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The Gun Lobby Is Down to Its Last, Unconvincing Excuse |
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Thursday, 05 October 2017 08:48 |
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Taibbi writes: "According to some sources, this is the 338th mass shooting in 273 days of 2017, meaning America is now a place where at least once a day, someone shoots four or more people."
Guns and ammo on the floor of the NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky, in May 2016. (photo: Mark Peterson/Redux)
The Gun Lobby Is Down to Its Last, Unconvincing Excuse
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
05 October 17
Las Vegas rips apart the "good guy with a gun" justification, leaving only a flawed constitutional take to justify the madness
 s of this writing, the death toll in Las Vegas is 59, with over 527 injured, making it easily the deadliest gun massacre in modern U.S. history. (Characteristically, there have been some deadlier ones in the distant past, including in St. Louis in 1917 and Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873, but they're often left out of coverage because the victims were all black.)
According to some sources, this is the 338th mass shooting in 273 days of 2017, meaning America is now a place where at least once a day, someone shoots four or more people. After incidents like this, electing Donald Trump looks like a relatively minor symptom of our clearly worsening national insanity.
This latest window into our blood-sick culture may mark the end of an era. Las Vegas should push the gun lobby down to its last excuse, when it comes to justifying the marketing of military-grade weapons.
We're still in the "NRA has yet to respond" period of the story, a dependable trope in the weirdly inflexible script of these massacre tales. This "deafening NRA silence" period usually coincides with news from Wall Street showing sharp upticks in the share prices of arms manufacturers. (We've already seen this this week.)
Gun stocks always bounce in advance of surges in gun sales, which are driven by fears in prepper country of hardcore gun control legislation that, of course, never actually comes.
Such fears similarly always inspire periods of intense fundraising for pro-gun politicians and groups like the NRA. After the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children, for instance, donations for the NRA went up 350 percent over the previous year. We'll surely see a similar surge after Las Vegas.
So the more horrifying the gun disaster, the more gun companies and gun lobbyists profit. From here the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs comes violently into play. Aggressive, well-funded lobbying by an industry that claims a $49 billion impact to the national economy always trumps the relatively disorganized horror and revulsion of ordinary voters.
The dirty little secret here is that while politicians in both parties can score points with voters through verbal support for gun control, anti-gun voters tend not to punish them for not following all the way through.
George W. Bush is a classic example of a politician who had it both ways. He claimed moderate status on the issue by pledging to sign an extension of Bill Clinton's assault weapons ban if it passed Congress. But surprise, surprise, that bill never made it to his desk, and the ban expired in 2004.
Politicians tend to be very lucky when it comes to having to take brave public stands on gun issues. There are almost always just enough pro-gun converts in Congress to prevent gun control votes from having real meaning. Harry Reid, for instance, is a name Nevadans should be recalling this week, as he repeatedly aided the NRA in efforts to scuttle that same assault weapons ban.
Within the Beltway, everyone knows this game is mostly about money. The NRA, like the financial services industry or Big Pharma, is an easy source of campaign cash, and all politicians have to do to get it is master the art of selling purely commercial lobbying as heartfelt ideological advocacy.
This is relatively easy when we're talking about hunting rifles, gets dicier when the issue turns to concealed weapons, and then becomes an exercise in pure political whoring and pseudo-intellectualism once it comes to making up justifications for selling military-grade weapons to Internet shoppers.
Las Vegas is going to provide a major rhetorical challenge on that front. After all, the gun lobby's consistent response has been to argue that such killings would be avoided, or at least reduced, if more people were armed.
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," NRA chief Wayne LaPierre infamously said after Newtown.
But the shooter in Las Vegas, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, was on the 32nd floor of a casino building, a quarter-mile away from the bulk of his victims down in a concert venue on the ground. Unless the NRA plans on advocating for carry licenses for F-16s or surface-to-surface missile systems, it's hard to see how the "good guy with a gun" argument is going to fly this time.
That leaves exactly one argument the industry can use, a pure intellectual gymnastics stunt that emphasizes fealty to the sacred text, i.e., the Constitution.
The NRA, which proudly sells "Because You Can't Fist Fight Tyranny" t-shirts, will eventually come around to arguing, even if only by implication, that massacres like Las Vegas are just the price we must pay to ensure that the individual is never left defenseless against government repression.
When the industry isn't letting its guard down and marketing AR-15s to morons gearing up for the coming zombie apocalypse (this is a real thing in the gun sales world), this is the narrative gun manufacturers use to sell to ardent collectors.
Just like cigarette companies told smokers they were hunky Marlboro Men, gun manufacturers sell a thrilling image to gun owners, telling them they're bulwarks against new-world-order tyranny. The NRA even once ran an ad using Tianamen Square images. Gun activists have even been sued for using stills from schlock resistance movies like The Patriot and Braveheart.
And why not? Absent some incipient end-of-democracy apocalypse scenario, assault weapons collectors would just be a bunch of yahoos wasting their disposable incomes on products that, like the Dinty Moore beef stew cans gathering dust in their bunkers, will never be used. Unless you're collecting all those guns for a reason, it's just weird.
As gun control advocates are quick to point out, the actual Second Amendment argument is probably a canard anyway, given that it protects the rights of citizens to bear arms within the context of a "well-regulated militia." Jurists for ages interpreted that term as pertaining to groups, not individuals.
Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative nominated by Nixon, was one of those jurists. He said Second Amendment arguments were a "fraud" and believed the "right to bear arms" belonged to the states, not individuals.
But relentless propaganda to the contrary has led to a series of legal decisions that define things differently, putting the law on industry's side. In the 2007 case District of Columbia v. Heller, Antonin Scalia – a humorless monster of a judge whose two great pleasures in life appeared to be killing birds and making unsubtly racist arguments against affirmative action – wrote the Second Amendment "protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia."
Still, Scalia was explicit in Heller that even he was in favor of certain limitations. "We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of 'dangerous and unusual weapons,'" he wrote.
He also described gun ownership as a right Americans exercised not for opposing tyranny but for "traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense." But most gun owners continue to understand their rights as primarily resting on the constitutional freedom-fighter argument. Polls consistently show that majorities of gun owners believe the purpose of the Second Amendment is "protection against tyranny."
So we're down to that – we need to put up with this, because it's gun enthusiasts who will come to the rescue if this ever happens in America.
Here's my question about that. Where were all these heroic tyrannophobe gun owners during the unprecedented expansion of police and surveillance powers that took place after 9/11?
Answer: nowhere. We didn't hear them shrieking about habeas corpus becoming a joke in the Bush years, or torture and extrajudicial assassination becoming standard practices. We didn't hear them protesting the vast expansion of the classification of government documents, or complaining about the widespread abuse of material witness statutes, the national security letter provision of the Patriot Act, or a hundred other problems.
Nor did they ever protest aggressive new domestic enforcement policies like stop-and-frisk and predictive policing, for the obvious reason that those programs were mostly directed against minorities in poor neighborhoods.
The NRA has at least shown occasional consistency on these issues, among other things joining with the ACLU in a lawsuit against the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA). That was one of George Bush's final gifts to the world, a law that allowed for the virtually unlimited collection of email, text and phone data.
But for the most part, conservative pols who sucked up NRA money and helped weapons makers avoid lawsuits and other restrictions – Devin Nunes is a great example – have been wholly unconcerned with the ramifications of such laws until, ironically, tools like FISA or the NSA's section 702 surveillance program were rumored to have been used against noted gun liberty enthusiast Donald Trump.
The tyranny argument, the gun lobby's last excuse, is a joke. People aren't buying up military-grade weapons in preparation for some new-world-order Anschluss into flyover country.
Americans are just bored and crazy and insecure and like to calm their nerves by shooting bottles, Kim Jong-un paper targets, and, pretty regularly now, crowds full of innocent human beings. It's madness, and there aren't enough highly paid pseudo-intellectual gun lobbyists in the world to justify it anymore. Can we finally at least drop the pretense that this is about anything but money?
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House Republicans Advance Five Bills to Cripple Endangered Species Act |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=27201"><span class="small">Center for Biological Diversity, EcoWatch</span></a>
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Thursday, 05 October 2017 08:33 |
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Excerpt: "In party-line votes, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources, led by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), advanced five bills today that would hamstring the Endangered Species Act and condemn hundreds of species to extinction."
The Endangered Species Act saved the Gray Wolf. (photo: National Geographic)
House Republicans Advance Five Bills to Cripple Endangered Species Act
By Center for Biological Diversity, EcoWatch
05 October 17
 n party-line votes, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources, led by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), advanced five bills today that would hamstring the Endangered Species Act and condemn hundreds of species to extinction. The legislation can now move to the full House floor for further consideration.
In December, Rep. Bishop stated that his goal was to repeal the act in its entirety. These bills represent the foundation of this longstanding goal.
"These bills would put monarch butterflies, wolverines and hundreds of other imperiled animals on a fast track to extinction," said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "This legislative onslaught is a brutal, blatant effort to cripple the Endangered Species Act. The only winners would be special interests that put profits ahead of our nation's most cherished wildlife."
The House Committee on Natural Resources approved the following bills today:
- H.R. 717 by Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) would require consideration of the economic costs of protecting an animal or plant on the endangered species list and remove deadlines for completing the listing process.
- H.R. 1274 by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) would automatically deem any information submitted by a state or local government to be the "best available" science even if such information were contradictory, out-of-date or fraudulent, weakening the listing process for endangered species.
- H.R. 3131 by Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) would hamper citizen enforcement and participation in the implementation of the act's provisions. Undercutting the ability of citizens to bring lawsuits would make the agency more prone to improperly consider politics in its listing decisions and prevent imperiled species from receiving protections in a timely manner.
- H.R. 2603 by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) attempts to limit the Endangered Species Act's provisions for exotic game species that have been imported into the U.S. for trophy hunting. If taken literally, this legislation would remove the need for conservation permits of exotic game species, eliminating a critical funding source for overseas conservation of those very species.
- H.R. 424 by Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) would reinstate a 2011 decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove federal protections for gray wolves in the western Great Lakes states. In 2014, a federal judge found numerous scientific and legal deficiencies with that 2011 decision and brought back protections for gray wolves. The legislation would invalidate the court opinion and preclude all judicial review into the future.
Since January, congressional Republicans have launched 47 legislative attacks against the Endangered Species Act or particular endangered species. Since the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 2011, more than 270 attacks have been instigated.
"When it comes to the Endangered Species Act, Rep. Bishop is only interested in undermining science, stopping citizens from holding the government accountable in court and green-lighting the slaughter of wolves," said Hartl. "The American people do not support these radical attacks. They want our government to do more to help endangered species recover, just as it did with bald eagles and gray whales."
Nine out of 10 Americans support the Endangered Species Act and want it either strengthened or left unchanged by Congress, according to a 2015 poll.
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Lone Sniper in White House Wounds Secretary of State |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 04 October 2017 13:58 |
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Boardman writes: "Tweeting from the hip, the US sniper-in-chief got off a few rounds."
President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty)
Lone Sniper in White House Wounds Secretary of State
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
04 October 17
Mad Trump firing from golf resort nails Tillerson in Beijing
 e’re at the point as a country where even the renewed threat of a preemptive nuclear war on North Korea can’t compete with media coverage of the latest mass shooting in Las Vegas. What were the odds we’d end up like this?
On October 1, the hint of back-channel contact between the US and North Korea was front page news. While visiting China, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters that the US was exploring the possibility of talks with North Korea in an effort to de-escalate and eventually resolve conflict over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Tillerson said:
We are probing, so stay tuned. We asked, “Would you like to talk?” We have lines of communication to Pyongyang [the North Korean capital] — we’re not in a dark situation, a blackout. We have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang. We can talk to them. We do talk to them directly through our own channels.
This echoed Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, although Tillerson did not mention it. According to The New York Times, “Tillerson said the most important thing was to lower the temperature of the threats being exchanged in recent days between Mr. Kim and President Trump.” These included North Korea’s threat of an atmospheric test of a hydrogen bomb and Trump’s threat of genocide against 25 million Koreans. Tillerson commented dryly:
The whole situation is a bit overheated right now. If North Korea would stop firing its missiles, that would calm things down a lot…. I think everyone would like for it to calm down.
Well not everyone, as it turned out. Tweeting from the hip not a day later, the US sniper-in-chief got off a few rounds:
I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.... Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!
This, too, made front page news till it was blown away by the Las Vegas massacre. The US Secretary of State looking to calm things down is a soft story and even the President putting nuclear war back on the table has an old news quality that can’t compete with fresh blood here and now.
This turn of events prompted the Atlantic to run a story headlined: “Rex Tillerson Must Go.” The argument was that Tillerson can’t stay after being humiliated like that, since the President’s repudiation has destroyed the Secretary of State’s credibility. If Tillerson stays, Eliot Cohen argues, he will be reduced to a moral weakling and lickspittle. That assumes he’s not one now, and the record is mixed.
Others suggested that Trump and Tillerson are playing good cop, bad cop, an analogy that’s hard to apply, since the resulting confusion only leaves North Korea scratching its head. More likely they’re playing bad cop, worse cop. Most likely they’re not playing anything conceptualized and coordinated. Tillerson seems to be trying to be the grown-up in the room, and Trump is having none of it.
And at about 6 a.m. on October 4, NBC News ran a story with this hopeful headline: “Tillerson’s Fury at Trump Required an Intervention From Pence.” But it was not a current story, it was a mostly hyped-up report of a July meeting in a secure room in the Pentagon where Tillerson, meeting with top national security officials, called Trump a “moron” and wanted to resign, but the Vice President talked him out of it. That report was based on anonymous sources, some of whom were in the secure room. Now everyone, including Tillerson, denies he called the President a “moron.” There has been no denial that the President is a moron. A few hours after the NBC story broke, Tillerson called a news conference to affirm his loyalty to the President. Refusing to address the “moron” element, calling it “petty nonsense,” Tillerson said:
I have never considered leaving this post…. I have answered that question repeatedly. For some reason it continues to be mis-reported. There has never been a consideration in my mind to leave. I serve at the appointment of the President and I’m here for as long as the President feels I can be useful to achieving his objectives.
Tillerson has performed as Trump’s faithful toady in his adoration of totalitarian Saudi Arabia, his praise for the emerging dictatorship in Turkey, and his support for selling F-16s to the police state of Bahrain. At other times, Tillerson has put on a show of being independent and clearheaded, as in a late August interview where Chris Wallace questioned whether the US still lives by traditional American values:
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s values or the commitment of the American government or the government’s agencies to advancing those values and defending those values.”
Chris Wallace: “And the president’s values?”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “The president speaks for himself, Chris.”
To pretend that the commander-in-chief speaks only for himself is truly whistling past the graveyard. And Tillerson has done that before, in early August, when he played the minimization card instead of the calm-things-down card:
I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days. I think the president, again, as commander-in-chief — think he felt it necessary to issue a very strong statement directly to North Korea.
This was the same time that Secretary of Defense James Mattis was joining Trump in threatening a nuclear attack, as reported by Democracy Now:
Defense Secretary James Mattis threatened a nuclear attack. On Wednesday, Mattis warned North Korea not to take any action that could result in the “end of its regime” and the “destruction of its people.” His comments came a day after Trump startled the world — and, reportedly, his own advisers — threatening North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
A month earlier, perhaps just by coincidence, Tillerson moved to shut the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice that worked to hold war criminals accountable for their war crimes, of which a first strike nuclear war would be one. What was that Tillerson was saying about American values? As David Scheffer, who was the first US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, said: “This sends a strong signal to perpetrators of mass atrocities that the United States is not watching you anymore.” This news broke the same day that a Human Rights Watch report described US complicity in a torture regime in southern Yemen. Run by the United Arab Emirates, an ally of Saudi Arabia in the US-backed genocidal war on Yemen, the torture program is run in a secret network of prisons operated on behalf of the Yemeni government-in-exile in Saudi Arabia — all of which comprises a nexus of international war crimes that the US has supported for more than two years.
Back in April there was an earlier run of the North Korea nuclear war bait and switch. Then Trump fulminated: “There’s a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with North Korea. Absolutely.” At the same time, Tillerson was soft-shoeing about the US being open to negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear program. Pay no attention to what we say, watch what we do.
That was also when the THAAD missile defense program made a brief appearance in the news. THAAD is expensive military technology intended to intercept short range missiles heading for South Korea, especially the capital, Seoul. THAAD’s reliability is uncertain. THAAD is useless against the major threat to Seoul, massive North Korean artillery batteries some 30 miles away. But it is a provocation to North Korea. The US more or less forced an unwilling South Korea to accept some THAAD batteries, then secretly installed more than South Korea had agreed to. In late April, Trump started demanding that South Korea pay the US $1 billion for the unwanted THAAD installation, or else the US might cancel a free trade deal between the two countries.
What is that called? A shakedown? Extortion? New York real estate dealing?
Meanwhile at the State Department, Tillerson has gone for months with staff positions unfilled amid reports of the agency functioning uncertainly, with chronic low morale. Tillerson has long endorsed significant budget cuts at State with little public discussion of the reasoning or the consequences. General James Mattis, not Secretary of Defense, once said, “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, than I need to buy more ammunition.”
Back in March, while visiting Seoul, Tillerson took a hard line on North Korea: “Let me be very clear: The policy of strategic patience has ended. We’re exploring a new range of diplomatic, security and economic measures. All options are on the table.”
Tillerson just does his job and maybe Exxon gets to drill in the Arctic some day.
Now it all makes a kind of sense, maybe. The policy of strategic patience ended just as South Korea elected a new president committed to talking to the North. The US could lose control of such bi-lateral negotiations. Create enough fear and uncertainty all around and everyone has to buy more military hardware, even unwanted, ineffective missile defense systems. Let the good times roll, right up to the brink of Armageddon, whoo-eee!
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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A Supreme Court Justice Plays the Fake News Game |
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Wednesday, 04 October 2017 13:48 |
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Milbank writes: "Why would Alito resort to this sleight of hand? Perhaps because it's clear that if he stuck to the facts, he'd have to acknowledge that the growing abuse of gerrymandering threatens democracy."
Protesters gather outside the Supreme Court. (photo: Olivier Doulier/Getty)
ALSO SEE: Jeffrey Toobin | Ginsburg
Slaps Gorsuch in Gerrymandering Case
A Supreme Court Justice Plays the Fake News Game
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
04 October 17
 ake news has come to the high court.
At Tuesday’s argument before the Supreme Court about gerrymandering — the science of using map-drawing and Big Data to keep ruling parties in power even when a majority votes for the opposition — Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was searching for a way to uphold the unsavory practice. But there was a problem: Gerrymandering is making a mockery of the right to vote in Wisconsin, the focus of the case before the court, where a redrawn map allowed Republicans to hold more than 60 percent of the state assembly while getting less than half the vote.
And so Alito resorted to subterfuge. He waited until the closing minutes and hit Paul M. Smith, the lawyer arguing against the Wisconsin plan, with the last question of the argument.
“You paint a very dire picture about gerrymandering and its effects,” Alito said, “but I was struck by something in the seminal article by your expert, Mr.?McGhee, and he says there, ‘I show that the effects of party control on bias are small and decay rapidly, suggesting that redistricting is at best a blunt tool for promoting partisan interests.’ So he was wrong in that?”
The question baffled Smith, who said he would need to see the context.
“Well,” Alito retorted, “that’s what he said.”
No, it isn’t.
I called Eric McGhee, the expert, after the argument. The quote Alito pulled was not from the “seminal article” McGhee co-wrote proposing the legal standard for gerrymandering at the center of the case. It was from an earlier McGhee paper, using data from the 1970s through 1990s. In the paper at the center of the case, by contrast, “we used updated data from the 2000s,” McGhee told me, “and the story is very different. It’s gotten a lot worse in the last two cycles. .?.?. The data are clear.”
Why would Alito resort to this sleight of hand? Perhaps because it’s clear that if he stuck to the facts, he’d have to acknowledge that the growing abuse of gerrymandering threatens democracy.
Political gerrymandering has become dramatically more precise in disenfranchising voters with the revolution in data analytics — both in states such as Wisconsin and in Congress, where Democrats need to win the popular vote by more than seven points to break even in the House. (Democrats abuse gerrymandering too, though they hold power in fewer states.) There’s also no obvious legal reason that the court can’t intervene to curb the practice on grounds of free speech or equal protection.
“What’s really behind all of this,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said during arguments, is “the precious right to vote. If you can stack a legislature in this way, what incentive is there for a voter to exercise his vote?”
Smith predicted that if the court fails to intervene in Wisconsin, “you’re going to have a festival of copycat gerrymandering the likes of which this country has never seen. .?.?. The country is going to lose faith in democracy.”
Three members of the court’s conservative bloc — Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch and John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice — were searching for reasons not to intervene. (A fourth, the silent Clarence Thomas, previously voted against court involvement.) That likely leaves the decision to Anthony M. Kennedy, who is more prone to bouts of fairness than his conservative colleagues.
But even opponents didn’t defend gerrymandering (Alito called it “distasteful”) as much as they probed for excuses to leave it alone. Roberts described as “sociological gobbledygook” the data that show how Democratic votes were thrown away by being packed into a few districts (which aggravates a natural trend toward urban supermajorities for Democrats).
And, in an unusual soliloquy, the chief justice argued that the court shouldn’t get involved in the Wisconsin case because then it would have to intervene in others. “It’s going to be a problem here across the board,” he lamented.
The poor dears. Maybe, given that democracy is at stake, they could shorten their summer holiday, which just ended Monday?
Roberts continued: “The intelligent man on the street” will deduce that, if the Supreme Court rules with Democrats in a gerrymandering case, “it must be because the Supreme Court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans. .?.?. And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country.”
Now he’s worried about the public standing of the court? After Bush v. Gore, campaign finance rulings that give the wealthy dominance over elections, and the brazen politics of the Merrick Garland fiasco?
In the gerrymandering case, the justices have a chance to restore “integrity” by defending the principle of one person, one vote. Alternatively, the five Republican appointees can defend their patrons by allowing this perversion of democracy to continue.
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y Proposal to Repeal the Second Amendment and Replace It With This:
