Guns have been a big deal in this country since its inception, but since mid-December of 2012, I think it's fair to say the conversation has changed. It's not taboo for a politician to mention in public that maybe some new gun laws wouldn't be such a bad thing. Pro-gun supporters have taken their "extra rabies" pills to get the really good mouth-froth going as they conflate taking a second look at our gun laws and procedures as the impending war with the government Glenn Beck warned us about.
My last two posts focused a lot on guns, and I realized that I never put forward my own solution to our country's gun culture problem. So here it is... don't change a thing, as long as every gun owned by a private citizen looks like a big ole floppy dildo.
Actually, change one thing. Make conceal and carry just plain carry. No more hiding the fact that you're packing one, maybe even two dildos ready at a moments notice to thwart the homicidal intentions of a lunatic failed by our mental health system carrying a gigantic dildo loaded with two high capacity ammunition balls.
Now, opponents might say that dildo design specs lack a certain stiffness required for a gun barrel to insure accuracy. My response? You seem to know an awful lot about dildos...
Imagine the following... cultural icon Dirty Harry in one of his most famous - screw it. Thanks to the power of the internet, I'll just show you.
Now seriously imagine that whole scene, racist black guy dialogue written by a white guy"Gots ta know" and all but with every gun replaced with a dildo that fired bullets. Did the dildo shoot five shots or six? The "44 Magnum" is the largest hand dildo in the world. Dirty Harry strolling away holding his 44 dildo in one hand, and the shotgun-sized dildo slung over his shoulder in the other.
Do this with any other gun-glorifying scene in pop culture and I bet those moments are suddenly hysterically bizarre double entendre-athon's that come across as stupid as all the dry-humping we give gun ownership in this country. There are people out there defending their second amendment rights with more passion than anything else in their entire lives.
So I say, if guns mean that much to you, keep them proudly. Just make them all look like cocks and balls. You can even choose the color, because the important thing is that you'll finally look as ridiculous as some of you sound.
My posts here have been far too infrequent which seems odd considering how much has been going on as of late. I don't fool myself into thinking there are droves of people looking forward to these posts, I write them because I enjoy writing in general - not necessarily writing well given the sloppiness and the typos. Maybe there's a way to get back to some semblance of a schedule as things get interesting.
First off, something that affects millions of Americans everywhere and something that we've remained silent on for far too long.
I've always suspected something was off when I wolfed down a Subway footlong, but I always suspected that it was how the sandwich basically had no flavor regardless of what ingredients they threw on the bread. Every sandwich basically tastes like iceberg lettuce, which basically tastes like nothing. I'm willing to bet that Subway's culinary wizards have even found a way to make their lettuce-free melts taste like iceberg lettuce.
Having said that, the NY Post and its tag-team investigative effort took to the streets to confirm a photo that went viral on the internet. The piece cuts through corporate slight-of-hand like "shrinkage," where Subway unintentionally linked the mental image of men's balls to its bread. In the end, the Post's fearless reporting got Subway on record admitting that eleven inches just isn't good enough for their standards, giving them more in common with the porn industry than ever before.
Second... The Hobbit. People who know me know I have a love of film, I've studied film production, and I've made a career of it (so far... sort of...). What intrigued me about Peter Jackson's latest dive into Middle Earth wasn't the chance to once again show up to a midnight premiere dressed as Galadriel, but the new high-frame rate 3D technology used to photograph the film.
I won't spend too much time on this, but basically a typical movie screens at 24 frames per second (fps). 3D movies, because of techniques used to separate the two images to create the 3D effect, often look blurry when shown at 24fps. This blur not only makes the image look like crap during an action scene, it can lead to headaches for the viewers. Jackson filmed The Hobbit at 48fps, double the frames of information. It cured the blurriness I've seen in the few 3D non-animatied films I've seen, it made every movement in every action scene crisp and readable. It also looked like crap.
People complain about how high frame rates make the footage look like a soap opera, and The Hobbit didn't disappoint. That soap opera look shown through the most in daylight scenes, making Middle Earth feel low budget. Shooting digitally meant that every daytime sky looked washed out and the colors as a whole felt flat. The 48fps made certain movements on screen feel like they were sped up almost to unintentionally comic effect. And 3D sucks, as does the use of 2D film techniques in a 3D medium for no reason. So 48fps solves problems created by filming in 3D while making everything look worse. A visual self-inflicted wound (3D) gets a treatment (48fps) instead of not inflicting the wound in the first place (Christopher Nolan's F You to pressure to film Batman in 3D).
There's no way Peter Jackson can look at the 48fps 3D version and feel satisfied across the board. In conclusion, this "get off my lawn" dinosaur will take my movies the old-fashioned way... missionary and in 2D. Wait, I meant-
Moving on. Vice-President Joe Biden handed off his gun control findings to President Obama a few days ago, and President Obama wasted no time putting out his plan. The plan involves a combination of executive actions and a request to Congress for legislative action. Here's a pretty concise summary of what the plan entails, thanks to WILX 10 News.
NEEDS CONGRESSIONAL ACTION:
-- Requiring background checks on all gun sales. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence says 40 percent of gun sales are conducted with no criminal background check, such as at gun shows and by private sellers over the Internet or through classified ads. Obama said there should be exceptions for cases like certain transfers among family members and temporary transfers for hunting purposes.
-- Reinstating the assault weapons ban. A 10-year ban on high-grade, military-style weapons expired in 2004. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says such a ban might clear the Senate but doubts it could get through the House.
-- Renewing a 10-round limit on the size of ammunition magazines.
-- Prohibiting the possession, transfer, manufacture and import of dangerous armor-piercing bullets.
-- Senate confirmation of a director for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The agency has been run by an acting director, Todd Jones, whom Obama will nominate to become director.
-- New gun trafficking laws penalizing people who help criminals get guns.
----EXECUTIVE ORDER:
-- Address legal barriers in health laws that bar some states from making available information about people who are prohibited from having guns.
-- Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.
-- Make sure that federal agencies share relevant information with the background check system.
-- Direct the attorney general to work with other agencies to review existing laws to make sure they can identify individuals who shouldn't have access to guns.
-- Direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other research agencies to conduct research into the causes and prevention of gun violence.
-- Clarify that no federal law prohibits doctors or other health care providers from contacting authorities when patients threaten to use violence.
-- Give local communities the opportunity to hire up to 1,000 school resource officers and counselors.-- Require federal law enforcement to trace all recovered guns.
-- Propose regulations that will enable law enforcement to run complete background checks before returning firearms that have been seized.
-- Direct the Justice Department to analyze information on lost and stolen guns and make that information available to law enforcement.
-- Provide training for state and local law enforcement, first responders and school officials on how to handle active-shooter situations.
-- Make sure every school has a comprehensive emergency management plan.
-- Help ensure that young people get needed mental health treatment.
-- Ensure that health insurance plans cover mental health benefits.
-- Encourage development of new technology to make it easier for gun owners to safely use and store their guns.
-- Have the Consumer Product Safety Commission assess the need for new safety standards for gun locks and gun safes.
-- Launch a national campaign about responsible gun ownership.
From the Congressional Action section, the only thing I can see that might be considered a total affront to the second amendment is the assault weapons ban. Nothing else there would prevent law-abiding citizens from exercising their second amendment rights, assuming you're not one of the those who insist that any action whatsoever ever that even mentions the word gun totally tramples on the almighty ghosts of our founding fathers and their second "whoops" in the initial lineup of ten.
The items under the Executive Order section seem to feel pretty second amendment-friendly to me as well, but I'm a bleeding heart liberal, so I imagine that's not surprising.
So right on cue, despite a lot of these measures having broad national support, Congressional leaders start their retreat away from what many people want to the bitch comfort of the NRA. And by bitch comfort, I mean irrational, cowardly fear.
In an Et Tu Brutus fashion, we start with Senate Democrats.
You would think that one of the 200+ groups Biden met with would include his own team in the Senate... anyway, here's one quote.
"We must find a way to balance our Second Amendment rights with the challenges of mental illness, criminal behavior and the safety of our schools and communities," Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said in a statement, noting Louisiana's tradition of hunting, target shooting and gun collecting. She said she would give the proposals "serious consideration."
I find this to be a somewhat dumb statement on some levels. I don't think we need to balance the second amendment with the challenges of mental illness. Those things feel like they should have some space between them. There's no balancing of our Second Amendment rights and criminal behavior, criminals forfeit a number of rights when they choose to break social contracts.
Which leaves the final part of Senator Landrieu's statement. Does Obama's plan balance the Second Amendment with the safety of our communities? I would argue it does. We put more effort into tracking pets than we do weapons. We willingly carry phones with GPS trackers built in, but the moment anyone suggests we try and get a handle on just what the hell is going on with guns, advocates freak out.
As I said, I don't feel the proposed measures prevent a law-abiding citizen from acquiring a gun and I think we've clearly demonstrated that the status quo doesn't have the right mix of guns and people not getting slaughtered. So let's give it a shot. Something doesn't work, we'll adjust. Something does prove to infringe on the Second Amendment, challenge it and it will get taken care of. Our democracy is an on-going experiment, so let's try an experiment that could save lives, even if only a few.
Or we can all just wait for the Congressional puss-ing out to begin because it seems like it's the only thing they know how to do at this point.
It's been a week since one of the most horrific things I can imagine happened in Newtown, CT. I thought I would let a little time pass before writing about it, and I want to talk more about a response from Mike Huckabee over at Fox News. I'm not sure where this one will end up, but let's start with this clip from the beginning of the week:
There's a number of things I found interesting with this clip, namely that it encapsulates a number of expected responses to a nightmare such as the one that transpired on December 14th. First, the question attributed to Neil Cavuto... where was God in all of this? How could God let such violence occur, especially to children? Mike Huckabee made a somewhat expected response when he mentioned how we push God out of our public life and then ask where did He go when something unimaginable happens.
Obviously Huckabee wasn't claiming that if we had prayer in school none of this would have happened, but then he goes on to state, in very different words, that when we set out to create a society that tries to accommodate vast differences in personal beliefs, well then we shouldn't be surprised when those efforts invariably lead to pure evil. Essentially he states that we allow evil in various forms to run our society... calling The Gays normal, having abortion pills, trying to maintain the separation of church and state called for by the founding fathers (maybe to a ridiculous degree in some cases). By doing that, and by denying moral absolutes (I guess the particular moral absolutes that a subset of people who agree with Huckabee subscribe to which doesn't an absolute make), we create a godless environment with the potential to create an Adam Lanza.
First I'd like to congratulate Mike Huckabee for not addressing a single issue that can be directly connected to the shooting in Newtown. This will probably come up later on.
Second, I guess I'll throw my own thoughts out here on these lines of thinking, and these thoughts should be taken with a ten-pound grain of salt.
I'm a spiritual person and I believe in God. When tragedies such as Newtown happen and people ask how God could let this happen, I often think about one of the earliest stories in the Old Testament... Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden eating an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The story I grew up with had Adam and Eve forbidden from eating from this specific tree. Eve, pushed by a snake, eats first and disobeys God. Then Eve pushes Adam to do the same. That original sin dooms human kind to death and suffering.
Taking that story literally, God didn't protect all of humanity from our original sin, he gave us a choice and we chose poorly. Taken less literally, I think the story of original sin drives home the importance of free will and accepting responsibility for our actions even in the presence of an omnipotent God. For me, the story of original sin means that God isn't there to be used as some easy outlet of blame or source of abandoment in the worst of times. God didn't stop Adam and Eve from making their choice and he held Adam and Eve responsible for what they did. God isn't going to stop the next Adam Lanza from commiting whatever atrocity that occurs, and we need to hold ourselves responsible as a collective for events like Newtown.
There are other stories, such as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego getting thrown into ovens to burn to death only to have God protect them and keep them unharmed, but I feel like some of these other stories aren't so focused on the free will of human beings like those concerning Adam and Eve.
But I completely agree with Mike Huckabee that you can answer the question "Where was God?" by looking at the first responders, those trying to comfort the community and specifically the families of those lost. More specifically you can answer that question by looking at the fallen staff members who selflessly gave themselves out of love for the children in their care. Some charged the gunman, others cradled children and tried to shield them from gunfire. I also personally believe you can find God in the faces of the children that died and in the faces of children everywhere. You can find God in the words President Obama spoke to help ease Newtown's suffering, his address at the interfaith service on the Sunday after the shooting was inspirational and moving.
In the end, though, asking "Where was God..." feels more like a distraction after the initial shock wears off. Horrors such as these feel random at the time, but they really aren't. There's a series of events and decisions that led to that moment. Adam Lanza suffered from mental illness, his mother Nancy was a proud gun collector - wait, let's just stop right there and let that part of the puzzle fall into place for a moment. Just after the Newtown shooting, the following article made the rounds:
I thought it was an interesting, moving, heartbreaking peak into what some families in our country have to deal with and the societal shortfalls they encounter. But let me tell you exactly why the author of the above article is not Adam Lanza's mother... she doesn't collect guns while raising her child suffering from mental illness. I'm not trying to over-simplify what happened in Newtown or single out Nancy Lanza, but it does seem like a combination to be avoided.
Then there was this gem of an article over at The Daily Beast:
First, nothing like a "throw in the towel" headline in the wake of a tragedy, but let's talk a bit about the content. Here's a collection of quotes from the top of the article:
The things that would work are impractical and unconstitutional. The things we can do won't work.
There just aren't good words to talk about Newtown. It is a crime that literally defies imagination--hell, it flings imagination down and dances upon its head. No one reading this can imagine strolling into an elementary school and opening fire on a bunch of small children. You can't imagine even wanting to.
When one tries to picture the mind that plans it, one quickly comes to a dead end. Even if I had been raised with no moral laws at all, even if there were no cops and no prisons, I'm pretty sure that I still wouldn't want to spend a crisp Friday morning shooting cowering children. Trying to climb this mountain of wickedness is like trying to climb a glass wall with your bare hands. What happened there is pure evil, and evil, unlike common badness, gives an ordinary mind no foothold. Since we can't understand it, we can't change it. And since we can't change it, our best hope is to box it in.
Right off the bat, I feel like Megan McArdle, the article's author, is working from a flawed premise. Maybe some of the solutions we might attempt are impractical, but so are a lot of things governments take care of... that's why they are handled by the public and not by private market forces. Maybe you could argue banning some kinds of weapons is unconstitutional, but the constitution isn't fixed. If we, as a society, deem it important enough to answer the assault weapon question once and for all, we can do that at the constitutional level. Not saying an amendment is realistic or practical either, but I can't see caving just because of the reasons laid out in that very first sentence above.
Then Ms. McArdle seems to confuse empathy with understanding in the second passage. She's absolutely right, I literally can not imagine what must be going through someone's mind when they decide to murder a child. But we, as a society, don't need to in order to understand Adam Lanza's illnesses better or the shortcomings in our mental health system that Nancy Lanza may have faced.
Finally, in the third passage, she seems to mix up her nature versus nurture. Adam Lanza suffered from a physical illness, and no comparison to someone raised in a lawless dystopia is going to clarify that point.
Ms. McArdle states a little further into the article that "Not every problem has a policy solution." I agree, and so does President Obama when he clearly said in his first remarks about the shooting that no single policy is going to solve massacres. The driving force of his response though, was we have to try to find solutions that at least make events like Newtown less likely.
It might be more tricky on some levels in this particular case, but I agree we should try. As the article rightly points out, the Lanza's had money and lived in an affluent part of the country. The school system had, probably, more resources than most to try to help kids like Adam Lanza growing up. But Lanza wasn't in the public school system anymore, so why can't a first step be to look into what we do for these troubled kids as they finish growing up? As the article states:
Adam Lanza, the apparent shooter, had some sort of moderately severe autism-spectrum disorder. Over the years, like many parents of special needs children, his mother seems to have increasingly withdrawn from work and the community in order to focus on taking care of her son.
So we have a single Mom having to spend more and more energy caring for her grown child suffering from mental illness. Was there help available to her at this stage like there probably was when Adam was in school? Did she take advantage of it given she most likely had the resources to do so? If not, why? Was something getting in the way from a policy standpoint or was there no help out there?
Another fact mentioned is that Adam Lanza tried to buy firearms and was denied. Gun laws worked as intended there, but what's the difference if Adam buys the gun himself or if he lives in a house with pistols, an AR-15, and a shotgun for him to take? Is there nothing that can be looked at here from a policy perspective? Adam had an extended 30-round clip for the AR-15, the gun used to commit most of the atrocities. Sure, it's not fully automatic or capable of three-round bursts, but it is capable of firing off rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger with magazines available to allow the shooter to do that for a good long while (see Aurora). Is there nothing to look at here from a policy perspective?
From later in the article:
I'm not even going to delve into the various "tax/ban" ammunition arguments; they're just a special case of gun control, and about as useful. Regular old bullets are extremely deadly, especially when fired at close range. He didn't need something capable of penetratng kevlar.
Then maybe regular ammo should be considered as well under ammo tax discussions? I don't know, but it's worth the discussion. For me, this next quote embodies a lot of the failure behind Ms. McArdle's article:
But we are back to generic solutions. These "reasonable controls" would not, in fact, have done much to stop the horror at Newtown; Lanza's problem was not that he didn't know the four rules of gun safety, or that his aim was bad. And Lanza didn't buy the guns, so a background check would not have stopped him.
Maybe all the government can do is offer up generic solutions, but she fails to admit the cumulative effect that a series of "generic solutions" might have. The article demonstrates that a lot of time and thought went into arguing for the status quo, but what's she arguing for, on some level, is why we all should be comfortable with tragedies like Newtown.
From the reaction I've seen, I don't think most people want to feel comfortable with what happened in Newtown. Our rejection of the Newtown shooting necessitates that we try to do better as a society, Hopefully there are people working as hard at trying to discover possible policy solutions to help prevent another Newtown as Ms. McArdle worked at telling us how we can't.
I don't think any of the four readers of this site will be surprised to know that I was pulling for Obama to win last night. It's not that I felt the world would end if Romney won, but I'm glad to see his political approach not get rewarded. I also feel last night's election as a whole was a nice, strong statement against the Tea Party fringes that have been trying to push their way into politics like it's the midnight opening of a Walmart on Black Friday.
More than that, I feel like the Bullshit had a hard light shown on it and people got to see what they were stepping in. One big thing was Karl Rove doubting the call to give Ohio to President Obama. Let's start here:
So we have Karl Rove bringing in his own numbers and given who he is, I'm sure he's experienced enough to make some decent calculations on the fly. But he ends up running into the classic How I Want The World To Be versus How The World Really Is. During the clip, Rove argues that Romney closes a twenty thousand vote gap with only a few percentage points of polls added to the reported column. I don't think he realizes he's partly making the case against his argument. The Stats Guys probably could see some closing occurring as Romney blew one of his last, bigger, wads, leaving nothing left for when Obama pulled ahead with the Cleveland area votes. In fact, to Fox News' credit, they went and talked to the Stats Guys themselves to get the full dirt:
What I like about the response is how the Stats Guys, when asked to talk about Rove's theory, basically say there's no theory there to talk about. There's no 2004 exit-poll debacle, it's just straight raw numbers matched with historical trends. There comes a point when there's nothing left for spinning something... the fact becomes the fact.
Another part of the Bullshit to get illuminated in full ugly was Donald Trump, who basically melted down on Twitter as the election results came in.
He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election. We should have a revolution in this country!
The phoney electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one!
Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble...like never before.
That's not a rational reaction to an election (and neither is an Obama supporter playing Queen's We Are The Champion or rolling around the interwebs rubbing in the victory). I liked Brian Williams briefly commenting on those tweets on this Huffington Post link. Right off the bat, Williams states that Trump has "driven well past the last exit to relevance." I'm glad he did. Sure, Williams prides himself on being in the business of news first, but here he got to mention, however under the radar, that commenting on Trump's tweets in the first place was a bit of bullshit, and the poster of said tweets was drowning in bullshit. Trump, and people like Trump, have no place in our political discourse. There is no reason not to publicly shame them into either shutting up or contributing in an intelligent fashion (so most likely shutting up). Fox News should stop being the low self-esteem network and realize they can hold a right wing position without being a constant joke (honestly, I feel like that would do wonders for the current right wing in this country, and probably the country as a whole). Fox News should stop pandering to fringe Bullshit like Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are rigged for Obama, polling that favors Obama must be biased, etc. As Fox News host Stephen Hayes said last night, "The polling was more accurate than it wasn't." No, Stephen... no. Those who did correct polling and came back with answers the right didn't like (s'up Nate Silver?) were accurate, you just didn't like the results and then went all late-eighties/early-nineties Oliver Stone. That's not the polls being inaccurate, that's you being either stupid or crazy. What last night revealed to the fringe right, on some level, is that, facts exist, they can be uncovered, and you actually have to deal with them. Last night it was the math behind polling, maybe tomorrow it can be the science behind climate change. I'm not saying the real fringe doesn't have the right to state that certain things are a hoax or statistical analysis has a left-leaning bias, they just can't be part of the grown-up discussion that wants to get real things done in this country.
I live in Jersey, and as everyone knows, we got with by Sandy last week. Real things need to get done in order to restore the tri-state area, just like real things need to get done to protect this area from future super-storms that are now more likely due to climate change. It's time to relegate the fringe back to the fringe so that we can move forward like a rational superpower in the 21st century. I'll let Jon Stewart bring it home:
The statement that launched a thousand internet memes.
Truth of the matter is that when Romney took office, women made up 42% of the "important staff" which is something I don't think he should shy away from. That's a great number. Sure it was down to 25% by the end of his term, but you can't necessarily blame Romney for the mass exodus of ladies... right?
Here are a few of my favorite memes based off that binders line:
I get what Romney was trying to say during this debate moment, so I don't hold it against him that it may have come out a bit awkward on the spot during a debate watched by 65 million people while vying for the most powerful position on planet Earth. I don't need every sentence to come out like poetry, but what shouldn't be lost in all of this internet attention is the question asked.
The L.A. Times has a good article breaking down this entire moment for both candidates:
In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72% of what their male counterparts earn?
Very good question, because, let's face it, it feels like bullshit that we can't figure out something this simple. The article states:
...Their responses were surprisingly condescending.
They each immediately and very noticeably went personal, as if the word "females" triggered some deeply embedded Skinnerian word association response — "Women like personal stories," you could almost hear their handlers whisper. "Tell them a personal story."
For Obama:
Obama, with two daughters and the formidable Michelle as his wife, clearly thought this was an easy out. He loosened up, took his time. He was, as he reminded everyone for the 7 millionth time, the son of a single mother who put herself through school, raised by a grandmother who, though discriminated against in the workplace, never complained "because that generation didn't complain."
As if this were a good thing, not complaining. Which, and we must beckon for the fact-checker here, I'm fairly certain some of them did, including Betty Friedan, who was a contemporary of Obama's grandmother, as was the late great Bella Abzug, only they called it "protest."
Obama then pointed out that he had supported the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, after Ledbetter lost her pay equity case in front of the Supreme Court.
"So we fixed that," the president said. Et voila, pay equity all around! Instead of discussing how, say, that act might work for real women, he decided to turn a question about equal pay into an opportunity for him to point out his support for legal abortion and insurance coverage of contraceptives.
Because clearly any mention of women must prompt a discussion of abortion and contraception, and legal abortion and covered contraception should, somehow, make up for women not getting paid enough. (Memo to American management: Next time a man asks for a raise, just hand him a box of condoms.) He summed up with his go-to argument of the night: He would ensure that everyone gets an education. Because we all know that women with college degrees are never discriminated against in the workplace.
So yeah, looking back at Obama's response, that's kind of a train wreck of avoidance. And obviously I posted the meat of Romney's response at the top of this article. His binder statements struck me in the same way people proving they are not racist because some of their best friends are minorities. Fair pay for women? Of course I support that. Look how much I enjoyed hiring women as governor! Beyond that, from the L.A. Time article again:
...He also allowed his female chief of staff to go home at 5 o'clock every day so she could make dinner for her young children.
Because if you want to hire women, you have to be flexible enough to let them bring home the bacon and then fry it up in a pan.
During the debate, that part about allowing the Chief of Staff to go home and cook dinner was what jumped out at me, but I didn't consider it at the moment because I was following the rest of Romney's response. Ms. Mary McNamara, who wrote this oft-quoted L.A. Times piece, critiques that moment perfectly.
Now, even beyond all of that, another point of interest from the Binder segment came after the debate itself. From the Huffington Post:
After the debate, after Romney stated his love for equal pay, Romney Campaign Advisor Ed Gillespe talked about how Romney felt about the Lilly Ledbetter Act:
Had Mitt Romney been president in 2009, he would not have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, a top adviser to the Republican nominee told The Huffington Post Tuesday night.
Now that the law has been passed, Romney has no plans to get rid of it, that adviser, Ed Gillespie, added. But Romney didn't support it while it made its way through Congress.
"The governor would not repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Act," said Gillespie, following Tuesday night's presidential debate. "He was opposed to it at the time. He would not repeal it."
Truth of the matter is that Romney never actually came out in favor of or against the bill (not sure why), and when his campaign was asked directly by the Huffington Post on a conference call with the press, the campaign simply said "We'll get back to you." Obama specifically mentioned that during the debate. So maybe this was the Romney campaign finally getting back to someone on that question.
That's obviously not the case, so poor Ed Gillespie had to roll himself out again to clarify his clarification:
Hours after this story was published, the Romney campaign sent a statement from Gillespie walking back the comments he had made the night before.
“I was wrong when I said last night Governor Romney opposed the Lily Ledbetter act," the statement read. "He never weighed in on it. As President, he would not seek to repeal it.”
So a retraction on the clarification. Why is this such a big deal? Two reasons, first is the general vibe of why doesn't a presidential campaign have its shit together? Seems like you want to know where you stand on something from the start just so you have a position to build on as things come up. Seems like you would want to know what your candidate said before addressing what your candidate said.
Second, and this is a point that's been making the rounds for a while, it's infuriating that Romney is allowed to say one thing to an audience only to have his campaign "clarify" his actual positions as the exact opposite.
I know that clip is long, but it's worth watching through because the beginning establishes the Romney campaign's history of lying, and at around the six-minute mark, goes into the heart of the matter... the pattern of saying one thing and having staff say the opposite later. While the Binder correction may not be the strongest or most blatant example of this behavior, it's the thing everyone is paying attention to at the moment. It's an accessible way to get everyone on board with Romney's particular method of weaseling around positions or the truth. Between Romney's "State and later Correct" and Ryan's inability to own up to his own marathon times, I think we have a ticket that clearly doesn't have the stones to run the country. Edit: The Romney campaign tried to respond to this Binder Meme and just failed:
This sucks... the Romney campaign sucks at the internet.
By now, everyone probably knows the name Jerry Sandusky. Charged with and found guilty of multiple counts of child molestation, Jerry and his wife Dottie offered some words to the judge just before his sentencing. CNN published the letter here to go along with the following article:
I guess I'm not entirely surprised by the tone because I don't believe Sandusky feels he ever did anything wrong. His wife must be in a tough emotional spot, I can't imagine what it must feel like to have your spouse accused of one of the worst crimes imaginable. Luckily my wife only dabbles in the white collar stuff and some light cocaine trafficking. Reading over the three-page letter from Jerry Sandusky obviously yielded some interesting passages, such as:
I write without expectation or a plea for leniency. However, I write with hope and resolve to keep fighting for a brighter day.
There were so many people involved with the orchestration of this conviction (media, investigators, prosecutors, "the system," Penn State, and the accusers). It was well done. They won! When I thought about how it transpired, I wondered what they had won. I thought of the methods, decisions, and allegations. I relieved (sic) the inconsistent and dishonest testimonies.
Wondering what would happen if the accusers and conspirators were investigated, Sandusky mused:
All of their issues would surface. They would no longer be these poor, innocent people, as portrayed. I have been blamed for all of their failures and shortcomings, but nobody mentioned the impact of the people who spent much more time with them than I did. Nobody mentioned the impact of abandonment, neglect, abuse, insecurity and conflicting messages that the biological parents might have had in this.
That last passage struck me as odd. Maybe those closer to the victims could have more influence, but those closer to the victims aren't charged with sexually molesting anyone. Seems like molestation might intensify your influence on someone's life greatly even in the shortest of timespans.
Sandusky's letter goes on to mention conspiracies to protect the "system," it drops a Thoreau quote, and finally talks about a book covering the Rwandan holocaust. Yes, Sandusky compares himself to a survivor of the Rwandan holocaust:
There was betrayal and murder. Families turned against one another. Best friends became enemies. Those who had been helped at one point in their life sought and killed those who had helped them. In a lesser way I've experienced this.
In the end, his faith in people is gone but his faith in God remains.
Dottie Sandusky also penned a few pages on her husband's behalf. It also avoids asking for sympathy, it mentions lost faith in the system, it throws the adopted son who testified against Jerry Sandusky under the bus as a Bipolar off his meds, and unfortunately includes a lot of passages with unintended molestation double entendre:
He is a very up front man.
Jerry always puts others before himself and always wanted to make each person feel special no matter who they were.
Many times he would give up much of his free time, which was not many hours when he was a coach, to make a sporting event of one of the kids he was trying to help.
In the end, there's nothing good to come from this. The victims get closure seeing Sandusky hauled off to prison for the rest of his life, but that can't change the past. With appeals, much of the Jerry Sandusky story could be regurgitated multiple times over the next dozen years. The victims may have to undergo their pain again and again during this process.
Regardless of what you think of Sandusky, his family is shattered. His wife gets to spend the rest of her life alone except for weekend visiting hours. Their adopted kids who didn't say they were molested just lost their father for all intents and purposes. I'm not claiming sympathy for Sandusky, but collateral damage is collateral damage.
In the end, I find this whole saga one of the saddest stories I've heard in a long time. As a rebuttal to Sandusky's letter, I offer some moments from Bob Costas' interview with Sandusky:
Can Sandusky be a cog in his own grand conspiracy?
Every morning, I ask myself the same question but I never muster the stones to answer that question honestly. Luckily, Investors.com shouldered my burden to protect me from my own cowardice:
Having read the article, I have to admit my original question remains unanswered because it appears that Obama doesn't even know America Ferrera. But the even more alarming question came to light... why does President Obama hate this country? I know if I ever hated someone, I would spend my adult life climbing a tedious and bullshit-ridden path full of personal inconveniences just so I could hope to get hired as that hated person's #1 guy. That's totally not a crazy and ridiculous thing to do with your precious limited time here on Earth.
The article addresses a recent - you know, I hate to do this to a word in the English language but I guess I must - documentary titled 2016. The Investors article breaks down the argument made in the film 2016 by its creator,Dinesh D'Souza. The thesis driving the film is that everyone has underestimated the impact Obama's father had on him, leading the President on a lifetime mission of revenge against the very country he leads. Not convinced? The article asks why would President Obama do the following things if this were not the case?
• Hold corporate America, Wall Street and the wealthy in contempt.
• Run against capitalism in a country run by capitalism.
• Deny America's exceptionalism on the world stage and lead from behind.
• Apologize and bow, literally, to Third World leaders in a bizarre and unprecedented doctrine of mea culpa.
• Throw key Middle East ally Israel under the bus over Jewish settlements.
• Withdraw hastily from Afghanistan while refusing to talk about this key front in the War on Terror in terms of victory.
• Propose slashing the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while mothballing missile defense.
• Fail to guard national security secrets critical to protecting America from foreign threats.
• Curb domestic oil production and block the Keystone Pipeline, while underwriting exploration and drilling in South America.
• Compound America's debt crisis with even more federal spending, risking more U.S. credit downgrading.
Looking at that list... the accusations are pretty damning but they are also extremely broad at times, open to chunks of interpretation, or explainable by a number of other means (what's up last item on the list?). Regardless of the specifics, D'Souza believes that the heart of Obama's actions are to...
...either redistribute wealth at home or U.S. power abroad. He argues it's strategic, designed to right past wrongs and delegitimize America as the world's richest superpower.
I might argue that a lot of Obama's presidency has been to react to an inherited catastrophe the same way I might if I was riding in a car spinning out on ice and the driver said "take the wheel!" Other parts were reneging on his foreign policy promises to cut back our human rights awfulness or stepping up lethal precision attacks. Another part was health care, and the final part was running face first repeatedly into the Senate filibuster. The AP came back and said the claims made in 2016 are highly subjective, but let's allow the article a chance to cover the response to the AP's accusations:
For instance, D'Souza points out that London had gifted a bust of Churchill to the Oval Office only to have Obama, in a slap, return it as soon as he took office. The Brits made it clear Obama could keep the small statue in the Oval Office. Problem is, Churchill happened to be prime minister when Britain ruled Kenya and allegedly mistreated Obama's grandfather. So Obama shipped it off.
AP claims there's no truth to the story, even though an Obama aide recently had to retract a statement denying Obama sent the bust back to the Brits.
Now, while I personally believe that the above explanation is the only possible one that could ever fit all the facts, let's give the Liberal Media a chance to defend itself:
So ABC claims that there were two Churchill busts, one on loan to President Bush as a post-9/11 symbolic gesture, and the other a permanent fixture in the White House residency. The one on loan got returned, another bust put in its place. So Obama, in order to take a dump on the evil imperialistic America, returned the Churchill bust in his office but decided to keep living with the other. Or if the bust replacement really was a symbolic gesture, was the decision to replace the returned bust with one of Lincoln or MLK Jr just a clever ruse or some other anti-American enigma? And was the AP claiming there was no truth to the bust being returned or no truth to the batshit reasons put forth by some to explain why Obama returned the bust? The latter feels 147% obvious, but there's that -47% wiggle room I guess. You can keep going in the article to read the list evidence that feels like it should end with a character in an Oliver Stone film repeating "Back, and to the left." One other key bit of support was taken directly from Obama's memoirs, Dreams From My Father, which the article talks about:
It's plain from Obama's memoir that he worshipped his father. Obama devotes more than 130 pages, or roughly a third, of "Dreams" to covering his father's life and his colonized ancestry in Kenya. This is purposeful. Obama sympathizes with the idea that "neocolonial wealth," held even by Asian business owners in Nairobi, should be "redistributed to the people." (Neocolonialism is the alleged economic exploitation that remains even after political independence.)
Obama says he realized who he is and what he really cares about when he visited his father's grave. He describes breaking down and weeping, whereupon he reflects: "The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
Personally, I've never read Obama's memoir but given what I know about his relationship to his father, it doesn't surprise me that a big chunk of it would be devoted to the subject. Obama was essentially abandoned by his Dad, so does it seem so bizarre that Obama would want to explore the mystery of "just who was my father?" It's twelve pounds of Freud and a few Shakespearian plays all wrapped into one. To D'Souza, it's a nefarious Bond-villain plot. In the end, the reality of day-to-day life in the United States over the last four years just doesn't sync up to what the article claims. If Obama is pursuing some agenda fueled by O.G. beef, I'm not sure he's really started yet. After Romney's done flip-flopping his fists into his own groin and calling it a presidential campaign, after Obama wins re-election, if all of D'Souza's predictions come true, I will happily read every instance of "I Told You So" he desires to print. But it's so rare that the crazy guy yelling on the street corner gets that satisfaction.
