MORE: Billy Long also just said women have the right to control their bodies is what’s causing mass shootings: “Something has happened to our society. I go back to abortion… Life has no value to a lot of these folks.” pic.twitter.com/wWaNHm4eWG
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 2, 2022
Yes, women having choices about their lives has no doubt been very hard on men like Billy Long.
——
NEW: Trump-endorsed Senate candidate Blake Masters admits the country has a gun violence problem. His analysis: “Black people, frankly.”
Me @thedailybeast https://t.co/79aZ4Fxhnr
— Roger Sollenberger found true love, suckers (@SollenbergerRC) June 6, 2022
Now that J.D. Vance is no longer hogging the media spotlight, Peter Thiel’s back-up Senate candidate in Arizona has decided to make his play for attention:
… “It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”…
After pinning gun violence on gangs and Black people—and saying, falsely, that Democratic administrations “don’t want to do anything” about gang shootings—the Stanford-educated libertarian went on to complain to Oravits that gun control efforts target “law-abiding people like you and me.”
“When they ban ‘ghost guns’ and pistol braces, that’s all about disarming law-abiding people, like you and me, that’s what it’s about,” Masters said, referencing government efforts to crack down on the surge in privately made, untraceable firearms. “They care that we can’t have guns to defend ourselves.”
Masters—a Bitcoin evangelist who routinely hawks automated surveillance technology developed by his benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel—claimed that “it’s pretty rare” for homemade firearms to show up in criminal activity. But his information might be outdated…
… Masters—who has likened federal campaign disclosure laws to Kristallnacht—veered into conspiratorial territory.
Democrats “don’t like the Second Amendment,” he said, because “it frankly blocks a lot of their plans for us”—an unhinged, fact-free statement that liberal officials have cooked up a plot to physically force conservatives to comply with some unarticulated evil regime, but have been held at bay by fears that a constitutionally endowed populace will shoot them if they try…
He may not win in Arizona, but Masters will always have a comfy sinecure available at one or anther of Thiel’s ‘think’ tanks.
——
just how big are these raccoons https://t.co/ZtaNswpzK2
— Jort-Michel Connard ?? (@torriangray) June 2, 2022
Tony Jay
Christ on a moped, that Conehead has really got into the all-donut diet!
Expatchad
Charter Members of Troglodytes in Extremis?
Ruckus
@Expatchad:
They are going to have to evolve a hell of a lot farther to be charter members of T in E.
Like about a million years worth of evolution. Then they might have a slim chance. Very slim.
These are people who don’t even listen to the absolute crap that they spew out of their own mouths.
Single cell ameba are smarter than them.
piratedan
in AZ the amount of MAGA on MAGA ad violence is really something as they all attempt to paint themselves as the True Conservative for all offices from Governor to Congress and Senator. I usually have to suffer thru about 10 minutes of these ads while solving puzzles with Vanna and Pat. It’s the usual litany of scare tactics about how they intend to finish the wall and out xenophobe each other about how they all feel about illegal aliens who are about to come and kill us all if we don’t finish THE WALL.
I won’t bother embedding any of that dreck here but its really an exposure on just how these guys think, i.e. Biden has hand-cuffed the ICE and border patrol guys from doing their jobs and that if we could just finish THE WALL (at taxpayer expense, ‘natch) then we can all rest safe and sound knowing that the threat has been averted. Now they’re calling each other liberals and soft on the border crisis (which doesn’t exist, but no one can say that, as they show shaky-cam of grainy people walking in the desert with the camera operators obviously afraid for lives with this scintillating footage).
They’re even claiming the leader in the GOP race for the Governor’s seat secretly donated to Obama (pearl clutching commences here) and can’t even be trusted despite her violation of her oath of office in leading the super-secret recall process that everyone with a firing synapse understood was a dumpster fire in attempting to prove voter fraud.
In a way its good to see the masks drop, the sad part is you don’t see too much commentary on just how completely beyond the pale these folks are.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
Those are 20 yr old donuts with stupid sprinkles on top. Lots and lots of stupid sprinkles.
If these shitheads weren’t so dangerous they would qualify for that room with the nice thick padding on the walls because they are fucking insane. I worked for 4 yrs as a mental health counselor and manned a suicide hotline. I met people with actual diagnosis of mental illness. Spent an hour with one guy that was an hour I will never get back but really don’t want it back either and I remember it almost 50 yrs later, like it was yesterday. People discussing how to commit suicide while I was talking to them and yes I remember those as well. Those people were sane and 100% OK compared to these ignorant fucks.
Amir Khalid
I really doubt that any of the AR-15-armed white male teenagers who perpetrate these mass shootings has ever done thunk one serious thought about abortion, let alone women’s health rights in general.
the pollyanna from hell
@piratedan:
Slug on slug action is a really specialized academic interest; that’s why no commentary. Unshelled mollusk My Octopus Teacher was less than a year old, and not far from the end of it, when she displayed point after point of wisdom far beyond what any maga maggots could imagine.
Ruckus
@piratedan:
They are getting desperate. Shit for brains was their chosen savior. Some of the more actual conservative movers and shakers seem to be seeing the light and have left the nest. Conservative leaders and faux not news have been feeding this shit storm of stupid and idiotic bullshit for the last 30 yrs. This is the result of wrapping total lunacy in a veneer of political bullshit which has reached it’s maximum pressure and is now leaking out of every seam of those converted from stupid to all out insanity.
Tony Jay
@Ruckus:
Aye. There’s a very particular ‘madness’ to these people and their endlessly malleable ideology that, what do they call them, ‘normies’, instinctively shy away from. They simply can’t couple the insanity of what they say and the chaos their policies encourage with them being a mainstream political party that has outwardly respectable cheerleaders all over the country.
They can’t really want to put a leopard into every classroom, can they?
But they do.
the pollyanna from hell
@Tony Jay:
Late night, slow thread, I indulge myself in the picky persnicketies: could you make it clear when you switch pronoun reference? They is not they is not they, thanks. And that’s entertainment!
Feathers
The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty not too long after the Roe decision. Having capital punishment is a much clearer cause for the increased violence and coarsening of society in the intervening years, but they always blame abortion, don’t they?
Origuy
@Tony Jay: In reference to your discussion Monday morning about conciseness:
“I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” – Blaise Pascal
gene108
Colorado foxes and raccoons must be some freakish mutant variety that plagued the Rocky Mountains until the AR-15 came along to save us all from the menace.
How humans lived in Colorado before AR-15’s is a mystery anthropologists have yet to resolve. There are rumors white settlers, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, brought chickens with them and managed to keep the chickens safe from foxes and raccoons without AR-15’s, but researchers are still searching for the secrets of their lost technology.
Matt McIrvin
No, they’re right. I don’t like the Second Amendment because it blocks our plans to continue living in a country where these people might exist.
geg6
@Feathers:
It’s the woman cooties.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony Jay: This is the new normie.
Matt McIrvin
(Maybe it was the old normie all along. Goes well with wearing a white sheet by night.)
BellyCat
So the problem now is Black people. Again. Huh… Whatever happened to Messicans?
Shopping for LatinX votes sure has inspired some revisionist clarity for the GOP. Wonder what will happen if/when they realize that women are able to vote?
Gvg
Wouldn’t an AR15 kill the chickens too? I don’t picture it as a precision weapon.
I also do not appreciate that jackass’s anti women comments blaming us for everything. I recall a lunatic preacher on my college campus years ago who blamed women for every sin. I avoided him, and I noticed everyone else did too. Never saw anyone listening to him for more than a minute in all the years he persisted. I wish these extreme nut GOP politicians got the same reaction. I can understand the quiet reasonable sounding racist getting away with elections for years, I can’t understand the frothing public lunatics not being sidelined fast. Trump should have been laughed off the stage the first week so obviously something has changed.
I have a burning resentment for these misogynistic blowhards. I won’t forget.
Matt McIrvin
@piratedan: Pat is one of them.
Tony Jay
@the pollyanna from hell:
But it’s morning here! 8-)
I do my best, sometimes it’s far from good enough.
Tony Jay
@Origuy:
Thanks, Blaise. My argument, better made.
Soprano2
*facepalm* I know Long has to know better than that. The R candidates in the MO Senate race are desperate, too. They’re all calling each other “extreme liberals” in their ads. It’s bizzare to see all these TFG Republicans labeling each other liberal.
Andrew Abshier
With Louie Gohmert leaving Congress after this session, the race for the America’s Dumbest Congresscritter™ title Louie will be vacating has definitely heated up. Billy Long has certainly made a strong bid for it.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Has this idiot never looked at another country? There are many out there, Billy Long, that allow abortion and do not have mass shootings. They also have mental illness, video games, rap music, weed, and whatever other excuse the gun apologists come up with.
It’s the ready availability of guns, you fools!
Baud
He seems nice.
Liminal Owl
I am reminded of when Pat Robertson said that because of America’s sin of abortion, we no longer had the moral capital to win a nuclear war with Russia.
Liminal Owl
And I really hate fat-shaming, and appearance-shaming more generally (not, alas, for altruistic reasons), but when I looked at that picture I did think of Jabba the Hutt.
satby
As a native Chicagoan, it’s nice to see vile POS Masters clarify what’s been incredibly obvious: when they say “Chicago” they mean black people, but they’re thinking “n****rs”. Pretty soon they’re going to actually say the word.
Greg Sargent has been reporting on the gun culture’s attempts to gin up a race war in an interview with a former executive of a gun manufacturer.
NotMax
‘@Liminal Owl
Best selling issue by far was the one featuring the legendary centerfold of Jabba in Playhutt.
:·)
NotMax
‘@satby
Flashing back to Jesse Jackson’s repugnant “Hymietown” intonation.
Geminid
@Soprano2: Are you hearing anything from the Kunce or Valentine Democratic Senate campaigns?
satby
@NotMax: Yep, that was a racial slur too. But he wasn’t stating that gun violence was the fault of being born Jewish.
PST
I realize that Blake Masters is self-evidently wrong. I usually resist the urge to refute comments as stupid and malicious as his, but it made me think about one of the things I admired most about the surviving Parkland students and their efforts to mobilize public opinion. Several of them came to Chicago four years ago for a rally in Union Park. They emphatically acknowledged that the gun violence faced by students in cities like ours is more relentless and takes a greater toll than mass shootings like the one they lived through. Most of the speakers were local, many of them Black students with stories of their own. It’s all part of one problem. The State of Illinois and City of Chicago have tried hard to craft solutions only to be foiled by the courts’ interpretation of the Second Amendment. I am reminded of a study I saw somewhere that sought to answer why Americans are more violent than Brits or Australians. The conclusion? They’re not, not one bit. We don’t get into more fights; we’re just better armed, with horrendous consequences for participants and bystanders both. The idea that Democrats don’t care about daily urban gun violence is a baseless lie. Of course we care, and we have solutions to offer, but extremists and cynical panderers stand in our way. And the inventory of guns has been allowed to grow to such a degree that when we finally get our chance to apply those solutions improvements will come slowly.
NotMax
‘@satby
Who needs guns when you’ve got space lasers?
Coin operated ones, natch.
// :)
gene108
@satby:
Adam can comment more in-depth on this, but there’s an overlap between the interests of gun manufacturers, the gun lobby, and white supremacists. How intentional this is I don’t know for certain.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the only people who I heard about stockpiling guns were members of white supremacist groups (like the one Randy Weaver sold sawed off shotguns to) or Michigan “militia” types, who were not as open about their white supremacy. Larry Pratt, with his ties to white supremacists, founded Gun Owners of America, because the NRA wasn’t radical enough about advocating for guns everywhere.
Now the whole stockpiling guns has gone mainstream normalizing what used to be considered a radical white supremacist habit. I’m guessing this provides white supremacists more targets to recruit and cover for activities that used to stick out and attract law enforcement attention.
NotMax
‘@gene108
Whomsoever perfects coal-fired guns will pocket a veritable fortune.
//
Soprano2
@Geminid: I’ve gotten a couple of e-mails, but I haven’t seen any mailers yet. That’s not that surprising, since this is definitely TFG country. If I were them I wouldn’t spend too much money down here until July. Mostly I’m getting stuff from the Republican candidates, each flyer crazier than the previous one. There’s a Greitens PAC that’s going after Schmitt, which tells me they think he’s Greiten’s biggest threat. The polling of the race is all over the place; Greitens is ahead, Schmitt is ahead, it’s a 3-way race between Greitens, Schmitt and Hartzler, and so on. There’s still a lot of time until the August primary, and I only expect the vitriol to get worse.
When Long first ran for the House, his slogan was “Fed Up”. My husband says it should be “Well Fed”. LOL My joke was always that now they have a real auctioneer to sell their votes to the highest bidder.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So if they take the House this fall it’s going to be endless committees on how grooming is causing inflation.
I have to see it really seems like energy is more like 2018 were everyone is feed up with the Conservative clown circus, there is nothing like the Tea Party going on and Right is in a near open civil war, but the polls say the GOP is winning on the generic ballet.
Alce_e_ardillo
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I think we can safely say he has never looked at another county, let alone country.
NotMax
‘@Enhanced Voting Techniques
The pedolibs gonna get ya if you don’t watch out!
//
Matt McIrvin
@PST: That old NRA slogan “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” has always primarily meant “black people kill people”. The racist gun fans are just being a little more brazen about it now.
It’s a good way of displacing the threat, too. If the gun problem is really just urban “black-on-black crime” then if you’re white, it’s not your problem; you don’t have to do anything. Just let the cops beat and shoot black people a little more.
Just another way racism makes people stupid.
Geminid
@Soprano2: The Kunce-Valentine contest interests me because they are so different as individuals. Kunce grew up in working class family, Valentine’s family was very wealthy. Kunce has campaigned since last year, Valentine jumped in just a couple months ago. They both have professional backgrounds; Kunce is an attorney, Valentine is an RN.
Kunce seems like he might do better in rural areas; Valentine seems like she might do better in the suburbs. Both are unknown quantities electorally, though. This is Valentine’s first run for office (she says that Senator Duckworth from nearby Illinois helped talk her into running). Kunce ran for state senate almost 20 years ago, while he was still in law school. Kunce lost to an entrenched Republican incumbent, and then joined the Marines.
Kunce and Valentine look like they could be good candidates, in different ways. Either one will face an uphill battle against the Republican nominee.
Robin Goodfellow
Billy Long, if ever there was a Jabba the Hutt look alike contest, he would win in a walk. Same morals too. He makes creeps look good. Oh wait, I think I’m to something!
satby
@gene108: if you read Sargent in WaPo (I didn’t, no subscription, but he ran a series of Tweet excerpts at my previous link), he and Ryan Busse (the former gun manufacturer executive) explicitly tie a lot of the arming frenzy to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and white supremacist recruiting among those vets too.
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
There’s been a lot like the Tea Party going on, over the past few years. There’s QAnon, there’s antivaxxers, there’s all the agitation against COVID control measures (somewhat diminshed by the controls basically going away), now all the renewed moral panics about trans people and gay people and calling everyone who even supports LBGT rights a pedophile. All astroturf panics sparked by some combination of Republicans and domestic and foreign trolls.
People don’t feel good and the President is a Democrat, so the Democrats are the “in” party by default and they’re going to get the grief.
debbie
Billy Long doesn’t look like he can hold the thread of a thought long enough to accomplish his plan to reinstate TFG. //
Burnspbesq
@BellyCat:
They have plans to correct that mistake.
Burnspbesq
@Gvg:
If the user has been properly trained and the weapon has been properly maintained, it can be. Spray and pray isn’t really what it’s intended for, but in the hands of an untrained knucklehead who’s just looking to maximize the body count, it works far too well.
Mike in NC
This country has an unlimited supply of stinking rotten assholes who never missed a meal in their lives. 99.9% are Republicans.
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: They were probably thinking about how they couldn’t get a sniff (with good reason) and society was going to pay!!!
Paul in KY
@gene108: They lost alot of chickens back then when they only had bolt action & lever action rifles. Not to mention revolvers, single shot weapons, big clubs, heavy duty boots, etc.
Bad times they were…
Paul in KY
@Gvg: You certainly couldn’t eat the raccoon after splattering it with an AR-15.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Billy Long is one weird fucking looking dude. That’s really all I can think of to say right now.
plaindave
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Anyone else think of Trey Gowdy when you see Billy Long’s point?
GoBlueInOak
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: We have entered the “It’s the economy, stupid” phase of the four year Presidential term cycle – rapidly spiking inflation, housing costs, wage growth not keeping up, etc.
Yeah, unemployment is low but its been low for quite awhile for the more affluent portion of the population that disproportionately turns out to vote so “unemployment is so low” doesn’t register for them as something “good”, so much as background noise. Sure, low wage service workers got kicked in the teeth with unemployment during the pandemic, but between Trump/Biden Covid/stimulus payments & rapidly recovering, it was pretty brief & not broadly painful.
Instead we got middle class workers who stayed employed throughout whole pandemic such that “low unemployment” is status quo but at same time, their household budgets are pinched. And the lower wage workers are now finally back on their feet, and they can’t afford anything.
Biden’s low approval numbers have dropped most amongst younger and middle aged voters. He is below 50% approval in all age groups, but is performing best amongst 65+. Its “the economy, stupid”.
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
It’s the ready availability of guns, you fools!
They really are fools aren’t they.
They cry about losing their guns, they lust after their tens of thousands of dollars of guns, some have collections of guns so big they can’t lay them all out on their patios, they wear them with pride – all the while showing that they are scared shitless of something. I served on a guided missile destroyer in the navy that didn’t have anywhere near the number of individual weapons many of these idiots have. I wonder what the powers that be would do if these idiots turned on them? Republicans have been stewing their supporters in this hate fest for at least the last 30 yrs, and it’s no longer an idiotic political concept, it is a corrupt attempt to overthrow the very concept of government we are supposed to have. They think there is no other way than this asinine concept of armed rebellion to overthrow the concept of them having it all. They lose any intellectual contest in governing so they have gone full on towards armed rebellion. It’s not about their safety, it’s about killing their “enemies.”
I know this will be seen as a radical idea, but what else is this leading to? They’ve tried forced insurrection in 2020, will they try armed insurrection next time? They sure look like they are preparing for it.
Calouste
@Ruckus:
Having more weapons than you can use, like those gun-nuts with their massive collections, means that you’re a high-value target for an opponent who has a shortage of weapons.
RevRick
@Liminal Owl: me too!
Ruckus
@Calouste:
Sure, but with all those guns and ammo, they are also, possibly a rather tough, high-value target.
Jado
“An AR-15 is a gun of choice for killing raccoons before they get to our chickens.”
This comment is a little difficult to understand unless you translate it into the vernacular
“An AR-15 is a gun of choice for killing coons before they get to our chicks.”
Makes more sense now, doesn’t it? Change my mind…