Month: December 2012

Just When You Thought the NRA Could not be Any More Contemptible………

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While the NRA was condemning violent video games, it was also bankrolling the same games:

As Electronic Arts prepared to market Medal of Honor Warfighter, the latest version of its top-selling video game released in October, it created a Web site that promoted the manufacturers of the guns, knives and combat-style gear depicted in the game.

Among the video game giant’s marketing partners on the Web site were the McMillan Group, the maker of a high-powered sniper’s rifle, and Magpul, which sells high-capacity magazines and other accessories for assault-style weapons.

Links on the Medal of Honor site allowed visitors to click through on the Web sites of the game’s partners and peruse their catalogs.

“It was almost like a virtual showroom for guns,” said Ryan Smith, who contributes to the Gameological Society, an online gaming magazine. After Mr. Smith and other gaming enthusiasts criticized the site, Electronic Arts disabled the links, saying it had been unaware of them.

The video game industry was drawn into the national debate about gun violence last week when the National Rifle Association accused producers of violent games and movies of helping to incite the type of mass shooting that recently left 20 children and six adults dead at a school in Newtown, Conn.

While studies have found no connection between video games and gun violence, the case of Medal of Honor Warfighter illustrates how the firearms and video game industries have quietly forged a mutually beneficial marketing relationship.

Many of the same producers of firearms and related equipment are also financial backers of the N.R.A. McMillan, for example, is a corporate donor to the group, and Magpul recently joined forces with it in a product giveaway featured on Facebook. The gun group also lists Glock, Browning and Remington as corporate sponsors.

Seriously, these f%$#s make Dick Cheney look like Mother Theresa.*

*FWIW, I’m not a big fan of Mother Theresa, though I am not has extreme about this as Christopher Hitchens was.

It;s the Hypocrisy, Stupid

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Me Like Republican Mug Shots

Senator Mike Crapo was just busted for drunk driving:

Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho was arrested early Sunday and charged with driving under the influence in a suburb of Washington, D.C., the authorities said.

Mr. Crapo, a Republican, was pulled over after his vehicle ran a red light, the police in Alexandria said. He failed field sobriety tests and was arrested about 12:45 a.m., said a police spokesman, Jody Donaldson, and then was taken to the Alexandria jail and released on an unsecured $1,000 bond about 5 a.m.

“There was no refusal” to take sobriety tests, Mr. Donaldson said, and “no accident, no injuries.”

“Just a traffic stop that resulted in a D.U.I.,” he said.

The police said Mr. Crapo, who was alone in his vehicle, had registered a blood alcohol content of 0.11 percent. The legal limit in Virginia is 0.08 percent.

Mr. Crapo, 61, has a Jan. 4 court date.

“I am deeply sorry for the actions that resulted in this circumstance,” he said in a statement on Sunday night. “I made a mistake for which I apologize to my family, my Idaho constituents and any others who have put their trust in me. I accept total responsibility and will deal with whatever penalty comes my way in this matter. I will also undertake measures to ensure that this circumstance is never repeated.”

So, why is hypocrisy an issue?

It’s not because he’s a Mormon. There is no reason to expect anyone to observe all the manners of observance of their religions, bur rather it is because he describes described himself as a Mormon who abstains from drinking alcohol.

It was a politically expedient lie about a moral position, and as such it is appropriate to invoke the “H-word”.

Talk About Irony

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Over at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, JR was discussing banging his head against a wall a discussion with his right-wing father over gun control.

In describing the discussion, he wrote the following:

I do think its a complicated question and gun control is only part of it. We have other nations with high gun ownership and not as many rampages. I do think that we need to approach the mental health angle, the question of how our society makes people crazy in the first place, etc.

It’s kind of like fire-fighting. Having firemen is a good thing but building places like tinderboxes is also a big problem. Having no building codes is a problem. There are a lot of ways to mitigate against fire before it ever happens. But the f%$#ing NRA is like any other industry advocacy group trying to prevent reform because it costs money. The f%$#ing car companies said we couldn’t afford safety equipment in cars. Manufacturers said OSHA standards would be too expensive to comply with. Maimed workers are the cost of doing business.

(%$# mine)

It’s a valid point.

Today though, it’s fraught with irony, because earlier today, some whack-job set a fire in Webster, NY and ambushed the firefighters who responded, shooting two of them dead.

Seriously, f%$# the NRA.

Better yet, don’t f%$# the NRA, or more specifically don’t f%$# NRA members.  Take the example of Lysistrata.

Hunting for a Cat With a Chain Saw.

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Ambiguity, the Devil’s Vollyball

No, I have the chain saw, not the cat.

As you are probably aware, one of our cats, Hummus, has gone missing.

We believe that she is hanging with the local feral cats, who use a heavily overgrown area that sits on a space between our back yard, and that of our back yard neighbor. It was created by an easement for phone lines.

So, at a minimum, I needed to clear the heavy growth on the slope leading to our fence, the unused area acts as a sort of a reservoir, hence the use of a chain saw.

It’s so much fun starting a small two stroke motor, let me tell you.

Thank You CIA, for Preserving Polio

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You see, the Taliban is targeting workers on the UN Polio eradication program, because they claim that they are CIA spies.

The problem here is that the CIA has, and has probably continued, to use vaccination programs as a part of the intelligence gathering process:

Back in 2000 I shared a train cabin from Amsterdam to Munich with an Afghan man who, when he learned I was a journalist, pleaded with me to communicate to the American public that the CIA had to stop destroying his country and rebuild it instead. “They have so much power,” I recall him saying. I reacted with the tolerant and condescending attitude of the Western liberal. The real sources of Afghan misery, obviously, were tribal, political and religious rivalry, and while it was tempting for people with lower levels of political understanding to blame a foreign mastermind for their troubles, such conspiratorial thinking was actually part of the problem in the Mideast, as in Eastern Europe. Right?

Afghanistan and Pakistan are where liberalism goes to die. In the years since, it’s become increasingly clear that my traveling companion was at least partially right: when trying to explain a social or political event in Afghanistan or Pakistan, it’s entirely rational to assume that it stems from a plot by an intelligence agency, quite likely the CIA. The sickest confirmation of this point was the recent revelation that the CIA ran an operation to verify Osama bin Laden’s location by gathering DNA samples through a false-flag hepatitis B vaccination programme. As James Fallows notes, American officials are defending this operation, not denying it.

This is despicable and stupid.

I would use the term evil, a term that I have increasingly applied to various actors in the United States state security apparatus, though one could also use the quote from (probably) Tallyrand, “It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake.”

Worst………Speaker………Ever

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You cannot negotiate with him, because, when push comes to shove, he is completely incapable of delivering the votes, even on a meaningless vote that was intended to call out a President that his caucus hates:

I just finished laughing from this spectacle on the House floor today. The House leadership tried desperately to pass “Plan B,” the main part of which was an extension of the Bush tax cuts on the first $1 million of income. In truth, all of the other giveaways in it would actually result in lower taxes for many wealthy earners, but tax rates have this weird power, especially within the Republican caucus. And you could just feel today that conservatives weren’t willing to pass the bill, even at that ridiculously high level. John Boehner and the leadership added a sweetener in the form of a package that eliminated the sequester on defense spending and applied it to more discretionary spending cuts, and even that barely passed, tainted by the association to Plan B.

We waited for a vote. And waited. Then the House Republicans held a closed caucus. And then Boehner had to come out and call the whole thing off.

The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass. Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff. The House has already passed legislation to stop all of the January 1 tax rate increases and replace the sequester with responsible spending cuts that will begin to address our nation’s crippling debt. The Senate must now act.

This is astonishing. Boehner spent three days talking up Plan B, which you just don’t do without the votes in hand. But conservative groups rule the House, and they turned against a bill that gives tax breaks to everyone making up to $1 million, along with enough reductions in other taxes to soften the blow for those poor millionaires. But House Republicans just aren’t going to do it, on this or any tax increase.

Seriously, negotiating with John Boehner is over the budget like negotiating with the Tatyana Egorova, coach of FC Rossiyanka, the leading Russian women’s soccer team over nuclear arms reductions.

Even if you assume good faith negotiations, they simply cannot deliver on their promises.

2 Manny Guns, Sulushen iz Moar Gunz

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So, the NRA has finally made a statement about how to prevent more gun deaths, at schools, and their solution is lots of people with high powered weapons, and if that gets too expensive, they are suggesting amateur volunteers with guns:

After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country, implicating violent video games, the news media and lax law enforcement as being far more to blame for the recent rash of mass shootings than guns.

 “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A. vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, “N.R.A. Killing Our Kids.”

 The N.R.A.’s plan for countering school shootings, coming a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was met with widespread derision from school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some critics calling it “delusional” and “paranoid.” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican, said arming schools would not make them safer.

 Even conservative politicians who had voiced support this week for arming more school officers did not rush to embrace the N.R.A.’s plan.

………

 Mr. LaPierre said his organization would fund and develop a program called the National Model School Shield Program, to work with schools to arm and train school guards, including retired police officers and volunteers. The gun rights group named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who has been a strong supporter, to lead a task force to develop the program.

………

 But what the N.R.A. proposed would expand the use of armed officers nationwide and make greater use of not just police officers, but armed volunteers — including retired police officers and reservists — to patrol school grounds. The organization offered no estimates of the cost.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, you want any Johnny off the street and hang out with MY children?  I don’t think so.

Tell you what, how we levy a tax on gun and ammunition sales to cover all this sh%$?

BTW, the Universe is having nothing of Mr. LaPierre’s bullshit. As they were giving their non-press conference (no questions allowed), another mass shooting was happening in Pennsylvania, and it happened despite the presence in the area of peace officers with guns:

The National Rifle Association today held its first press conference since last week’s deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, and the takeaway was clear: We need more guns.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” said NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

He went on to call for an armed police officer to be stationed in “every single school” across America to prevent further mass shootings, as critics tried to point out that armed law enforcement officials might not be the panacea the NRA thinks it is.

But before they could finish their sentence, the counterargument made itself as news broke of a mass shooting event in Pennsylvania with multiple casualties, including state troopers.

According to local reports out of Blair County, at least four people were killed and five more were injured in a shooting spree near Altoona. The gunman is said to be among the dead, and at least two state troopers were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

WPXI’s Courtney Brennan says she was told by emergency officials that the shooting suspect “was ‘mobile’ at one point and went up and down a rural road and shot victims.”

No additional information is available at this time, but a spokeswoman told the Altoona Mirror it was “a relatively large crime scene.”

Seriously, The Onion needs to shut down and lay off all of its own staff, because they have been trumped by the world we actually have.

Obama Will Definitely Nominate Hagel for Secretary of Defense

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How do I know this, because in 1998, Chuck Hagel aggressively gay bashed James Hormel when he was nominated to be ambassador to Luxemberg:

The nation’s largest LGBT rights group on Thursday called “unacceptable” comments former Sen. Chuck Hagel made in 1998 opposing a Clinton administration nominee because he was “openly aggressively gay.”

The 14-year-old comments about Clinton’s nominee to be ambassador to Luxembourg, James Hormel, came to light Thursday as Hagel is a front-runner to be nominated by President Obama for defense secretary in his second term.

Human Rights Campaign spokesman Michael Cole-Schwartz also said, however, that “we do not know … how [Hagel’]s views have evolved over time” and that the group “look[s] forward to hearing from Senator Hagel on these issues should he be nominated.”

The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which works to support out LGBT presidential appointees, noted that times have changed since Hormel’s nomination.

This would not be a SecDef who will move aggressively on removing the last vestiges of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” from the military.

His nomination, absent a serious and sincere mea culpa, would be a finger in the eye of the LGBT community, which would give Obama the sort of “Sister Souljah moment” opportunity that he loves so much, which is why I think Hagel will be nominated by Obama.

If You Spend the Better Part of a Decade Sh%$ting on a Profession………

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It appears to me that if you are going to do your level best to be horrible to teachers, and to make their lives a living hell, it’s Probably not a good idea to let them bring firearms to work and to give them military training:

Tennessee has emerged this week as a center of the “the answer is more guns in schools” sentiment following the Newtown, Conn. elementary school shooting.

A member of the Republican-controlled legislature plans during its upcoming session to introduce a bill that would allow the state to pay for secretly armed teachers in classrooms so, the sponsor told TPM, potential shooters don’t know who has a gun and who doesn’t.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) has said the idea will be part of his discussions about how to prevent a shooting like the one in Newtown from happening in the Volunteer State.

This is not quite as stupid as McArdle’s suggestion that we brainwash 6 year old children into gang tackling gun toting maniacs, but it’s pretty f%$#ing close.

I am waiting for The Onion to announce mass layoffs, because they can no longer compete with reality.

Obama has lost………Markos Moulitsas Zúniga?!?!?!?

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As in “Kos” of Daily Kos, who is thoroughly unimpressed with Obama appearing to cede ground on core Democratic Party values:

If President Barack Obama has a flaw, it’s his obviously overwhelming desire to appear reasonable and conciliatory and “work together” to find “compromise” and “get things done”. Bipartisanly. With a sane, reasonable, conciliatory opposition, that approach would make sense. But after four years of getting slammed by Republicans eager to destroy his presidency, Obama still hasn’t learned the lesson. He still thinks he’s going to get rewarded for being the “adult in the room.” Yeah, everything I’ve put inside scare quotes is a joke. A bad, painful joke.

So there’s nothing better than headlines like this one, in the Washington Post, to deliver the lesson to the White House to, well, just quit being the Capitulator In Chief:

A rough 24 hours for the White House

You see, Obama had drawn a line in the sand, and then—to no one’s surprise—ended up capitulating on everything he said he’d never capitulate on.

While I think that Kos is entitled, and in fact justified in his disappointment, but I think that he is being naive about what is going on.

Barack Obama is not negotiating with himself, and he is not incompetent, he is getting exactly what he wants.

He is a conservative “Blue Dog in everything but name” Democrat; he is a Reagan revolution “Democrat” who thinks that our social safety net is too generous, and that taxes on the rich will destroy the economy.

Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest solution is usually the best.

You have two alternate theories.

The 1st theory is that Obama is unable to learn and he is a poor negotiator, but he went to Harvard Law, which is arguably one of the best training grounds for negotiation in the country, and was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, which means that he had to out do the greatest legal minds of his generation.

The 2nd theory is that this is pretty much what Obama wants.

So, which theory seems simpler to you?

What a Surprise, US Style Hyper-Capitalism Kills

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The shock treatment liberalization of the USSR and the former Warsaw Pact Nations, led by largely Larry Summers, and looted extensively by Summers protege Andrei Shleifer, resulted in over a million deaths:

As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.

The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.

The rapid privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as ‘shock therapy’, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis.

Yes, this is a 3½ year old story, but I just found out about this today, and I thought that I should comment.

Running an economy by, and for the banksters, and the privitization of government assets during the breakup of the USSR and WarPac was an invitation for the finance types to steal as much as they could carry, does more than impoverish people.

It kills people.

If you look at these numbers, and see this, plus the arbitrage in world food markets that had prices (and malnutrition) rising, the dismantling of the Greek healthcare system, etc. it could be argued that the extreme free market policies espoused by the US since at least the Carter administration have killed more people than all the wars over that period.

The refrain of the free market mousketeers out there  is not about freedom or free markets, it rather about a kleptocratic and parasitic society whose primary purpose is to impoverish the rest of us to their benefit.

As If Facebook Did Not Suck Enough

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I’m sure you have heard of the Instagram thing, where they came out with new terms of service which said that they could sell your photographs, and you did not get anything.

It’s a classic Facebook move, but it really does not bother me, because I don’t “get” instagram.

If I want to funky things to photos I snap with my camera phone, I’ll do it on my PC on an old copy of Paint Shop Pro.*

That being said, I really don’t get Facebook either.  I appreciate its huge user base, and I signed up so that I could mirror my blog there, boosting eyeballs.

In the process I did reconnect with a bunch of old friends, but again, that’s largely a function of the user base, not the site.

One of the problems is that it appears that every upgrade makes the totality of the experience worse.

The latest innovation is that Facebook will be adding auto start videos to its video feed:

Get ready for video ads in your news feed.

 Facebook is set to unveil a new video-ad product in the first half of next year in its largest attempt to date to attract big swaths of ad dollars from TV advertisers, according to several industry executives who have been briefed on the company’s plans over the past few weeks.

 ………

 In what’s sure to be a controversial move, the visual component of the Facebook video ads will start playing automatically — a dynamic known as “autoplay” — according to two of the executives. Facebook is still debating whether to have the audio component of the ads activated automatically as well, one of these people said.

 On the desktop version of Facebook, the video ads are expected to grab a user’s attention by expanding out of the news feed into webpage real estate in both the left and right columns — or rails — of the screen. Facebook is also working on a way to ensure that the video ads stand out on the mobile apps as well, though it is unclear how exactly the company will accomplish this.

I guess that they decided that the whole anal probe ad server thing just wasn’t evil enough.

I do not get it. Are already running their server farms on power generated by incinerating harp seal pups, and claiming that it was “green” energy.

Isn’t that evil enough for them?

Damn, he needs to buy a white Persian cat and a bond villain lair, and be done with it.

*BTW, a big f%$# you to the folks Adobe® who bought the makers of the program, JASC, and shut them down a couple of years later, because they did not want the product, a fairly capable and easy to use image editor, they just wanted to shut down a competitor.

Canada is a Strange Place

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And I have to preface this by, “No, this is not The Onion.”

It appears that Quebec police have foiled a massive theft from the Canadian Strategic Maple Syrup Reserves:

It was a culinary whodunit involving a daring heist, a golden bounty, and now, some allegedly sticky-fingered suspects.

 Police in Quebec announced the arrest of three men in the theft of 6 million lbs. of maple syrup from a provincial warehouse, a haul estimated at $18-million and enough to smother a Himalayan mountain of waffles and pancakes.

 The arrests mark a badly-needed break in a case that circled the globe and pulled in law-enforcement agents operating in two countries and three provinces, all deployed in the retrieval of one of Canada’s most cherished resources.

 The theft was discovered in August at a depôt rented by the Quebec Federation of Maple Syrup Producers, in what police believe was an inside job. Some 10,000 barrels of stockpiled syrup, part of the federation’s carefully guarded “International Strategic Reserve,” had gone missing. The Fort Knox-style controls reflect the fact that Quebec dominates the world market in maple syrup and carefully controls the commodity’s price and supply.

(emphasis mine)

Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve? Seriously?

Something is seriously weird here.

Also:  If they have a International Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve T-shirt, or a baseball cap, I want one.

Megan “Math is Hard” McArdle is the Most Horrible Person in Punditry

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In her latest spewing (no direct link, ever) she suggests that we need to train school children to gang rush gunmen:

I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.

Ummm ……… You ignorant Randroid sociopath, you are are unaware of the physical capabilities of a 6 year-old child.

Let me illustrate this with pictures.

This is 8-12 6 year old children:

This is the worst ranked defense in the NFL, the New Orleans Saints:

While I could concede that the Saints (What is with those pink shoes and gloves) might be able to take down an adult armed with a wet noodle, those kids could not take down a llama, or for that matter, the Dali Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet.

Repeating for the benefit of the terminally stupid:

Children with llama
New Orleans Saints:
Dali Lama

And the Dali Lama, and the aforementioned 2 “l” llama,  are both more likely to take down a gunman armed with an assault rifle than are the children.

Why does this child or privilege and political patronage have a job?

If You Are Going to Watch Zero Dark Thirty, For F%$#’s Sake, Torrent It

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Because no one involved with the enterprise deserves a penny of money.

Glenn Greenwald rightly calls it a, “CIA hagiography, [and] pernicious propaganda.”

Spencer Ackerman, of Danger Room, admires the torture scenes and how they show moral ambiguity, but this is completely wrong.

You see, in a private letter to members of Congress Leon Panetta stated that torture had no role in locating bin Laden, though in public, he continued to defend the CIA’s torture directorate in public.

There is no ambiguity here. Our torture served no purpose but to satisfy the sadism of certain elements of the state security apparatus, along with people above them in the chain of command. **cough** Dick Cheney **cough**

There is no ambiguity. We did not derive actionable intelligence from torture. All we did was give Dick Cheney an erection.

FWIW,it should that the the European Court of Human Rights has officially declared that the CIA engaged in systematic torture. (See also here)

The fact that Obama and Holder have been complicit in indemnifying, and covering this up makes them more than reprehensible human beings, it makes them war criminals as well.

(on edit)

I am not suggesting that you torrent Bigelow’s other works, though I wouldn’t object to it.  I’m not gonna watch any of it.

Jim F%$#ing Manchin?

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Yes, the West Virginia Democrat (so-called) who literally shot holes in a copy of Obamacare for his campaign, is calling for meaningful gun control:

A stream of Democrats in Congress including a prominent senator known for his support for the firearms lobby have backed President Barack Obama’s call for stronger gun controls but few Republicans have broken ranks to join them in the wake of the Connecticut school shooting.

Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democratic senator with an “A rating” from the National Rifle Association, marking him out as a strong defender of gun rights, told MSNBC that it was time to move “beyond the rhetoric” on the issue of guns.

“I want to call all our friends in the NRA, sit down and have this discussion,” he said. “Bring them into it. They have to be at the table. We all have to.”

Mr Manchin did not detail what changes he supported; nor so far has Mr Obama, who indicated in his speech at a memorial service in Newtown, Connecticut, on Sunday evening, that he will pursue legislation to try to reduce firearm violence.

Call me a cynic, but I don’t think that his commitment to change will last beyond the first proposal to close the gun show loophole, but it is still kind of a remarkable development.