Tsarnaev not once but 'multiple' times, including an alert it sent after he was first investigated by FBI agents in Boston, raising new questions about whether the FBI should have paid more attention to the suspected Boston Marathon bomber, US senators briefed on the investigation said Tuesday." ...
... Boston Globe: "Thousands of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students, faculty and staff as well as law enforcement officials from across the nation are expected to attend a memorial service for fallen campus police officer Sean Collier.... Vice President Joe Biden, as well as MIT President L. Rafael Reif, police chief John DiFava and members of Collier's family are scheduled to speak."
New York Times: Italian "President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday appointed Enrico Letta, the deputy head of the Democratic Party, as prime minister designate tasked with forming a government to lead the country out of weeks of political impasse following inconclusive national elections."
New York Times: "An eight-story building in Bangladesh that housed several garment factories collapsed on Wednesday morning, killing at least 70 people, injuring hundreds of others, and leaving an unknown number of people trapped in the rubble, according to Bangladeshi officials and media outlets." CW: Like Texas, Bangladesh is a third-world country where the people prefer to let businesses like sweatshops flourish rather than be hampered by safety inspections. ...
... Reuters UPDATE: "A block housing garment factories and shops collapsed in Bangladesh on Wednesday, killing nearly 100 people and injuring more than a thousand, officials said.... One fireman told Reuters about 2,000 people were in the building when the upper floors slammed down onto those below.... Mohammad Asaduzzaman, in charge of the area's police station, said factory owners appeared to have ignored a warning not to allow their workers into the building after a crack was detected in the block on Tuesday."
Washington Post: "At 1:07 p.m. on Tuesday..., the official Twitter account of the Associated Press sent a tweet to its nearly 2 million followers that warned, 'Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.' ... At 1:08, the Dow began a perilous but short-lived nosedive. It dropped about 150 points, from 14697.15 to 14548.58, before stabilizing at 1:10 p.m., when news that the tweet had been erroneous began to spread. By 1:13 p.m., the level had returned to 14690. During those three minutes, the 'fake tweet erased $136 billion in equity market value,' according to Bloomberg News' Nikolaj Gammeltoft.... About an hour after it was over, a group of hackers who cause trouble in support of Assad, an informal collective known as the Syrian Electronic Army, claimed responsibility for the attack."
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Can't believe I forgot to share this yesterday! It was Happy Krauthammer Day--the 10th anniversary of Charles the Crazy's declaration that we would know in five months (in 2003) whether Iraq had WMD! Yikes. Now it is TEN YEARS!
And Krauthammer is still a big WaPo op ed writer, held in high esteem by Fred Hiatt--the editor, and all the wingnuts! Whatta buncha losers! Have any of them (or Tommy Freedom) apologized for their mistaken beliefs and prophecies? Yeah sure, when the warming earth freezes over.
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"A Belated Happy Krauthammer Day" (Crooks and Liars)
...."It’s now been exactly a decade since Charles Krauthammer told
us that Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.
Charles Krauthammer has not only had that five month period, but twenty-three other five month periods after that first one, for weapons of mass destruction to be found. It’s news to no-one that no weapons have been found. It’s news to no-one that the reason they haven’t been found is because they weren’t there in the first place.
It’s news to no one that Charles Krauthammer is still a columnist at the Washington Post, a syndicated columnist across the US, and a regular talking head on TV. It’s news to no-one that Fred Hiatt, his then-boss and fellow Iraq bullshit artist is still the editor of the Washington Post’s editorial page. Or that Jackson Diehl, who I heard at the time from Washington Post people was even worse than Hiatt, is still there too.
Conservatives and neocons attacked Hans Blix and every other Iraq war cautioner and dissenter with as much ink, talk and hatred that they could muster up and they didn't have to worry about any consequences for their actions because of their media accomplices. Atrios brought us the Friedman Unit after his laughable time tables.
The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006, article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing the repeated use by columnist Thomas Friedman of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out... whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War.
So how many F.U.s have gone by so far since we attacked Iraq? What shall we call all those who fall into Krauthammer's paradigm?"
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Not the End of Story--unfortunately! The creeps thrive and prosper.
Breaking Bad Baucus: I got a sniff of this guy's shifty ways during the AFCA's trial and error push through. Sitting in back of Baucus was a nice looking little lady who we were told at the time was an aide, but as we found out later was affiliated with WellPoint. She was glued to her chair throughout–– whispering, handing him papers, giving him on occasion what looked like gummy bears to keep him from falling asleep. There was always something that bothered me about old Max––whenever I listened to him I got visions of swarthy men with tall hats riding their horses across the Montana plains pretending they were rugged buccaneers when in reality they were just really rich white guys out for an afternoon spree. "What a friend we have in Baucus" was the refrain heard up and down K Street, especially on Sundays when the singing was oh, so sweet. Good riddance Max! We hardly knew ye, didn't we.
Re; Ignorance is bliss but stupidity is a comfort.
"People, through their elected officials, clearly send the message of their comfort with the amount of oversight." -- Gov. Rick Perry.
Way to go, Gov; You just explained how you got elected.
How about some help with your campaign to lure industry to the great "Lone Gene State"? Here's one; "Come to Texas; your business will explode!" or "Texas; home of the federal-free disaster" or "Texans, the dumbest workforce in America"
And just a word about crotch openings apropos of our discussion here of bodice ripping–––only men of steel meaning men with swords could rip open those bodices that held women in so tightly they continually had those fainting spells or what they called then "the vapors"––but back to crotches: I would suggest that the open crotch was most useful for “passing water” as they used to say; this is not to dispel the idea that those like Victoria and Albert didn’t have on occasion a quickie in the closet although how you managed that with those billowy skirts taxes the imagination. There is a scene in the film, “Mrs. Brown” where Judi Dench who plays Queen Victoria, out on a walk with her ladies in waiting , squats down to pee whilst her hand maidens drape themselves around her as camouflage. Nowadays, if perchance nature calleth whilst walking in the woods, we women have to disrobe somewhat awkwardly behind some thick tree, pee and take the chance of getting a case of poison ivy. So much for modern garb.
Re: Keeping abreast of the thread; As far as I know this is the only web site that can discuss federal law and ripped bodices with equal amounts of intelligent input. Thanks to Marie and the rest of you all.
JJG,
Not to mention learned commentary on the vicissitudes of discretely peeing in the out of doors, as they say.
And speaking of peeing, discretely or otherwise, luckily we won't have Max Baucus around much longer to pee on everyone and tell us it was raining out, so to that poltroonish picador I commit the following:
There once was a man named Baucus
Who lurked on the Democrats’ caucus
A churl and a hack
With a knife for each back
Good riddance, he’ll no longer fock us.
Playing fast and loose with some benign regulation in re: the fertilizer plant seems just a tad understated. Aren't we talking about a large amount of materials that can and have been used in "weapons of mass destruction" that went unreported to Homeland Security? Seems like the terrorism, oh excuse me I mean TERRORISM!!!!!!!, watchdogs are decidedly not on their game. Perhaps we'll get a Cruz lecture on FREEEEDOM instead. After all, corporations are people and unless you are a maybe Muslim, you have every right to possess large quantities of bomb making materials. I'm pretty sure that's in Cruz's copy of the Constitution, i.e the asswipe version.
@Ahkilleus. Love the Baucus eulogy.
Kate,
Shit stains like Krauthammer will always be with us because their readers only care that they hate progressives, liberals and any policies and political stances they might support. It doesn't matter if their predictions are correct. It only matters that they toe the conservative line.
Facts, truth, accuracy, common decency, and civility, none of that matters. All that matters is that he rip those he and they consider unAmerican or worse.
Krauthammer, a highly paid columnist who pretends on occasion that he's still a working psychiatrist, once spent an entire column psychoanalyzing the Berenstain Bears. The fucking Berenstain Bears, fer chrissakes, because he was pissed that the Papa Bear wasn't the kind of caveman husband that Krauthammer idolizes. He wasn't MANLY and worse, he did the dishes and helped his wife with household chores. I guess he wanted his kids to read the one where Papa Bear smacks Mama Bear upside the head for mouthing off, "The Berenstain Bears Learn About Restraining Orders".
But as much as he despised what he refers to as Papa Bear's "post-feminist" (read "pussy") attitudes, Mama Bear gets both barrels of Krauthammer-style misogyny. Mrs. Berenstain, according to Krauthammer, obviously playing out some weird adolescent rejection fantasy, was, he whined, the kind of uppity bitch you just wanted to kill when you were in school (he suggests drowning) because she was just too perfect (too perfect, or too smart, anyway, to go out with an aberrant asshat like Krauthammer).
(What is it about people like Krauthammer that make them hate women so much?)
And he gets PAID to write this kind of shit. Honestly, someone who has such dramatic, violent responses to characters in children's books needs to be medicated or locked up. Preferably both, but I'll settle for locked up.
But anyway, it doesn't matter if he's EVER right about anything. It's the thought that counts. Hate, psychotic role-playing, wingnut wishful thinking clothed in blood, gore, resentment, victimization, and misogyny underpin his thinking and ensure that his writing will never make sense to anyone in the real world.
But he still cashes those checks. Go figure.
Another mass shooting. This time in a small town in Illinois. A gunman shot and killed an entire family including two small children, one of whom was a one year old baby.
But never fear, Wayne LaPierre and all the cowards who voted against controls to help prevent this sort of thing want you to know that this is a once in a lifetime situation. Never happen again. Sad, but what can you do, because, you know, FREEEDDOOOMMM.
More deaths from an attack by one man with several guns than in the Boston Marathon attack with two bombs. And all Fox and the other conservative apologists can talk about now is how to save us from those evil Mooslims, and how we need to stop immigration altogether.
But here we are at the end of April and our yearly average number of people killed by gunfire should be approaching 10,000. But hey, those people simply have to die for the sake of the gun lobby. Because.....well, you know why.
And shhhhhh.....we're not allowed to talk about doing anything about this particular atrocity. If it involves death by gunfire, it's A-OK and it's an All-American way to go! So hip, hip, fucking hooray, praise the lord and pass the ammunition. Plenty more innocents to murder.
Better get crackin'.
I feel in especially good company this afternoon. Charlie Pierce also characterized the Tsarnaev losers as well.... "losers" earlier today. From Pierce today at Esquire:
"Losers can kill people as easily as winners can, and ennobling the actions of a couple of bloodthirsty square pegs by draping those actions with vast, geopolitical significance is a bigger disservice to their victims than laughing at the two of them is. Let them be ridiculed. Let them be tried. Let them be convicted. Let us then not hear of them again. But let them be ridiculed first. It's healthy."
Read more: More Information Out On Tsarnaev Brothers Partying - The Stupid (And The Deadly) Was Strong In These Ones - Esquire http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/more-information-out-on-tsarnaev-brothers-partying-042413#ixzz2RPovW8CF
Akhilleus: Passage of Manchin-Tooney would have done nothing to stop this massacre. The killer could have walked in the door with his Sigg-Sauer P229 pistol loaded with 13 9mm rounds, shot everyone twice and still had 3 rounds left to finish off any survivors. Before reloading. I'm not aware of any law, past or present, passed or proposed, that is/was intended to stop something like this. Of course I'm not American so I've not been exposed to the mass protests by a citizenry enraged at the failure of the senate to pass the M_T.
Thought this quote from Mark Morford's column today was quite to the point.
"Sure they’re from a violent and war-torn region, mostly (though Chechnya is quite stable now), but it’s also a part of the world almost no one knows or cares anything about, and never really will."
@cowichan: you have made a blanket statement about a multiple murder in Illinois without providing evidence to support your thesis. According to the AP report, "Scott County State's Attorney Michael Hill said Smith, [the alleged gunman], of rural Morgan County, had previous convictions for reckless homicide, drugs and bad checks." (See today's Ledes for link.) I don't know how Smith got his weapons, but since Manchin-Toomey requires background checks, it seems possible, if not likely, that with his history of reckless homicide & drug use, Smith would have flunked the background check & have been denied purchase of his weapons.
Also, I don't know where you got your information about the type of gun Smith had, which you describe as a "Sigg-Sauer P229 pistol loaded with 13 9mm rounds." According to the AP report, Smith allegedly shot the victims "at close range with a shotgun.... Police said they found a rifle, shotgun and large hunting knife in Smith's car." I don't know what a Sigg-Sauer P229 pistol is, but it doesn't sound like a shotgun to me.
In addition, Akhilleus did not say or imply that Manchin-Toomey, had it been in effect way back when, would have prevented this particular -- or any particular -- murder. For the most part, as reports we've linked to here have indicated, states with stricter gun laws have fewer gun murders per capita.
So even if strict background checks would not have prevented the mass murder in Illinois -- and I submit that they might have -- they would surely prevent other murders, gun suicides & accidental shootings.
In the future, please write comments that are consistent with the facts, or at least the facts as they are known at the time of writing. Making up stuff does not advance the conversation.
Marie