Monthly Archives: March 2012

Guns Don’t Kill People; Paranoid Whackjobs With Guns Kill People

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Steve M has been blogging up a storm about the shooting of Trayvon Martin, but for now I just want to riff a bit on this post and also Jesse Taylor’s post on paranoia.

Over many, many years I’ve attempted to communicate to gun, um, enthusiasts. I do try to be fair. For example, I give the 2nd Amendment the same expansive interpretation I give the rest of the Bill of Rights. Sometimes liberals don’t want to hear this, but in fact the 2nd was assumed in early American history to protect an individual right (for white men, anyway) to own firearms, the militia clause notwithstanding.

I’m not really anti-gun. I grew up in a rural culture in which the menfolk would, from time to time, gather up dogs and rifles and go out to the woods to shoot forest creatures. The menfolk in my family rarely actually killed anything, as I remember. But the point is that I don’t faint away at the sight of a firearm, and I’m not opposed to people owning firearms.

However, I have big issues with the idea that anybody should be able to carry a concealed weapon anywhere he wants. And my issue is that a big chunk of humanity doesn’t have the sense God gave mushrooms. People who are frightened, panicked, startled, angry, drunk, stupid, or whatever, are not people I want to have “locked and loaded” in my neighborhood, thanks much.

And then there are the Fox News viewers who have been commenting on the Martin case. I assume most of these people are law-abiding citizens, meaning they’ve never been convicted of a crime. But how many of these hate-spewing bigots would you like carrying concealed weapons in your town?

In my conversations with Gun People I have seen over and over again that they divide humanity into two types of people – “criminals” and “law-abiding citizens.” And the latter, the LACs, are seen as noble and sensible people who would never, ever, shoot anyone who wasn’t a “criminal.” Gun People assume that the only reason we Not Gun People are nervous about guns is that we think that more “criminals” will get guns and use them to commit crimes.

But that has never been my concern. My concern is that a large part of the people I have met — pretty much all of them, actually — who are all fired up to carry guns wherever they want appear to have serious anger issues, if not outright paranoia. If I could vote on which people I would trust to carry a concealed weapon, it would not be them.

I’ve even communicated with whackjobs — sorry, but that’s what they are — who cannot understand why it’s a really, really bad idea to have loaded guns within reach when there are small children in the house. They thump their chests and say they will teach their kids to leave the guns alone, which tells me they have no actual hands-on experience raising children (even if they have children). Even “good” children do things they know they aren’t supposed to do. But the consequences of raiding the cookie jar or getting the handgun Dad keeps under the bed are quite a bit different.

Last week in Washington state three children were shot, and two died, because they got their hands on loaded guns adults kept for self-defense. In one case, a three-year-old shot himself in the head with a gun his father kept in his car. In another, a 7-year-old girl was shot and killed by a younger sibling, also with a loaded gun kept in the family van. In those cases, the adults were in compliance with all firearm laws, and no charges were filed.

If you’ve got small children, you go around putting caps on unused electric sockets and keep the Draino out of reach. Yet some people refuse to acknowledge that maybe a loaded gun is at least as dangerous to small children as Draino. Like I said, they lack the sense that God gave mushrooms.

And then there’s the National Rifle Association. Current leadership has whipped up paranoia among its members to keep those dues coming in. So potentially violent paranoids with guns — albeit who are not “criminals” — now have their own lobby. And Florida’s “stand your ground” law is the fruit of that. Jesse Taylor writes,

An expansive self-defense doctrine turns the expression of paranoid activity into a socially acceptable, excused form of vigilantism. Hunting down and murdering a teenager visiting his father because he “looked suspiciously at houses” and “walked slowly” – teenagers being known, of course, for their otherwise purposeful, focused strides – becomes a he said, he dead proposition. The paranoiac who fixates on black youth is protected, because feeding a certain form of majoritarian paranoia bears rather awesome political fruit.

The issue is not simply that a non-black man has a problem with the existence of young black men. It’s that the law in Florida is structured in such a way that the former can use the latter for target practice, and says nothing so long as one is afraid of 140-pound teenagers for the right reasons.

I’d like to point out one more wrinkle in Trayvon Martin’s case. The evidence we’ve heard about in news stories makes it clear that Zimmerman followed and confronted Martin, and that Martin had tried to get away from Zimmerman. Yet Zimmerman claims Martin assaulted him before he fired. I am skeptical, but let’s assume that’s true.

Didn’t the unarmed Martin have a right to “stand his ground” also? A much bigger man, a stranger, had been following him and then confronted him in a belligerent manner. Martin had even tried to get away, but failed. If it turns out that Martin did land a punch or a kick on Zimmerman before he was killed, didn’t he have a right to do that? Or does “self-defense” only apply to people with guns?

Death and Taxes Updates

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A new piece of information in the Trayvon Martin case came out this afternoon, which is that up until moments before he was killed Martin was talking on his cell phone with his girlfriend. Phone records support this. The young lady said that Martin had become aware that someone was following him and had tried to get away.

If that shooting wasn’t criminal I don’t know what is.

The other news is that Paul Ryan has come out with a new budget that, in the grand tradition of Paul Ryan budgets, would end Medicare in favor of a bigger defense budget and tax cuts for millionaires. The wonder is that Ryan still hasn’t figured out that this stuff is toxic for his party during an election year. He must be very stupid.

Race-Obsessed Radicals and Guns

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The Breitbrats are still “vetting” Derrick Bell and his critical race theory. Apparently to even suggest that U.S. institutions might be rigged to favor white people is an outrageous lie promoted by “race-obsessed radicals.” Worse, say the Breitbrats, critical race theory is even being used “as a foundation to encourage teachers, students, and school systems as a whole to talk about race,” at taxpayers’ expense.

Wow, imagine that. Just you watch; next schoolchildren will be indoctrinated with the idea that it’s not nice to beat up gay people, or something.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is taking an interest in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American male killed by a “neighborhood watch” captain. Martin had been walking from a 7-11 holding a suspicious bag of Skittles and a very threatening can of Arizona Ice Tea.

This would normally have been a local case, but law enforcement officials in Sanford, Florida, seemed disinterested in prosecuting the shooter, George Zimmerman. And the forensic evidence plus eyewitness testimony plus a 911 call made by an obviously hysterical Zimmerman all suggest that Zimmerman chased down, assaulted and shot Martin for no rational reason. But Zimmerman claimed the shooting was self-defense, and the local police bought that and were making no effort to investigate further.

Part of the problem here is that Florida self-defense laws are so broad and loose that just about any shooting — well, unless perhaps the accused shooter is a black gang member and the victim is a comatose nun — could be considered self-defense. Pretty much all the perpetrator has to do is say it was self-defense, and it’s like holding a Get Out of Jail Free card. The prosecution has such a high burden of proof to meet to declare otherwise that it’s pretty much open season for homicide in Florida. Remarkably, Louisiana has a higher homicide rate than Florida, which makes me wonder what the bleep is going on in Louisiana.

For the details in this case, please see Adam Weinstein, Charles Blow, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. For possible future further developments, see Steve M.

Equivalence? In Your Dreams …

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According to most of the Right and also the perpetually clueless Stanley Fish (note to Protein Wisdom: If Fish is a “progressive,” I’m Pat Robertson. And Jesus.), this …

… is equivalent to this …

For those of you who are not able to watch the videos, in the first Bill Maher tells a joke about Sarah Palin — that when she heard about last year’s disaster in Japan, she demanded that we invade Tsunami. And then he introduced the next joke with “speaking of dumb tw*ts….” The second video shows highlights from Rush Limbaugh’s three-day rant against Sandra Fluke. (I realize that Maher has said other naughty things about Palin beside this, but again, the Rush video only shows some of what he said about Fluke.)

To say these are equivalent is a bit like saying an average-size rain puddle is equivalent to Lake Superior. And I’m not defending Maher. As I wrote a few days ago, using gender insults to ridicule a particular woman puts down all women in the same way that calling one black person a N—– puts down all African Americans.

But the fact is that if Rush had only said that Sandra Fluke was a “dumb tw*t it probably would have gone unnoticed. Instead, Rush went on, and on, and on, for three freaking days.

But beyond quantity of verbiage, we might also consider another measure of difference between these two “examples.”

What was the effect? Did Maher’s line have any measurable effect on public opinion or the quality of serious political discourse? Comedians make fun of politicians all the time, and the public is free to either be amused or offended. But I doubt that what Maher said changed anyone’s opinion about Palin one way or another.

On the other hand, Limbaugh flat-out lied about Fluke’s testimony for three days (and no doubt beyond), and judging by comments on rightie sites, in large part thanks to Limbaugh a big chunk of the American public actually believes that Sandra Fluke demanded that taxpayers pay for her contraceptives so she could have more sex. And no amount of linking to or explaining Fluke’s actual testimony can change their minds. In other words, Rush utterly poisoned any discussion we might have had on the issue of private insurance mandates and contraception.

Fish’s argument appears to be that we are supposed to see these two as equivalent because it’s the fair thing to do —

These questions come naturally to those who have been schooled in the political philosophy of enlightenment liberalism. The key move in that philosophy is to shift the emphasis from substantive judgment — is what has been said good and true? — to a requirement of procedural reciprocity — you must treat speakers equally even if you can’t abide what some of them stand for. Basically this is the transposition into the political realm of the Golden Rule: do unto others what you would have them do unto you. Don’t give your friends a pass you wouldn’t give to your enemies.

So if you come down hard on Limbaugh because he has crossed a line, you must come down hard on Schultz and Maher because they have crossed the same line; and you should do this despite the fact that in general — that is, on all the important issues — you think Schultz and Maher are right and Limbaugh is horribly and maliciously wrong.

However, I don’t think Schultz and Maher were “right.” But Ed Schultz was taken off the air for a week because of his use of a sexual insult, and I think that was appropriate. The price was paid. The scales were balanced in his case. He probably won’t do that ever again.

I don’t think Maher received any punishment for the “dumb tw*t” remark, but once again, if that is all Limbaugh had done, those of us who never listen to Limbaugh probably wouldn’t have noticed, or cared.

Fish continues,

The idea is that in the public sphere (as opposed to the private sphere in which you can have and vent your prejudices) you should not privilege your own views to the extent that they justify treating those with opposing views unequally and unfairly. (Fairness is the great liberal virtue.) This idea is concisely captured by the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he says that in political life we should regard our most cherished beliefs, “whether moral or religious … simply as someone’s beliefs rather than as truths.” In short, back away from or relax your strongest convictions about what is right and wrong and act in a manner that grants legitimacy, at least of a formal kind, to the convictions of others, even of others you despise.

The difference between Maher and Limbaugh is the difference between insult and slander. Maher insulted Sarah Palin; but all he communicated was that he doesn’t like her. He didn’t make any substantive claims about her that one could judge to be true or not. But Limbaugh spent three days telling outright lies about Sandra Fluke’s testimony.

So where’s the equivalence, Mr. Fish?

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

I reject making moral judgments about behavior based on how I feel about the people acting out the behavior. The more useful measure is to consider the effects, actual and potential, of a particular act. And again, by that measure comparing Maher and Limbaugh is comparing a puddle to Lake Superior. They are both “wrong,” but wrong on an entirely different scale. And not equivalent.

See also Whiskey Fire.

Today’s Paranoid News

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This weekend President Obama executed a coup against Congress and the American people, according to a number of rightie bloggers. The President will personally be coming for your guns and womenfolk and will probably confiscate your Bibles and your beer as well. Well, unless it’s Schlitz or Coors Lite; you can keep those. Pam Geller (to whom I do not link) claims that even our bodies have been nationalized and are now subject to presidential whim.

How did he do this? He signed this executive order. To be fair, not everyone on the Right is preparing for a final shoot-out for freedom in the mountains somewhere. Even William Jacobson figured out we are not really under martial law.

So if you want something real to worry about, read “The Collapse of Employment-Based Coverage” by Krugman. Although, also too, “First They Came for the Golf Courses.”

Wingnutism as an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

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Along with not being able to control their fear/loathing of women, wingnuts also are decidedly knee-jerk when it comes to government social programs. So it is that some Republican Senators (Rand Paul, LIndsey Graham, Jim DeMint, and Mike Lee) have trotted out a new plan to “save” Medicare by destroying it.

Dana Milbank writes,

If you’re thinking of answering this in the affirmative, you might want to pause long enough to learn what transpired on the third floor of the Capitol on Thursday. There, four prominent Republican lawmakers announced their proposal to abolish Medicare — “sunset” was their pseudo-verb — even for those currently on the program or nearing retirement. …

… For years, Republicans have insisted that they would not end Medicare as we know it and that any changes to the program would not affect those in or near retirement. In the span of 20 minutes Thursday, they jettisoned both promises.

And in an election year, too, although I don’t know if any of these four is up for re-election this year. Rand Paul isn’t, of course.

DeMint and his colleagues think the time to end Medicare is now — with a cold-turkey conversion to a private program, effective in 2014. “I think if Americans actually find out the truth about what we’re doing, it will be a very big positive for Republicans in the fall,” DeMint forecast.

The plan is to scrap Medicare and enroll seniors in the health care plan for federal workers. Exactly how this would save money is a mystery to me, although Rand Paul says it would save Medicare $1 trillion over ten years, a figure I assume he pulled out of his ass. It’s possible he doesn’t appreciate that adding all those seniors to the federal group insurance plan would drive up the cost of the federal group insurance plan.

At Thursday’s news conference, Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times pointed out that the lawmakers were proposing to do with Medicare almost exactly what President Obama’s reforms do for non-retirees: Direct them into private insurance with a subsidy for those who need it most.

Paul was flummoxed. “Uh, anybody want to comment on that?” he asked, producing laughter in the Senate TV studio.

DeMint gave it a try. “Medicare’s already set up as a government program, so we’re beginning to privatize with this idea,” he said. He said his plan takes Medicare recipients “out from under that manipulative umbrella of the Democratic Party.”

I’ve seen primary exit polling that suggests many seniors vote for Republicans because they believe they will “save” Medicare from the evil President Obama, who wants to “cut” it. Of course, the opposite is actually true. The President is trying to keep the program as it is but keep it solvent by putting tighter controls on payments to providers. On the other hand, all of the GOP candidates, including Mittens, have endorsed some variation of the Paul Ryan Medicare-killing plan. But a big talking point with them is a promise to maintain the current program for people already on it.

Now Rand, DeMint et al. are challenging the candidates to go even further Right on Medicare than they were already, which would be a disaster for whichever one of them is in the general election. That they couldn’t contain themselves and wait until after the November election to make this proposal makes them all look even more like lemmings than they did already.

Related: “The Case for Crazy.” John Avlon argues that the best thing that could happen to the GOP is to nominate Rick Santorum and lose in a historic landslide in November.

If Mitt Romney does finally wrestle the nomination to the ground, and then loses to Obama, conservatives will blame the loss on his alleged moderation. The right wing take-away will be to try to nominate a true ideologue in 2016.

But if someone like Rick Santorum gets the nomination in an upset, the party faithful will get to experience the adrenaline rush of going off a cliff together, like Thelma and Louise—elation followed by an electoral thud.

Part of the delusion that is “movement conservatism” is the belief that a large majority of the American people agree with teabaggery, and that only a fringe of elitist liberals stand against them. A teabag candidate sinking like the Titanic might wake some of them up, and might also be a warning to the small group of gazillionaires underwriting this nonsense that there’s a limit to what their money can buy, even in the age of Citizens United.

Today’s Freedom News

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So now Frothy vows to end internet and other porn (Note to commenters — remember to misspell “porn” so that your comment isn’t caught in the spam filter. Or just call it “santorum.”).

Santorum says in a statement posted to his website, “The Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.”

If elected, he promises to “vigorously” enforce laws that “prohibit distribution of hardcore (obscene) pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite TV, on hotel/motel TV, in retail shops and through the mail or by common carrier.”

According to the Daily Caller article linked above, the way to “stop” internet porn would be to prosecute people who are receiving it. So if the Gubmint determines you are browsing in naughty places, the prosecutors might knock on your door, seize your computer and indict you for what you were doing with it.

Ain’t freedom grand? But one catch with this (hat tip Digby) — internet porn consumers disproportionally live in red states.

In 2009, Benjamin G. Edelman of the Harvard Business School published the results of a state-by-state study on the number of people who were subscribing to adult membership Web sites; Edelman found that eight of the 10 states that had the highest per capita consumption of online porn were states that Republican John McCain won in 2008’s presidential election. Utah topped the list, and other red states in Edelman’s top 10 included Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, North Dakota and West Virginia. The only states in Edelman’s top 10 that Obama won in 2008 were Florida and Hawaii.

To be fair, this may be because other outlets for porn are less available in, say, Salt Lake City than in, say, San Francisco. But my impression was that porn is not the hot-button issue it was in the 1970s or so. See also Annie Laurie and Doghouse Riley.

The state of Texas, which tirelessly protects women’s freedom to not get abortions, has now gone a step further and liberated poor women from access to family planning services.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced on Thursday that it will cut off all Medicaid funding for family planning to the state of Texas, following Gov. Rick Perry’s (R) decision to implement a new law that excludes Planned Parenthood from the state’s Medicaid Women’s Health Program. …

… The federal government pays for nearly 90 percent of Texas’ $40 billion Women’s Health Program, and nearly half of the program’s providers in Texas are Planned Parenthood clinics. But the new law that went into effect earlier this month disqualified Planned Parenthood from participating in the program because some of its clinics provide abortions, even though no state or federal money can be used to pay for those abortions.

I’m sure the women of Texas are grateful.

And They Deny There’s a War on Women

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It just keeps coming — Senate Republicans are fighting to kill the Violence Against Women Act. It’s like they can’t help themselves.

VAW is up for renewal. Although some Senate Republicans supported VAW in the past, the Dems have added two measures to the bill that Republicans are calling poison pills. One, they want to make it easier for battered women who are illegal immigrants to get temporary visas. Two, they want to include same-sex couples in programs for domestic violence.

Some conservatives are feeling trapped.

“I favor the Violence Against Women Act and have supported it at various points over the years, but there are matters put on that bill that almost seem to invite opposition,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, who opposed the latest version last month in the Judiciary Committee. “You think that’s possible? You think they might have put things in there we couldn’t support that maybe then they could accuse you of not being supportive of fighting violence against women?”

I don’t know if that was the plan. But considering all the creative ways Republicans in Congress have used “poison pills” so that they could bash Democrats for one thing or another (here’s just one example, from the maha archives), I say — choke on it, dude.

Meanwhile, some righties are still trying to trash Sandra Fluke. This time, they find she is dating a liberal Jew. Oh noes! Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money provides insightful commentary.

Sandra Fluke’s boyfriend is…wait…a JEW!!!!

And not the good kind of Jew that likes to kill Palestinians in order to further bizarre apocalyptic fantasies of right-wing Christians.

No, Fluke likes the kind of Jew who might know leading Democratic players like….oh my god….CASS SUNSTEIN!!!!!

What’s next? Black men hugging each other? Sorta kinda related — Tbogg.

And wading further into the murky world of guilt by association, Little Lulu has discovered that Soledad O’Brien knows somebody who knew Derrick Bell, and that she has read one of Derrick Bell’s books, twice. Obviously, this “pro-Bell bias” disqualified her from attempting to crack through the dense wall of stupid known as “Joel Pollack.”

Actually, it’s not a war on women. It’s a war on humanity.

They Don’t Learn, Do They?

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A Bloomberg poll says that 77 percent of Americans side with progressives on the question of contraception and women’s health.

Americans overwhelmingly regard the debate over President Barack Obama’s policy on employer-provided contraceptive coverage as a matter of women’s health, not religious freedom, rejecting Republicans’ rationale for opposing the rule. More than three-quarters say the topic shouldn’t even be a part of the U.S. political debate.

More than six in 10 respondents to a Bloomberg National Poll — including almost 70 percent of women — say the issue involves health care and access to birth control, according to the survey taken March 8-11.

Meanwhile, the yahoos in the Arizona legislature think that employers need to be informed about their employees’ contraception use.

A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they’re using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona’s an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees’ sex lives could fire them as a result.

This is all about “freedom,” of course.

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.

“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. “So, government should not be telling the organizations or mom and pop employers to do something against their moral beliefs.”

Yeah, I’m sure the women of Arizona will be fine with having to get permission slips from their bosses to be on the pill.

Meanwhile, just weeks after the Komen for the Fail debacle, Mittens promises to get rid of Planned Parenthood:

“The test is pretty simple. Is the program so critical, it’s worth borrowing money from china to pay for it? And on that basis of course you get rid of Obamacare, that’s the easy one. Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that. The subsidy for Amtrak, I’d eliminate that. The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities,” he said.

I’d borrow money from China to buy Mittens some integrity. Or maybe even a brain.