The verbal contortions this NRA-captive Republican knob employs while trying to explain a vote that makes no sense whatsoever would be funny if the action he took wasn’t so likely to result in more preventable tragedies:
The rule the GOP idiots voted to overturn last night “banned Social Security beneficiaries from buying guns if their disability payments are handled by an outside party due to their ‘marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.’”
Seems like you’d pretty much have to be dumber than a bucket of lead-painted snails to believe that folks who are deemed legally incapable of handling their disability payments should be armed with deadly weapons. Even most of the people who were stupid enough to believe that a tacky pathological liar and con artist would “Make America Great Again” appear to at least grasp the concept that the mentally disabled shouldn’t have guns.
Yet this Wyoming senator — who is also a physician! — pretends not to get that. And blames Obama! Then blames big gubmint! To quote Steve M again, it’s the NRA’s world; we’re just sheltering in place in it.
Elizabelle
Says an elite who is hidden behind layers and layers of taxpayer-paid for security, in secure buildings.
What a dick.
oklahomo
A lot like Issa bitching about Obama’s midnight rules preventing coal companies from pissing in a waterway near you, and then voting to remove said rule.
hedgehog the occasional commenter
Forget it, Jake, it’s Wyoming.
Gus
Time and again after a mass shooting, we were told that the issue isn’t guns, but policies around mental illness. Now this. Whocoodanode they were just full of shit when they argued that?
JordanRules
These surrogates are all disturbingly ignorant.
oklahomo
@Elizabelle: No wonder they are cancelling town hall meetings right and left: it’s to prepare for this change.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
So our former babysitter is a girl from our nominal church (Greek Orthodox, which we used to attend frequently and participate in often). She’s very liberal and married to the very liberal son of other friends of ours from that congregation – in fact, his dad was at the Louisville rallies and standing beside me this week.
The girl is from a convert family, and her dad is VERY prominent as an operative in the local GOP political realm. She facebooked this story about the rule and demanded to know “why”, and her dad publicly posted a snide response.
He is such a fucking asshole.
Fester Addams
Anyone mention the need to water the tree of liberty with the blood of the grandchildren of the non compos mentis?
mistermix
Barasshole is bad but they also elected Liz Cheney. Has she been opening her ignorant cakehole on the TeeVee lately?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Gus:
There will always be some older white Walter Mitty around to save the day with his concealed carry piece.
Or maybe some lard assed younger white guy will be there with his open carry Bushmaster to save the day and get laid by some hot girl without having to pay money for it.
Adam L Silverman
This one isn’t so cut and dry. Not only did the NRA object to this one, but so did the ACLU. The concept behind the rule – to make it harder for those with mental deterioration due to age, illness, or both – seems straightforward, the implementation wasn’t. Basically the regulation was written that if someone helps you with your social security, medicare, veteran’s benefits, etc, then this is a sufficient indicator of mental deterioration and would/could be used to restrict one’s access to firearms. It was a decent idea executed poorly. It scooped up senior citizens, as well as veterans – senior citizen or not – that needed some assistance from a family member or trusted friend to assist with paperwork and treated them as if they were all experiencing some variation of dementia.
The idea always was, and should remain, preventing the mentally ill from having access to firearms. But there’s a potential problem here too. How do you administer this? If you go and seek treatment for severe depression or if you have post traumatic stress from a major vehicular accident and seek treatment and, as a result of law or regulation, you surrender your right to a firearm (or any other type of weaponry), once you’ve been treated and a determination is made that you’re cured, how do you get your rights back? Is it enough to have the mental health professional who treated you submit a form and once its processed you’re good to go? Do you have to petition a court? These were problem issues with this regulation as well – how to challenge the determination and get one’s rights restored. That members of Congress can’t articulate any of this, but I can dash out two quick, coherent paragraphs on it says more about the piss poor job we do in terms of selecting our elected officials and about the piss poor qualities of said elected officials then it does about the merits of striking down this specific regulation.
hovercraft
@Gus:
It was never about mental illness, or terrorists, or any other group, the gun manufacturers want everyone to buy guns. I scary people have guns, then you need several guns to protect yourselves from all those scary people with guns. See, it’s a win, win, they sell lots more guns, and you feel safe enough to leave your guns lying around so the kids can kill each other. Yay.
Yarrow
Didn’t some state pass a law last year so that blind people could buy guns? Seems like that fits right in with this.
SFAW
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I think a great NSF-funded study would be to find a Rethuglican who isn’t. Might take years.
Of course, if someone applied to the NSF with something like “to show that 25 percent or more of Republicans are NOT fucking assholes,” they’d get laughed out of the room.
To quote the esteemed efgoldman:
Fuckem.
Major Major Major Major
What if people who are mentally equivalent to schoolchildren need to protect themselves from bears? answer that, libtard!
SFAW
@Yarrow:
Something about Rethugs’ heads being up their collective asses — so they can’t see — but they shouldn’t lose their right to buy shoulder-mounted SAMs or suitcase nukes?
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, I don’t like chipping away at gun nuts by picking on people with mental illness or convicted felons or people on the dubious terrorism watch list.
At this point I want to cut the knot and repeal the second amendment. Then we can regulate guns like any consumer products, whether they’re mattress tags or lawn darts.
oklahomo
@Major Major Major Major: To be fair, can we arm the bears too?
Chris
1) “We won’t do anything to help treat people with mental illness, because government provided health care is socialism.”
2) “Here’s a gun.”
“PS: we are the pro-life party.”
SFAW
@Major Major Major Major:
Well, the Second Amendment CLEARLY says that the bears are armed, so I guess you’re point is valid.
Major Major Major Major
re: media can’t get straight answer on whether White House considers Islam a religion–isn’t that one of Gen.
RipperFlynn’s hobby horses?Mark Regan
@Adam L Silverman: You are right, Adam Silverman, and people on this site ought to be a little more thoughtful before saying rotten things about people with mental illness — or, although most of the stories haven’t mentioned this, people with cognitive impairments.
NotMax
But can they tell the difference between a clip and a magazine?
Gus
@Yarrow: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/08/iowa-grants-gun-permits-to-the-blind/2780303/
Yarrow
Update on the supposed Secret Service firings. That info wasn’t correct.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@oklahomo: yes… there are so many coal mines in S Cal…
If I’m not mistaken, a Montana state legislator (R) proposed several years ago getting rid of drunken driving laws in the state, in addition to no speed limits and allowing open carry in bars… what could go wrong?
Adam L Silverman
@Thoroughly Pizzled: Don’t take the mattress tag off, that will definitely count as the type of illegal activity that can get your guns taken away!//
Villago Delenda Est
@Fester Addams: Moloch must have sacrifices.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@NotMax: Magazines have centerfolds?
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: Better yet, can they differentiate a potat-OH and a po-TAT-oh?
oldster
@Adam L Silverman:
You know, Adam, that’s an interesting take on the problems with the previous law.
But if the Republicans really were motivated by the good-government concerns that motivate you and me, then they would write a new and better law *first*, before repealing this one.
If they actually did that–i.e., if they have already passed a new law that still keeps guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, while doing a better job of providing a process for the restoration of their “rights” to own guns–then I have no complaint about their repealing the law that they repealed.
But I seriously doubt that they did it that way. These people are all about smashing things, and then standing around saying, “oops! governmenting is hard. oh, but government bad anyhow.”
(“rights” in quotation because Heller’s fabrication of “individual rights” was a blatant misreading of the 2A, purchased at the cost of risibly bad legal scholarship.)
? Martin
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah, California’s rules are different and fairly cut and dried.
Now, the GOP could have lifted these very regulations from California and in the bill to repeal the existing rules added these in their place. So the real question is why didn’t they? We know the answer, but they should be made to state it.
Adam L Silverman
@Mark Regan: I don’t think anyone is making fun of the mentally ill or those with cognitive impairments. They’re clearly making fun of members of Congress. The problem with the reporting on this is that it is not very good, the members of Congress have talking points that don’t provide clarity, so most news consumers don’t come away really educated on what is actually going on here.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Or the shoulder thingie that goes up…
NotMax
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
May not have to be older in Kansas anymore.
Kansas Lawmaker Seeks To Drop Concealed Carry Age To 18
Chose that link because it is a pro-gun site which is against the bill.
Major Major Major Major
@Adam L Silverman: also we should keep in mind ‘legally blind’ is not the same as ‘blind’.
@Mark Regan: who here says rotten things about the mentally ill?
Villago Delenda Est
@hovercraft: It’s about moving product. Always has been, always will be.
Adam L Silverman
@Gus: I sit corrected.
Villago Delenda Est
@Major Major Major Major:
We say rotten things about Donald all the time.
Roger Moore
@oklahomo:
Sadly, neither the right to arm bears nor the right to bare arms is included in the Second Amendment.
Yarrow
@Adam L Silverman: Okay, thanks. The way you describe it, it still sounds like not a good idea. Blind people with guns? What could go wrong. See also the comment under yours for Iowa.
@Gus: Thanks.
D58826
And why do you think lead-painted snails would be caught in the same bucket as this idiot.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@NotMax: Why 18?
Why not 15 or 12?
Hell, maybe they should pass a ‘Fetus Protection Act’ so fetus-persons can pack…
Major Major Major Major
@D58826: that’s offensive to buckets!
wenchacha
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Wolverines!!!!
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle: Keep in mind, he has to go home sooner or later…..
Adam L Silverman
@Roger Moore: damn anti-tanning advocates!
TenguPhule
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Can you harden your heart so that he will not be missed when his time to stand up against the wall when the revolution comes?
Adam L Silverman
@Yarrow: Given how poorly I’ve seen some sighted people shoot, I’m not really sure they could do much worse…//
TenguPhule
@Major Major Major Major: Dude, legally blind means they have the eyesight of a feral water buffalo…at best.
rikyrah
People will die because of this.
sigh.
Adam L Silverman
@TenguPhule: well that’s gnu
(what?)
RareSanity
@Adam L Silverman:
Just think about how differently this whole thing would play if the Senator, very calmly, said exactly what you just wrote.
I will side with Betty on this guy’s motivations, which were not to make sure that the wrong people were not caught up in the proposed rule. Since he is a whore for the NRA, by default, he is reflexively opposed to any measure restricting gun ownership…full stop.
So reflexively, that it didn’t even cross his mind to see what the NRA’s actual position was on the matter. He isn’t representing his constituents or the Republican party…he’s representing the NRA, and he even doing a terrible job of that.
D58826
@Adam L Silverman: I can truthfully say that the few times I have fired a rifle that I can not hit the broad side of a barn – FROM THE INSIDE OF THE BARN’
Fester Addams
@Yarrow:
Resigned in protest, my guess. It’s got to be like Core Wars inside Big Cheeto’s phone, with various hackers’ and intelligence services’ spyware fighting each other for access to the microphone and camera.
EBT
@Major Major Major Major: I don’t think that many people who’s corrected vision is still worse than 20/200 (that is they can only read at 20 feet text that someone with “good” eyes can read at 200) would do a great job of stopping someone in a crowd with a gun.
TenguPhule
@Adam L Silverman: Expecting me to throw a cow about this?
TenguPhule
@EBT: To be fair, if armed with a shotgun they would definitely stop the crowd.
randy khan
@Yarrow:
This is not really that much more encouraging.
D58826
@rikyrah: The GOP only cares about the life of a zygote. But then a few of them might be murdered when the zygote-carrier gets in the way of an innocent bullet.
rikyrah
Trump’s Goldman Sachs-Style Economic Populism
by Martin Longman
February 3, 2017 12:01 PM
I know that we live in a post-factual political environment, but optics still matter. That’s why it didn’t make a ton of sense for the Trump administration to send out Gary Cohn, (until two weeks ago) the president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs, to explain that “President Donald Trump on Friday plans to sign an executive action to scale back the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-overhaul law, in a sweeping plan to dismantle much of the regulatory system put in place after the financial crisis.” In his new job, Cohn serves as Trump’s chief economic advisor and the Director of the National Economic Council.
Hillary Clinton was pilloried for given paid speeches in the foxes’ den. Donald Trump unlocked the door and shoved the foxes in the henhouse. In addition to Cohn, he also tapped Goldman Sachs veteran Steve Mnuchin to run the Treasury Department. Mnuchin is best known for his post-Goldman career where he oversaw a scheme to foreclose on people without having the proper documentation, in some cases for being behind in their payments by less than a dollar. All told, during the financial crisis, Mnuchin was responsible for throwing roughly 35,000 people out of their homes.
Gutting the consumer friendly Dodd-Frank law isn’t the only thing on today’s agenda. Trump also plans to sign an executive order “aimed at rolling back a controversial regulation scheduled to take effect in April that critics have said would upend the retirement-account advisory business.” In this case, the optics are about as bad as they can get.
No organization in the country has a worse reputation for failing to act in the best interests of their clients than Goldman Sachs.
……………
For Trump to hire the president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs as his chief economic adviser is bad enough, but to actually make him the man to announce the rollback of a regulation aimed at preventing investment advisers from betting against the investments that they recommend, that takes real chutzpah. And to cast the change as beneficial to consumers is beyond risible.
……………..
It was supposed to be a giant tyrannical Kenyan/communist conspiracy every time President Obama attempted to get around an obstructive Congress by issuing executive orders, but it doesn’t seem to bother the Republicans that Trump is issuing a flood of executive orders even when he has a friendly Congress willing to do his bidding. Hypocrisy isn’t the only problem here, though, because these orders are (and should be perceived to be) violations of the trust a lot of working people put in him to look out for their interests.
The Dodd-Frank reforms are primarily designed to prevent another economic meltdown arising from widespread bank failures. The economic advisor regulation is aimed at preventing big investment banks from destroying people’s savings by recommending that brokers handling individual retirement and 401(k) accounts invest in products they are secretly betting will decline disastrously in value.
Adam L Silverman
@D58826: Are you left eye dominant and right handed? Is the rifle too long or too short for you to have it properly shouldered and for a proper trigger reach? Are the sights aligned correctly? Is it too heavy or too light for you? Is the barrel shoot out? Is out of spec? Is it not bedded or floated properly? All of these, in isolation or together, could have an effect on your accuracy.
NotMax
@TenguPhule
Arm the buffalo!
Not quite the same species, Cows With Guns.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: The important thing here is that the merchants of death move product, and profit from doing so. Nothing else matters.
Adam L Silverman
@TenguPhule: Maybe just tip one.
Major Major Major Major
@EBT: The standard established in Heller is self-defense within the home. If you live alone and it’s a shotgun…
ETA: And, of course, it’s not the government’s role to determine whether or not you live alone. Only if you live with a lover of the same sex. #scaliafacts
Yarrow
@Adam L Silverman: Yeah. Still seems like a bad idea. At least gun owners should start with the ability to see their target.
As far as gun ownership, I think a big push should be made to show that people whose guns are used where people are injured or killed are NOT “responsible gun owners.” They have to pay a price, like attending remedial classes, higher insurance rates, some sort of points deduced on their gun license (like with drivers licenses). I’d prefer jail time and massive fines and not being able to own a gun. But that’s not realistic at this point.
If they leave their gun out and their child gets access to it and shoots themselves or another person they have NOT “suffered enough.” We wouldn’t say that if they were drunk behind the wheel of a car. It’s a similar thing. They’re irresponsible gun owners. The distinction needs to be made clear. You never even hear the phrase “irresponsible gun owners.” It’s not even being used. It should be.
Amaranthine RBG
Don’t some disability recipients have a son or daughter appointed as their payee for their social security checks because they just don’t want to deal with handling the money?
I’m in favor of background checks and so forth but a ban based on this seems a bit broad brush.
I’m in favor of background checks but targeting
rikyrah
BREAKING: Government reveals more than 100K visas have been revoked as a result of Trump Admin’s immigration order during hearing in Va.
— justin jouvenal (@jjouvenal) February 3, 2017
The 109 number was a lie told by multiple senior administration officials.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) February 3, 2017
BREAKING: Federal judge in Va. allows Virginia to join case against Trump’s immigration order.
— justin jouvenal (@jjouvenal) February 3, 2017
President Trump says he plans to roll back Dodd-Frank financial regulations because so many friends of his in business can’t borrow money
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 3, 2017
randy khan
In other news, the CEO of Uber is leaving Trump’s economic advisory council. Apparently losing 200K customers had something to do with it. The tech community’s initial instinct to engage with Trump is rapidly disappearing.
Another one bites the dust
GregB
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, but they are staunchly supportive of the culture of life when you exclude the guns and arms industry, tobacco, chemicals, coal and oil and the their pro war and death penalty positions.
elm
@Adam L Silverman: If it’s a problem of implementation, then they could fix the rule. They didn’t.
They did this because selling guns is the NRA’s prime directive and Republicans listen to the NRA.
Adam L Silverman
@Amaranthine RBG: Yes they do. And that’s part of the argument over how this regulation was written.
Peale
@rikyrah: Yep. Look. In 2008 i was scared enough to know that absent government intervention, the financial system would have frozen and that had we done nothing, the recession would have become a very deep depression. You can’t lose your banking system like that. Next time (and I’m predicting 3 years) the loan crisis that will come from the US banks suddenly lending – well, I’m not going to protest too much if the banks fail. Since they sued to get their bonus and would sue again, that pretty much iced my support for bailing them out. If they want to repeal the regulations, I’ll just keep cash on hand for 90 day freeze.
What fucking galls me is that many of these regulations are new. Thats why congress can repeal them. It took six years of comment and delay and whatever to get an ethics rule in place that said clearly that advisers are responsible for their clients. Now that’s over. But for immigrants? Well those rulte changes can take place immediately. No questions asked. Just do it. Again, fuck it.
Adam L Silverman
@elm: I’m just clarifying what the problem with the rule is. I’m not saying I support what was done or how it was done.
hovercraft
@Thru the Looking Glass…:
Joy Reid had a whack job prolife lady on her show Saturday who did not think the life of the mother was a valid reason for abortion. She thinks that they should do whatever they can to make sure that she survives, but there is no reason to commit murder to save her.
D58826
@Adam L Silverman: I was born with a partial paralyzed right eyelid. Surgery could only do so much. Could not hit a baseball to save my life. In 1946 my parents were heart broken. In 1968 when I was judged 4F for the draft it looked a bit different. So in my case it’s just a physical problem but still would be a danger to anyone around me with an kind of weapon stronger than a water pistol.:-)
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@rikyrah:
Yeah, I just ran across that Jaffy tweet.
What this indicates to me is that he intends to inflate a giant bubble with borrowed money. All that inflation we weren’t having? We’re going to get it based on nothing, now. Look for real estate and commodities to grind up, along with interest rates as the fed tries to correct.
If he’s not impeached and manages to not stumble into a gigantic set of major wars, I’m figuring Fed discount rates of 7+ percent by 2Q 2018, gasoline near $4 and UE6 at 8%, all through ineptitude and coddling of wealth. In the meantime, his WWC voters will suffer.
Brachiator
Second Amendment Absolutism, people!
Arm your babies now. If they can suck a bottle, they can pull a trigger.
D58826
@Brachiator:
Not funny, some of them have with tragic results.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@hovercraft:
Speaking of abortion, apparently, a local middle school drew abortion pickets this morning. One guy in my office reported that his wife (a GOP registered Catholic who voted blue) had dropped their kids off and then called him, livid. She wants him to write a huge check to the ACLU and is going to take the final leap to register D.
D58826
@hovercraft: Wasn’t she the one who wanted to ban contraceptives as well?
hovercraft
@D58826:
Yes she was, a complete nut job who tried to talk over everyone else, and she claimed that a majority of are millennials pro life.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
Women are not real people. All hail the Zygote! Women are merely vessels to carry a life, which is the prime creation of a man with a penis. All Hail King Fetus, and the Queenly Unborn!
Major Major Major Major
@D58826: @hovercraft: Meanwhile I saw a thread on Twitter the other day where a couple of prominent libertarians were debating whether the state was allowed to outlaw letting your child starve to death, because those people are fucking insane.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
Women are not real people. They are merely vessels to carry a life, which is the prime creation of a man with a p=nis.
ETA: An earlier version of this comment is stuck in moderation.
Bupalos
Silverman’s point seems valid to me, but the upshot of that kind of argument is an imbalance between rights and attendant responsibilities, and ballance of harms, wrt ownership of weapons. If the person is mentally competent to handle these kinds of affairs but just doesn’t want to for convenience sake (as supposed, though its worth noting these are probably a small minority of cases) then I don’t think there’s a significant problem with qualifying the right. Congress cannot abridge the right, it does not have to ensure that the exercise of that right does not conflict with perfect ease and convenience in every aspect of rest of your life. All while on the other side of this equation, someone else’s more fundamental and literal right to life is likely endangered. The vast majority of these cases of mental disability are pretty surely not people who just don’t like paperwork.
And IRL I know someone who fit this description and had guns and came pretty close to being a news-at-eleven story on multiple occasions.
oklahomo
@Major Major Major Major: Too bad their parents felt otherwise.
Adam L Silverman
@D58826: Or that…
Brachiator
@D58826: RE: Arm your babies now. If they can suck a bottle, they can pull a trigger.
I am angry, not just trying to be funny.
And Second Degree Absolutists would happily arm everyone.
Is that a pistol in your diaper, or are you just shitting me?
Adam L Silverman
@Bupalos: The issue, from my perspective, was not the intention behind the regulation, but how it was worded. It needed to be cleaned up and fixed to correct the unintended effects and results.
japa21
@Adam L Silverman: Adam, thank you for this. I had a knee-jerk reaction to this as well but, as usual, what you are saying makes sense. As others have pointed out, it would be nice if those supporters of the vote could explain their position as clearly as you did.
Of course, if they did that, they would have to deal with questions like those mentioned above: Why not just to a clarification of processes, corrections, etc. Which to me indicates that their justification for the vote is not the same as yours.
Of course, another explanation is that too many MoCs are just plain doo-doo heads.
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m inclined to say that Darwin will take care of this problem, but the kids are innocents, they didn’t chose these morons to be their parents. Between the right not to vaccinate, get medical treatment, take medication, allow churches to do whatever they please with your kids, if allowed to they could;d delete their genes from our collective gene pool. My mother told me about an episode of Wife Swap she watched with a family from Iowa that only eats raw food, and doesn’t allow any chemicals on the farm. They believe dirt is good, so they don’t clean, they use a combo of clay and fat to brush their teeth, and the topper is that they eat raw meat, the chicken fresh and raw, the beef they allow to basically rot. The kids didn’t go to school, working the farm was their education. I don’t know if the show or anyone contacted the authorities, but none of that sounded right to me.
Just googled it, it’s really old, so it was a rerun.
Calming Influence
“We can prevent all these gun deaths by simply enforcing the laws we already have!!”
(“Now watch as we remove the laws we already have.”)
Villago Delenda Est
@hovercraft:
If they’re poor, it’s because they choose their parents poorly – GOP doctrine.
Major Major Major Major
@oklahomo: Where were you when I needed something sassy to tweet at them??
@hovercraft: Ew.
EBT
@hovercraft: And think about the children who kill other people accidentally. Like that 10 year old girl who killed the instructor who gave her a machine pistol. Or that gun humping blogger who got killed by a friend’s kid. Those kids are goinna have serious problems the rest of their lives because some people who legally should have some responsibility, functionally slide through life with none.
Dave
Hi folks – could use some advice: my wife wants to call Pat Toomey’s office. She’s never been very active in politics, the election has stirred her up like it has a lot of other people. But she doesn’t know what to call about. And, frankly, neither do I. I told her she could call and ask him to vote no on DeVos – I already did call for that, didn’t get through (of course), and sent an email instead. What other stuff is upcoming that we can hope to influence Toomey on? Thank you!
Bupalos
@Adam L Silverman: I guess I’d only quibble with your “needed to.” Maybe more like “it would have been better if…?”
Again, your point is well taken and its always refreshing and healthy to see some cw pushback here. But the bottom line to me is that repealing the rule shows an extreme preference for speed and convenience of gun purchases over other more much more fundamental considerations of citizen rights and responsibilities. That the ACLU would make a maximalist literalist “original intent” mistake doesn’t surprise me, its one of the reasons I don’t think that’s the most effective organization for trump resistance donations.
elm
@Adam L Silverman: But from your original comment, rational evaluation on this vote is cut and dry. The people who passed it are psychopaths and idiots who will harm the US. They didn’t undo this restriction out of their abiding interest in rule of law or the need for people to have rights restored. They did it because the NRA told them to and the NRA told them to because it wants to maximize gun sales.
If the congressman could articulate half of what you wrote, it may not be cut and dry.
I’m not in this to argue with you about the quality of the rule that was in place, I accept your assessment that it’s imperfect. But that is irrelevant to the congressional vote here.
elm
@Dave: See 5calls for ideas on what to call about, scripts on how to talk about it, and phone numbers for Senators and Representative.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: Point well-taken, but the equally obvious point – that if Republican congress critters were actually serious about the noises coming out of their cake-holes to the effect that “guns aren’t the problem, mental illness is!”, then they would have taken steps to fix the old law or pass a new one that did a better job at trying to keep guns out of the hands of people with serious mental health issues – is also well-taken.
(My God, the length of that paragraph-sentence was positively Dickensian. Too lazy to go back and edit, however.)
Adam L Silverman
@elm: No disagreement here.
Dave
@elm: Awesome, thanks!
Major Major Major Major
@elm: Well, the ethical thing to do would have been patching the law to fix the problem the ACLU had with it. So, wrong view, wrong resolve, wrong speech, wrong livelihood, wrong effort, wrong mindfulness, and wrong concentration, but right action. 1/8 on the noble path is higher than most things Republicans do, I’ll give them that.
hovercraft
@EBT:
Sacrifices must be made, and they’ll throw in that cars kill lots of people but no one complains about that. Point out that yes people do complain about safety, that the are lots and lots of rules and regulations. Then they suddenly don’t want to talk about cars, it’s now all about the constitution. After all you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Freedom.
Calming Influence
@Thoroughly Pizzled: Lawn darts were FUN! But the nanny state outlawed lawn darts, so now only outlaws have lawn darts. (And my grandson is going to be just FINE, once his government-subsidised speech therapist gets off her ass and learns him to talk again.)
ETA: Got a set of “Jarts” from an Aunt one Christmas; took my dad maybe 5 seconds to recognize the danger and trash them…
Mnemosyne
@rikyrah:
Yes, but it’s a rich white guy talking, so that’s why it’s okay and not “bad optics.” If he was a minority or a woman (or god forbid, a minority woman), then everything he says would be bad.
Just more proof that the only reason anyone was mad about Hillary’s speeches was because she’s a woman and a Democrat, not because they hate Goldman Sachs.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
This part is not entirely nutty.
Adam L Silverman
@Miss Bianca: No argument here.
Yarrow
Adam, did you see this?
Adam L Silverman
@Yarrow: Not yet.
hovercraft
Bend over America, but don’t worry it won’t hurt, in fact you’ll enjoy all the new freedom you are about to experience.
Trump: We’re Gutting Dodd-Frank Because My Friends Can’t Get Loans (VIDEO)
President Donald Trump was blunt Friday morning when he told a roundtable of business leaders why his administration was committed to hollowing out some financial regulations in Dodd-Frank: His friends can’t get loans.
“We have some of the bankers here. There’s nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie, so you’re going to tell me about it,” Trump said, referring to Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase CEO and leader of Trump’s business roundtable.
“We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank, because frankly I have so many people, friends of mine, that have nice businesses and they can’t borrow money,” he continued. “They just can’t get any money because the banks just won’t let them borrow because of the rules and regulations in Dodd-Frank. So we’ll be talking about that in terms of the banking industry.”
Trump also promised the business leaders in the room that he would “get taxes even lower than we’re going to be cutting them,” and that he would seek their input in doing so.
@Brachiator:
I’ve no problem with the organic part of their existence, but since they don’t cook anything I’m picturing raw animal fat mixed with clay. and I want to gag just thinking about that, let alone trying to brush my teeth with it. As M x 4 said Ew !!
Mnemosyne
@hovercraft:
IIRC, annual gunshot deaths now outnumber auto deaths.
Yarrow
@Yarrow: He must have got it from a leak/source he has. Classified it as “RUMINT”, which I guess is the/his acronym for “rumor intel.” We’ll see what actually happens.
Adam L Silverman
@Yarrow: As someone who bakes and who has posted his cheesecake recipe here, I’m much more concerned about this:
Thru the Looking Glass...
@hovercraft: I think I read about that…
Perhaps someone will end up suing a state for allowing a mother to die while trying to save a fetus…
And once a baby is born, Repubs appear to feel no need to help it at all…
Kind of amazing, when you think about it…
oklahomo
@Major Major Major Major: High on cold meds cranking out spaghetti code for posterity.
Yarrow
@Adam L Silverman: Ha! Saw that. Although in the case of the Cheesecake Factory, there are plenty more of those around.
@Mnemosyne: And that has nothing to do with regulating the safety of vehicles and making unsafe drivers pay a price. Nothing at all. No regulations involved in any of that. No laws governing it. Nope. Just free market magic that made all those safety improvements happen.
NotMax
@Adam L. Silverman
Noticed in the sidebar there:
Nordstrom Drops Ivanka Trump’s Clothing Collection, Citing ‘Brand’s Performance’
Adam L Silverman
@Yarrow: RUMINT is the acronym used by military folks for rumors that can’t yet be substantiated. Its a portmanteau of rumor and intelligence like HUMINT is for human intelligence and ELINT is for electronic intelligence.
Adam L Silverman
@NotMax: Its a very low stamina brand, just can’t keep up with the other clothes. SAD!
rikyrah
@Dave:
1. Sessions (AGAINST)
2. How Obamacare is important to your family.
3. How Social Security is important to your family.
4. How Medicare is important to your family.
5. If you have any Veterans in your family, tell them that the VA works for your family -AS IS AND DOES NOT NEED TO BE PRIVATIZED.
Aleta
Bannon film outline warned U.S. could turn into ‘Islamic States of America’ -in Wapo
The outline shows how Bannon, years before he became a strategist for President Trump and helped draft last week’s order restricting travel from seven mostly Muslim countries, sought to issue a warning about the threat posed by radical Muslims as well as their “enablers among us.” Although driven by the “best intentions,” the outline says, institutions such as the media, the Jewish community and government agencies were appeasing jihadists aiming to create an Islamic republic.
Major Major Major Major
@oklahomo: Oh, good, I was worried we were running low on spaghetti code written by heavily medicated people.
Miss Bianca
@Adam L Silverman: I still prefer your definition of ELINT being the fuzz that collects on your computer screen and other electronic implements.
hovercraft
@Adam L Silverman:
Perhaps he was protesting the ridiculously long wait for a table, and the stupid no reservations policy, while having a ridiculously small waiting area?
hovercraft
@NotMax:
Yay, they see the presidency as a marketing opportunity, but at the rate he’s going, they’ll all be changing their names back to Drumph before this is all over.
Shalimar
@rikyrah: The question I wish a journalist would ask Mr. Cohn: “The laws you’re repealing were put in place to prevent another Great Recession. Should that happen again in the next 8 years, rather than trust the government to punish those responsible, the American people will rise up and throw you out the window of a tall office building. Are you really comfortable with your choice given the future consequence if you’re wrong?”
Another Scott
@rikyrah: But I heard just today that they’re both the same.
Really, I did.
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
(E-mails! Wall-Street Speeches!!11)
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: Me too, me too.
@Another Scott: After all, Saint Snowden told us that this election was a choice between Goldman Sachs and Donald Trump.
ETA: In a tweet that’s now been deleted! LOL. Good thing we have screenshots.
Bupalos
So people react and Conway is getting more air time to correct her supposed mis-statement. She says she meant to say “Bowling Green terrorists” instead of “Bowling Green Massacre.” A simple slip of the tongue you silly liberals! So substitute that into the sentence, and you get “those who masterminded the Bowling Green Terrorists.” Which elitist college grammar liberals will drop their war on white people, coal, and Christmas long enough to note still does not seem to work. Which means later today she’ll be back for her 3rd hour of airtime to clarify the clarification — she means the people who masterminded the plot to get these terrorists into the country which is Isis Obama liberals, natch!
hovercraft
What Does Putin Think About Trump’s Saber Rattling Against Iran?
by Nancy LeTourneau
February 3, 2017 10:47 AM
On Wednesday, Trump’s national security advisor Michael Flynn put Iran “on notice” after they tested a ballistic missile. It is now being reported that the administration is planning to impose new sanctions on Iran. As Reuters reports, they are unlikely to have much effect.
The impact of the new sanctions will be more symbolic than practical, especially as the move does not affect the lifting of broader U.S. and international sanctions that took place under the nuclear deal. Also, few of the Iranian entities being targeted are likely to have U.S. assets that can be frozen, and U.S. companies, with few exceptions, are barred from doing business with Iran.
The bigger question is whether or not the recent saber-rattling against Iran is a lead-up to Trump’s campaign promise to get rid of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration. At a speech to AIPAC last March the president said that his number one priority “is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” We know that Congressional Republicans would support that, given their response as the agreement was being finalized. Several of Trump’s inner circle have expressed similar support for nixing the deal, including VP Pence, who promised that Trump would “rip up” the agreement once in office. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s CIA director said, “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism.”
There’s one big hitch to all that. As conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote several months ago, “Trump can’t be pals with Putin and stand up to Iran.”
Sooner or later, however, [Trump] will need to confront an unpleasant reality: Russia and Iran are allies, and both want to displace the United States as the primary force in the Middle East. Put differently, if we want to turn the screws on Iran, Russia will not want to “get along” with us.
Russia has long been an ally of Iran and has consistently chosen to side with the Shiite government both there and the minority aligned with Assad in the Middle East proxy wars between Sunni and Shia. Alienating Iran (and potentially Russia) means losing any hope of working with those two countries to deal with ISIS in Syria.
Russia was part of the P5+1 group that negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and has been moving to further strengthen economic ties with that country since its implementation.
<em>“Iran is Russia’s longtime partner. We believe that bilateral relations will benefit from the reduction of tensions around Iran following the comprehensive agreement on the Iranian nuclear program,” Putin said in a major interview with Azerbaijani state news agency Azertac released on Friday. He added that Iranian leaders shared his approach.
While Putin is obviously happy that the U.S. elected Trump to be president, he certainly has no love lost for this country. It could be that he would welcome the kind of disruption of our relationships with allies and the chaos that would be unleashed if the Trump administration pulled out of the Iranian deal and/or escalated the tensions with them. But were that to happen, it would mean that all of Trump’s bluster about getting along better with Russia would go by the wayside as Putin would – at least publicly – have to choose sides.
In the end, the Trump administration will have to decide if their friendship with Putin is more important than the enmity they feel for anything accomplished by Obama.
Mnemosyne
@Another Scott:
And don’t forget, Trump was going to keep us out of overseas wars, unlike that warmongering warmongerer, Hillary the Bloodthirsty.
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: I cannot say.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Yarrow: I hate to say it, but there’s no reason that a blind person shouldn’t be permitted to have a gun if they want one. Maybe they want one in their home, where a live-in assistant will be able to access it at need. Maybe they just think that it’s really cool to own X_Gun. Maybe, although legally blind, with a high-powered scope, they can still drive nails with their gun, and they think it’s *way* cool to show that a blind person can do that. Maybe they want to buy one for a child for when s/he turns 12, like their parents did for them.
TriassicSands
We have to forgive Senator Barrasso, he was most likely under attack by a grizzly bear when this interview took place. Every person in Wyoming, including every school child, needs to be armed with an assault rifle in order to fend off the rampaging grizzly bears. Even mentally disabled people, like Senator Barrasso, need protection.
Mnemosyne
@hovercraft:
I suspect that Islamophobia will win out over Russia. Putin may end up being surprised at just how virulent Islamophobia can be here, because he doesn’t realize that it’s tied so closely to anti-Black racism.
Shalimar
@Yarrow: 9 Americans are killed each year by Islamic terrorists. 21 Americans are killed each year by gun-wielding toddlers.
hovercraft
@Bupalos:
What’s that old chestnut? Oh yes, “if you are explaining, you’re losing.” The fact that she has had to spend the whole day trying to clean up her mess, instead of pushing the next set of talking points, is proof that their hard earned reputation for being a bunch of liars is getting to them she must have numbers showing that this is harming the Shitgibbon. Remember she is a pollster. Feeling the heat they are ;-)
hovercraft
@Major Major Major Major:
Wilmer is saying he’s willing to work with this new admin after saying that Hillary could not be trusted with the presidency because speeches. Funny how all of a sudden all the people who had issues with her Wall Street ties have stopped talking about Wall Street. Snowed can go DIAF or freeze to death in the Volga for all I care, he’s a traitor and a coward. Chelsea may be an ungrateful bitch, but at least she stayed and faced the music.
Bupalos
@hovercraft: that’s just it though, she’s not explaining anything. She’s pretending to be explaining it, the reality is she’s sitting their making the same point over and over: Muslims are terrorists, liberals are their hysterical dupes, trump will kill them all before he lets a single one of them upset your TV schedule.
That’s what they’re betting on. Hopefully thry’re wrong, but she’s not on defense here.
Yarrow
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks.
Calming Influence
@Major Major Major Major: In my younger days I was renowned for my angel-hair code.
Adam L Silverman
@Bupalos: @hovercraft: The bigger news, which is being missed, is the part where Matthews asked her about the decision making on the botched Yemen Op. She had no answer. It wasn’t the usually dissemble, change the subject, turn the question back on the questioner thing she does frustratingly well. Rather, you could watch her try to think her way to an answer and she couldn’t. She couldn’t because she wasn’t there. Because she wasn’t included in the decision making and as a result had no idea what actually went on, let alone how to spin it. That was a very informative part of the interview. She actually looked scared for a moment.
Shalimar
@Bupalos: What Conway might as well say if she were ever honest: “When I heard the Obama administration had suspended immigration from Iraq and implemented several new steps in the vetting process, I assumed it was in response to an actual attack I had forgotten about. We wouldn’t even have arrested people for buying guns. It is everyone’s God-given right to buy guns.”
Kay
Wow. I wonder if people realize how bad this is. There’s no “vetting” of Social Security disability recipients as far as having a trustee to handle funds. If they can’t handle their own funds it means something has already happened to make that necessary- in other words the incapacity is so pronounced it came to someone’s attention and was affirmatively addressed. Doesn’t have to be violence of course. The vast majority of the time it’s incapacity- they’re not in any way dangerous to anyone other than themselves but not allowing them to have a deadly weapon is an absolute no-brainer. They can’t have a checkbook or a debit card but they can have a gun?
Bupalos
@Adam L Silverman: didn’t see the whole thing. I’m surprised she’d struggle with that since she can just fall back to some version of “Donald Trump is willing to kill as many Muslim terrorists as it takes to keep us safe and he will always err towards our safety.”
Also, if its being missed, it isn’t the bigger news, QED. I’m now interested to watch it she dropped the time-sucking “massacre” jujitsu bomb because it was going badly.
D58826
OK somewhat OT but on MSNBC there is an article about the plan that Japan has to invest in American infrastructure. It will create 700k jobs according to the Japanese PM. Now ignoring any pandering to Trump in all of this, my question is why do we need the Japanese to spend billions of dollars on high tech investment in the US? Are we some kind of poverty stricken nation that we can’t accord to build our own roads? Or so illiterate that we have to import state of the art technology from other countries? I’m not saying that we turn the plan down but I remember when the US built the interstate highway system and not the (country of your choice). I’m, afraid that I know the answer to these questions
Aleta
On Thursday, the Senate voted 54-45 to repeal the so-called“stream protection rule” * using a regulation-killing tool known as the Congressional Review Act. The House took a similar vote yesterday, and if President Trump agrees, the stream protection rule will be dead. Coal companies will now have a freer hand in dumping mining debris in streams.
Killing this regulation won’t really help Trump fulfill his goal of reversing the coal industry’s decline; that decline has more to do with cheap natural gasthan anything else. Instead, Republicans are mostly focusing on this rule because they can. Because the stream protection rule wasn’t finished until very late in 2016, it’s much, much easier to kill than most of the other Obama-era rules around coal pollution. It was an easy target, so long as the GOP acted fast.
*restricts coal companies from dumping mining waste into streams and waterways.
-Vox
Something to condemn when asking a rep for a vote on something else.
Calouste
@Adam L Silverman:
Easy.
You want to own a firearm, which means you have a mental illness and should not be allowed to own one.
Kay
All this does is throw the job to county court judges, who are absolutely swamped with mental illness/incapacity issues as it is. They’ll have to put protection orders in, and they will. National Republicans are just kicking the can down the road to local police and judges.
It’s cowardly and it’s bad government. If judges are doing too much then that means legislators are failing. Judges aren’t supposed to be regulators. The conservative view of government is all fucked up and broken.
hovercraft
@Bupalos:
Like Adam said she never answers the questions put to her, so this is not surprising, in the past they would simply have left the turd out there in the sun to stink up the entire joint. But the are not, they sent her back out there to try and spin away and repeat old talking points. They can point and say democrats want to get you all killed but she is out there because as Rachel pointed out in this mornings thread, people aren’t buying the Muslim ban as necessary for national security. She’s out there trying to attack and spin from a defensive position. The people are against them.
@Adam L Silverman:
I didn’t watch the interview, between Tweety and her, I might stroke out. I think we should be prepared for a lot more of those moments he is erratic and sending people out unprepared is his M.O.
Aleta
@Aleta: from the Hill, some other plans to use the CRA soon:
hovercraft
@Shalimar:
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, Kellyanne honest, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Pigs will fly first.
D58826
@Aleta:
I think he misspoke. he meant giving power back to Goldman-Sachs.
But Hillary’s speeches!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
Actually, she is a political strategist who got her candidate elected, the first woman to do so, and is now counselor to the president. I think she is vile, but don’t belittle her accomplishment.
Aleta
@Aleta: Re that dump your mining tailings in your streams vote:
In the Senate,
I wonder if repealing this will somehow be useful as they prepare to open/reopen other mining operations besides coal.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator: We’ve established what she is, now we’re just arguing over how much she charges.
TenguPhule
@Aleta: The right people. The people who like to lie, steal and cheat Americans out of their hard earned savings.
The people who will soon find their heads mounted on spiky poles.
Aleta
@D58826: Remember when Trump’s campaign was part of a plot to help Hilary get elected?
Adam L Silverman
@hovercraft: I saw a clip of it after it had aired.
A Ghost to Most
@Calming Influence:
My gun humping brother keeps a set of jarts in his gun room, part of his ‘collection’.
My Aspergers son once wrote for school a compelling argument for the right to bare arms. He had misunderstood the teacher’s verbal assignment.
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Meh. Her “accomplishment” is thanks to Karl Rove’s scheme of voter suppression and restrictive voter ID laws to prevent minorities from voting in specific states. She benefited from his successful gerrymandering of our country.
But if you want to celebrate the fact that race-based voter suppression helped Conway advance her career and facilitate a fascist takeover of the US, be my guest.
TenguPhule
@Another Scott: Snowden is a dead man walking. Coin toss between Russia deciding he’s outlived his usefulness or the CIA deciding that he’s done enough damage to America to justify making a bloody example out of him.
Brachiator
@Shalimar:
Where are these toddlers going to get radicalized?
A Ghost to Most
@Adam L Silverman:
I’m sure glad Penny and Bernadette don’t work there any more.
/Nerd – I wonder who got there first.
hovercraft
@Brachiator:
I was not belittling her, it’s what she does. When the “shut that whole thing down” business happened and then then the other guy in Indiana said something stupid, the reports were all about the RNC hiring Conway a republican strategist and pollster in to teach them how to appeal to women. I have no problem with pollsters, they perform a service for their clients, I dislike assholes like Luntz and Conway who twist reality with their wordsmithing but it’s their right.
From wiki
ETA: I think the fact that she is a strategist and a pollster makes her more valuable to her new boss, she can give him numbers to back up what she is trying to get him to do. Her rep as an expert on appealing to women, was I think also a big part of her success in getting 53% of white women to vote for him.
Mark
Replace “Social Security payments” with “food stamps” and “guns” with “steak” and then watch how their opinions change.
Major Major Major Major
@Brachiator: Everybody knows that there’s a big problem with assimilation by second-generation gun owner toddlers. For whatever reason they’re just more likely to shoot their parents than their parents were at their age.
Aleta
@Major Major Major Major: That’s why we can’t just traumatize them at the borders but must shut down access to subsidized day care for anyone deemed likely to apply for it.
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
If Trump consolidates his power, I’m fully expecting Snowden to get a full pardon for his services to the Motherla– er, the United States.
hovercraft
South Dakota GOP literally declares ‘state of emergency’ to repeal voter-approved ethics reform law
By Stephen Wolf
Friday Feb 03, 2017 · 12:30 PM EST
On Thursday, South Dakota’s Republican-dominated state government literally declared a “state of emergency” to repeal a voter-approved ethics reform law after the electorate passed Measure 22 in 2016, a ballot initiative that established a package of ethics and campaign finance reforms. Particularly infuriating is that lawmakers’ use of an emergency provision means repeal takes effect immediately and is immune to a voter-referendum veto. It would take twice as many signatures to initiate a constitutional amendment to restore the law as it would for a veto referendum.
Measure 22 would have placed strict limits on lobbying, created an independent ethics commission, and implemented a first-in-the-nation public campaign finance system that would have given each voter a voucher to donate to their preferred candidates. These reforms passed by a 52-48 margin even as Donald Trump won a 62-32 landslide, indicating that they had bipartisan support from the voters. Nonetheless, Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard insultingly claimed that voters were “hoodwinked” into passing the initiative.
Repealing the voter-approved law in this manner is a slap in the face for voters who are fed up with corruption, but hopefully it will serve as a warning for reformers in the future: If you want to subject lawmakers to restrictions that they personally oppose, you better make sure that your proposals alter the state constitution if possible instead of merely change a statute that lawmakers can repeal.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Bupalos: I suspect her floundering is because to her “Secular Humanist = Islamofaschits” seems intuitively obvious and not batshit nuts.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
I like to know exactly who my adversaries are, and what they have accomplished. This prevents my underestimating them.
And I’m not big on revisiting the election, but everyone thought that Clinton had it in the bag. Everyone. Including Clinton. So, she had incorrectly factored in the effects of voter suppression and other bad actions by the Republicans and thought that she had it covered. And fatally, like most people, she believed in the polling (or misunderstood their significance) and did not press the advantages she had.
Bupalos
@hovercraft: on the defense/offense thing, maybe its the difference between strategy and tactic. Yes they are on defense on the ban, but in that context the “mistake” on the massacre looks to me like a tactical counteroffensive jujitsu thing. The point she wants to get across as loud and long as she can is that muslim refugees are terrorists, that’s how she swings the 54-46 against number around. To do that she’s trying to get BOWLING GREEN!!! talked about as much as possible. I’m pretty sure she was counting on the backlash to the “massacre” to help do that work. I’m not sure overall it’s working, I think they’re likely overplaying their “alternative fact” media outrage manipulation. But I am pretty sure its not unintentional and she wasn’t trying to get away with actually slipping “massacre” through. They want the shitstorm, they always want the shitstorm.
hovercraft
How Can We Believe Anything This Administration Says?
by Nancy LeTourneau
February 3, 2017 2:24 PM
Let’s name the lies.
1. That President Obama had a six month ban on the Iraqi refugee program.
Glenn Kessler assigned that one three pinocchios last Saturday.
Former Obama administration official Jon Finer denied that any ban in Iraqi refugee admissions was put in place under Obama. “While the flow of Iraqi refugees slowed significantly during the Obama administration’s review, refugees continued to be admitted to the United States during that time, and there was not a single month in which no Iraqis arrived here,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “In other words, while there were delays in processing, there was no outright ban.”
2. That the ban (which didn’t exist) came after two Iraqis were radicalized and became the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre.
There was never a “Bowling Green massacre.” The two Iraqis were arrested after federal agents infiltrated their circle and they never managed to carry out their schemes – although one of them was found to have planted explosive devices while still in Iraq.
3. That people didn’t know about all this because the media didn’t cover it.
Of course, the media didn’t cover a massacre that never happened. But the arrest of these two men and the Obama administrations subsequent review of the vetting process for Iraqi refugees were not only reported on widely, the latter was the subject of a Congressional uproar – and was discussed at a Senate hearing.
After her remarks made headlines, Conway suggested that she meant to refer to “Bowling Green terrorists” rather than a “Bowling Green massacre.” So lets pretend that lie was merely a matter of letting the wrong word slip. Here is how her statement would have read:
I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green terrorists.
That they were the “masterminds behind the terrorists” makes no sense.
No… Conway said exactly what she meant to say. And as Kevin Drum notes, her audience for the idea that there was a Bowling Green massacre won’t ever hear the fact check about how it actually never happened.
It will soon become an article of faith on the conservative email network that hundreds died in the Bowling Green massacre, complete with before-and-after pictures from Google Earth of the Baptist church that was left a smoking crater in the aftermath.
In other words, those three lies affirm the fact that Trump supporters will go on being manipulated and that the rest of us should think twice before believing ANYTHING this administration says.
It has only been two weeks and already the lying from Trump and his administration has reached epic proportions. The latest comes from Kellyanne Conway, who managed to give us three “alternative facts” in less than 19 seconds.
oklahomo
@Major Major Major Major: If I’m really feeling crazy, I’ll do it in COBOL.
Shalimar
@Brachiator: Kindercare. Still can’t trust the Germans.
Aleta
Swedish trolls
Bupalos
If you watch the WSJ TV summary of the whole kerfluffle, I think its easy to see what Conway was trying to do, as well as (hopefully) how it isn’t quite working. Hopefully the idea that this is a manipulation technique gets fleshed out and ingrained enough that Tweety types can in real time do a “oh, are you doing the make something up to create a hoo-ha thing again, or do you really believe that?”
Mnemosyne
@Brachiator:
Trump’s people also thought they were going to lose and were as shocked as anyone that they pulled out an Electoral College victory, which is another reason I’m reluctant to hail Conway as a secret genius. When you can show that the other team cheated to get their win, do you then hail the coach as a genius for his skill at cheating?
NeenerNeener
@Brachiator: Conway jumped on an already moving train when she went to work for Twitler. If she actually deserved her reputation we would be protesting her previous client, President Cruz.
TenguPhule
@Mnemosyne: You forget how Trump traditionally rewards those who do a job for him. If Snowden is lucky, they won’t torture him before they shoot him.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
But, but, the Republicans believe in “giving the power back to the people.” As long as the people want what the Republicans tell them they want. Oh, well, looks like the people in that state have to decide whether they want to continue to be led by knaves, or whether they have the gonads to throw the bums out.
Bupalos
@hovercraft: that’s exactly the reaction I’m suggesting Conway is angling for. I think it mistakes the intent. They have no need to consolidate the base, while I agree there is a simple message for them (MUSLIM MASSACRE!!) the deeper purpose is aimed at swingable security moms, getting max airtime for the idea that there are refugee terrorists and the liberals care too much about them.
rikyrah
How the GOP Became For-Profit College Abuse Deniers
by Stephen Burd
February 3, 2017 12:27 PM
The Republican Party’s stance on for-profit higher education is similar to the one it has taken on climate change. Despite voluminous evidence that a significant share of for-profit colleges have defrauded students and taxpayers, Republican lawmakers refuse to acknowledge that there have been any problems. The G.O.P. has become, over the past two decades, a party of for-profit-college-abuse deniers.
…………………
So what changed in the 20 years between the Nunn and Harkin investigations?
The answer is that the for-profit higher sector transformed itself. The old generation of mom and pop trade schools died off, and by a new breed of for-profit colleges – mostly huge, publicly traded corporations – began to dominate the industry. These corporations were not only much larger, serving tens of thousands of students, if not more, but they also had much deeper pockets than their predecessors, allowing them to shower campaign money to their supporters on Capitol Hill. At the same time, the Republican Congressional leadership began the infamous “K-Street Project,” rewarding industries that were generous to their members. Republican lawmakers who pushed legislation to deregulate these giant for-profit college companies were richly rewarded (as were Democrats, like Rep. Alcee Hastings, who shilled for the industry.) In fact, campaign contributions from the student-loan and for-profit college industries helped propel Republican Rep. John Boehner’s rise to House Speaker.
Republicans responded to these companies’ largess by taking the reins off the industry – essentially giving these schools the green light to rip off students and taxpayers.
In 2002, the Bush administration took the teeth out of a law that Congress had passed a decade earlier to prevent schools from compensating recruiters based on their success in enrolling students. Under Bush, the Education Department issued new regulations creating giant loopholes that allowed for-profit colleges to easily circumvent the law. As a result, in their desire to keep on growing to lift their stock prices and receive ever-larger amount of federal financial aid, many of these companies encouraged their employees to deliberately recruit and admit unqualified students, who ended up taking on significant amounts of debt for training from which they were unlikely to benefit.
And then, in 2006, Republican lawmakers succeeded in striking down another important consumer protection law that limited the growth potential of these companies. By eliminating the “50 percent rule,” which had prohibited colleges from participating in the federal financial aid programs if they enrolled more than half of their students in distance education courses, Congress allowed these companies to carry out their “growth at any cost” strategies. From 2005 to 2010, Bridgepoint Education, for example, expanded its enrollment by over 7,800 percent, from 968 to 77,179 students, according to final report from Senator Harkin’s investigation. Unsurprisingly, considering its extremely rapid growth, the company in recent years has been the subject of multiple federal and state investigations over allegations that it has defrauded students.
Given that their actions helped lead to widespread abuses throughout the for-profit college sector and put students and taxpayers in harm’s way, is it any wonder that G.O.P. lawmakers continue to refuse to acknowledge that there have been any problems? Unfortunately, this incredibly disturbing level of denial means that history will probably repeat itself, with the Trump administration and Republican Congressional leaders trying to take the reins off this often-unscrupulous industry all over again.
Ohio Mom
I just want to add that it is not at all easy to qualify for disability payments. Social Security turns down something like two-thirds of all initial applicants. There’s probably an argument that it is too rigorous a vetting process.
Also, SS periodically reviews cases to determine if you are indeed still disabled enough to be qualify. A family I know with a pretty autistic twenty year old just received notice that after a mere two years on SSI, they need to prove he’s still eligible. We autism moms had a good laugh about that.
rikyrah
Trump does Wall Street’s bidding, betraying campaign promises
02/03/17 12:48 PM
By Steve Benen
More so than any modern Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump positioned himself as an opponent of Wall Street. In fact, as regular readers know, the GOP candidate spent months insisting that it was Hillary Clinton, not himself, who’d do the financial industry’s bidding.
Clinton, Trump said, is “nothing more than a Wall Street puppet.” Her campaign is “paid for by her bosses on Wall Street,” he added. The public was told that Clinton is “owned by Wall Street,” “is in [the] pocket of Wall Street,” and is “bought and paid for by Wall Street.”
As it turns out, Trump magically transformed soon after winning the election, tapping industry insiders to help run his administration, and even inviting a Wall Street insider to oversee Wall Street. Today, the new president is going even further, delivering on one of the financial industry’s top policy priorities.
Brachiator
@Mnemosyne:
I didn’t call Conway a genius.
@NeenerNeener:
The Trump train was careening out of control. She came on board and helped steer them to victory. I give Conway props for what she accomplished. YMMV.
hovercraft
Don’t know how I missed this. They are putting all of us on notice. If you thought FEMA camps were bad:
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
As you admit, it’s part of what she does.
But 56 per cent of white women voted for Romney in 2012. I don’t see that Conway used great knowledge to help Trump appeal to these women. She let Trump be Trump, and helped with the propaganda campaign to sell him to the voters. And she found effective ways to continue to focus on the negative views that some white women (unfairly) held towards Hillary.
hovercraft
@Bupalos:
She can try, but usually for that to work you need to have a big, um, massacre, just going on TV and repeating the term doesn’t really move the numbers. That’s what happened with McCain Obama, the GOP tried to run on him being a neophyte and a naïf, but after 8 years then, now 15 of warmongering it didn’t work. Part of the problem for him and the GOP is that they won, they can do as they please, so it’s on them to stop it, the democrats have no power. She can whine about weak dems all she wants, but this is on her boss, if the experts say he’s endangering us and he disagrees, he can still do it. Their problem is the public is disagreeing with him too, they think this is a bad idea.
CBS approve 40 disapprove 48
Gallup approve 43 disapprove 52
That’s just the generic, I think Rachel downstairs had the specifics on this, and it wasn’t good.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
Jebus Criss! We’re not even through the first month of the reign of Trump.
How soon before the “unauthorized” becomes the “mandatory?”
hovercraft
@Brachiator:
Okay last one, she is a pollster, it’s what she done for years, she got a big promotion last fall and was elevated to campaign manager, and now advisor and strategist to and for the president. But up until two weeks ago, she was still a pollster, leaving her job at the company she founded does not negate what she’s spent most of her career doing, like Anne Seltzer she founded her own polling company, built up a reputation for herself, but even with her new job I guarantee that she still sees everything through a pollsters eyes. Her job as a strategist involves conducting polls to see how their actions are playing with the electorate, that was one of the tools she used to get her boss to listen as much as he’s capable of listening during the campaign. She put numbers in front of him showing where he was improving when he listened.
PaulW
My father worked as a legal guardian in Florida for decades.
When you have a person whose Social Security benefits have to be managed by a legal guardian, it’s 99.99 percent that said person is full incapable of making rational, thought-out decisions of ANY kind.
What could also happen here is that people who ARE under some form of guardianship is going to have their identities used as cover for their guardians to make illegal gun purchases, and those poor people are never going to know what happened.
hovercraft
Howard Stern Claims Donald Trump Wants Hillary Clinton to Be President
Elizabeth Durand Streisand 3 hours ago
Howard Stern has said some shocking things in his time, but perhaps nothing quite so shocking as this: The radio host recently claimed that Donald Trump secretly wants Hillary Clinton to be president. Seriously. On Wednesday, the former America’s Got Talent judge argued that Trump ran in the election not because he wanted to be the leader of the free world but because he wanted “a couple more bucks out of NBC” in his contract for The Apprentice. “That is why Donald is calling for voter fraud investigations. He’s pissed he won. He still wants Hillary Clinton to win,” Stern added (jokingly?). “He’s so f***ing pissed, he’s hoping that he can find some voter fraud and hand it over to Hillary.”
While the idea that someone accidentally won the presidency when all he wanted was a fatter reality TV contract might sound like the script for a movie, Stern and Trump have been friendly for decades, which means the shock jock might have a more in-depth understanding of what motivates the new commander in chief than the rest of us. (ICYMI, Trump appeared on Stern’s show many times.) So, according to Stern, what is Trump’s main goal? It’s pretty simple: Trump “wants to be liked; he wants to be loved,” Stern said. “He wants people to cheer for him.”
The 63-year-old star added that he was “amazed” when Trump first announced his candidacy back in 2015, because he remembered the billionaire businessman as being a staunch Clinton supporter. While the topic of discussion during Trump’s visits to Stern’s show had more to do with panties than politics, Stern did say that Trump had been “pro-abortion.” Of Trump’s campaign, Stern added, “The new Donald Trump kind of surprised me.” It’s safe to say he wasn’t alone on that one.
Another area where Stern noted some serious flip-flopping? Trump’s take on Hollywood. “He’s now on this anti-Hollywood kick. He loves Hollywood! First of all, he loves the press. He lives for it! He loves people in Hollywood. He only wants to hobnob with them,” Stern argued.
In fact, he thinks the situation Trump is in now (namely, that he’s the president of the United States) might be bad for his health. “I don’t think it’s going to be a healthy experience,” Stern said. “All of this hatred and stuff directed toward him, it’s not good for him. It’s not good. There’s a reason every president who leaves the office has gray hair.” Stern then added that he worried that being president might actually “be detrimental to [Trump’s] mental health.”
scav
@Brachiator: Blithely counting on the military to uphold their traditional oath does sometimes seem a little overconfident. I’ve every confidence it could be interpreted in such a manner as to support doing whatever they already wanted. Infighting there won’t be lovely.
Speaking of govt limbs wandering about in states of confusion, Some customs agents have apparently decided that even visiting those dangerousdangerous counties of evilevilevil is in itself suspicious. And what’s with this blatent and overt practice of diplomacy?! REAL national leader bellow in tweets and hang up. Former Norway PM held at Washington airport over 2014 visit to Iran.
Brachiator
@hovercraft:
Holy anachronism, Batman! Let’s pull out the Trump Time Machine.
oklahomo
@hovercraft: Doesn’t that assume he was mentally healthy and some point in the last few years?
Yarrow
@hovercraft:
I linked that yesterday and several wags replied, “How could you tell?” Ha.
Brachiator
@scav:
It’s the only thing standing between us and the end of democracy.
Time to rent “Seven Days in May” again. Terrific movie.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@NotMax:
Here in Indiana it’s been 18 to get a LTCH (License to Carry Handgun) since 1983.
Back in 1985, a friend of mine got mugged after leaving our ‘chemical free’ HS graduation party.
His parents took him to apply for a carry permit and bought him a pistol because you still have to be 21 to purchase a handgun under Federal law, despite the fact that you can legally get a permit at 18 under state law.
Indiana Code for carry permits
Personally I think there needs to be at least a short defense law review & firearm safety class before permits are issued.
As you can imagine, my more zealous gun owning friends think that I’m a ‘squish’ on gun rights. :D
bupalos
@hovercraft: What I mean is what she is trying to get airtime for is the truthful nugget in that mess, which is that 2 Iraqis in the refugee program really were ENEMY MUSLIMS ENEMY MUSLIMS RIGHT THERE IN THE HEARTLAND!! They welcome the media talking about this, on any terms the media wishes, including and especially “Conway is lying, these two Evil Muslims Posing as Refugees were caught before they could create a MUSLIM MASSACRE IN THE HEARTLAND.”
Elizabelle
@hovercraft: Stern’s comments don’t sound outlandish to me. Suspect there’s some truth in there. Maybe not all of it — Stern and Trump are pretty much entertainers — but they’re not mean comments by Stern.
Shalimar
@hovercraft: 2 weeks in and Trump has already gotten one of them killed. At this rate, there won’t be any SEALs left to fly a Trump flag by mid-terms.
lord at war
Can anyone provide a reason they shouldn’t be allowed to buy a gun, but we let them vote?
ingressus sum
Perhaps this “Doctor”/politician would not have a problem with molten gold poured down his throat, as long as the pourer didn’t resemble THAT GUY and the gold didn’t come from THAT GUY.
Adam L Silverman
@lord at war: Not sure I understand the question. If this is in regard to lowering the age for purchase of firearms to 18, then I think part of the argument, and rightly so, is if you’re old enough to vote, and old enough to serve in the military, then you’re old enough to purchase a gun. Though not to legally drink.
lord at war
@Adam L Silverman: It was just a simple “Costitutional Rights” question,,,
You obviously see some of my point with the military and alcohol references- where do we draw the line on a Gov’t prohibition of buying a gun, buying a beer, signing up for the Marines, driving a car, voting, or anything else you might need the Gov’t to declare is “legal” for you- with a possibly mis-judged diagnosis of “mental incompetence” from the Social Security Administration?
J R in WV
@oklahomo:
I once had a job on contract to convert programs that were originally written in a pre-cobol assembler-type language, then run through a converter to produce running cobol programs. Variables were “A” and “B” and “C” – etc, etc. A long time before we came along.
Ouch! Still get headaches just thinking about it. Made a lot of money in OT, though. And managed to get the job done, too. On my estimated schedule!
When writing cobol, though, in modern structured style, it can be done right. Converted assembler, not so much!
lord at war
I mean- the Gov’t “let” people vote for Trump, Ckinton, Johnson, Stein, Sanders, McMuffin, Cruz, et al last time- Choose the candidates you think people had to be mentally incapacitated to vote for, or the one the gov’t won’t “let” you vote for… :o)
Adam L Silverman
@lord at war: I did. I’m quick that way…
More seriously, I’m not sure there’s a clear answer. The reason for this is there are three different traditions of thought on the 2nd Amendment that come down to us from the founders. The first, from the Federalist, was based on both the Federalist Papers and other correspondence, as well as the limited Congressional Record as there wasn’t much discussion on the 2nd, even as its language was being amended into its currently unwieldy form, is that it dealt with the Federal government being in charge of the militia in terms of command, control, and provisioning and that the explicit right to keep and bear arms was in regard to this. The non-militia, private right is therefore implicit at the Federal level, though explicit in some of the original state constitutions.
The second is the anti-Federalist position, which can be found in what has now been collected to be the Anti-Federalist Papers, as well as other anti-Federalist correspondence and debate at the state level ratifications in certain states like Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts among others. Here too the predominance of the debate was in regard to command, control, and provisioning of the militia, which makes sense as this discussion was intended to be the counter debate to that of the Federalists. The anti-Federalists believed this should take place at the state level and that only during times of national emergency should the Federal government get command and control and, depending on the depth, scope, and length of the emergency provisioning.
Neither of these are really the modern debate/discussion/dialogue over the 2nd Amendment we have today. Rather that debate is largely around the third tradition, which is sometimes referred to as radical localism. This tradition, a radical offshoot of anti-Federalism that was considered to be fringe and dangerous by the majority of anti-Federalists (that does not make it illegitimate, just providing the context), sprang up along the frontier away from the larger towns and cities. One of its centers was in Carlisle, PA. This tradition held that all government above the local/municipal was, at best, proto-tyrannical as it was too far away from the people, too powerful, and the people’s ability to effect it and check it was limited. Therefore the militia and the citizenry were completely interchangeable, the right to keep and bear arms was not just about formal militia service in defense of state or Nation, but primarily about protecting the citizenry at the local level against the tyranny of their state governments in the capitals far away, as well as the Federal government. It is within this third tradition that 2nd Amendment absolutism or maximalism is rooted.
All three of these traditions and their permutations are American. All of them go back a long time. All of them are right and wrong. And because the US has changed so much over time, none of them may be particularly helpful in answering your question. While we don’t like to talk about it or ignore it or just don’t realize it we do regulate almost all of our Constitutional rights. You have the freedom to religion, but human sacrifice is not going to protected under the 1st Amendment. Nor ancient Levantine temple prostitution. In my view we over regulate 4th Amendment rights. And we’re all over the map on the rights rooted in the post Civil War Amendments. And we regulate both the right to peacefully assemble in a variety of ways and, to an extent, free speech, though in other ways we deregulate that too. And worse we’ve extended it to artificial constructs like corporations.
I’m not sure that helped much, but its as honest an answer as I’ve got.
lord at war
Very interesting, and well researched Adam.
I’m just an unfrozen caveman non-lawyer. I have come to my version of libertarianism (The first law of “L”ibertarianism is that no two Libertarians will agree on anything, but they’re happy to tell you why you’re wrong!) from some combination of my sort of conservative backlash against my more liberal parents and a more anarchist worldview inspired by my reading- and I am simply searching for a “due process” justification for this particular regulation and considering what might be the consequences in other circumstances.