“Paralyzed By A Crazed Gun Lobby”: Gun Advocacy Has Now Become Parody
When I was growing up in the Cold War era, teachers instructed their pupils in the fine art of ducking under the desk as a shield against a strike from an atom bomb. That was a futile exercise, of course: A desktop provides no protection from the powerful destructive capacity of a nuclear weapon.
But it allowed teachers and their charges to pretend to have a defense against a frightening communist enemy whose might nearly equaled our own. It created a psychological barrier against helplessness.
These days, teachers train to protect their students from armed madmen who shoot up schools. They are taught to recognize not just the sound of gunfire in the hallway but also to hear the bone-chilling thump of an empty clip hitting the floor. They learn to hide their students; they memorize escape routes; they practice throwing ordinary classroom tools, like staplers, at an armed assailant.
As schools search for solutions, a manufacturer’s spokesman said sales of a product called the “Bodyguard Blanket,” a bulletproof covering that might offer a bit of protection from a school shooter, have been surprisingly strong. Why wouldn’t it sell quickly? Since the December 2012 Newtown massacre, there has been, on average, a similar incident every five weeks, according to CNN.
However, there’s a huge difference between the dangerous enemy we confronted in my youth and the current menace: Average citizens could defeat the lunacy now threatening our children. We are not helpless. Instead, for reasons that I simply cannot fathom, we are paralyzed by a crazed gun lobby.
It’s difficult to adequately describe our sense of defeatism in the face of the firearms fanatics. We don’t fight back when they insist on laws allowing guns in schools, in bars, in churches. We throw up our hands when they resist background checks. We shrug when another child is gunned down at school.
Oh, polls show our support for common-sense measures that would curb the death rate. After Newtown — when 20 small children and six adults were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School — 91 percent of Americans supported background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and private sales. Yet the Senate could not manage to pass a bill that closed the “gun show loophole.”
It’s unlikely that any of the senators who voted against the measure will be called to account in the only way that matters — with defeat. While 41 Republicans (and five Democrats) voted against the bill, the GOP is expected to gain seats in November’s elections. What kind of message does that send to the gun fanatics?
Meanwhile, the gun lobby’s favorite arguments for its positions have been, well, gunned down. Gun advocates claim that widespread firearms ownership by responsible law-abiding citizens would help to stop the carnage. They insist that a would-be school shooter, for example, would be killed before he could hurt anyone if only teachers were armed.
Experience shows it rarely works that way. Earlier this month, anti-government extremists, husband-and-wife team Jerad and Amanda Miller, killed two police officers in Las Vegas, ambushing the officers as they ate lunch. The couple then went to a nearby Walmart, where they encountered an armed citizen, Joseph Wilcox, who spotted Jerad and tried to stop him. Wilcox, too, was shot dead.
Facts, however, don’t faze the National Rifle Association and its allies, who have long since descended into a lunacy that rivals parody. Consider this: Recently, gun fetishists in Texas have begun demonstrating their support for “open carry” laws by carrying their heavy-duty weapons into restaurants. They’ve posted pictures of themselves with their assault-style weapons — civilian versions of rifles such as the AK-47 — strapped to their backs as stunned diners look on.
The NRA posted an opinion piece on its website discouraging those antics: “It makes folks who might normally be perfectly open-minded about firearms feel uncomfortable and question the motives of pro-gun advocates,” the writer said. Guess what? Within a few days, a backlash ensued from the gun cult, and the NRA disowned the commentary.
This is Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole madness. What does it say about the rest of us that we allow it to rule?
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor at The University of Georgia; The National Memo, June 14, 2014
“Chris Christie Spares No Legal Expense”: Short-Changing The State’s Pension Fund Is Another Story
Anyone who slogged through the 344-page report on Bridgegate from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s lawyers in March understood that this old fashioned whitewash would be extremely expensive.The governor hired one of the nation’s big time law firms, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which dutifully declared that Gov. Christie was not to blame for the massive traffic jams last year. Those problems were the work of others, the report insisted. The governor’s hands were clean.
Now taxpayers are starting to see what that one-sided report is really costing them. The latest invoices show that the state has been billed over $3 million in legal fees for work on behalf of the governor’s office. The governor’s legal team billed the state $1.1 million for work in January and another $2.6 million for February. Since the report came out in late March, there will undoubtedly be a few more eye-popping invoices to come. Moreover, other administration employees will require legal help as the investigations continue.
The governor and his staff deserve legal help, of course, and it’s customary for the public to pay for it. But at a time when Mr. Christie is squeezing every extra penny out of his state budget and short-changing the state’s pension fund, the governor has spared no expense on his lawyers.
Taxpayers should question whether the gold-plated report is, at best, another form of public relations for the governor. Despite all the interviews, the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher team failed to talk with many of the major players, including Bridget Kelly, the deputy chief of staff who was fired by Mr. Christie, and David Wildstein, a former Christie ally at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The report blamed Ms. Kelly and Mr. Wildstein for the scandal, adding disparaging comments about both.
Mayor Dawn Zimmer of Hoboken, N.J., who charged that the administration threatened to cut her Hurricane Sandy funds if she failed to support a development promoted by the governor’s allies, also refused to talk to the governor’s lawyers.. Without her side of the story, the report mocked her for yawning at a public event (thereby showing that she had not been upset about threats) and concluded that her charges “do not match objective reality.” The public is supposed to fork over millions of dollars for that?
The acting state attorney general, John Hoffman, should take a hard look at some of these bills and decide whether the taxpayers of New Jersey are being over-charged.
By: Eleanor Randolph, Taking Note, Editorial Page Editors Blog, The New York Times, June 11, 2014
“So What’s The Point?”: Mandatory ID ‘Isn’t Just For Voting Anymore’
As part of a broader voter-suppression campaign, Republican policymakers in many states now require voters to show a photo ID in order to cast an election ballot. This step, ostensibly intended to combat voter fraud that doesn’t exist, is a hurdle that’s never been necessary before, and which studies show disproportionately affect Democratic constituencies. There’s ample evidence of registered voters already being blocked from voting because of these measures.
But as my msnbc colleague Zack Roth reports, “For Republicans, requiring photo ID isn’t just for voting anymore.” It’s now being applied to recipients of government benefits.
North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature – which last year passed a voter ID requirement as part of the nation’s most restrictive voting law – advanced a bill Thursday that would make recipients of jobless benefits also show a photo ID. It’s expected to pass next week. […]
Other Republican-led states are even moving to require photo ID to buy food. Starting in July, welfare and food stamp recipients in Maine will have to show photo ID, under a program pushed by far-right Republican governor Paul LePage. He said transactions records show food stamp cards were used thousands of times at strip clubs, smoke shops, and bars, which isn’t allowed. Georgia recently passed a similar requirement for food stamp recipients.
Given all of these efforts, one might assume that fraud is rampant and that ID requirements would save money while preventing illegal schemes.
Except, that’s not quite right.
As Zack’s report made clear, fraud does exist when it comes to the distribution of government benefits, but most of the wrongdoing is the result of “concealed-earnings fraud,” which refers to people who have financial resources they mask in order to remain eligible for benefits, cheating the system.
How would forcing these people to show ID prevent this fraud? It wouldn’t.
For that matter, because food-stamp benefits are distributed by way of Electronic Benefits Transfer cards through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, ID requirements wouldn’t reduce fraud here, either.
So what’s the point? Proponents will have to answer these questions themselves, though Zack’s report added a key detail: ”Studies suggest around 11% of Americans – including one in four African-Americans – don’t have a photo ID. Among those who receive government benefits, that number is almost certainly higher.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 10, 2014
“The Fix Isn’t In”: Eric Cantor And The Death Of A Movement
How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.
I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.
By rejecting Mr. Cantor, the Republican base showed that it has gotten wise to the electoral bait and switch, and, by his fall, Mr. Cantor showed that the support network can no longer guarantee job security. For around three decades, the conservative fix was in; but no more.
To see what I mean by bait and switch, think about what happened in 2004. George W. Bush won re-election by posing as a champion of national security and traditional values — as I like to say, he ran as America’s defender against gay married terrorists — then turned immediately to his real priority: privatizing Social Security. It was the perfect illustration of the strategy famously described in Thomas Frank’s book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” in which Republicans would mobilize voters with social issues, but invariably turn postelection to serving the interests of corporations and the 1 percent.
In return for this service, businesses and the wealthy provided both lavish financial support for right-minded (in both senses) politicians and a safety net — “wing-nut welfare” — for loyalists. In particular, there were always comfortable berths waiting for those who left office, voluntarily or otherwise. There were lobbying jobs; there were commentator spots at Fox News and elsewhere (two former Bush speechwriters are now Washington Post columnists); there were “research” positions (after losing his Senate seat, Rick Santorum became director of the “America’s Enemies” program at a think tank supported by the Koch brothers, among others).
The combination of a successful electoral strategy and the safety net made being a conservative loyalist a seemingly low-risk professional path. The cause was radical, but the people it recruited tended increasingly to be apparatchiks, motivated more by careerism than by conviction.
That’s certainly the impression Mr. Cantor conveyed. I’ve never heard him described as inspiring. His political rhetoric was nasty but low-energy, and often amazingly tone-deaf. You may recall, for example, that in 2012 he chose to celebrate Labor Day with a Twitter post honoring business owners. But he was evidently very good at playing the inside game.
It turns out, however, that this is no longer enough. We don’t know exactly why he lost his primary, but it seems clear that Republican base voters didn’t trust him to serve their priorities as opposed to those of corporate interests (and they were probably right). And the specific issue that loomed largest, immigration, also happens to be one on which the divergence between the base and the party elite is wide. It’s not just that the elite believes that it must find a way to reach Hispanics, whom the base loathes. There’s also an inherent conflict between the base’s nativism and the corporate desire for abundant, cheap labor.
And while Mr. Cantor won’t go hungry — he’ll surely find a comfortable niche on K Street — the humiliation of his fall is a warning that becoming a conservative apparatchik isn’t the safe career choice it once seemed.
So whither movement conservatism? Before the Virginia upset, there was a widespread media narrative to the effect that the Republican establishment was regaining control from the Tea Party, which was really a claim that good old-fashioned movement conservatism was on its way back. In reality, however, establishment figures who won primaries did so only by reinventing themselves as extremists. And Mr. Cantor’s defeat shows that lip service to extremism isn’t enough; the base needs to believe that you really mean it.
In the long run — which probably begins in 2016 — this will be bad news for the G.O.P., because the party is moving right on social issues at a time when the country at large is moving left. (Think about how quickly the ground has shifted on gay marriage.) Meanwhile, however, what we’re looking at is a party that will be even more extreme, even less interested in participating in normal governance, than it has been since 2008. An ugly political scene is about to get even uglier.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 12, 2014
“All The Usual Suspects”: As Iraq Implodes, Neocons Still Have No Plan Except ‘Blame Obama’
Divided between neoconservative ultra-hawks and libertarian isolationists, today’s Republican Party is hardly a steady influence on American foreign policy. But there is one thing that can be reliably expected from every right-wing faction in Washington: Whenever disaster threatens, they eagerly cast blame on Barack Obama – and utter any falsehood that may be used to castigate him.
As the failed state of Iraq strains under attack from a jihadist force – the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – all the usual suspects are popping up on the Senate floor to denounce the president. Ignoring more than a decade of miserable history in which most of them played ignominious parts, these politicians now claim that if only the president had listened to them, the current disaster would have been averted somehow.
“Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right,” said the Arizona senator, praising himself and his South Carolina sidekick. “Our failure to leave forces on Iraq is why Sen. Graham and I predicted this would happen.”
Nobody with a functioning memory can take such arguments seriously.
By the time our troops left Iraq at the end of 2011, the war had inflicted such immense damage on our military and our communities that Americans were in no mood for further misadventures. Not since Vietnam had a ruinous policy come so close to breaking America’s armed forces. The fiscal damage was equally serious – trillions of dollars in current and future costs, mostly borrowed from China. The American people wanted out.
Even had we wanted to stay, however, the Iraqis no longer desired our presence – as they had made absolutely clear in their electoral choices and their subsequent negotiations with both the Bush and Obama administrations over keeping U.S. troops in Iraq. It was Bush who signed the Status of Forces Agreement in December 2008 that set a deadline of January 1, 2012 for the departure of all U.S. forces – unless the Iraqis negotiated and ratified a new deal to maintain our troops there.
No such deal was ever made, however, because the Iraqis wanted our troops out – even the tiny force of roughly 3,000 advisors that Obama hoped to provide. He was left with no choice because the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki refused to grant legal immunity from prosecution to any U.S. troops. Imagine what McCain and Graham would have said had Obama decided to leave American officers and troops vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment by local Iraqi warlords – especially when such an incident inevitably occurred.
So when Republican senators leap up and start barking about Obama’s refusal to leave troops on the ground, they either don’t remember what actually happened or – sadly but more likely – hope to deceive this country’s amnesia-addled voters.
Neither McCain nor any of the other trash-talking statesmen on the Republican side has much useful advice to offer the president. They say we shouldn’t have pulled our troops out, but they sure don’t want to send them back in. Drop some bombs on the jihadist camps, they suggest – knowing very well that won’t do much to clean up this horrific mess.
Still they insist on talking about Iraq, loudly and constantly, as if someone else created the mess and they have the answers. They need to be reminded just as loudly that it is their mess and they still have no idea what to do.
Americans should try to remember how this happened – even if the disgraced figures who promoted the invasion of Iraq will never accept responsibility for squandering trillions of American dollars, thousands of American lives, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives for what could most charitably be called a massive, irreparable blunder. Never mind the nonsense about the weapons of mass destruction – which nobody has yet found there, by the way. Absolutely none of the predictions about Iraq by the neocons in and around the Bush administration proved accurate. None of their strategies provided real development or security. And all of their grand schemes for regional stability and democracy simply crumbled.
Instead of serving as a sturdy bulwark against extremism, the Shia-dominated government of Iraq immediately allied itself with the neighboring mullah regime in Iran. The curse of sectarian warfare, famously dismissed by William Kristol as a chimera, has exploded into a continuous catastrophic reality that threatens regional security and may create a fresh haven for terrorism.
It is hard not to wonder why anyone still listens to McCain, Kristol, and company — especially on this grave issue. But if they insist on serving up blame, let them step up first to accept their overwhelming share.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, June 13, 2014
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