Fish Fear Me

Whores Whore

The competition has been fierce already this week, but I think this has to take the lead in the category of dumbest thing of the week:

Washington lobbyist Jack Burkman on Monday said he is preparing legislation that would ban gay athletes from joining the National Football League.

Burkman in a statement said he has garnered political support for the bill, though his statement didn’t mention any specific lawmakers who are behind it.

”We are losing our decency as a nation,” Burkman said in a statement. "Imagine your son being forced to shower with a gay man. That’s a horrifying prospect for every mom in the country. What in the world has this nation come to?”

In fact, this is so ridiculously dumb that it has to be phony, and sure enough Ben Jacobs at the Daily Beast comes up with the smoking gun:

While the lobbyist wouldn’t reveal the members of Congress who supported the bill, as specific language had not even been drafted, he did say that almost all shared something in common: They were all Republicans worried about a Tea Party challenge. Burkman told The Daily Beast he thinks “95 percent of supporters” will be Republicans facing primary challenges and therefore looking for political cover. Burkman spelled out his coalition, saying that one Senator and six members of the House were definitely on board, but that those numbers could expand to six Senators and 36 congressmen. And, of those 42, “all but one will do this politically because they have been under fire from Tea Party and far right wing element” in their states.

Bullshit, and here's why.

While there's certainly some crossover between social conservatives and the Tea Party, the priority issues for the vast majority of Tea Party types are fiscal and federal government restraint, not things like gay marriage. And certainly not something so intrusive from the federal government like a ban on gays in the NFL. That's insane. You want to know what a real Tea Party person would say to such a thing?

"Where does it say the federal government has the right to order something like that?"

That's the real deal, not the phony Tea Party that Democrats and establishment Republicans fantasize about. Which brings us to the why of all this.

After progressive Democrats, the establishment Republicans are the ones who fear and loathe the Tea Party the most. Primary season is just around the corner and a number of those establishment Republicans are facing challenges from, you guessed it, Tea Party conservatives. That makes it the perfect time to smear the challengers and you just know that with something like this, Democrats and their allies in the media can't help but jump all over it and lend a hand. 

As far as I can tell it's working. But tell me, if this stupid proposal is really intended to provide cover for more moderate Republicans, where are the Tea Party candidates who have proposed something similar or are endorsing Burkman's proposal? I'll bet a six pack that neither you nor I can find one.

But why would Burkman, who seems to be a staunch conservative and Republican, do something like this?

Because he's a whore. They call it lobbyist, but what Burkman does is accumulate knowledge and power influence and then he sells himself to clients who wish to do business with the feds and/or influence federal legislation and regulations. It's probably the number one occupation in Washington D.C. I have no proof that Burkman got paid to do what he did in this particular case, but you know, whores whore, and doing it for free runs against the normal business model. Decide for yourself.

But THIS Time Will Be Different

The Obungler administration is once again exerting great effort on a peace accord between the Palestinians and the Israelis and once again it is unquestionably going to fail. The only thing to be determined is just how badly Secretary Lurch will damage Israel in the eyes of the world when the current round of talks goes off the rails. Such talks are always doomed because they all try to work around the central and intractable problem: Palestinians refuse to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

The presentation last week of a US proposed "West Bank security plan" is just another example of straining mightily, and futilely, to get around that problem. Because Israelis smartly and correctly recognize the murderous intent of the Palestinians, they insist on extraordinary security measures to protect their nation.

"Aha," says the US, "We'll let the Israeli military keep a security zone along the border of a sovereign Palestinian state."

"Not a chance," say the Palestinians, correctly recognizing that they won't really be a sovereign nation if another nation controls their border. "We'll let an international force watch the border though."(wink, wink)

"Right," say the Israelis. "Would that be the same international force that has failed to dislodge Hezbollah's rockets in southern Lebanon?"

When the Palestinians rejected the latest Kerry plan, they also reportedly gave him a letter listing "Palestinian red lines", one of which is "the refusal to recognise Israel as a Jewish state".

And there you have it. The Palestinians continue to hold dear the destruction of Israel, which leads to understandable but untenable security demands from Israel, which leads inevitably to another failed round of talks. Diplomats around the world can talk all they want, but the core problem remains Palestinian hatred of Israel and it cannot be bypassed no matter the effort. 

Education and experience should make people see truths such as that all the more clearly, but with much of our current political "elites", in this case specifically John Kerry and Barack Obama, the passage of time sees them move in the opposite direction. Because they lack honesty and integrity at a fundamental level their vision is obscured by their own bullshit and their arrogant determination to believe it no matter how much the real world gets in the way.

It's all really quite stupid, perhaps even insane. But then, there are so many other policies and actions of this administration that fit that description that one more run of the mill stupidity doesn't even stand out.

Because Apparently There Wasn't Enough Poison In Our Politics Already(update)

Some woman in Texas thought she would be clever on Sunday and showed up at a protest against the George Zimmerman verdict with the following sign:

Note the caption and how the NY Daily News ran with it as a straight news item. The UK's Daily Mail online played it as a straight news photo of a George Zimmerman supporter also.

It turns out that she was actually with the Trayvon Martin side at the protest and she was just being "sarcastic."

 

It may have been sarcasm as far as she's concerned, but two major news organizations put it on the record as testimony to the racism of Zimmerman supporters.

I'd like to know how that happened, because according to the story at the video link, at one point she was clearly on the side of the street with the Trayvon Martin supporters. Is that where James Nielson of AP took the picture? Did he know that wasn't really a Zimmerman supporter and did he provide that context when he submitted the photo to his editor? 

Who was the editor and was that image altered in any substantial way? Was important context cut before it was sent out over the AP wire to other news organizations?

I wonder how many thousands or even millions of people have seen or will see that picture as a Zimmerman supporter standing unmolested amongst other Zimmerman supporters and therefore see that as a true representation of the racism of all Zimmerman supporters. How many people have been or will be misled into anger and hatred and have their hearts hardened by that photo?

I wonder if Renee Vaughan, the name of the woman with the sign apparently, is proud of that.

I wonder if James Nielsen is proud of that.

I wonder if AP President Gary Pruitt and his staff of managers and editors are proud of that. 

I wonder if Philip Caulfield and the publishers and editors at the NY Daily News and the Mail Online are proud of that.

I wonder if any of them actually give a shit.

Update: As of 12:45 CDT the New York Daily News has memory-holed the photo without a correction notice, but left the following copy in the story:

One woman in the Zimmerman group held a sign that said, "We're racist & proud."

Austin resident Renee Vaughan echoed the sign’s ugly sentiments by yelling, "We're racist. We're proud. We're better because we're white," at the Martin group as they passed, according to the Chronicle.

At this point it is hard to escape the conclusion that Philip Caulfield and all his editors are a bunch of giant assholes who are out to deliberately deceive their readers.

Why Gun Control Is Failing

It's been two weeks now since various gun control measures went down in flames in the US Senate, prompting President Obama to don his petulance pants and lecture us from the Rose Garden. In that time I've read quite a few pieces by Democrats seeking to explain, in one way or another, how gun control could fail in the wake of the Newtown mass shooting. Some blame the NRA, of course. Some blame Republicans, of course. Some even blame Obama, but not for the reasons I'm going to cite. Pretty much all are long on self-pity and short on self-examination, so here are my criticisms of the pro-gun control side, because they are every bit to blame, if not more, than the NRA and Republicans.(This is a long one, so I'll put most of it below the fold)

Obama's poor leadership

When Obama outsourced the issue to Joe Biden, the probability for meaningful action took an immediate and negative hit. At that moment Obama signalled that it was really going to be business as usual, in other words it was going to be "inside the beltway politics." In the short term that was probably smart politics for Obama personally, but it was also another missed opportunity for him to match the greatness of his office.

He could have taken the role of an honest broker between the two sides and step by step publicly guided the conversation toward what was possible. That would have meant swallowing his own personal preferences for the moment and acting as President of all of these United States to bring both sides together. I suppose many in both party establishments would consider that idea naive, but my gut tells me the less ideological on both sides and independents would have eaten it up. Besides, isn't that the Hope and Change president we've been promised twice now?(I know, I know, that was always phony, but I couldn't resist) 

Biden's Poor Leadership

Many projects fail before they even begin because the problem and/or the scope of the solution are not properly defined from the start. I've seen it countless times over the years to the point where I can smell a looming clusterf*ck from a mile away. As I noted here and here, the problems of overall gun violence and mass killing are related but also distinct, and they have related but also distinct solution sets.

A tightly focused effort on Biden's part might have had a chance, but instead we got what was basically a free for all of gun control wish list items, regardless of how effective they would be in preventing the next mass shooting or daily gun violence on the streets.

To be fair to Biden, the Washington Post back in January noted how Obama had tied his hands somewhat from the start. Still, he wasn't just Obama's puppet on this issue. He fully embraced Obama's strategy of foregone conclusions, emotion over reason, and divisiveness through demonization. That worked in the last general election with the media covering their backs, but as shown in the results two weeks ago, it's a disastrous way to try to govern.

Real Journalism, RIP

Real Journalism died yesterday after a long and heroic struggle against Political Correctness. The coup de grâce was delivered by AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, who said, "Fuck it, let's stop pretending. Real Journalism stopped mattering a long time ago." 

Real Journalism is survived by its estranged children, Entertainment, Tabloid, Advocacy, Pack, and the hypocritical bastard who now goes by Truth to Power. 

Real Journalism was noted for its intense desire to inform the people on the important issues of the day, so they could make sound decisions about their lives and public policy. Transparency, reason, integrity, and clarity were its most important tools. It wasn't always pretty, but for decades it flourished by giving its customers the solid information they craved.

Real Journalism was infected with Political Correctness long ago, but it managed to fight bravely on for decades before its tools began to fail. It suffered a terrible blow when integrity totally failed during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and with the shutdown of clarity yesterday, it was gone.

Small and scattered bands of followers will hold private services this week and keep the flame alive in the hopes that someday, Real Journalism will return.  

Gun Control Theater

As you probably have heard, this week Harry Reid declared Sen. Dianne Feinstein's assault weapons ban to be dead in the U.S. Senate. Oh, it will have its "Weekend at Bernie's" moments until it is finally planted for good in April, but it's dead. More thoughtful gun control advocates welcomed the death of this worthless bill because it distracted from efforts that might actually be effective. Less thoughtful gun control advocates, think Mike Bloomberg as Larry and Joe Biden as Richard, have decided to continue to drag this corpse of a bill from one event to another. The batshit crazy gun control advocates, as exmplified by Mike Lupica, predictably let loose with unhinged rants.

We can go back and forth all we want on the details of Feinstein's bill, but the fact of the matter is that the core of the bill is a falsehood. And that falsehood is that cosmetic features like barrel shrouds and pistol grips alter the basic lethality of these rifles in any meaningful way and banning them would make our society safer. It will not, and the falsehood is easily illustrated.

This gun would be banned under Sen. Feinstein's bill, in fact it is specifically named:

 

This rifle is not classified as an assault weapon under Sen. Feinstein's bill:

In the same way that automakers put different body styles on the same engineering frame, Sturm Ruger offers different looks on the same guts of these rifles. The same holds true for the Bushmaster series that Lanza is said to have used. That's why Mike Lupica is absolutely wrong when he says something like this:

Any fool knows that Lanza couldn’t possibly have killed as many children as quickly as he did on the morning of Dec. 14 without an assault weapon in his hands. 

And this:

Again: Ask any gun owner if Lanza could have killed as many children as he did in as short a time as he did — before he was a sure shot putting a bullet from one of his handguns through his snake-filled brain — if he didn’t have an AR-15 in his hands. Then go ask the gun lovers to explain all over again how a ban on weapons like this wouldn’t have saved three young lives that morning, or five, or maybe even more than that.

Lupica can deny the truth all he wants, but the reality is that those kids were killed with a semi-automatic .223 caliber rifle and they would be just as dead whether Lanza used one with a flash suppressor(or any other cosmetic feature) or not. To say otherwise is not true, and to insist on holding that position in the face of that overwhelming truth is frankly stupid, intentionally deceitful, or some form of madness. So is claiming that stopping future production, but not the possession of the millions of such existing weapons, will have any real effect at all.

I guess some gun control advocates see value in the symbolism, but symbolism would not have shielded those kids nor will it save anybody in the future. There are lots of things around firearms that we can do, big and small, to make society safer, including what would have been most effective in the Newtown shooting, a better way to identify people who have become dangerous and know if they have access to firearms or anything else that can be used for mass killings. It's too bad that the work that has gone into Feinstein's futile effort wasn't used on something that would actually be effective.

One final note. I've pretty much had it with people like Lupica. It's one thing to be well-meaning but wrong. It's another to be aggressively, militantly, rudely stupid. I wish I could peer into his mind to know if he is just cynically callous to the truth, intellectually incapable of grasping it, or actually suffering from some sort of mental illness. My default position is to always give the benefit of the doubt to people I disagree with, but Lupica, with his grossly false and churlish attacks on gun owners doesn't deserve that anymore. There's something seriously wrong with the man, and Mort Zuckerman should be ashamed to publish his "work."

More Climate Change Hypocrisy

Awww, isn't it special that Derk Jeter, presumably in Davos, Switzerland as celebrity meat for Pepsi at the World Economic Forum, is worried about climate change?

DAVOS, Switzerland -- As global political and business leaders gather here for the World Economic Forum this week, New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter hopes climate change is addressed.

"I was in New York for Hurricane Sandy," Jeter told The Dispatch this morning, following a private function in Davos, Switzerland. Jeter is here for the Forum this week with Pepsi.

"It's just something that's gotten so much attention," Jeter said of climate change. "Regardless of how you feel about it, it's something that needs to be addressed because we're seeing more and more natural disasters each year, it seems like. Something has to be causing it."*

I'm guessing "something" means the day-to-day activities of us peons and not the Pepsi corporate jet or charter he probably flew on to Switzerland, nor the lavish accommodations you know he's enjoying in Davos with all of the bigwigs.

Nor the private jet he took to get his ankle checked last fall.

Nor the extravagant 30,000 square foot house he had built in Tampa Bay a few years ago.

I've said it before: I do not begrudge Jeter or any other rich person their lavish carbon-spewing lifestyle, or house, or toys. But they are going to have to do some major downsizing in those areas before I'll listen to one reeking-of-hypocrisy word about climate change from them. 

*This is all besides him being wrong on the facts.

Focus, Part 1

Another day, another example of how we as a nation fail to properly define a problem and therefore flail about instead of finding real solutions:

Gun violence is just one of many factors contributing to lower U.S. life expectancy, but the finding took on urgency because the report comes less than a month after the shooting deaths of 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents. None of the 16 other countries included in the review came anywhere close to that ratio. Finland was closest to the U.S. ranking with slightly more than two violent deaths per 100,000 residents.

The study puts the US murder rate at 6.5/100,000 while the actual rate of homicide and non-negligent manslaughter in this country is really 4.8/100,000 according to the FBI. That study uses some sort of age adjustment mumbo-jumbo that I'm somewhat skeptical about, but the real problem is how it, and so much of the discussion about violence in general and gun violence in particular, looks at the problem from such a high level.

America is not a violent nation. America is a mostly peaceful nation with pockets of primarily urban violence. And even in most of those urban areas, much of the violence is concentrated even further into smaller pockets. By looking at the issue so broadly, we not only fail to address the real problem, we also risk damaging otherwise healthy parts of our society.

Let's take a look at Minnesota first, because it's the state I am most familiar with. 

According to the FBI, in 2010 the national murder rate was 4.8/100,000 and the violent crime rate was 403.6. For Minnesota that year, the numbers were 1.8 and 236.0. If you isolate for just Minneapolis and St. Paul(668,039 people total), they jump to 7.9 and 924.6 while the rest of the state(4,635,886 people) falls to .9 and 136.7. And knowing Minneapolis and St. Paul like I do, I can tell you that we can further isolate most of the murder and violent crime to just certain neighborhoods. 

For the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans, the murder and violent crime rates are no different from the Western Europe rates that people love to cite so much.

Minnesota might be an outlier to some extent, but not by all that much. Illinois had a murder rate of 5.5 in 2010, but if you isolate just Chicago's(city proper, not metro) rate of 16.0 the rest of the state drops to 2.7. California led the nation with 1809 murders in 2010, but the top 20 reporting law enforcement agencies out of almost 400 account for more than half of that total. 

I don't have any numbers in front of me, but I bet gun violence specifically also tracks very disproportionately to particular geographic areas.  

At this point I'm sure some people are saying, "Well duh, Dave," and I understand that, but why then do our politicians and media approach the problem as though it's as prevalent across the land as it is in primarily urban hotspots?

Before I address what I think is the answer to that question in another post and also bring mass shootings into the discussion, I'll end this one by noting a couple of points.

Any violent crime is too much of course, and pockets of violence can happen anywhere, not just urban areas. Even my little city that abuts Minneapolis has some violent crime. But here and across most of the country the level of violence and murder is at or pretty near what could be understood as the human condition. Wasting efforts on those areas while people suffer in violent hellholes is immoral to an extreme.

The policy disconnect here does not go unnoticed by most gun owners and it is one reason they resist gun control so vehemently. Why should I, in my little house in my pretty peaceful little city, roughly 15 times more likely to be killed by Mother Nature than a gun, have to surrender my gun rights because violent crime is rampant in near-North/South sides of Minneapolis?

If gun control advocates would at least seriously consider that question we might be able to do something together that would have a real impact on violent crime and gun violence specifically. Assuming that's what they truly want.

Astounded

I realize it's a short clip, but can any additional context actually save this from eternal mockery?

 

Any? Any at all?

And I'm not talking about the "tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist” part, though you know what would have happened if Bush said that. No, I'm talking about government spending becoming so entrenched that even freakin' cowboy poetry has become a sacred budget line. 

If we can't cut that, can anything be cut?

Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

Your meaningless statistic of the day, brought to us courtesy of the author, one Ezra Klein:

And in the aggregate, of course, the business community spends much more than the unions — in 2010, business groups spent $1.3 billion, while unions spent $93 million.

This is one of those statistics we will see over and over and over that turns out to be just another myth of community-based reality. Why? Just follow the link directly above and see the prominently displayed disclaimer(emphasis mine):

The broadest categories that CRP uses to analyze the contributors of campaign cash are shown below. Business interests as a whole contribute far more money to candidates and political parties than do labor unions or ideological groups. Of course, business is a much bigger category than the others. However, business contributions tend to be overstated. Because CRP uses employer/occupation information to categorize donors, and because just about everyone works for a business, contributions from members of labor unions and ideological groups are often classified under business.

So, for example, a GM union worker's contribution gets classified as a business contribution. Then doesn't that sort of thing render that category somewhat meaningless as a measure of "business contributions"? 

Looking beyond bullshit artists and their meaningless statistics, further efforts at national campaign finance reform are doomed to fail because they are treating the symptom and not the disease. It's like giving a man with lung cancer a cough suppressant.

The problem is not money in politics, that's just the symptom. The disease is the enormous and growing power of the federal government to tax, spend, and increasingly regulate huge sectors of society. Of course people are going to want to influence those things, and they will spend money to do that. The more powerful the government, the more money that will be spent to influence that government. It's not rocket science. 

You want to reduce the influence of campaign contributions? First, reapply the 10th Amendment limits to the role of the federal government. Then dramatically simplify the tax code. Finally, end all payolasubsidies to industries and the pernicious market distortions that they create. Do those three things and we really would clean up government.

Hahaha...I know. It's almost like the politicians aren't sincere about that in the first place.