Colbert Report: Tennesee State Legislators Beat Back Terrorist Foot Sink in Capitol Mens Room

The Colbert Report
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Once again they've made the state safe for Dumbfuckery!!!
And the crowd goes wild!

J/K  I know amazing smart people who tweet from Tennessee.  None of which are in the state legislature.  (Tough I'm convinced there are some there too.)

The Daily Show: SCOTUS and Marriage Equality: The Introduction

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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So far, our hero is delivering fast, heavy kicks to the groins of haterz.  Story still developing.

It's Barack!: The Daily Show: Obama In Israel

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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I guess we're now just waiting for the musical to come out. (Get it? Nixon in China? Remember? Or was that an opera.)

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While Americans Are Anxiously Waiting For Stronger Gun Safety Measures, The NRA's GOP Puppets in Congress Slip Anti-Safety Measures into Resolution To Keep the Government Going

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Please note that every "Aye" vote for each of those odious measures was cast by a Republican. Not one Democratic Congressperson joined in with their charade. It has been proven that the GOP Gerrymandered their way into the majority in the US House of Representatives and now they are using their power to hinder our government's ability to keep us safe.

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Is Anyone Surprised that Nixon's Treason Has Finally Been Revealed?

 

Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California

The Neo-Classic front, with all those pillars, is eerily fitting for Nixon's administration.  All hail Caesar!*

Anyone who was still in denial of the treason of  our 37th president (like most of the mainstream press) should have had their delusions pierced this week as the BBC (doing actual stupefyingly arduous work that is unimaginable from US media -- well maybe from unpaid interns) listened to recently released tapes made by the Johnson Administration that reveal FBI tapping of then candidate Richard Nixon's phone (which was illegal and possibly due to a treasonous order from the Johnson administration itself). The BBC is apparently the source that broke this latest news on presidential phone tapping according to various sources though their piece didn't actually take credit they don't identify another so I'm guessing ground zero was at that news service, possibly a audio or video report.  Here's an online printed version: The Lyndon Johnson tapes: Richard Nixon's 'treason'

No one is in love with the late President Johnson who greatly enhanced our involvement in Vietnam killing tens of thousands of Americans. But, as others have pointed out that peace talks looked like they would be successful near the time of the 1968 election (if only to keep the White House in Democratic hands).  Ending the war in late 1968 or early 1969 could have saved up to twenty-two thousand American lives and possibly a million or more lives in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Most news sources are using the innocuous term "untold" because no one has bothered to find out how many, and yes, it would be an arduous task  (At least Nick Turse has researched and told the story of what happened to some Vietnamese families in "Kill Anything That Moves", while a diary of a North Vietnamese's doctor in their military Dang Thuy Tran's "Last Night I Dreamed of Peace" has also been published.  Search your favorite book seller for those or other books on the Vietnam War for more information.)

And now we are more aware than ever that wars are started or kept alive to get the citizenry to forget problems,  and or, to ensure a place in history for a leader or a wannabe leader, though we shouldn't have been surprised that actual treason does go on in and around government after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq both of which wars were prosecuted for political purposes of the lowest degree. No administration should be immune to historical review, something so many on the inside think is necessary to allow the president to do what he or she will.  Funny, but a little bird keeps cheeping in my ear about how, maybe a president should be forced to face history's ire in 10 years time, not 45.  Maybe the constraint placed on a Commander in Chief through disclosure would be good for the nation.  As it is, if it's really bad the US press with not even want to check into it.  That may be why we have to rely on the BBC to tell us what.

But running around in the streets will not do anything to help.  Strong concerted action probably could, but no entity is actually doing that.  All our activists on the left are most active in collecting and siphoning money for themselves out of those collections.  The good news is that the other side does the same thing as does the "middle".  The bad news is that the latter two types of groups have a lot more money they can collect because they feed the billionaires coffers, and with your tax dollars and are, lately, looking to throw in your earned benefits called Social Security and Medicare. 

Front side of White House

It's nice to see that the BBC has gotten some of its fire back.  The run up to the Iraq War turned it into a kitten that could do little more than to offer news blurbs and opinion after the suicide of a man who wrote a piece for the news service against invading Iraq because the real reason was about securing new sources of product for various American and British oil companies.

I think I almost heard a roar from our old friend the BBC lion in this article, or at least a long hungry growl. 

White House From Ellipse

*Yes, I understand that one could call the front of  the library also neo-colonial reminiscent of the portcullis in front of the White House. (You see the back of the White House from Constitution Avenue) American colonial architecture in the warmer summer regions was somewhat based on classical designs because days in summer in both Rome and Southeastern North America are hot and long so an adaptation of classical design was popular.  The RMN library is even more Roman than colonial though, ergo my description though I doubt I can't be schooled by a well informed architect.  So I rest on my "less informed opinion but that's what I see" rights, and they seem to be borne out by Internet searches. Think Lincoln Memorial for purer Neo-Classical architecture.  For living quarters the pure form of that might be a bit much, these days. Since the removal of hand for simple theft fell out of favor, other forms of protection had to be developed.  Even the library is enclosed in glass.

Picture above used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to their various posters at Flickr none of which have any connection to this blog or our bloggers,

Top from site of Flickr user StuSeeger.  White House front from Flickr user Brent Rostad. White House from Ellipse (my description) from foxypar4

How to Help or Hinder the Economy

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Does a "Good Guy" With a Gun Really Stop a "Bad Guy" With a Gun, or a Knife, or a Heavy Object?

The study on whether the availability of assault weapons increases or decreases crime would be an arduous task, and I'm not sure anyone is doing it. If they are, the data isn't available from an Internet search as far as I see (Google, Bing, and Duck Duck Go). Gun Rights groups claim it does based on charts showing a decrease in murderous crime since the end of the assault weapons ban in 2004, but that is not a responsible assessment. What we have in the US is an aging population. old fogies, a group more and more of us belong to, are not likely to go out and commit violent crime, because we are apparently "Le Tired" in the words of the French lady in delightful short video "The End of the World". I know that though I've never committed violent crime (that I can remember) I also don't go out until 2am doing other things very often anymore either.   I think most of us can relate to that.
(Chart on Top comes from The Death Penalty Information Group).

Bloomberg has published a chart showing that gun deaths per year will exceed traffic deaths by 2015 (post 2010 all projected).  But that is not controlled for population numbers as I can tell.  See first graphic below.  And though we can also see a precipitous drop in gun related deaths starting the year before the 1994 assault weapons ban and getting steeper as the ban goes into effect that seems to continue until the year 2000 though our population was increasing at that time as it has continued to do.  Apparently the decrease in deaths from auto accidents is from again our aging population, as well as automobile safety enhancements, and more informed procedures.  Twelve years ago who was putting the baby's seat in the middle back instead of right beside mom?

But if we give the gun advocates their due we should look not at only gun deaths, but at least all murders. Personally I don't care if you lose your automobile or your new stereo to a burglar, gun owner because you have the ability to shoot the the suspected thief (or the bird that bounces against your window).  I care about people dying.

So Bloomberg can show that more people are dying from "gun deaths" with an illustrative bounce in 2004 when the assault weapons ban expired, but we also want to know if more assault weapons and more firearms in general reduced the total murders (controlled by population).  Does a good guy with a gun stop a bad guy with a knife, or a baseball bat, or his fists in an unwarranted attack on a vulnerable person.  The chart clipped from the top chart for clarity shows that the murder rate has been reduced since 2004 which I explained above as possibly being due to an aging population, but look at the steep slide after the ban went into effect in 1994!

That was like the first big drop of a roller coaster ride.  Was an greatly improving economy a big help in that? It may have been, but, I think the ban, that supposedly totally unnecessary ban (according to the gun lobby) must have increased the slide for those years under Clinton.

Later, did the doldrums of the George W Bush years (in clip of chart set below) stop the slide, or was it the increased national belligerence (illustrated by the invasion of Iraq in 2003) and extreme partisanship induced by angry whites which would later emerge as the Tea Party that set a new trend in violence?

Luckily the "Le Tired" syndrome seems to have re-emerged as we sit our aging bodies down and watch our TVs, Hulu, dvds or Netflix or engage printed meda, or even read or argue over the Internet.

But I don't think the NRA's claim that resuming sales of assault weapons has done the job on the murder rate since 2004.  I think it's just old cranky bones.  Otherwise, murders wouldn't have done what they did  from 1994-2000.

Unfortunately, information is available only in small samples and specialized charts on the Internet.  Sometimes it seems that people try to use the small bits to make points that aren't valid, such as the NRA's "point" that the murder rate has gone down since assault weapons were allowed to be sold again.  In fact the first thing it did was go up for 3 years and from what I've seen in gun sales charts on pro-gun sites with I will not copy here since it would be from a hostile source, the drop in murder rate 2008-2009 coincides in a drop in gun purchases from 2007-2008, most likely because of the financial distress that was sweeping the nation.  Gun sales began going up again in 2009 (possibly late 2008) but that may not mean that more people had them, only that a smaller group was buying more guns each which means the murder rate reduction of 2009-2011 isn't correlating  with gun purchases because how many guns do you need to fend off a bad guy with a knife or club or even a gun?  Probably, only in extreme circumstances, more than one.

It would be helpful  for the number of gun owners to be counted, instead of gun purchases, and for all this to be tracked someplace everyone could easily find it.  Instead we get gimmicks from partisans -- like gun sellers and manufacturers and their lobbyists at the NRA to, even, gun control groups -- or fleeting news episodes some more emotionally manipulative than informational.  I believe though, that I've put down some useful analysis of what I could find to counter the idea that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, a club, or a knife, is a good guy with a gun.  It doesn't appear to be happening, given the other factors influencing our lifestyles in the US since the Assault Weapons Ban expired.

A big part of the reason that more available gun sales has not reduced murders is that straw purchases carry little penalty.  That is one problem that Common Sense would tell us to change by increasing those penalties.  But again apparently Wayne La Pierre and his cronies cannot stand the thought that a wealthy woman's son or a small time pimp can't get his hands on whatever weapon he wants to go out and kill other teens an young adults or even mow down first grade students at a local school.  

 Other resources on Gun Control, the NRA or the above report:
CS Posts:

Now There's Proof: Stricter Gun Laws = Fewer Gun Deaths

Neo Nazi Murderer, Illegally Posessing Fire Arms, Was Tracking Officials

Murderapolis No More. How Minneapolis Reduced Gun Violence

All New Wayne La Pierre. Now Making 100% Less Sense!  

Four Pinnochio Noses For NRA Ad Claiming Obama Kids Protected by Armed Guards at School!

Grandfather Who Comforted Sandy Hook Children Attacked by Deniers

 Sandy Hook Shooting Faked?

 Hitler and His Nazis Did Not Take Away Guns. Other Lies Debunked

 Video: More Stewart. This Time on Guns and Gun Control.

Lawrence O'Donnell's First Word on Wayne La Pierre's Friday Speech

 Video:

  The End of the World as mentioned in post above ( and as allowed by You Tube embed code):

Other charts and snips claimed as "Fair Use" because of our non-profit status and the need of people to understand reality behind gun control and murder statistics.

Now There's Proof: Stricter Gun Laws = Fewer Gun Deaths

Great News!  There is proof that stricter gun control works to reduce gun deaths.

Tell your state and local officials 

From NBC report:  Fewer gun deaths in states with most gun laws, study finds

"It seems pretty clear: If you want to know which of the states have the lowest gun-mortality rates just look for those with the greatest number of gun laws," said Dr. Eric W. Fleegler of Boston Children's Hospital who, with colleagues, analyzed firearm-related deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2007 through 2010.
By scoring individual states simply by the sheer volume of gun laws they have on the books, the researchers noted that in states with the highest number of firearms measures, their rate of gun deaths is collectively 42 percent lower when compared to states that have passed the fewest number of gun rules. The study was published online in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Your representatives in state and federal government need to hear from you, because, otherwise, the loudest voices they are going to be hearing from are the Gun Manufactuers and gun biz lobbyist, Wayne La Pierre.

You can find out how to contact your Representative to the US House and your two federal Senators in this post.  ( I know, that portion should be a post in itself, but I don't have time right now.)  Check out state and local government sites for more regional representation, try even city venues for keeping gun trafficking under control.

Read rest of NBC report at original site linked above

Picture of  Crocus flowers and bee (in the morning sun it looks like) used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to Prilfish at Flickr.com who has no connection to this blog or blogger.  It seemed to be a symbol of hope as the crocus and morning look to warmer and brighter hours ahead.

Looking Forward to Hurricane, Tornado, and Wildfire Season, Folks? Going Forward You May Be Dealing with Those Monsters and Recovery/Rebuilding By Yourself Thanks to Sequester!

I think Scott is just dealing with reality.  We spend money on things in this nation to keep people safe and help them recover from disaster.  And it seems that most hurricane seasons Florida and large sections of the Southeast (heck even the northeast these days) are smacked with at least one of those fantastic storms, and some of the worst ones find that long finger of land and dance on top of it. before moving on.  The effects of Global Warming just assures more and bigger versions of the amazing storms, and enhanced droughts and wildfires. And the West Coast is still waiting for "The Big One" from the San Andreas fault and some newly discovered faults in Oregon and Washington which could cause deadly Tsunami and often watches huge wildfires ravage their own states in summer and/or fall.  (The LA Area also has some killer faults offshore that could cause massive death from smaller ruptures and resultant tidal waves that could prove very deadly because of concentrated housing and a total lack of attention to the danger by our communities and news media.)

But Sequester means help will be rationed.  So it's likely not the best idea for you or your region, but the GOP Congress members are raising glasses of bubbly to themselves over crippling the government from providing aid in those natural disasters as they cash their large (unsequestered) paychecks and the hidden ones from their billionaire and centi-millionaire backers.

Don't you want to scare them (and any other public official that you want) by threatening to help get them dumped?  Sure you can, but they demand your email be opened to them in return.   That can lead to receiving Karl Rove's talking points in it every morning.  Whether you are left or right you do not want Rove's BS in the email box you actually use as a daily thing. He convinced people to give him hundred of millions of dollars in the last election that were basically wasted. Believe me I've lost an email box or three to political spam.  Now I've picked up an extra box just for that.  Yahoo and other sites pass them out like flapjacks at a little league breakfast.  Pick one up and start talking to your government officials without the blow-back ruining your prime method of Internet communication.

To communicate with your Representatives and Senators go to Thomas.gov.  It's named after Thomas Jefferson, and is  a government website so it's creator isn't going to steal your info and sell it off to a spam-mill right away.  Your Representative and Senators' teams might be a different story, which is why I gave the new email box advice above. Once at thomas.gov  moving down the left column of information you will see links to House of Representatives, Senate, and U.S. Code. See Graphic to the left here.

Let's find your Rep's contact info since it's more complicated.  You know which state you live for a majority of the year and are registered in, right?  That will lead you to your Senators' contacts easily.  

Click on the House of Representatives link and you'll be sent to the page where you can get the ability to call, write, or fax them.  (Be warned, using a fax to contact anyone gives the recipient the right to fax you back.  That can cost you money, and once you open that connection it's hard to break it.) BTW, the pictures above and to the right are clipped from the websites via the Snipping Tool included with Windows 7.  I claim fair use of the resulting graphics by reason that they come from the government's domain and are used to help increase citizens' voices and power in our own government.

Notice that you will need your zipcode.  I assume you know your 5 digit primary code, but you could need your 4 digit extension, too (I do). You can usually find that on a bill, or bank statement mailing, but if that is not available to you right now, go to USPS. and click on "Look Up a Zipcode" as seen on the graphic to the left.  A box will open for you to enter your address, city and state.  You can add your 5 digit primary zipcode as well if you know it, but it's not necessary, unless you're not sure of the city you live in (it can be confusing if you live near the border between two of them).  Then, when they show you the zipcode with the 4 digit extension, you can use that to find your Rep and a means by which to contact the staff, who will relate your conversation somehow to your Congress member.

Be sure to tell them you want the sequester ended immediately.  You, like I thought that Congress; having dealt with other crises this year with predated bickering and then sudden resolve would do that same this time; but now that they are actually ready to burn the house down you are not going to sit and wait for them anymore.  Tell them to resolve the issue, now and make sure our "entitlements" (which this blog shows we the people pay for  here) and have their fat cat backers pay a little more if more money is needed.  Ever since Reagan cut their taxes in half the fat cats have been taking our jobs overseas and earning even more tax cuts for that job.  They've been walking away with everything and that has to stop. We the people are going to make sure our Congress works for us from now on, and that means, for starters ending this sequester NOW, and in our favor if they want to keep their jobs.  Sign your email, or mail as,  or tell the staff on the phone this is their boss's boss, YOU!

Tell those who want to cut your help from FEMA and the National Guard through Sequester Obstinacy that they have a special place on your political dart board,  and it's not the target of your money or your support.  Tell them to get off their duffs and earn the fat paychecks our government hands them or you'll start pushing to cut it, or eliminate it altogether by getting someone else in their seat.

Believe me-- it will help, if enough people burn their ears  with it (using your own words).  So tell your friends to do the same, because a natural disaster without FEMA, the National Guard, and/or recovery aid is a terrible thing to face.  Those of us who don't live in hurricane ravaged areas don't know and can't imagine what it's like, and I'm sure it's the same for wildfires, tornadoes, or even earthquakes.  And if people in the Mid West complain tell them that makes you a lot less in favor of their farm and drought aid.  If they support cutting your help, then we'll push for cutting theirs.  What's fair is fair.

I believe that the right have exhausted their sources of spam for Congress.  I figure, if everyone who reads this contacts their Rep and Senators that will create an upwelling in understanding among their privileged er "offices" that their future in their current cushy Congressional seats are at stake, and they can't get elected by just their campaign donations, but must depend on their constituents continuing to vote for them.

Don't face conditions like in the picture below alone while the Romney class jets between multiple mansions with double decker garages and car elevators.

Picture above used via Creative Commons License Attribution (CC by 2.0) thanks to Flickr user Florida Keys--Public Libraries which has no connection to this blog or blogger.

A good short URL for this post is: http://x.co/wDRt Actually it's not as necessary for Twitter anymore, but sometimes it can be useful.

Video: Justice Scalia Isn't the Only Member of the Supreme Court to Worry About In The Recent Case Against the Voting Rights Act

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Justice Kennedy also made a worrisome comment about it this week, and Roberts has a history of fighting the VRA with the Reagan administration.*  The auspices of the VRA helped stop onerous late approved extreme voter ID laws from being enacted for last year's election. Unfortunately though, the Court has not dealt with the Gerrymandering in state and US House districts at all, which is also disenfranchising minorities as it disenfranchises the actual majority of the US voting public. This Supreme Court would not be in session though, but through a vote theft in 2000 abetted by the most successful 3rd party presidential campaign in many decades without which the George W Bush machine could not have stolen the Florida delegates. 

Unfortunately, there are still money and power seekers out there pushing the 3rd party gambit which has proven to hurt the ability of ordinary citizens to protect our power and therefore our rights to the Social Security benefits that this blog showed each citizen or married couple earns and to ensure that the wealthy who actually use the most resources in the nation pay for their ability to make money off them.

*And who doubts that Alito and Thomas won't do what right wing billionaires want them to do, since they owe their seats to them?  The whole idea of hiring  Supremes Court Justices for life was to preclude Justices from pandering to big money, but that decision was made in the times when wives didn't work.  Thomas's wife for one appears to have been aggressively active in conservative causes that often come with a paycheck. Beyond that though. in 2000, at least two children of different conservative members of the Supreme court were offered very well paying jobs in a possible Bush administration before SCOTUS decided to hand the nation to the Republicans.

This is less than barely legal, but should show us what depths billionaire gaming of our nation is possible.

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