Politics doesn't get much more pathetic than this. pic.twitter.com/f6AmIvT3mw
— billmon (@billmon1) March 6, 2014
Joe Coscarelli, at NYMag:
It’s that time of the year again. All of the country’s important Republicans have gathered in Washington for the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, to stock up on talking points and bumper stickers for 2014. Kicking things off right this morning was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who gifted outgoing Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn with a rifle onstage…
But I count on my favorite Speaker-to-Republican reporter to sniff out the true crazeballs. Dave Weigel:
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—It’s a short but frigid walk from CPAC to a less scripted and more intense all-day event. This year, as they’ve done since at least 2010, a group of foreign policy hawks and critics of “creeping Sharia” have put on an alternative program, inviting conservatives who either aren’t at the main event or being given only a little time there.
In the past, this event’s usually amounted to the Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney reairing charges that Grover Norquist is a simp for the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s more fascinating this year—Breitbart (which sponsored 2013’s event) has teamed up with EMPact, a group that raises awareness of the danger of possible electromagnetic pulse attacks, to put on nine hours of national security speeches. Sen. Ted Cruz had given a pretty agreeable but rote speech at CPAC. He saved his best material for a 39-minute address at the alternative event.
“Speaking the truth speaks courage,” Cruz said at the start, “and that’s one thing that Frank Gaffney has an abundance of.”…
…”When Iran describes Israel as the Little Satan, and America as the Great Satan, we have every interest to make sure they don’t acquire the weaponry to kill millions of Americans.” Cruz imagined a nightmare scenario in which Iran detonated a bomb over “Tel Aviv or New York or Los Angeles.” Detonated here, the effects of an EMP attack could kill “tens of millions of Americans.”
Tens of millions? This was an incredibly effective line in the room, which contained about 100 people, to CPAC’s 11,000.
Do not turn your back on this guy. For all his furrin birth, he’s a true American Elmer Gantry, “… wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Tommy
Oh Iran. I did away with cable TV the other day and watched some political show on Hulu. I now can’t even find the program. A Republican was on saying we need more sanctions against Iran and maybe military action. The liberal surprised me. He asked, “when was the last time Iran attacked another nation? When? You are not saying anything cause it didn’t happen.”
David Koch
The Return of C-CRAP
/fixed
Zam
Don’t conservatives continually claim that liberals are Satan? or at least Hitler? I know they at least think gays are of the devil. If we follow Teds advice should we never let these kinds of people near the levels of power in this nuclear armed nation?
Suffern ACE
Ah. One is televised and the other is not. I think we should be covering the one that isn’t. That’s usually where the good stuff is.
jl
Shariah threat? That is so yesterday.
The Soviet threat is the happening thing.
I mean, yeesh, they even could have re-used their ‘Gates of Vienna!’ banner. And both Great Satans hate gays, artistic freedom, protest, dissident press, er… I mean, cultural decadence and decline.
There is simply no excuse for that weak work.
Belafon
While Kos and others have done pretty well setting up Netroots Nation, the left needs to set up a couple more of these type conferences, mainly to get media attention about it’s ideas.
raven
@Belafon: Right.
GregB
Mitch McConnell and Heston and the rest of these clownholes take their stage craft from their real mentors.
Belafon
@Belafon: We don’t want to always play their games, but getting people together to make a bunch of noise about taking care of the poor, supporting the right to choose, etc., wouldn’t hurt.
Tommy
@Belafon: IMHO folks don’t care that much about ideas, otherwise they’d listen to the stuff out of CPAC and run for the hills.
shelly
Oh, if only that gun (musket?) had accidently gone off, causing McConnell to have a little accident. I guess God doesn’t love us enough.
Chris
There’s something truly pathetic about right wing shills’ belief that being paid by people who agree with you, to tell an audience of people who agree with you, that you agree with them, in a country where free speech is a constitutionally protected right, somehow takes “courage.”
David Koch
The Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn’t love us enough to give Canada’s Rafael Cruz the nomination.
The plutocrats don’t have anyone to put their money behind. No one. Which makes me think they will fund and foment a fake grass roots effort push Mittens into the race.
Calouste
@Tommy:
On the other hand, Iran got invaded/occupied/couped in IIRC 1916, 1923, 1942, 1953 and 1980, with of course Anglo-Persian, now British Petroleum treating the country as their own private oil pump for most of that time. And that’s just the 20th century, we’re not talking about the Great Game between Russia and Britain that proceeded that. There’s a reason Iran wants some deterrent.
Bubblegum Tate
@jl:
Besides, Republicans have gone from warning about Sharia to attempting to install the Christian variant of it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Funniest thing I’ve seen so far is The Outlaw Jersey Whale telling Harry Reid to stop picking on the Koch brothers. He referred to Fred’s heirs as “entrepreneurs” and, wait for it, job-creators.
Tommy
@Chris: I often joke if I was an evil person I could come up with some bizarre conspiracy theory. Set up a web site and get these rubes to send me money. The more crazy the idea the better the scheme might work. If some media outlet actually picked up my rant and showed it was totally false, I’d just yell “see the lame stream media is all against us.” They have this racket down to an art form.
feebog
Did Cruz recite “Green eggs and ham” this time?
piratedan
well it’s nice to see Bagman Tom shuffle off into the griftiness, lets hope that Oklahoma doesn’t replace him with someone even more heinous, although I won’t hold my breath.
Hungry Joe
@Chris: They also like to spout crap like “Only in America could we be having this conversation,” because, you know, we’re the only free people in the world. If you expressed an opinion in, say, oh, I don’t know, let’s see, just off the top of my head … Canada, Iceland, Ireland, England, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Greece, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Panama, or Costa Rica, why, you’d be thrown into a dungeon. Because we’re the freedom-est people ever.
Tommy
@Hungry Joe: I was watching some political talk show on Hulu. The liberal was a Brit. The conservative said if they had more guns in England less people would be killed being robbed. The British guy look confused by this statement, and said he thought the number of murders during a robbery were 34 in 2012. The American said those 34 would be alive today if they had a gun. It was at this point I turned off the television and realized nothing is going to change in this country.
Mark B.
An EMP isn’t going to kill tens of millions of people. It’s going to fry all of their electronic devices and destroy a lot of the power infrastructure, which may eventually result in a some deaths, but I doubt it will be anywhere near the tens of millions. Essential services should recover in a few days or weeks at most.
Chris
@Tommy:
The Iranian revolution is an interesting case of the entire “civilized” world losing its shit at the sight of what they thought was a regime of Dark Ages lunatics bent on Armageddon who couldn’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with…
… and yet, oddly enough, the Iranians aren’t the ones who started a war of aggression in 1980, nor were they the ones who used chemical weapons in an attempt at large-scale extermination during (and after) that war. Nope, that was the civilized, secular, modernist, Western AND Soviet backed Iraqi government.
It’s not the only time we’ve painted our enemies as inhuman savages in order to feel better about our own behavior in being (or at least, enabling) inhuman savages, but it’s one of the more egregious ones in recent history.
GxB
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Let’s see: morticians, toxic dump remediators, cancer specialists, lawyers, think tank spin doctors, media lackies, ALEC stooges, goons to keep the grunts from getting uppity… oh and let’s not forget – tons of lobbyists.
He’s not entirely lying.
Chris
@jl:
No, no. The Soviets are the good guys, as led by their bold and brave Manly Man Vladimir Putin, boldly facing the metrosexual man-child and weak tyrant Barack Obama.
MomSense
I want to point and mock but I just feel like crying. I said in the previous thread that my son’s school had a lockdown drill so I had the pleasure of hearing about where they would hide and what they would do if the hypothetical gunman were to get in their classroom.
Then I got home and read the newsletter from the food bank to which I donate and volunteer. We have a backpack program where teachers are given food to put in backpacks so kids have food over the weekend. One of the teachers reported that one of her students looked in his backpack, saw the canned pineapple, and gave her a huge hug saying “how did you know pineapple is my favorite”.
These CPAC assholes are evil.
Seanly
I’m sure EMPact doesn’t have any over-priced will-never-be-used low quality survival gear to sell the
rubessavvy Tea Party folks.Speaking of Tea Party, can the media stop using “Tea Party favorite”? That was tiresome 4 years ago. A tea party favorite is just a conservative Republican.
Violet
@MomSense: In the 50’s and 60’s and maybe into the 70’s kids had drills about where they’d hide if there was a nuclear attack. Under the desks, of course. That would be safe!
GxB
@Mark B.: You may be neglecting the mass suicides that would occur if Twitter/FB were down for more than twenty minutes.
Tommy
@MomSense: My city used a government grant to build a food bank a few years ago. Some people were not so sure it was a good idea. They never said it, but you know poor people might come to out town. Oh crime.
We built the thing. Has won every community service award the state of IL can give out. It appears they are very good at what they do. And often the local paper will print a story about all the folks they serve. Literally hundreds and hundreds.
Litlebritdiftrnt
@Tommy:
We had our own version of Sandy Hook back in 1996 when a mentally ill man went into a primary school and shot a bunch of kids. It happened the day my Dad died, and I remember my Mum saying “well your Dad went so he could lead those children to Heaven”. At that point the Government said you can’t have a gun unless it is stored in a Gun Club until you are going out hunting, and seeing as you don’t need a hand gun to hunt we’ll ban those too.
My Uncle was an avid hunter, a signature dish at his restaurant was called “Poachers Pot” and consisted of Rabbit, Venison and Pheasant. It didn’t bother him one whit to keep his rifles at the gun club and going to sign it out when he went hunting.
I am not surprised that the Brit looked non-plussed at the wingnut, there are 60 gun deaths A DAY in this country. Compared to the 34 a YEAR in the UK.
dedc79
Suffice it to say that Grimes’ response was not exactly encouraging for those favoring some sanity on gun control: https://twitter.com/AlisonForKY/status/441610400438976512
NotMax
The only thing worth paying attention to about CPAC is the inevitable story about the pinbacks, T-shirts, bumper stickers and other items which CPAC deemed too extreme for display and sale there, and what messages such things bore.
Chris
@Seanly:
I refuse to use the words “Tea Party,” simply because 1) I still have enough respect for the American Revolution not to associate the Boston Tea Party with these guys, and 2) writing it like “Tea Party” implies that it’s a separate party as opposed to the Republican Party with a shitty makeover, a fiction our media loves.
“Teabaggers” is just fine with me. “Tea Party Movement,” if they absolutely want to be formal.
gbear
@Belafon:
Like this?
Hungry Joe
@dedc79: 1) I agree; but 2) Ms. Grimes is running for Senate in the state of Kentucky, and she would like to win.
Calouste
@Litlebritdiftrnt:
Another thing gundamentalists “overlook” is that there are actually slightly more non-gun murders per 100,000 in the US than there are in the UK. So all those guns floating around don’t keep people safe from a knife attack.
MomSense
@Violet:
I remember those drills and I remember the day I found out about mutually assured destruction. I was so mad at my parents that they were talking so casually about something as insane as nuclear war.
@Tommy:
I’m glad they went ahead with the food bank.
Pogonip
@Mark B.: That’s good to know because my car is computerized. I hope my insurance covers EMPs. Tried to find a non-computerized car but I guess they aren’t made anymore.
LanceThruster
The Turtle will forget and use that long gun as a cane and blow his wrist plum off.
Tommy
@Litlebritdiftrnt: My state, heck the area I live in is trying to limit guns, but running into the NRA. Heck the SCOTUS overturned our state law banning conceal carry permits a few months ago. Almost everybody I know owns a gun, like your uncle, to hunt. I don’t know many folks that want to run around town nor carry a gun on them, and I know some pretty darn Republican folks.
SiubhanDuinne
@Litlebritdiftrnt:
Geez, Litlebrit, have a heart, okay? That just shredded me.
RIP your dad.
Roger Moore
Sorry, but this quote needs to be updated. When Fascism comes to America, it will be burning a cross and wrapped in a Confederate battle flag.
Bobby Thomson
@Chris: Koch Party Republicans. That’s what they are.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Must be springtime, my allergies are acting up.
Jesus, I was disgusted by Paul Ryan’s blatherskyte about school lunches before I read that. How does a grownass man still believe in that Randian claptrap.
Roger Moore
@Belafon:
I think we need to set up and publicize more events like CPAC. Nothing will help liberals more than massive publicity for conservatives’ actual beliefs and platform.
JPL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Because he got his government help and look what happened to him.
NotMax
@MomSense – @Violet
The elementary school I attended at the time had classes in grades K – 6. By the time was in sixth grade, there were a small smattering of us (3 in all out of the two 6th grade classrooms) who recognized the ludicrousness of the drills and refused to participate.
Our ‘punishment’ was to have to trudge into the bowels of the school basement to be watched by the janitor, inside his supply closet, whenever a drill was held.
Looking back, that gave us a miniscule (but statistically significant) better chance of immediate survival.
bago
What kind of commie are you?
http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/06/urgent-news-poll-who-would-make-a-better-president-obama-or-putin/
Yup.
A Ghost To Most
@Pogonip:
Well, you could build a Faraday cage around the car with tinfoil. All the tinfoil hat folks would be jealous.
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
No, the Soviets are our Enemies, and it’s a damn shame that THEY have a really manly leader like Putin who invades countries at the drop of his shirt, while we have a selfish weakling like Obama who just sits around, makes a few phone calls, and watches as Putin ends up failing miserably without Obama having to touch him.
Tommy
@NotMax: LOL. I did a speech on how stupid these drills were. That we were only 3.8 miles from the military base that would be hit, multiple times, and in like .003 seconds we’d be dead. Getting under our desk, well not really effective. This would be one of many times the school called my parents to say their son was being difficult.
MomSense
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
And I really shouldn’t chop onions while reading the mail.
@NotMax:
Ok, that is funny!
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Belafon:
More large liberal events would be nice for liberals and that’s about it. I would imagine that Moral Mondays, no matter how big the crowd receive in-depth indifference. Let 200 wingnuts, or one Ted Nugent show up somewhere and sput gibberish and I bet that our anchors, Tawny Blowdry and Bob Vacuous, are all over it.
ranchandsyrup
I wonder if Yakov Smirnoff is getting booked again these days due to Putin rearing his head over the world.
JaneE
Is EMP supposed to be more scary than Nuke? Or is he trying to sound ignorant for his audience? EMP is a secondary effect of the nuclear explosion, which is what actually kills people. On second thought, maybe Cruz is saying that cell phones are more important to him than human beings.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
as someone who was called a Decadent Fifth Columnist because I saw Gee Dumbya for what he was long before, during and in the aftermath of 9/11, I will always read Sullivan with a healthy degree of skepticism, but this is good, and Sully has (I believe) a deep readership among the Villagers:
I especially like that he name-checked the Coiffe
Anne Laurie
@Violet:
In my third-grade class (early 1960s), Sister Augustine told us that we didn’t have to worry about duck & cover drills, because we were in the Bronx and wouldn’t even see the massive flashes that reduced the whole greater metropolitan NYC area to glass.
As long as we’d been to confession recently, of course. In those back-end-Boomer assembly-line-education days, we had our First Communions in second grade and were confirmed (ergo, ‘adult’ for religious purposes) in third grade. Knowing that we’d go straight to Heaven was better than duck’n’cover for protection, according to the Dominican sisters!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Whenever I see that quote, I think that Peggy Noonan has a book-like product (hat tip to Pierce or Tbogg, can’t remember which) called “A Heart, A Cross, and a Flag”. I don’t know if Lewis foresaw the mewling, maudlin sentimentality that would envelope the American Right.,
Violet
@MomSense:
I remember having a similar sort of experience. That people could be talking so casually about it was what got to me.
Tracy Ratcliff
@JaneE: The idea is that a single large bomb detonated at high altitude could create EMP that would propagate for thousands of miles (see the novel “Warday”). I’m betting current simulations show that it wouldn’t work like that, leaving the field open for the grifters.
WereBear
I too, got in trouble during nuclear drills. I informed some of my fellow third graders that it didn’t matter, we’d be killed anyway.
Some of them got very upset and I realized not everyone was a realist.
Bill Arnold
@Tracy Ratcliff:
Ah. The EMP comment was marketing?
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
First you get down on your knees
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect
@Jim, Foolish Literalist
As for Afghanistan, McCain must have a sad that the response from ‘our side’ is no longer to deny outright lethal snafus.
Anne Laurie
@dedc79: No, that’s a great response from Grimes. She’s being the Competent Grown-Up, telling Little Mitch that he’s not adult enough to handle a powerful tool,and should go back to waving sticks and making pew-pwe-pew noises like the other six-year-olds.
MomSense
Women of Soul performing tonight at the White House and Patti LaBelle just gave the President and First Lady the respect they should get from all of us!!
whitehouse.gov is live streaming.
Nice palette cleanser after this CPAC crap.
raven
@NotMax:
Drink the wine
and chew the wafer. . .
MaryRC
Have you seen this?
Paul Ryan tells an anecdote about a little kid who doesn’t want a free school lunch — he wants to bring his lunch to school in a brown paper bag because it shows that someone cares about him.
The anecdote is not only stolen from a book, it’s completely twisted and distorted.
So I guess billmon’s tweet was wrong. Politics can get more pathetic than an old man waving a gun.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@raven: You can make any move you want if
you get approval from the Pontiff
Ave Maria
Gee, it’s good to see ya!
Litlebritdiftrnt
@SiubhanDuinne:
Sorry. Remember it like it was yesterday. If it makes you feel better the first thing the IC nurse did when they declared him was go and make us a nice pot of tea. That’s what they do in England. Tea solves everything.
Thoughtful David
@Bubblegum Tate: They’ve always been all about installing their own version of sharia. It’s nothing new. Warning about sharia was the anomaly. But only because they never thought about it or knew what it was before.
Bill D.
@Pogonip: Insurance won’t cover “acts of war”, period.
Origuy
@ranchandsyrup: Yakov Smirnoff has his own theater in Branson, Missouri. Probably telling the same jokes he told in the 70s.
Roger Moore
@Calouste:
When you bring that up, you’ll get to see their racist side come out. The explanation may be rude or polite, but they’ll blame it all on violent minorities; if you look at the murder rate among middle class whites, it’s really low.
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax:
Drink the wine and chew the wafer
Two, four, six, eight time to transubstantiate!
Roger Moore
@Litlebritdiftrnt:
Even Sheldon Cooper knows to offer someone a hot beverage when they’re upset.
PurpleGirl
@MomSense: Thank you, the food bank and the school for being compassionate and wanting to help the students over the weekend. A can of pineapple may not seem to be much, but to that student it was Big Fucking Deal. It probably also made his parents happy to be able to serve him something he likes that they usually can’t afford.
The Ancient Randonneur
A real man would be bare chested and on a horse. Come on Mitch, grow a pair.
Baud
CPAC — The other “C” is for crazy. (so is the first “C”)
PurpleGirl
@Violet: Of course it was safe… they taught you how to fold yourself up under the desk, hold one arm across your back neck and the other arm across your head close to your eyes.
/sarcasm
Roger Moore
@The Ancient Randonneur:
I’m not sure if the Geneva Convention would allow that; it certainly sounds like inhumane and degrading treatment to viewers.
Suffern ACE
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: yeah. I believe he wanted to send in marines to support Mubarak, dispersing protesters in support of a sick, octogenarian dictator.
Villago Delenda Est
@WereBear:
One of the truisms about nuclear war that, fortunately, has never been tested, is that the survivors of a nuclear attack would envy the dead.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
The Geneva Conventions are, in the words of the Dark Lord, “quaint.”
Time to move on to newer, fresher atrocities in the name of Reagan.
JPL
OT As a person who owned two goldens, one of which had 11 puppies, I might buy a chevy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6bLugtJkQ
Kay
@MaryRC:
Paul Ryan was born in 1970. He’s nostalgic for this imaginary country that never was because he was born well after we addressed basic poverty needs. He’s been comfortably living in a house someone else built, and so he’s free to idly muse about tearing it down. He doesn’t even know what he wants to return to.
Elmo
@Litlebritdiftrnt:
I know exactly how you feel. My Dad died the morning of Dec 14, 2012 – the day of Sandy Hook.
It was also my birthday.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
I don’t know if Ryan is authentically nostalgic for imaginary pure America or if he’s just taking advantage of other people who are. And he isn’t idly musing about tearing down the house he lives in; he’s actively planning to tear down a house that other people live in because he wants to do something with the land it’s on.
PurpleGirl
@Anne Laurie: Growing up in Astoria, I was hoping that I was close enough to the Empire State Building to melted in a millesecond, being sure that the Empire State Building was bound to be a target. Alternate choices were the power generating plants and LaGuardia Airport because of their proximity to where I lived.
shelly
According to Newsmax, looks like Cruz is channeling his inner Reagan. Morning in America, y’all!
mclaren
Important article over at tomdispatch:
The Pentagon’s phony budget war: Or How the U.S. Military Avoided Budget Cuts, Lied About Doing So, Then Asked for Billions More , by Mattea Kramer, 6 March 2014.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I used to joke that they think the country began with the election of Ronald Reagan and I swear, there’s truth to it. They seem to think we did all these things for no reason. I don’t know, can a country survive where each new generation of conservatives has to start at 1911, and we go back over it with them? “Well, old people couldn’t work anymore, so we set up this program..”
I don’t think we have time for this :)
Roger Moore
@Kay:
Some of them, perhaps, but a lot of them know the reason and just don’t care. They want what they want, and they don’t care who gets hurt in the process of them getting it.
Omnes Omnibus
@GxB:
And Methodists!
Chris
@Kay:
Ding ding.
Wingnuts love to talk about how many student radicals (yeah, all three of them) are from well off families, bankers and lawyers’ kids whose parents are where they are and can afford to send them to college only because of the capitalist economy they want to tear down.
… WELP, in the same way, wingnuttiness seems to take root among the people who grew up in the shadow of the New Deal and in the middle class that it largely created. They’ve been living in big government for so long they don’t even realize it’s there and haven’t the slightest idea how drastically the world would change if they got what they wanted, how many of the things they take for granted would go away.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie:
It certainly wasn’t any worse.
Joel
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: it was already there; wasn’t that the purpose of Elmer Gantry?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mark B.:
Not to mention we did that to Serbia during the Kosovo thing in the ’90s and it didn’t result in mass death. Sounds like some Conservetards have been getting their facts from the latest Red Dawn movie.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: It could wipe out their bitcoin stockpile. That would be worse than death.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
I’m a little mad at myself because I should have anticipated school lunches would follow food stamps. Of course it does.
We have 50% free or reduced lunch in this bastion of rural conservatism. Half. Paul Ryan’s base.
celticdragonchick
@shelly:
Looks like a flintlock rifle (You can tell right off by the shape of the stock and the fancy filigree work). Muskets are smoothbore weapons made for military use. I own a replica King’s 2nd Land Pattern “Brown Bess” musket that I use as a Rev War re-enactor. A real shame that a perfectly good period weapon was given to a jackass who will never, ever use it to hunt or any thing else.
Cervantes
@Kay:
And Jimmy Carter was George III?
Hmm …
Omnes Omnibus
@celticdragonchick: You can tell rifle from musket from that photo? I can’t see if the barrel is thick enough for rifling.
TriassicSands
It seems like CPAC is happening every six months now. Has it really been a year already since the last gathering of lunatics?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Joel: I meant to say, I never read the book. All I know is Mrs Partridge won an Oscar for it.
Roger Moore
@celticdragonchick:
I saw another picture of it, and I thought it was a percussion cap model rather than a flintlock. The barrel also looks a bit short for a Revolutionary War weapon, so I would guess that it’s a Civil War era rifled musket. There are probably a lot of those still around, and I think there are replicas made for renactors. Giving a Confederate rifle would also go along with the general Republican modus operandi.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Can you imagine the prosecutorial joy when they read those emails?
Kay
And it gets better!
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Jesus. Can you imagine the defense attorneys’ consternation when those emails were disclosed?
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Oh dear.
Pogonip
@Bill D.: Thanks for the tip. When I file the claim, I’ll tell ’em the Russkies pushed the button by mistake. There’s precedent. In the early ’60’s, a computer mistook the moon for a flight of Russian missiles; a colonel stopped the counterattack. Something similar happened on their side and, once again, an unsung hero saved the world.
Matt McIrvin
@Violet: By the early 70s my second-grade teacher was telling us that they used to have nuclear-war drills, but no longer bothered because the bombs were powerful enough that there was no point.
Fun, fun days!
Bill D.
@Pogonip: You’re welcome. Of course, I’ll want a cut of the $0.00 you receive on your claim.
BTW, there were a lot more false alarms and close calls that that. Read Command and Control by Eric Schlosser and you will wonder why we are all still alive.
Matt McIrvin
…In fact, warheads in actual deployment have mostly gone down in yield since the 1950s, because more accurate targeting makes the gigantic multi-megaton H-bombs less useful. But at that point the numbers were still escalating.
Jeffro
@Chris: Just say “Tea Party Republicans” every time, that works. Doesn’t even matter if the listener thinks it’s an offshoot of the Republican party or how the GOP now refers to itself as a whole, still gets the point across.
Jeffro
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Me too. Of COURSE the poor kids would like to have nice bagged lunches from their folks, but they don’t, and it’s not because their parents don’t love them, it’s because they. don’t. have. the. money. and/or time.
Ryan makes me madder than almost any of them…
Jeffro
@Roger Moore: Ryan was a kid/early teen during the Reagan years and internalized all of that crap permanently. That plus reading Atlas Shrugged twenty gazillion times has left him permanently skewed and empathy deficient.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
I read a long piece about the whole mess. They had set up this crazy cycle, where they were paying people more and more to come onboard because they were already in trouble. Once they set out on that course, they just didn’t know how to stop. The new(est) highly paid person was supposed to bring in enough to keep the thing afloat, but all of the new hires were almost IN on it, the game. They were just collecting the money and trying to figure out when they should bail, trying to time it so they got one more check before the whole thing went under. It was akin to trying to time when to dump a stock.
Mike in NC
@TriassicSands: CPAC seems to meet every quarter, as far as I can tell. Wolverines!
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Ponzi scheme.
Mnemosyne
@Jeffro:
No excuse. I was a kid/early teen during the Reagan years. I even grew up within 100 miles of where Ryan did. And yet I was smart enough to realize that Reagan was full of shit.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
Too, I should say, I read the piece about six months ago and it was about hubris and greed and poor management and the financial crash and getting into debt.
It didn’t have anything in there about fraud and larceny and a 100+ count indictment.
None that I RECALL. At this TIME :)
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Can you find a link to the article? I would be interested in reading it.
PurpleGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I worked for the firm when it was still LeBouef, Lamb, Libbey and McCray (or the nickname — The Butchers). I was there when Donald Green came on board as Managing Partner and some of the ill-planned and expensive growth started. Then they merged with Dewey-Ballantine and it went really haywire.
Omnes Omnibus
@PurpleGirl: You aren’t still there, right? The BigLaw mergers were probably dumb as hell – in retrospect.
Ian
@Chris:
You mean the guys who dressed up like Native Americans and robbed a ship? Who refused to take responsibility for it? It was anti-government vandalism committed by revolutionary 1%ers pissed at the British authorities for (guess what?) taxes.
The dudes were criminals, not heros. They are a perfect image for the far right, as long as we actually remember what happened instead of pretending it was some great wolverine strike for freedom.
Suffern ACE
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t think anyone is there now, or will be much longer.
I read these stories and look for the auditor, working as I do in that industry. Pshew. Not us, not us.
PurpleGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: No, they let me go in 1992 as they began losing clients in certain departments. I was in Public Utilities and worked specifically in electric companies, contracts and rate filings.
I have no idea where they could have thought they could pay back loans in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The client base hadn’t recovered from the losses of the early 90s.
ETA: I know they thought that the merger would bring in new clients but it never really happened as they thought it would.
karen
What’s next? Get rid of public school?
No wait. Don’t answer that, I already know.
gian
@Omnes Omnibus:
hasn’t it created a whole lot of new law about conflicts?
and isolating parts of megafirms from each other?
couldn’t anyone who remembered that conflicts can be a problem for lawyers have seen that train coming down the tracks?
I was a bad idea at the time, I’m sure it had it’s cost cutting synergies and opportunities to leverage newly acquired expertise in some sort of corporate speak.
but if you have to “wall off” parts of your megafirm from each other to avoid conflicts, what’s the point of being a megafirm?
fidelio
@Kay: (and others)
There was a post at Lawyers, Guns and Money a while back about one of the survivors of that mess and his current financial problems, part of which result from the bankruptcy discharge payments.
Cervantes
@PurpleGirl:
My word. I bet you have stories.
Central Planning
No one shot McConnell? Did people feel safe with him brandishing a gun because he’s white?