maybe i am an easy grader

I pay school taxes so you people's spawn will be locked up during the day.

I am going to say that was never true. Kids have been moved along in schools since they were invented.

And the spawn will someday pay your social security and medicare. Funny how that works.

And the spawn will someday pay your social security and medicare. Funny how that works.

folks knock the speaker here regularly but he is the only one on his side who has nothing to gain and everything to lose by getting a deal done. he is doing it because he thinks it is right

zonk

don't underestimate the impact of cote, the ceo of honeywell. there was a meeting about 2 weeks ago and when the tea party reps laid out their proposed plan of going over the cliff and then holding the country hostage to a debt ceiling limit which they thought could drag out until mid-year cote allegedly told them they had no idea on how a modern economy functions and then turned to senator mcconnell and asked, 'who are these clowns?'

if i am repeating myself i apologize. but i relish that story and hope it's true

folks knock the speaker here regularly but he is the only one on his side who has nothing to gain and everything to lose by getting a deal done. he is doing it because he thinks it is right

The paper also estimated that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people results in a 35 to 50 percent decline in the homicide rate, but because of the low number of homicides in Australia normally, this finding isn’t statistically significant.

you should be glad that the guy in the speaker's chair is a dealmaker. if he wasn't this discussion would be very different and to the detriment of everyone

So did Joe slither away in embarrassment after his tone-deaf rant against teacher salaries on the day tales of the Newtown teachers' bravery and selfless heroism continued to pile up? Or is that too much to expect?

In the pantheon of crazy, I like the magic platinum coin idea better.

There's probably a lot of ground to agree on things like transportation and storage, but who can blame the gun owners for being suspicious?

I can. I'm sick of paranoid nuttery, and am under no obligation to pay it heed. I don't give two flying ##### about their "suspicions."

Personally, I don't find this to be a convincing argument to limit a right - I believe any competent adult has to right to end their life. I am in favor of much more severe punishments for parents that have kids that access their guns to commit suicide.

In the pantheon of crazy, I like the magic platinum coin idea better.

I suspect Joe is skulking in the shadows, ignoring this forum until his preferred narratives and talking points are not so obviously noxious to the general public.

Anyone know anything about Tim Scott? He's a Teaper, so I assume he's insane, but there's some pleasure to be had in seeing even a crazy-eyed TP kook of a black man take Strom Thurmond's old seat.

Not to rag on Joe ... the real cowards here are the NRA. They have gone fetal on social media and with the press. If you believe something then say it, stand up, but no they are cowards waiting for people to forget. It is likely the smart thing to do, but it is also cowardly.

In other words, you just don't like gun rights.

If the NRA instead spoke up and gave their position of gun rights, then you'd get angry about them being tone deaf, no doubt.

If you want to look at paranoid nuttery, the bleating from many on the left about how progressive indexing and raising the retirement age will destroy Social Security is a pretty good one, too.

If you want to look at paranoid nuttery, the bleating from many on the left about how progressive indexing and raising the retirement age will destroy Social Security is a pretty good one, too.

The White House offer marks a major shift for the president—Mr. Obama since his first run for the White House has campaigned to allow Bush-era tax rates to expire for households making above $250,000—and raises the question of whether he will be able to sell such a deal to his own party.

As part of the offer, the president lowered the amount of tax revenue he is seeking in a deal from $1.4 trillion to $1.2 trillion. He also agreed to accept a GOP proposal to slow Social Security growth by using a different inflation formula to calculate cost-of-living increases, people familiar with the matter said.

I hope that O continues to push for the payroll tax extension and the unemployment benefits. He's showing himself to be pretty skillful when negotiating in the lame duck.

The payroll tax extension is all but dead... might as well kiss that one goodbye, it ain't surviving any deal.

But it's SO stimulative AND it's a tax cut! Ezra Klein is reporting that infrastructure stimulus is likely, but that still can't possibly be as effective as eliminating an ultra-regressive tax. Can we negotiate removal of the payroll tax cap instead? That sounds more up Boehner's means-testing friendly alley.

And I do think it is important not to risk another recession. I understand and agree with the idea that the so-called fiscal cliff/fiscal slope shouldn't spark an immediate recession, but I'm not sure that my view is determinative; if most people think it sparks a recession, then it can spark one purely based on misunderstanding. And I think it's valuable for president, party, and nation not to do that. If it helps the Republicans, too, so be it.

So, when they aggressively defended gun rights after Columbine, you stood up and applauded them for their courage?

3539 manages to pull off the difficult trick of surprising me with the level of potential right wing crazy in the world.

Amid an intense debate over gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Connecticut, the federal agency at the heart of firearms regulation in America is so beleaguered and under-resourced that it has not had a confirmed director in six years.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a division of the Justice Department, is supposed to regulate the nation’s gun industry. But many within ATF say it is the industry that dominates the agency.

The gun lobby, concerned about government regulation of firearms ownership, has taken steps to limit the resources available to ATF and to prevent the agency from having a strong leader, according to former and current ATF officials.

For decades, the National Rifle Association has lobbied successfully to block all attempts to computerize records of gun sales, arguing against any kind of national registry of firearms ownership. And despite the growth of the gun industry and the nation’s population, ATF has fewer agents today than it did nearly four decades ago: fewer than 2,500....

President Obama’s nominee to be ATF’s permanent director is Andrew Traver, who oversees the bureau’s Chicago office. But his nomination has been stalled in the Senate for two years because Traver raised the ire of the gun lobby with comments it has characterized as anti-firearm. The NRA, which immediately opposed his nomination, has said Traver is linked to gun-control advocates and anti-gun activities in Chicago.

No permanent ATF director has been on the job in the six years since Congress required that the position be confirmed by the Senate. That action allowed the gun lobby to have a say on Capitol Hill about the agency’s leadership, according to ATF officials.

Even Michael J. Sullivan, a former U.S. attorney in Boston nominated by President George W. Bush, could not get confirmed. He was blocked by three senators who accused him of being hostile to gun dealers. One of the senators was a member of the NRA’s board of directors....

Past and current Justice Department officials say the gun lobby has further hampered the work of ATF by moving to block the government’s attempts to put gun-ownership records into an easily accessible computer database. When guns are used in crimes, such as the massacre in Newtown, Conn., ATF employees must go through an antiquated, laborious process, mostly done by hand, to trace the firearms to the stores where they were bought.

Susan Shannon, author of Short Little Rebel, uses Bible Scripture and God's inspiration to analyze both national & international news

Anyone know anything about Tim Scott? He's a Teaper, so I assume he's insane, but there's some pleasure to be had in seeing even a crazy-eyed TP kook of a black man take Strom Thurmond's old seat.

Though I'm not sure if the LIBOR intimidating through turning sons into mass killers thing is a particularly right-wing thing.

So, when they aggressively defended gun rights after Columbine, you stood up and applauded them for their courage?


You can disagree with them after Columbine and still think they are cowards for not defending their positions after Newtown.

So, when they aggressively defended gun rights after Columbine, you stood up and applauded them for their courage?

Some highlights. I am not a fan.

What a bizarre conversation this is. The NRA is an advocacy group; why on earth should they care if people who hate and fear them don't like their tactics? If the BMs of the world are complaining about the NRA being cowards, it's probably evidence that whatever they're doing is effective and well-advised.

If the BMs of the world are complaining about the NRA being cowards, it's probably evidence that whatever they're doing is effective and well-advised.

The NRA is an advocacy group; why on earth should they care if people who hate and fear them don't like their tactics?

I doubt anyone but the deep right wingers would be a fan of a Teaper House rep getting promoted to Senate,

Not really. At its core, it's a cowardly, clownish, and extremist organization dedicated to helping men compensate for their own inadequacies by "bearing arms."

For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls.

Bryant was one of them, and he remembers one incident very clearly when a Predator drone was circling in a figure-eight pattern in the sky above Afghanistan, more than 10,000 kilometers (6,250 miles) away. There was a flat-roofed house made of mud, with a shed used to hold goats in the crosshairs, as Bryant recalls. When he received the order to fire, he pressed a button with his left hand and marked the roof with a laser. The pilot sitting next to him pressed the trigger on a joystick, causing the drone to launch a Hellfire missile. There were 16 seconds left until impact.

"These moments are like in slow motion," he says today. Images taken with an infrared camera attached to the drone appeared on his monitor, transmitted by satellite, with a two-to-five-second time delay.

With seven seconds left to go, there was no one to be seen on the ground. Bryant could still have diverted the missile at that point. Then it was down to three seconds. Bryant felt as if he had to count each individual pixel on the monitor. Suddenly a child walked around the corner, he says.

Second zero was the moment in which Bryant's digital world collided with the real one in a village between Baghlan and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.

"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

So does my right to bear arms include the right to bear drones?

And in general being percieved as cowardly is bad for any advocacy group. It is much better to be respected as tough guys than thought of as a bunch of cowards. It is hard to make people take you seriously if they think you are yellow bellied pigs who duck from a fight - that is just political reality.

The smart move is to let emotions cool down and wait for people to get some much needed perspective.

How's the Patriot Act working out for us?

Not when it's just concern trolling, which this is. The smart move is to let emotions cool down and wait for people to get some much needed perspective. The Newtown shootings, while a great tragedy for those affected, is an outlier event and not particularly meaningful for society as a whole. Children are still much, MUCH more likely to drown in a swimming pool, poison themselves with household chemicals/drugs or perish in a car accident than die in a school shooting. It's just not a meaningful danger statistically speaking; certainly not one worth giving up Constitutional rights for.

Whenever some outlier event occurs that results in lots of deaths, Americans line up to give their rights and freedoms to the government in exchange for "security," and it's never a good idea. How's the Patriot Act working out for us?

I don't disagree...

If 2/3 of the economy is consumer spending, it makes the most sense to put more money into the pockets of people who live hand-to-mouth...

However, as a stalwart defender of Social Security -- I also recognize that we can't have it both ways. I believe in the program - but I also believe in paying for it. Social Security's finances are in decent enough shape that it can certainly afford the revenue hit for a while longer, but the longer the revenue cut is in place -- the harder it becomes to undo. As much as I would like to find a way to extend it, I think I'd have to find the revenue elsewhere to do so.

...and frankly, on a purely personal level - it's probably the part of the equation that has the most direct and immediate impact on my own paycheck.

And in general being percieved as cowardly is bad for any advocacy group. It is much better to be respected as tough guys than thought of as a bunch of cowards. It is hard to make people take you seriously if they think you are yellow bellied pigs who duck from a fight - that is just political reality.


Not when it's just concern trolling, which this is.

"Did we just kill a kid?" he asked the man sitting next to him.

"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.

"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.

Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.

They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?

If it's this stupid fundie/teaper #### about the end of times, or resisting "tyranny," you can understand why it should be paid no heed ... right?

Children are still much, MUCH more likely [die from things that have intended, non-lethal uses] than die [from something that is only made for killing].

I believe any competent adult has to right to end their life.

Whenever some outlier event occurs that results in lots of deaths, Americans line up to give their rights and freedoms to the government in exchange for "security," and it's never a good idea. How's the Patriot Act working out for us?

Not when it's just concern trolling, which this is.

In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with "concerns". The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you're an ally. Concern trolls who use fake identities are sometimes known as sockpuppets.

What bothers me most about that law, is the asinine name given to it by Congress

And if the gun owners believed that argument was made in good faith, rather than made from the same people who advocate for complete bans and overturning of Heller, to be followed by the next incremental "compromise" and the next one, there would be more grounds for down-to-earth pragmatism to take sway.

The lobby wouldn't, but you'd get more support from the public and the types of Republicans that get elected to governorships.

The lobby wouldn't, but you'd get more support from the public and the types of Republicans that get elected to governorships. I know plenty of gun owners that aren't crazy Obama=socialist crazies but are suspicious of the motives of the most strident gun control advocates. It's part of the reason why Democrats like Tester and Manchin exist.

The talk of new gun control measures that has followed Friday's mass shooting in a Newtown, Conn., elementary school has gun owners rushing to the nearest store and picking up new weapons, according to gun store owners and state police background check information.

On Saturday, Virginia state police fielded 4,166 requests for background checks, a 42 percent increase from the same Saturday last year and the highest number of transactions received in a single day since the program was implemented in 1989. Sunday's 1,828 background checks in Virginia represented a 43 percent increase from a year ago. Colorado also set a one-day record for background checks on Saturday with 4,200, the highest number since the program began in 1999.

Paul Decker, the owner of Hunters' Heaven in Hayes, Va., said he saw a big spike in sales over the weekend, with many customers buying the AR type of rifle allegedly used in the Newtown shooting. Gun control advocates want AR and other semi-automatic rifles banned, returning to the Bill Clinton-era policy that was the law of the land from 1994 to 2004. Also flying off the shelves were high-capacity magazines and ammunition, over fears Congress could vote to limit them.

"The people that would normally buy a box [of ammo] are buying four or five boxes," Decker said.

buy ammo?

phshaw. make your own.....chumps

Do you cast your own lead Harvey?

And a massive meteor shower or asteroid could hit Earth, too. That doesn't mean individuals have the right to possess a private arsenal of weaponry in preparation therefor.

When it came time to formally cast their votes in the presidential race, three Arizona electors, including the Chair of the state Republican party, raised concerns about Barack Obama’s eligibility to be president.

On Monday, the state’s eleven electors officially cast their votes for Mitt Romney – but three of them said they still have questions about the President’s birth certificate. ”I’m not satisfied with what I’ve seen,” said Tom Morrissey, state GOP chair. ”I think for somebody in the president’s position to not have produced a document that looks more legitimate, I have a problem with that.”

“My issue isn’t whether he was born here,” he told KFYI radio on Monday. “I have questions [the birth certificate]. … You know, I have a law enforcement background. I come at this with a little different perspective. It just doesn’t ring right with me.”

According to KNAU.org, Arizona’s public radio station, another elector, Don Ascoli, compared questions about Obama’s birth certificate to the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal. ”The majority of the people had no dream that Bill Clinton did what he did until a young lady had a blue dress and proved he did,” he said. “And he had to come out and apologize to the world because he lied to you and me.”

If you don't limit it to shootings at schools, you end up with different numbers. Just under 3000 kids 19 and under died by firearm in 2007; 1000 died by drowning. The biggest killer of non-infants remains car accidents, and why we don't treat that as a bigger crisis, I don't know.

The "Consititutional" right extends only to guns necessary for self-defense. Even that's a wacko interpretation of the Second Amendment, but we'll stipulate its validity as the law of the land for these purposes.

The kids were killed by guns to which the mother did not have a constitutional right to possess or use.

Let me sum up TGF's position:

"I can't buy and bear an M-16? Okay. No problems."

"I can't buy and bear a .223 with an extended clip? TYRANNY!!"

Just stupid at the heart of the matter, really.