“Guns On Campus”: Lawmakers Cooking Up Recipe For A Bloodbath
The very first bill being rammed through the Florida House of Representatives this year would allow guns to be carried on college campuses.
This screwball idea comes from Rep. Greg Steube, a young Republican from Sarasota. Remember his name in case he’s ever daft enough to run for statewide office.
In the macho comic-book world where Steube’s imagination dwells, armed college kids will stand ready to whip their pistols out of their book bags and shoot down crazed campus intruders with flawless aim.
This delusion has been nurtured by the National Rifle Association, which owns so many stooges in the Legislature that a dozen others would have been thrilled to introduce the campus gun bill, if Steube had balked.
Florida is currently one of 20 states that prohibit concealed weapons on university property, the wisdom being that firearms don’t belong in college classrooms, football stadiums or booze-soaked frat houses.
Most of the remaining states allow universities and colleges to decide their own firearms policies, and — no surprise — the vast majority of institutions don’t allow anyone but police officers to carry guns on campus.
Seven states do, thanks to the NRA. Florida is next on its list.
If Steube’s bill passes, it would open the way for firearms to be carried at private colleges as well as public universities, although each private school would be able to implement its own weapons ban.
Steube said he was working on his guns-at-college bill before the Nov. 20 shooting at Florida State University, where a mentally disturbed alumnus named Myron May shot and wounded two students and an employee at the school library.
Police arrived within minutes and killed May. Steube has speculated that an armed undergrad might have been able to drop him even quicker.
Or missed the shot completely and hit a bystander by mistake, which sometimes happens even when experienced police officers are pulling the triggers.
“School safety has always been the paramount issue I’ve dealt with,” said Steube, dead serious.
He’s eager to point out that only students with concealed-weapons permits would be allowed to pack heat. “These are 21-year-old adults who have gone through background checks, who have gone through training, who do not have a criminal record.”
Well, that certainly should reassure all worried parents, because 21 is the age of instant responsibility and maturity. Binge drinking, all-night partying, fighting — all that magically ends on a person’s 21st birthday, right?
And just because they lose their car keys now and then doesn’t mean they’d ever misplace a loaded Glock, or leave it out where their roommate could take it. You might wonder if Steube has ever set foot on a college campus. In fact, he has.
He graduated from the University of Florida, and stayed to get a law degree. During all that time in Gainesville he must have encountered at least a few fellow students who were unstable, angry, depressed, or battling drug and alcohol abuse.
In other words, troubled young men and women who shouldn’t be sitting in a classroom (or anywhere else) with a loaded weapon.
This would be a nightmare scenario for families who’ve sent their kids off to college believing they’ll be safe, at least while they’ve got a book in their hands. It’s also a nightmare scenario for teachers and professors, who’d be left to assume that every student in every class is armed. Would you give any grade except an A+ to a sophomore with a semiautomatic?
Most student and faculty groups are appalled by Steube’s campus gun bill, for good reason. It’s a recipe for another bloodbath.
A House subcommittee endorsed the measure last week, each Republican on the panel voting yea under the hawkish eye of the NRA. Luckily, there are more sane and cautious voices in the Florida Senate, where a similar piece of nutball legislation was snuffed four years ago.
At that time, John Thrasher, an influential Republican senator, opposed the push to put guns on college grounds. He had a friend whose daughter had been tragically killed in an accidental shooting at FSU.
Although Thrasher left the Senate last fall, he still has powerful friends in that chamber who pay attention to his opinion.
And they should, because Thrasher is now president of FSU. He started on the job 11 days before Myron May went to the library and started shooting.
The rampage didn’t change Thrasher’s mind about the danger of arming students. That’s because he lives in the real world, not the Bruce Willis fantasy inhabited by Steube and his reckless cohorts in the House.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 29, 2015
“Praise God And Bash The Gays”: More Hate On The Way. Oh, Joy
This past week, I read that “social conservatives” will attempt to reinvigorate their anti-gay campaign for the 2016 presidential race. Briefly, I succumbed to the old response of bracing myself.
More hate on the way. Oh, joy.
James Hohmann, writing for Politico from Des Moines, Iowa: “The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rule on gay marriage once and for all in June, and there are many Republicans who privately would love nothing more than to have the question settled and off the table in time for the 2016 presidential election.
“It’s not going to happen. Social conservatives here are determined to keep the issue alive during the run-up to next February’s Republican caucuses, no matter how the high court rules or how much some establishment figures would like to move on.”
Such a curious term, “social conservative,” when there is nothing cordial or hospitable in wielding God as a political two-by-four in the fight to deny basic human rights — in this case, the right to marry.
Same-sex marriage is now legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia. I live in one of the holdouts, Ohio. I’m not proud of that, but I can say it out loud without the usual spine rattle because I’m confident that on this issue, the bigots’ days are numbered from sea to shining sea. You can tell by the desperate, ridiculous things they’re saying lately, particularly in Iowa.
My favorite quotation so far came out of Mike Huckabee, who showed up last week at Iowa’s conservative summit. Rep. Steve King organized the gathering. His most famous contribution to public discourse is his 2013 description of immigrants as dealers dragging their drugs across the desert with “calves the size of cantaloupes.”
Not to change the subject, but I’ve always wondered why the congressman was spending so much time looking at those guys’ legs. It’s the kind of thing that makes you go “hmm.”
Anyway, back to Huckabee. He likened laws allowing gay people to marry to the U.S. Supreme Court’s racist 1857 Dred Scott decision, which said that no black person, free or enslaved, could become an American citizen.
And this, Huckabee argued, is why gays can’t marry.
“Nobody argues that Abraham Lincoln should have abided by the Dred Scott decision,” Huckabee said. “We recognize that he had the courage to realize that he didn’t have to enforce something that was morally wrong.”
If you think you should be able to figure out how Huckabee managed to connect those dots, you’re in for an even longer Republican presidential primary than the rest of us. Don’t try to make sense of this stuff.
I’m making light of this only because for too long, I was angry with people like Huckabee and didn’t like what it did to me. More to the point, I didn’t like how I was letting their nonsense whittle down faith. For a while there, I was reluctant to say I was Christian for fear that someone might think I was one of them. In my worst moments, I began to wonder where God fit into all of this.
I used to resent fundamentalists for this internal crisis of mine, but now I thank them. I hear them saying stupid things about gay people they’ve never met and feel the tug of my Christian roots, which taught me that faith is a riverbed where hope bubbles up and carries us along.
One of my favorite books is a collection of sermon excerpts by the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin. That man was a Christian willing to take on his own people.
“It is not Scripture that creates hostility to homosexuality,” he wrote, “but rather hostility to homosexuals that prompts some Christians to recite a few sentences from Paul and retain passages from an otherwise discarded Old Testament law code.
“In abolishing slavery and in ordaining women we’ve gone beyond biblical literalism. It’s time we did the same with gays and lesbians. The problem is not how to reconcile homosexuality with scriptural passages that condemn it, but rather how to reconcile the rejection and punishment of homosexuals with the love of Christ. It can’t be done.”
It can’t be done, he said.
Let justice flow like a mighty river.
By: Connie Schultz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist and an Essayist for Parade Magazine; The National Memo, January 29, 2015
“Rand Paul’s Prevarication Problem”: Afflicting The Afflicted & Comforting The Comfortable
Last week I called Sen. Rand Paul the most interesting man in Republican politics, and I still think that’s true. I also expressed some anxiety about the threat he could pose to the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. That’s subsiding. In the last week Paul’s been caught in some big fibs, degrading struggling workers while defending the Koch brothers. That’s an interesting guide to his values.
Like all the GOP contenders, Paul is now talking piously about the problem of poverty, which modern Republicans have discovered because Barack Obama hasn’t made it go away. You can almost hear the briefing from a Frank Luntz type: “He’s the first black president, and he hasn’t ended poverty! Not even black poverty!” It also lets them slyly play on the notion of Obama as a privileged, uppity Ivy Leaguer – a “snob,” in Rick Santorum’s parlance — who doesn’t care about the poor or working class.
Whatever you say, Mitt Romney.
I still give Rand Paul some credit for identifying the criminal justice system as a source of black disadvantage. And if he ever figures out something meaningful to do about it, I promise to revise my thinking about him as mostly an opportunist. But when it comes to policies that might ease either poverty or the suffering of the working and middle classes, Paul learned at his father’s knee that government is the bad guy – and that slackers and moochers are playing the system and exploiting the rest of us.
That’s why he shamefully claimed that most recipients of Social Security Disability Insurance are faking it. “Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts,” he told New Hampshire voters. The Washington Post fact checker showed the “back pain” disability category he cited included everything from muscle strain to amputations, while the “anxiety” number included conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He got three Pinocchios for that one.
A few days later, asked whether he supports a time-honored GOP alternative to welfare, the Earned Income Tax credit for the working poor, he insisted the program is fraud-ridden – which it is not. Speaking to the Koch Brothers’ Freedom Network Chamber of Commerce event Sunday, Paul claimed the EITC has a “fraud rate” of 25 percent that costs taxpayers “$20 billion to $30 billion a year.” He cited a report from the Government Accountability Office, but Factcheck.org found “that’s not what the report said.”
The program did have an “improper payment rate” of 24 percent, but that includes worker filing errors and IRS paperwork problems that are largely attributable to the complexity of the tax law itself. Such payments cost $14.5 billion, less than half of Paul’s high end estimate.
Of course those slackers and moochers stand in sharp contrast with those hardworking and honest Americans, Charles and David Koch (who just revealed they’ll spend $900 million on the 2016 races). Paul took up their cause a couple of days later on Fox Business Network, defending them from “liberal haters” and claiming their advocacy “has nothing to do with government.” Paul went on:
I defy any of the liberal haters that are out there to find one instance when they have ever asked for a subsidy or a special government break. I have never heard of any and what they’re wanting is to be left alone, like most businesses in our country.
The folks at American Bridge took up the challenge, and found dozens of ways the Kochs have “asked for a subsidy or a special government break.” Last year in particular Koch Industries ramped up its lobbying efforts, according to OpenSecrets.org, spending $4 million in the third quarter of 2014 alone, largely on issues of “the environment, oil and financial policy.” An energy and environment trade publication found “that amount of lobbying money makes Koch Industries one of Washington, D.C.’s biggest influence spenders so far this year, outranking energy competitors such as Exxon Mobil Corp.”
But it didn’t start in 2014. A 2011 report by the Center for Public Integrity found that Koch Industries “spends tens of millions of dollars to influence every facet of government that could affect its global empire,” working through trade organizations whose names – the National Environmental Development Association, for instance — obscure their goals. They’ve lobbied heavily against carbon control and the use of lower-carbon fuels, and against federal regulation of toxic chemicals. They also pushed unsuccessfully to protect the expiring Bush tax cuts.
It’s good to know that Paul will trounce sick and struggling working people and come to the aid of gazillionaires. That doesn’t make him “the most interesting man in politics;” it makes him a standard issue Republican. Ralph Nader has told the left it should support Paul in 2016 because of his anti-war rumbling (though lately he’s criticized his wobbling on the issue), but anyone who takes Nader’s advice after 2000 probably isn’t serious about issues of war or justice anyway.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 29, 2015
“The Internet Of Every Damn Thing”: Face It, Personal Gadgetry Tied To The Internet Is Selling Data About Your Habits To Businesses
Federal Trade Commission head Edith Ramirez put the matter plainly: “If I’m wearing a fitness band that tracks how many calories I consume, I wouldn’t want to share that data with an insurance company.”
In a study last year, the FTC found that 12 mobile fitness apps shared information with 76 enterprises. Face it; personal gadgetry tied to the Internet is selling data about your habits to businesses — and in ways you have no idea about.
These devices now range from home burglar alerts to apps that turn off the porch light to toothbrushes. As of this year, there will be 25 billion such things.
Hence, the FTC has just suggested some guidelines for neat but sneaky gear. They’re in a new report, titled “Internet of Things: Privacy & Security in a Connected World.”
I’d sort of given up on the privacy part. The choices have become so complex that I apply a simple rule. Anything I absolutely don’t want the world to see, I don’t put online. Period.
My Facebook friends know they will never see a look-what-I-just-bought post. As for my Web surfing, my life is not an open book, but if someone should disclose my interests, I’d be OK. I have an excuse for everything.
The potential problems arise with those very useful apps that need my personal information to do their job. Sure, I want Google Maps to know where I am. And if I had some serious medical condition, I’d want a monitoring device communicating with my doctor. But there’s a dark side: Some evil being could invade this data flow and change the medical settings.
I don’t see why my movie ticket app should always know my whereabouts. Fandango gives us two choices on giving it access to our location. One is “Never,” and the other is “Always. Access to your location will be available even when this app is in the background.”
Fandango thoughtfully provides a five-page privacy policy written in fluent legalese. It includes a discourse on its use of “Pixel Tags,” invisible files on the Web pages you visit. The point is that few consumers wade through these privacy policies, and even fewer have the faintest idea what they’re talking about.
The electric company sends me reports on my energy use and how it compares with that of neighbors. My most virtuous months seem to be those in which I’m not at home. My vacation schedule is unbeknownst to the company, I hope.
The FTC report calls for new rules governing the sort of information Internet-connected devices may collect, how it is used and how secure it is. This is a valiant effort, and I wish the regulators luck. But if hackers can break in to movie stars’ private photo files, what can we realistically do to protect our secret stashes from prying eyes?
Smartphone sensors can already guess a user’s sour mood, aggressive personality, pathetically low level of physical activity, sleeping difficulties and other behavioral patterns. And such snooping is perfectly legal.
In the end, consumers will have to decide: How much is the convenience of turning up the heat at home before leaving the office worth? What drives me nuts is all the thinking and research we have to do in balancing the trade-offs — and the attention that must be paid to various app settings.
The only current solution is to unscrew what you want kept private from the Internet. If you’ve forgotten how to use paper, you can put the information on a device not connected to the Internet — and then trip over the plug. Five minutes spent on some app’s privacy policy may convince you of the wisdom of primitive living.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, February 29, 2015
“Against Putin, Obama Gets The Last Laugh”: Where Did All The Republicans Go Who Heralded Putin As A Strategic Mastermind?
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama didn’t name names, but he reminded some of his critics in the Republican Party that their praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin was sadly mistaken.
“Last year, as we were doing the hard work of imposing sanctions along with our allies, as we were reinforcing our presence with frontline states, Mr. Putin’s aggression it was suggested was ‘a masterful display’ of ‘strategy and strength.’ That’s what I heard from some folks,” Obama said. “Well, today, it is America that stands strong and united with our allies, while Russia is isolated with its economy in tatters. That’s how America leads – not with bluster, but with persistent, steady resolve.”
Obama had reason to feel good – and take a not-so-subtle dig at Putin’s GOP fans. Not only is the American recovery gaining strength, but as Matt O’Brien explained yesterday, Russia’s credit rating was downgraded this week to “junk” status.
[I]f Russia is rated junk, then its companies will be too – which will increase the borrowing costs on their existing debt. It could also trigger earlier bond repayments, which, together with the higher interest rates, could, according to one official, cost them as much as $20 to $30 billion.
And that’s $20 to $30 billion it really can’t afford. Russia, as I’ve said before, doesn’t have an economy so much as an oil-exporting business that subsidizes everything else. But it can’t subsidize much when prices are only $50-a-barrel.
The confluence of economic events unfolding in Russia is amazing: cheap gas, banks in need of a bailout, crashing currency, high interest rates, and an inability to repay debts, all against the backdrop of additional sanctions.
There’s no reason conditions are going to improve in Russia anytime soon and Putin doesn’t know what to do next.
With these developments in mind, I’m curious: where did all the Republicans go who heralded Putin as a strategic mastermind? Where are the Fox News personalities who liked the idea of Putin leading the United States?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 28, 2015
They seem to have fallen quietly lately. Maybe someone should ask them whether they stand by their previous gushing over the Russian autocrat.
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