Jared Loughner was a college student too

This cannot end well:

Texas is preparing to give college students and professors the right to carry guns on campus, adding momentum to a national campaign to open this part of society to firearms.

More than half the members of the Texas House have signed on as co-authors of a measure directing universities to allow concealed handguns. The Senate passed a similar bill in 2009 and is expected to do so again. Republican Gov. Rick Perry, who sometimes packs a pistol when he jogs, has said he's in favor of the idea.

Texas has become a prime battleground for the issue because of its gun culture and its size, with 38 public universities and more than 500,000 students. It would become the second state, following Utah, to pass such a broad-based law. Colorado gives colleges the option and several have allowed handguns.

Supporters of the legislation argue that gun violence on campuses, such as the mass shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Northern Illinois in 2008, show that the best defense against a gunman is students who can shoot back.

"It's strictly a matter of self-defense," said state Sen. Jeff Wentworth, R-San Antonio. "I don't ever want to see repeated on a Texas college campus what happened at Virginia Tech, where some deranged, suicidal madman goes into a building and is able to pick off totally defenseless kids like sitting ducks."

Yes, because nothing will stop a deranged gunman like a hail of bullets from a bunch of panicky, untrained college kids.

Can't we just tell everyone in Texas that yes, they have the biggest penises we've ever seen and be done with it?

If telling people that people in the Administration should be shot in the head isn't going to drive someone to kill someone, what is?

I can't believe that we are reduced to running Tweety clips, but there we are:

The right has denied that anything said by Glenn Beck is going to drive anyone to violence. When Beck talks about shooting people in the head because they are destroying this country, does hereally think that no one is going to actually do it?

Right now there is an elderly professor named Frances Fox Piven, who in a recent column in The Nation, called on the unemployed to form a mass movement. Piven is one of Glenn Beck's favorite targets because of her advocacy of movements to produce social change. It's interesting that in Glenn Beck's sick, twisted world. a mass movement of peaceful action by the powerless and the disenfranchised is a threat to America, but a mass movement of people toting guns because of an imagined totalitarian threat led by the first Black president is what he wants to see.

Like Orcs, Beck's minions are already rising to their master's call:

These are not pretty e-mails, but they appear positively decorous compared with what has been written about her by commentators on Glenn Beck's website, The Blaze, where she's been the target of a relentless campaign to demonize her—and worse. There, under cover of anonymous handles, scores of people have called for Piven's murder, even volunteering to do the job with their own hands. "Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I'll give My life to take Our freedom back," wrote superwrench4. "ONE SHOT...ONE KILL!" proclaimed Jst1425. "The only redistribution I am interested in is that of a precious metal.... LEAD," declared Patriot1952.

I ventured into the cesspool that is The Blaze, and comments like this have been scrubbed -- not surprisingly, since there is undoubtedly someone out there right now preparing to take a shot at a 78-year-old professor no one had heard of until Beck decided to place her in his Pantheon o'Scapegoats.

The thing that's so dangerous about Glenn Beck is that I'm not convinced he's buying any of it. When you look at him, and his TV schtick, he seems more of a carnival barker than a right-wing rabble-rouser. I'm always reminded more of Andy Kaufman than of Rush Limbaugh when I see what Beck does, because while Limbaugh is a genuinely mean, greedy, hateful man who gets paid millions for stirring the rage pot of downwardly-mobile white American males, Beck seems simply to be a guy with a troubled background, steamer trunks of emotional baggage, who has found a form of performance art that has made him wealthy beyond his wildest imaginings.

The jury is still out on whether an overall climate of hate, of legitimizing violence against those who disagree with you politically, of scapegoating politicians for your own grievances, contributed to the Tucson shootings. I still maintain that when you create an echo chamber of violent rhetoric, you legitimize the plottings of those mentally ill who hear voices in their heads. After all, if the voices outside your own head confirm what the ones inside your own head are telling you, that must make it OK, right?

For eight years you could get kicked out of school for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt. Wal-Mart would rat you out for a photo of an anti-Bush poster you made and you'd get a visit from the Secret Service. Hang one in the privacy of your dorm room without even taking a photo and you'd also get a visit from the Secret Service. Nuns and Quakers were put on no-fly lists. And neither Glenn Beck, nor the frothing hysterics screaming about how Obama is going to take away their penis substitutes guns, said a word. But now, with a black man in the White House, the kind of lunatic ravings you used to hear on street corners by unhinged people distributing crude, homemade pamphlets, are pumped into people's homes and into the public consciousness every single night.

Glenn Beck has as much right to rant and rave as the street corner guy used to. What he does not have is a right to have the public airwaves on which to do it.

Yeah. That'll work.

As the great Jim Earl says, "No wonder this state is shaped like a stupid dick":

Florida’s solution to violence: more guns

TALLAHASSEE -- All told, lawmakers have filed three separate bills that seek to restrict local governments from regulating firearms, stop doctors from even asking patients about them and that allow for licensed gun owners the right to wear firearms outside their clothing — including on college campuses.

The bills were all drafted prior to last week’s shooting in Arizona, and before a drunken Florida State University student in Tallahassee accidentally killed his girlfriend’s twin sister with an AK-47 on campus.

Both tragedies loom over the legislation, but they probably won’t halt the passage of any of the bills. Almost every year, a gun-rights measure passes Florida’s Legislature.

“The gun lobby has a stranglehold on Tallahassee,” said Rep. Ari Porth, a Fort Lauderdale Democrat and career prosecutor. “I ran for office to keep the public safe, and what we do in the Florida Legislature with guns isn’t good for public safety.”

But a majority of the Legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, don’t see it that way. Many adhere to the maxim that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

“I don’t think that there’s any amount of gun control that would have stopped some of the tragic events that we’ve seen,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Fort Walton Beach Republican who’s sponsoring legislation to clarify an old state law that bars local governments from regulating guns.

“It’s unfortunate,” he said, “that anytime there’s a tragedy people come out of the woodwork with their agendas.”

Everyone in the state Capitol has an agenda, though. Normally the National Rifle Association’s is supreme.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/01/16/2018335/floridas-solution-to-violence.html#ixzz1BCbP98Yd

Here's what I don't understand. ONE loser gets caught smuggling explosives onto a jet, and now everyone has to get x-rayed or groped in order to get on an airplane. Flyover state legislators are always trying to have fertilized eggs declared to be full human beings with a "right to life". But over 100,000 people a year are killed by gunfire, but our "freedom" to have as many assault weapons with extended clips as we want is a right that is sacrosanct. In what sane country would these things happen simultaneously?

This heinous act was not committed by Muslims

Also via Blue Girl:

A man apparently bent on destroying the police headquarters in McKinney was shot and killed this morning after spraying the building with bullets.

Police say 29-year-old Patrick Gray Sharp drove a Ford F150 pickup pulling a trailer to the station and set it on fire in an apparent attempt to draw people out of the building. Inside the trailer, police said, were wood chips, roadside flares, gasoline, and ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the type used in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.

"He had a plan. He was executing his plan," McKinney Police Chief Doug Kowalski said at an afternoon news conference at which he confirmed Sharp's identity and talked about the unusual nature of the attack.

This is the imagery being used by John McCain's 2008 Vice-Presidential running mate

Sarah Palin has Democratic legislators in her gun sight:



Yes, folks, a would-be presidential candidate IS dog-whistling violence at her frothing minions. But hey, Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan and Dick Morris and anyone who thinks this woman should be president can think about her while they're in the bathroom with a bottle of baby oil and this image.

(via)

Oh. And MORE right-wing thuggery.

Dispatch from the Department of Duh

And these are the people that Beltway pundits are calling a grassroots movement of ordinary Americans:

he Massachusetts man charged this week with stockpiling weapons after saying he feared an imminent "Armageddon" appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, and saw Sarah Palin, who he said is on a "righteous 'Mission from God,'" as the only figure capable of averting the destruction of society.

As we reported yesterday, Gregory Girard, a Manchester technology consultant, was found with a stash of military grade weapons, explosive devices including tear gas and pepper ball canisters, camouflage clothing, knives, handcuffs, bulletproof vests and helmets, and night vision goggles, say police. They believe Girard, who pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, was "preparing for domestic and political turmoil," and feared martial law would soon be imposed.

Girard's wife said her husband had recently told her: "Don't talk to people, shoot them instead," and "it's fine to shoot people in the head because traitors deserve it."

In the linked article, police said that Girard "feared Armageddon." Now I'm confused. Aren't these Jeebofascists supposed to WANT Armageddon? Isn't that what Sarah Palin's Israel flags are all about -- bringing about the Battle of Armageddon so that she and the First Dude and all their children can be Raptured to sit and eat nachos at the right hand o'Jesus while we heathen down here get all their stuff?

Yes, this would-be domestic terrorist (funny how Republicans don't seem to think guys like this are a threat), spouts standard teabagger boilerplate crap:

I have studied the "National Security Force," which is Obama's name for the secret police force he is creating. I have read the new law that gives them the right to operate as an extension of the DoD, carrying firearms, and executing search warrants, executing arrest warrants, and the like. Needless to say, it's a secret police force of some kind, and it appears likely to be created from inner city youths.

This is Sarah Palin's people. This is the Tea Party Convention. This is whom the Republican Party is cozying up to. When I was a kid, these people were called the John Birch Society and they were pretty much regarded as fringe nutballs. Today they are the Republican Party.

Or does pointing out this reality make me "condescending"?

(BIG h/t)

A Boy and His Gun Go to President Obama's Town Hall...Tweety Attempts to Sort it Out....

I don't know what to think anymore. This is just the kind of thing that we've all been worried about from the get-go; we've been aware of these wacky fringe types, with the undercurrent of rage, who are either organized by the insurance lobby or just operating on their own steam, coming to these town hall meetings to try to show that they have constitutional rights, as they understand them anyway.... everyone is riled up about the most insane and far fetched lies, and then along comes some idiot carrying a loaded gun in his car, not to mention the knife in his pocket.

Even Tweety was exasperated, trying to get some sort of acknowledgment out of this character....What do you believe doh-doh? What did you think was gonna happen if you exercised your rights by carrying a gun to a place where the President was speaking. I really hope that the secret service got a few minutes alone with this guy, because Ive done some work with them, and they don't screw around!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

He doesn't even acknowledge or realize that he's done something wrong and terribly stupid!
What gets me is that no matter how much these survivalist constitution types argue the fine points of their rights, and how every program that made government bigger was a mistake, they never offer up a feasible plan as to how we would handle a society this big if it was every man for himself. It may work in new Hampshire in some small town, but in a city or given an outbreak of disease or a natural disaster, I don't see how a militia could handle, much less prepare for,what would be needed. He disagrees with taxes but what are they gonna do in utopia when the town hall catches on fire? How are they going to treat the sick and pave the roads?

A big part of the problem is that the media is featuring these wackos as if they are the main stream, when the real story is that when it shakes out, they may amount to hired hands...unpaid hired hands at that, who are just following the script that seems to pluck just the right strings in their song of woe and misunderstanding.

My question is about their plan; what exactly is it? because we've seen deregulation and we've seen outsourcing, and even the biggest skeptic will tell you that it doesn't work. Is there a way that this fringe element that is so happy to shut down discourse could just put forth their own plan rather than waste time going on about the constitution and the size of government? The fact may be that with a more complex society and with a larger population, we have ended up with a bigger government to deal with more complex problems. Demonizing that reality does little to help anything; so lets figure out how to work within the reality of this century and the needs of a complex population with a changing environment and emerging disease threats, among other things. This isn't Little House on the Prairie or the Oklahoma Land Grab; we have to look at the world now and move ahead in a sane way that will offer safety to all.

c/p RIP Coco

Scary Latina Tough from the Bronx Wants To Take Your Weapon

Castration anxiety much from the right about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court? I myself love the sound of wealthy white male talking heads in the media mewling about the oppression of white males in the morning.

Last night I responded to a comment from our resident troll Barry (who's been awfully quiet lately since his party went completely off the deep end), whose concern about the Constitution is limited solely to gun rights, had expressed his concern about the Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court.

I think even if Barack Obama had nominated Robert Bork to the Court, I think the wingnuts would have similarly gone bonkers, because it's all about this stealth Muslim terrorist radical Negro (sic) having the opportunity to make such decisions. I'm no legal expert, but from what I'm reading, Sotomayor is not the judicial equivalent of William Ayers; she's actually a fairly centrist judge who relies heavily on precedent when deciding cases. In fact, as the New York Times reports, Sotomayor isn't always favorable to the idea that a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy is absolute, as today's New York Times points out:

In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”

nd in a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.

In a 2004 case, she largely sided with some anti-abortion protesters who wanted to sue some police officers for allegedly violating their constitutional rights by using excessive force to break up demonstrations at an abortion clinic. Judge Sotomayor said the protesters deserved a day in court.

Judge Sotomayor has also ruled on several immigration cases involving people fighting deportation orders to China on the grounds that its population-control policy of forcible abortions and birth control constituted persecution.

Now these cases don't deal specifically with Roe, but the case which has Barry (and presumably others whose concern with the Bill of Rights begins and ends with the right to bear shoulder-fired missile launchers to hunt deer) up in arms (heh) is Maloney v. Cuomo, in which Sotomayor ruled with the majority that a New York State law against possession of nunchaku did not violate the Second Amendment:

The Supreme Court recently held that this confers an individual right on citizens to keep and bear arms. See District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783, 2799 (2008). It is settled law, however, that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right. See, e.g., Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886) (stating that the Second Amendment “is a limitation only upon the power of congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state”); Bach v. Pataki, 408 F.3d 75, 84, 86 (2d Cir. 2005) (holding “that the Second Amendment’s ‘right to keep and bear arms’ imposes a limitation on only federal, not state, legislative efforts” and noting that this outcome was compelled by Presser), cert. denied, 546 U.S. 1174 (2006). Heller, a case involving a challenge to the District of Columbia’s general prohibition on handguns, does not invalidate this longstanding principle. See Heller, 128 S. Ct. at 2813 n.23 (noting that the case did not present the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to the states). And to the extent that Heller might be read to question the continuing validity of this principle, we “must follow Presser” because “[w]here, as here, a Supreme Court precedent ‘has direct application in a case, yet appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions, the Court of Appeals should follow the case which directly controls, leaving to the Supreme Court the prerogative of overruling its own decisions.’”

If anything, this decision should hearten the fetophiles, because it gives an indication that Sotomayor might be favorable to throwing the matter back to the states.

Jill Filipovic of Feministe is relatively unconcerned about the nomination even in the face of Sotomayor's vote in Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. v. Agency for International Development:

The First Amendment claim was dismissed because the issue had already been decided in the Planned Parenthood case. The Due Process claim was dismissed for lack of prudential standing, because CRLP's complaint did not fall within the "zone of interests" protected by the Due Process Clause - it was a third party (the foreign NGOs), not CRLP, whose rights are constitutionally unclear because of the Gag Rule. The Equal Protection claim was dismissed because the Gag Rule's privileging of anti-abortion views did not infringe upon a fundamental Constitutional right or target a suspect class (legalese for a classification of groups which have historically been subject to discrimination, and therefore receive increased scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause); further, Sotomayor pointed out that "the Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position, and can do so with public funds."

The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy lost the case, and the Global Gag Rule continued to compromise women's health around the globe until Barack Obama took office.

That outcome disheartened feminists, liberals and reproductive justice advocates, and I wish it had been decided differently. But the decision wasn't necessarily a bad one - and it absolutely should not stop progressive women's rights activists from supporting her nomination.

If anything, CRLP v. Bush highlights precisely why Sotomayor should, in a sane world, be an easy confirmation: She sticks to the rule of law, respects precedent and writes thoughtful and reasoned opinions. She was nominated to the federal district court by George H.W. Bush. Her decisions are left-leaning insofar as she generally seeks to protect Constitutional rights by supporting religious freedom and free speech, and she often sides with the plaintiffs in discrimination cases - hardly "activist" material. But she's not a liberal dream by any stretch. She has some bad First Amendment cases to her name (Doninger v. Niehoff, where she sided with a school that disqualified a student from running for senior class secretary after the student posted a vulgar school-related message on her blog), and some bad Fourth Amendment ones (United States v. Howard, where she held it was constitutional for state troopers to entice suspects away from their cars in order to allow other troopers to search the vehicles for drugs). Those cases, though, are the exceptions rather than the rule; generally, Sotomayor follows a fairly consistent Constitutional philosophy, and errs on the side of maintaining rather than limiting rights.

Given her history, it's hard to grasp why conservatives brand her "a liberal activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important than the law as written," as Wendy E. Long, counsel to the right-wing Judicial Confirmation Network, put it. Sotomayor has clearly and consistently deferred to "the law as written" -- she's considerably less activist and dogmatic than Bush's two Supreme Court appointees, John Roberts and Samual Alito. Unfortunately for conservatives, the law as written does affirm the rights to speak without governmental intervention, to practice your religion freely, to be free from state-sponsored religious exercises, to maintain your privacy, and to retain certain protections even if you are a suspected criminal or a criminal defendant.

We were never going to get a progressive dream nominee from this president, just as we weren't going to get a progressive dream agenda from this president. Anyone who painted his or her own agenda onto the face of Barack Obama during the campaign because he was inspiring just wasn't paying attention to this guy's record. This is a thoughtful, careful man who has spent his entire life straddling two different worlds, and there was no reason to believe he'd be any different as president. This is precisely the kind of attempt at a consensus nominee (albeit with the added benefit of being a woman and having the potential to shut the door between Republicans and Latino voters for good) I would expect him to make. If the wingnuts would crawl out of the deep end of the insanity pool for five minutes they might see that.

But then they wouldn't be nearly as much fun to watch.

So America can enjoy it all over again

It's not even 6 AM, and already the media are wallowing in the hushed tones used to cover or commemorate carnage. In this case it's the 10th anniversary of the Columbine massacre. Unless you were exiled to Siberia ten years ago, you spent days hearing about "Trenchcoat Mafia" and heroic girls who affirmed their belief in God before being murdered.

There was something pornographic about the coverage of the massacre then, and there's something equally pornographic about the "Let's enjoy it all over again" aura to the reprise of footage from that day, coverage that shows the same lack of insight and simplistic opinions that we saw that day ten years ago.

In a new book, author Dave Cullen has debunked most of what is conventional wisdom about the Columbine massacre:

3. What are the biggest myths?

• Jocks, minorities or Christians were targeted. False.


• Columbine a hostage stand-off. The killing went on for hours. False. (Not even half an hour.)


• Eric Harris killed Dylan Klebold. False. Chapter 52, "Quiet," depicts the actual suicide, and presents the forensic evidence to back it up.


• Christian martyr Cassie Bernall's last act was a gunpoint profession of faith. False. "Martyr" describes the truth of what happened in the library, and how the confusion with another victim developed. [...]


• The Trench Coat Mafia. Nearly everything about this barely-existent band is false. [...]
• Hitler's birthday, Marilyn Manson, Goths, flying planes into New York city skyscrapers . . . All wrong. Eric did mention the planes in his journal, which lies at the heart of understanding this case: the chasms between three things: Eric's apocalyptic vision for April 20, what he set out to accomplish that morning, and what he and Dylan actually did.  

And of course the ready access that a probably psychopathic high school kid and his depressed companion had to enough guns and ammunition to pull off a massacre of this magnitude is still off-limits for discussion, even as right-wing talk show hosts and lunatic Congresswomen call for armed revolution only a few years after opining that war protesters should all be imprisoned at Gitmo.

I have a friend who lost a child. Her child wasn't murdered, but her loss is every bit as wrenching, particularly on the anniversary of her child's death. When that time comes around, what she wants more than anything else is to do her remembering in her own way. I can't imagine that any parent who lost a child that day is somehow soothed by the giant gaping maw of 24-hour news replaying their child's last moments again and again, particularly when discussion of our culture of gun rights with absolutely no responsibilities is forbidden.

YEE-HAH!!!

Well, our good friend and resident troll Barry is a happy man tonight, because today the Supreme Court overturned 230 years of precedent and decided that the entire U.S. ought to be just like the Wild, Wild Old West -- where everyone's packing heat, and everyone can just shoot whomever and whatever they want.

But the Bush Administration isn't going to be satisfied with just the overturning of Washington, DC's handgun ban. No, the pencil-dicks in the Bush Administration want everyone to be packing heat in the country's National Parks, so that everyone can hunt for bears -- or stray tourists:

The Bush Administration proposed a repeal of the current law governing firearms in national parks in favor of new regulations that would allow for people to carry loaded, concealed weapons into the parks. This move would increase poaching in the parks, according to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

PEER released a statement Thursday arguing against the proposed change for its failure to consider environmental concerns. The organization blamed the proposal on the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA).

"The Bush administration proposed the rules in response to a National Rifle Association campaign that threatened congressional repeal of the park service rules," it said. "The NRA has made no secret of its desire to increase hunting within national parks."

The right sure does love its guns. Funny how the Second Amendment is the only one they really care about. Funny how they have they don't care about the government sweeping up all phone calls and internet activity, but take away a big stick that shoots with power and they get their....panties....in a twist.