Enough!

Andy Sullivan goes off on the Repugs big time. 1st and last ¶:

Between the humiliating and chaotic collapse of Speaker Boehner's already ludicrously extreme Plan B and Wayne La Pierre's deranged proposal to put government agents in schools with guns, the Republican slide into total epistemic closure and political marginalization has now become a free-fall. This party, not to mince words, is unfit for government. There is no conservative party in the West - except for minor anti-immigrant neo-fascist ones in Europe - anywhere close to this level of far right extremism. And now the damage these fanatics can do is not just to their own country - was the debt ceiling debacle of 2011 not enough for them? - but to the entire world.
...

Enough. This faction and its unhinged fanaticism has no place in any advanced democracy. They must be broken. But the current irony is that no one has managed to expose their extremism more clearly than their own Speaker. His career is over. As is the current Republican party. We need a new governing coalition in the House - Democrats and those few sane Republicans willing to put country before ideology. But even that may be impossible.

Couldn'ta said it better myself.

Saturday Emmylou Blogging

Assuming there is a Saturday, of course. Emmylou and Buddy "Stingy Brim" Miller.

"Wide River to Cross" at the Miracle on Music Row concert in Nashville TN, December 15, 2012

Thanks to JWarrickVideos.

Ah'm ready fer them black hella-co-peters now, you betcha!

I bought a firearm yesterday.

Backstory is, I got my Wednesday Sierra Sun and in amongst the advertising supplements was one from Cabela's Reno store like there is every week.

A word about Cabela's if you're not familiar with them - a huge store, what we used to call a "sporting goods" store, now called "outfitters", which in actual fact can outfit you for every kind of outdoor activity from a short hike to a year in your bunker. Fishin', huntin', hikin', campin', shootin', boatin', ATV-in', blastin', an' grillin' barely begin to cover it. Mrs. G bought some delicious fudge too!

Anyway, they had an item on sale that I've wanted one of for thirty years. I wasn't actively pursuing said burning desire but it leaped off the page at me and off I went.

The store has a firearms counter about a hundred feet long with three full time staff. Enough rifles, pistols, and assault weapons to equip a small nation's army. Or make a gun nut pop serious wood. There were several of those there, but I took a number and got right up, serious buyer that I was.

I bought one of these. If you click the link you can "add to cart" and buy one at the sale price right there. It's called the "Model 1851 Confederate Navy .44 Caliber Revolver". I don't care for the Confederacy very much so it's just the "1851 Navy" to me, and that is how the manufacturer refers to it everywhere except when it comes in a Cabela's box.

It is made by Pietta in Italy. Them Eye-ties is a-catchin' right up in the field of modern weaponry! It's well made and quite heavy. A good looking piece too, to my eye, and it's in my favorite caliber.

Keep in mind that this thing is no toy. It's a .44 caliber revolver that is perfectly capable of killing a human being, not that I have any plans to do so. Perish the thought.

I bring that up because there are several anomalies in our firearms laws regarding black powder firearms. There is no background check required. I am a California resident and was able to buy it across the counter in Nevada, which I could not have done with a "normal" firearm. Hell, they didn't even ask my name. If I had paid cash, there would have been no record of the transaction. Which I was going to do, except they offered me an additional $25 off my purchase if I got a Cabela's Visa card, which, thrifty sort that I am, I did. Then they wanted to know my name! Heh. I filled out a very short form. The clerk handed me a complete finalized credit card about a minute later and I headed for the cashier and that was it.

Note: I had a choice of 5" or 7" barrels. I opted for the 5" barrel on the logical assumption that the extra 2" would slow down my draw when the Blue Helmets/black helicopters/revenooers/guys with the big butterfly nets/whomever come for me.

I also bought some Pyrodex, percussion caps, and a "starter kit" so I can shoot the damn thing, which I probably won't be able to do until spring because the road to our local firing range is closed due to snow. I don't dare even load it because I haven't the faintest idea of how to unload it except by pulling the trigger which is a bozo-no-no in town. I'm looking forward to it though. Should be big fun!

The following video shows one reason perhaps why there are so few restrictions on buying these - they take more time to reload than you would have at a mass shooting spree before the cops come. Not exactly a weapon of mass destruction. The one in the video is purported to be a Colt but it looks exactly like mine.

Thanks to Lylea876.

Afterthought:

The only other firearm I ever bought over the counter (at our local Longs Drug of all places) without a background check was a perfectly functional M1 Garand. One of the finest mankillers ever devised, it's considered an antique and thus no check is required. Since I carried one of those in the Marine Corps for a while, I guess I'm an antique too. Sigh.

Plan B - Over The Top

Plan B fiasco leaves GOP lost, divided, and weak

Nothing wrong with that!

I used to think Orange Boner was just so weak a leader that he couldn't throw a beer party in a brewery if someone else brought the nachos.

Today I'm more inclined to think of him as a character in a WWI movie. Picture him as Sub-Leftenant Pugsley-Codswallop waving his Webley revolver, on a lanyard of course, over his head and exhorting the grizzled veterans of Her Majesty's Involuntary Rifles to "Over the top, lads! Follow me!". The men, played by Reps. Cantor and McCarthy, simply wait until his machine-gun-bullet-riddled corpse falls back in the trench and continue with their bully beef and tea and hope he doesn't have so much lead in him that he'll be too heavy to carry off before he starts to stink.

It's a heartwarming visual, isn't it?

Update:

The humiliation of John Boehner

He's powerless, and his own party continues to make him look like a fool. Maybe he'll just walk away

Better than being carried. Heh.

The End Is Here...

Headline of the Day

The 50 Worst Columns of 2012

Just ... go.

Update:

It was brought to my attention that the above link was broken. Thank you. It's fixed now.

A Post on Gun Laws That Will Piss Off Guntards

El Rude-o. Not too off the mark, but this part is right on the money:

You own a weapon. You own a thing that is meant to kill people. Respect that. Respect that society has a stake in making sure that your mechanism of death isn't used stupidly or criminally. Statistically, you will never get the chance to be a hero. You will never stop a mass shooting. In fact, pretty much everyone who ever did stop one was a trained police or security officer or ex-military.

You might hate speed limits because you know you can drive fast safely. But all it takes is one person not as skilled as you believe you are to spin out and kill a whole bunch of us. If you speed a lot and get caught, you get your license taken away. All you gotta do is respect the speed limit, and you can drive as much as you want.

Gun laws exist not to deny you anything, but to protect the rest of us.

He failed to add "from you".

A Message To The NRA From Robert E. Lee

From One Who Knows. Heh. Goblinbooks.

What do you think the Confederacy was? It was the largest, most well-organized American militia group that ever tried to take on the US military. And they went after us like a pack of pitbulls going through an old folks home. It was not pretty. And when your time comes, you and your camping buddies from the real estate firm are not going to last anywhere near as long as we did, okay? You'll get a million views on YouTube, they'll pop you into a federal prison, and nothing will be any different.

Why does this matter? Because a main argument you gun nuts use to fend off regulation is that you act as a powerful check on tyranny. You do not. I know it, the feds know it, and even you know it, deep down.
...

Stop playing soldier, stop preventing common sense gun control laws, and take some responsibility for your government.

And by the way, NASCAR sucks, Carolina barbecue is overrated, and Lynrd Skynyrd are from Florida, which isn't even part of the South. I'm done here.

OMG, dissing NASCAR and Carolina BBQ?! Two of the very few things that are good about the South? No wonder he lost. He's right about Florida. Two outta three ain't bad if yer tryin' ta piss people off.

Firefighters, Bikers, Block Haters

New Civil Rights Movement. Links and photos at site.

Newtown: Police, Fire, Motorcycle Group, Among Do-Gooders Preventing Westboro Funeral Picket
...

Westboro Baptist Church had posted to their picket schedule that they would be on hand for the funeral of Sandy hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung. Reports from Twitter, and Anonymous, the Internet hacktivist group, state the Westboro Baptist Church members were in town but apparently didn’t venture out of their hotel.
...

“I can’t put you through to those rooms,” a desk clerk at the motel told Examiner. “I wish those people weren’t staying here. I hate them and what they stand for.”

So, besides being hateful, obnoxious, and disgusting, the bastards are chickenshit as well.

Why isn't WBC paying taxes? They're more of a tax evasion group than a church.

The Right’s ‘Limited Government’ Scam

A good read by Robert Parry.

A favorite line from the American Right – both well-educated libertarians and know-nothing Tea Partiers – is that the Founders believed in “limited government” and the United States must return to that constitutional principle. But the argument is both nonsensical and insulting.

Everyone believes in “limited government” – unless you’re a totalitarian or a fan of absolute monarchies. Liberals, conservatives, socialists, free-market ideologues and pretty much everyone in between believe in limitations of government power. The point of having a constitution is to set the limits and rules for a government.
...

Today’s Right doesn’t want to acknowledge this history because it destroys the right-wing narrative by revealing the Framers to be advocates of a strong central government and opponents of states’ rights.
...

Indeed, this current right-wing attack on “federal overreach” has been around since the 1950s and the civil rights movement, which put an end to Jim Crow laws in the South. The Right’s claim is essentially neo-Confederate and harkens back to the South’s efforts prior to the Civil War to insist that slave-states had the right to nullify federal laws and ultimately to secede from the Union.
...

As part of that propaganda effort, wealthy right-wingers, like the Koch Brothers, invested heavily in think tanks and academic institutions where “scholars” cherry-picked quotes from key Framers, particularly Madison, to distort the history surrounding the Constitution. This false history was then packaged and sold to ill-informed Tea Party types who fancied themselves as channeling the anti-government passions of the Founders.

For instance, one right-wing canard about the Second Amendment is that the Framers wanted an armed citizenry so the people could go to war with the government to protect individual liberties. The reality, of course, was entirely different. Aristocrats like Madison and Washington wanted armed militias so the government could maintain order in the face of disruptions like Shays’ Rebellion as well as to resist Native Americans on the frontiers and to put down slave revolts.

The real reason for 'limited government', of course, is to let the 1% roll over the rest of us unimpeded. The money boys mask their desire with all that other shit so the 'tards will buy into it.

GOP Leaders Finally Ready to Cave on Taxing the Rich

The Daily Beast

Like those Japanese soldiers holed up in caves on Pacific islands in 1945, the House Republicans don’t seem to grasp that the war over higher taxes on the rich is effectively over. This war ended, of course, with the election.

In case there's any doubt that I'm a little off, I had a hilarious visual of the House GOP sneaking out in the middle of the night in their underwear to steal food...

Tactical Reality

Very interesting explanation of the modern gun "culture".

From TPM Reader SS …

I’m a pretty left-of-center liberal. Read TPM regularly. Donated nearly $1,000 to BHO’s re-election campaign. But I was raised with guns. More to the point, my childhood was steeped in gun lore: I learned to hand-load ammunition when I was 10 and 11, and - by the time I was 14 - my dad was trusting me to prepare my own handloads. I could (and to some extent, still can) recite chapter and verse of firearms arcana, from muzzle velocities - a product of the type of gunpowder used in one’s handloads; of the weight (in grains) of a projectile; of the length of a gun’s barrel (the longer, the faster); of the temperature and elevation at which one is shooting - to impact energy (measured in footpounds), to trajectories (flatter for heavier bullets; some calibers have an innate advantage over others), and so on.
I bring this up to establish my bona-fides.

The gun culture that we have today in the U.S. is not the gun culture, so to speak, that I remember from my youth. It’s too simple to say that it’s “sick;” it’s more accurately an absurd fetishization. I suppose that the American Gunfighter, in all of his avatars, is inescapably fetishistic, but (to my point) somewhere along the way - maybe in, uh, 1994? - we crossed over into Something Else: let’s call it Gonzo Fetishization. The American Gunfighter as caricature.
...

The “tactical” turn is what I want to flag here. It has what I take to be a very specific use-case, but it’s used - liberally - by gun owners outside of the military, outside of law enforcement, outside (if you’ll indulge me) of any conceivable reality-based community: these folks talk in terms of “tactical” weapons, “tactical” scenarios, “tactical applications,” and so on. It’s the lingua franca of gun shops, gun ranges, gun forums, and gun-oriented Youtube videos. (My god, you should see what’s out there on You Tube!) Which begs my question: in precisely which “tactical” scenarios do all of these lunatics imagine that they’re going to use their matte-black, suppressor-fitted, flashlight-ready tactical weapons? They tend to speak of the “tactical” as if it were a fait accompli; as a kind of apodeictic fact: as something that everyone - their customers, interlocutors, fellow forum members, or YouTube viewers - experiences on a regular basis, in everyday life. They tend to speak of the tactical as reality.

And I think there’s a sense in which they’ve constructured their own (batshit insane) reality.

One in which we have to live.

Gun Shy

AlterNet

There’s no disputing that the Democratic Party has regressed dramatically on the issue of gun violence over the past two decades. [...]
...

It can be hard to remember now, but well into the 1990s, national Democrats proudly associated themselves with gun control, championing laws that restricted access to deadly weapons. [...]

The Democrats’ cowardice on guns traces back to the fateful election of 2000. Clinton, despite his aggressive pursuit of gun control measures, fared relatively well with rural gun-owning populations in his 1996 reelection campaign. But those same voters turned hard on Al Gore in ’00, shifting Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee to the Republican column. A victory in any one of those states – all of which Clinton carried twice – would have made Gore president. Democrats concluded that they’d scared off rural, lower-income white voters who had traditionally supported them – and that guns were the big reason why. A new consensus emerged: Gun control could no longer be a central component of Democratic messaging. So it was that John Kerry in 2004 and Obama in 2008 and 2012 did their best to ignore the issue. Kerry went so far as to embark on a goose hunt in rural Ohio just before Election Day.

I firmly believe that Al Gore's stance on "gun control" saddled us with The Bush Years, which will be a stain on the nation for generations to come.

"Gun control" needs to be re-messaged as "common sense firearms safety regulation", even if the NRA and its guntards (a tip o' the Brain to The Rude Pundit) have trouble with that many words of more than one syllable.

We don't need so-called "assault weapons". When it comes to defending the nation from the government, I'll be able to not shoot down the drone that fires the Hellfire that vaporizes me just as well with one of these.

Assault weapons are mainly used to try to convince people that the owner actually has a dick anyway.

Plea For Repug Sanity? Bwahahahaha!

Truthout

The OxyContin and Viagra-soaked brain of Rush Limbaugh is warning of the coming self-destruction of the Republican Party. But, former Republican insider and Reagan staffer Bruce Bartlett knows the grim truth: The Republican Party has already destroyed itself.

Halle-fuckin'-lujah!

Yes, by raising taxes, Rush Limbaugh’s Republican Party – that Party that’s denied thirty years of economic reality, attempted to set up an Ayn Randian paradise in America, and fear mongered everything from Muslims to socialists to gays to women – will indeed destroy itself.
...

As Eisenhower wrote to his brother Edgar, in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things…a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Ike knew.These days, their number may still be negligible, but their money is not and they are worse than stupid.

“As long as you've got crazy Tea Party people who for some reason vote against their own direct economic interest and support the billionaires against themselves, we’re kind of stuck,” he lamented.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the Republican Party that’s stuck. As long as those “crazy people” are running the people’s House of Representatives, the American people are stuck, too, watching helplessly as our nation unravels, and waiting anxiously for Bartlett’s “Reality-Based Community” of Republicans to rise again.

Yes, I just linked to The American Conservative. So sue me.

The nation needs more than one political party, but the current Repug party is not one of them. They can keep waiting 'til I'm long gone.

I'm-Sorry-I-Couldn't-Resist-I'll-Pay-For-The-Bleach Update:

Republican leaders let Rush Limbaugh dominate their party

Worse-Than-Unhelpful Headline of the Day

Tennessee pastor: Mass shootings because schools teach evolution and ‘how to be a homo’

I wish these ignorant god-squadders would STFU. I think that crap is worse than saying teachers should be armed in the classroom.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

Obama: Prosecution of Pot Smokers Not “Top Priority”
Impact: if you and a bunch of guys drive around getting stoned and calling yourselves the Choom Gang, don't expect to be brought up on federal charges.

U.S. Military Judge Rules That No Mention of Torture of Accused May Be Permitted in Trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed
Citing Sharia law.

Heh.

Mitch McConnell Filibusters His Own Proposal
Then punches himself in the nose, shoots himself in the foot.

Bwahahahaha!

Whites No Longer Majority In U.S. by 2043
Americans can look forward to better food, better music, better sports.

Now that, folks, is no shit!