Hey, Mitch, change your blog's name to "a shot in the foot".

Wow! Thanks. I've screen capped the Good Guys And Gals With Guns?  post since you just made the argument for why the relaxing of concealed carry is bullshit from a practical point of view.

According to some reports, the Nashville Covenant school was not a gun free zone...

Some of the usual suspects are already trying to use this factoid to indict the idea of armed school staff:...

Even in “Stand your Ground” states, self-defense law doesn’t as a rule allow citizens to close with and engage perpetrators, acting as cops or infantry.

The proper role for an armed staffer, according to the way actual self-defense law works, is to barricade themselves and the kids they’re responsible for into a room, and be ready to shoot at a perp who comes through the door with mayhem in mind.

So, really armed citizens are as ineffective as unarmed ones since as you point out the only people who should be going after the "orcs"are the first responders. Armed citizens with handguns can only hope to stop someone with a long gun which is going to be far more accurate and have a higer velocity than their weapon. 

So, the armed citizen hopes they might get a shot off before being turned to hamburger by someone with an AR-15 or similar weapon. Which does jackshit since the progunners neglect that sometimes mass shooters have shoot outs with real trained professionals to go on to further carnage as was the case with the Columbine Shooters.

Quite likely a mass shooter could have a bullet proof vest which would protect against handgun rounds as well.

Let's toss in the armed citizen could be confused with the active shooter for good measure as to WHY someone has to have shit for brains for even buying this argument for concealed carry in the first place. Nothing like adding to the confusion by being a halfwit with a gun. 

Alas, the dumbfucks who have bought into the "pro-gun" horseshit have probably bred and are not candidates for Darwin Awards. They have progeny which we can only hope will be smarter than their parents. Emphasis on hope since I would hope most people would use their brains, but most people, especially Amerloques, tend to be intellectually challenged.

It would be nice if other pro-gunners were as honest as you. Although, it would be nice if you took your statements to their logical conclusion and realise that you are just full of shit. Also that you have been lied to by the people you see as "leaders". You are one of the sheep if you have bought into this without question.

As I like to say, the pro-gun arguments don't stand scrutiny.

And you just shot yourself in the foot.

Stop shooting in the dark, Mitch. 

And thank you from all the anti-gun organisations who now have copies of this post. You are going to be the anti-gunner poster child for this statement against interest.

You should have a serious rethink of the "pro-gun" position since deep in your subconscious you know it's a pile of horsehit.

Oh, and stop using the word "ignorant" since you obviously have no idea what it means, or you would understand the irony of your posts: this one post in particular.

Friday Fun Day - time to laugh at Conservative dishonesty, BUSTED by Factcheck.org

Trump eats crow

In this morning's Factcheck.org feed, to which I subscribe, was this about Trump's (and in his condidacy day's Cruz's) claim that Hillary Clinton was a birther.

She wasn't, and Factcheck.org documents that very well, as far back as July 2015.

Everything old is new again.  I can rely on my friend Mitch Berg, over at SitD, to demonstrate almost daily everything wrong about blogging and the right wing; specifically I can rely on him to remind me of everything I DON'T want to be as a blogger. I can also count on him to repeat every vile attack and factually false claim made by the right without substantive fact checking.

That only works where you have fact-averse conservatives who are more interested in having their prejudices stroked than in factual accuracy.  Mitch can safely rely on his many radical right wing readers to avoid fact checking as personally painful.

What makes this fun for Friday material is that Mitch yesterday quoted Factcheck.org, without a link of course, to support the current Trump claim that Hillary was the original birther.  She was not.  Here is the most recent ACTUAL Facthcheckc.org research on claims that Hillary Clinton was ever a birther.

Was Hillary Clinton the Original ‘Birther’?

Two Republican presidential candidates claim the so-called “birther” mhttps://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6337568240689378702#editor/target=post;postID=782530987619291560ovement originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008. While it’s true that some of her ardent supporters pushed the theory, there is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with it.
In an interview on June 29, Sen. Ted Cruz said “the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008,” and earlier this year, Donald Trump claimed “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther.”
Neither Cruz nor Trump presented any evidence that Clinton or anyone on her campaign ever questioned Obama’s birthplace, demanded to see his birth certificate, or otherwise suggested that Obama was not a “natural born citizen” eligible to serve as president.
For those unfamiliar with the controversy over Obama’s birthplace, it refers to those who contend that Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president.
At FactCheck.org, we have written about the issue of Obama’s birthplace on multiple occasions — indeed we were the first media organization to hold his birth certificate in our hot little hands and vouch for the authenticity of it. But facts have done little to squelch the conspiracy theories that continue to bounce around online.
(quoting Ted Cruz)
“It’s interesting, the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama,” Cruz said (at about the 25:25 mark). Cruz then went on to say that he believes he clearly meets the constitutional requirement for a president to be a “natural born citizen.”
The claim about Clinton’s tie to “birthers” was made earlier by Donald Trump in February at the CPAC event (at 24:20 mark). Trump — who has a history of pushing bogus theories about Obama’s birth —  said, “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther. She wanted … but she was unable to get it.”
According to the [Politico April 22, 2011] article, the theory that Obama was born in Kenya “first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.”
The second article, which ran several days after the Politico piece, was published by the Telegraph, a British paper, which stated: “An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.”
Both of those stories comport with what we here at FactCheck.org wrote two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”
Both of those stories comport with what we here at FactCheck.org wrote two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”
Claims about Obama’s birthplace appeared in chain emails bouncing around the Web, and one of the first lawsuits over Obama’s birth certificate was filed by Philip Berg, a former deputy Pennsylvania attorney general and a self-described “moderate to liberal” who supported Clinton.
But none of those stories suggests any link between the Clinton campaign, let alone Clinton herself, and the advocacy of theories questioning Obama’s birth in Hawaii.
One of the authors of the Politico story, Byron Tau, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told FactCheck.org via email that “we never found any links between the Clinton campaign and the rumors in 2008.”
The other coauthor of the Politico story, Ben Smith, now the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, said in a May 2013 interview on MSNBC that the conspiracy theories traced back to “some of [Hillary Clinton’s] passionate supporters,” during the final throes of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. But he said they did not come from “Clinton herself or her staff.”
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Cruz’s claim is false. “The Clinton campaign never suggested that President Obama was not born here,” Schwerin wrote to us in an email.
It is certainly interesting, and perhaps historically and politically relevant, that “birther” advocacy may have originated with supporters of Hillary Clinton — especially since many view it as an exclusively right-wing movement. But whether those theories were advocated by Clinton and/or her campaign or simply by Clinton “supporters” is an important distinction. Candidates are expected to be held accountable for the actions of their campaigns. Neither Cruz nor Trump, whose campaign did not respond to our request for backup material, provides any compelling evidence that either Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with starting the so-called birther movement.

— Robert Farley

Now over at SitD, Mitch cites the disreputable and unreliable, not credible source of Breitbart which is no more news than Fakes TV, claiming a Clinton campaign exec plotted the birtherism controversy.

NOT TRUE.  And the birther movement is nothing if not the definition of 'negative'.

As covered by a different entry from Factcheck.org that came out this afternoon specifically faulting Trump as a liar noted:

Trump on Birtherism: Wrong, and Wrong

On March 19, 2007, then Clinton adviser Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo to Clinton that identified Obama’s “lack of American roots” as something that “could hold him back.” That memo, which was part of campaign documents featured in a September 2008 article in The Atlantic, cited Obama’s “boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii” as life experiences that made his “basic American values … at best limited.” But Penn’s memo did not question Obama’s birthplace or his birth certificate. It advised Clinton to contrast her life experiences in middle America “without turning negative.”
“We are never going to say anything about his background,” Penn wrote.
Again, if there is evidence that Clinton or her campaign had something to do with the origins of the so-called birther movement, we’ve yet to see it. And Trump has never offered any proof.

Shame shame shame on the right, including local bloggers,  for trying to excuse their nominee by trying to tar someone else with his lies.  I can only speculate how many of his supporters who still believe this rubbish - because so many conservatives of the ilk who support Trump, the deplorables, DO believe lies like this - will now be discontented with their evil candidate.

Bur dishonesty is the only alternative when facts are consistently not on your side.

Chimps, Chumps, Nukes and Drumpf: the Goldwater rule

It's back!

In the 1964 election, GOP candidate Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson.  LBJ won by a landslide, with Goldwater winning only the state of Arizona and the deep southern former confederacy states.  Current GOP candidate has been striving apparently to repeat or exceed / 'trump' that bad performance in the general election in November 2016.

One of the fears about Goldwater who, like Trump, opposed civil rights legislation, was that he was also too dangerous in temperament to entrust with nukes, a concern which is again in the public square as regards Donald Trump.  And in response the APA has reiterated the Goldwater rule.

The Goldwater supporters espoused the slogan, "in your heart you know he is right", while opponents responded with "in your guts you know he's nuts".  The issue of mental health was a real one, in spite of the use of a casual slang term used to stigmatize real mental illness.  It appears to be a serious concern again.

It is worth noting, that Trump is now appearing to lose in both Arizona and the deep south, per the current polls.  The last democrat to win in Arizona and in some southern states was Bill Clinton.

At the time, the American  Psychiatric Association felt that it was necessary to issue what became known as the Goldwater rule, a rule in response to psychiatrists expressing negative opinions on the mental state of presidential nominee Goldwater in a magazine of the day.  Goldwater sued and wona law suit regarding the article.

The rule reads:

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

The television ad below, which did not run very widely at all, aired on September 7th, 1964, underlining that concern about temperament.  The timing is not all that different from the rising concerns about Trump's erratic temperament problems.



A local conservative blogger and propaganda pusher, Mitch Berg, some years ago wrote in a rant that even a chimp who was consistent with conservative thinking and policies would be more successful and more acceptable to conservatives than any liberal. It appears he got the essence of his wish in the candidacy of Trump, supported by the dumbed down extreme right that is all that really remains of the old GOP after they drove out the moderate and more liberal members, and embraced the crazy evangelical right and the more militant racists and other extremists, like the militias and sovereign citizens.  Instead of an actual chimp, the chumps, aka Trumpanzees, on the right have primaried Donald Trump into the position of nominee, along with a young earth and creationist promoting unpopular governor, Mike Pence as Veep. 

Even Goldwater rejected the crazy evangelicals, as he demonstrated with this quote:

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”

Bonus points if any of you can remember who Goldwater's VP was, or are familiar with his liberal media figure daughter.

It is unlikely that either Trump or Pence can carry their home states of New York or Indiana in the general election, much less Goldwater's home state of Arizona apparently.  The duo of dumb appear to be losing steadily, but it is still early days, giving them even more time to make unforced errors that will appeal to the chump base.  Extremism about nukes, about minorities, anti-immigrants, theocracy, etc. seems to be a cyclical problem for the right which cannot be stopped or corrected until they themselves self-destruct.

With Trump, and his supporters, the countdown has begun. Again.

Mitch Berg Fails Another Fact Check: Endemic Intellectual Dishonesty on the Right

I'm writing this because I'm annoyed, out of patience completely with the rampant intellectual dishonesty on the right.  It is a pattern, an unacceptable pattern, one which beggars any hope of honesty or progress.

Let me hasten to add that this, clearly, is not true of all conservatives; but it IS true of an appallingly large segment of the right wing politicos, and the right-wing media, including the right wing-nut blogosphere.

So to a degree, my friend Mitch is being made the whipping boy, the example, for what is a far larger offense beyond his own responsibility; but it is not completely unfair either, because Mitch also does this regularly.

This morning, Mitch wrote:

Limousine LiberalsBy Mitch Berg

Number of federally-owned limousines  Limous soars on Obama’s watch;

Limousines, the very symbol of wealth and excess, are usually the domain of corporate executives and the rich. But the number of limos owned by Uncle Sam increased by 73 percent during the first two years of the Obama administration, according to an analysis of records by iWatch New. .

In related news; Strib still biased.

So, I followed Mitch's link to the iWatch News, the source of the claims that the Obama administration is indulging in wealth and excess. The purchasing limousines claim is completely debunked, not supported, by Mitch's OWN SOURCE. 

The very site that he links to in order to make his claim says the exact opposite of what he wrote:

State Department dominates the limo count, says purchases reflect need to protect diplomats and foreign visitors in a dangerous world (caption to photo OVER headline)

Most of the increase was recorded in Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

According to General Services Administration data , the number of limousines in the federal fleet increased from 238 in fiscal 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush administration, to 412 in 2010. Much of the 73 percent increase—111 of the 174 additional limos—took place in fiscal 2009, more than eight months of which corresponded with Obama’s first year in office. However, some of those purchases could reflect requests made by the Bush administration during an appropriations process that would have begun in the spring of 2008.

The GSA said its limousine numbers are not reliable, even though the federal fleet numbers are officially recorded every year. In a statement, GSA spokeswoman Sara Merriam said, “The categories in the Fleet Report are overly broad, and the term 'limousine' is not defined,” adding that “vehicles represented as limousines can range from protective duty vehicles to sedans.” Asked whether the GSA actually knows how many limos it has in its fleet, Merriam responded that GSA “cannot say that its report accurately reflects the number of limousines.”

So, apparently, the limos that Mitch refers to aren't really limos; they're not luxury vehicles, they are sedans and vehicles for protective duty. 

And there aren't really as many of them as claimed; it is apparently a clerical category. 

And they weren't all purchased under the Obama administration, an unknown number appear to be from the Bush administration.