The NRA is attempting to declare bankruptcy so that they could move to Texas in order to evade a corruption investigation by the New York Attorney General.
A federal judge Tuesday denied an effort by the National Rifle Association to file for bankruptcy protection, ruling that the gun rights group had filed the case in a bad-faith attempt to fend off a lawsuit by the New York attorney general.
“The Court finds, based on the totality of the circumstances, that the NRA’s bankruptcy petition was not filed in good faith but instead was filed as an effort to gain an unfair litigation advantage in the NYAG Enforcement Action and as an effort to avoid a regulatory scheme,” Judge Harlin Hale wrote in a 37-page decision.
The decision was a victory for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who filed a far-reaching civil suit against the group last August accusing top officials of fraud and self-dealing. NRA chief Wayne LaPierre and his legal team had contended that the lawsuit was a political act intended to destroy the organization.
AG James is not attempting to shut down the NRA, she is attempting to throw Wayne LaPierre, and his corrupt cabal in jail. In fact, it could be argued that her efforts may create a more accountable and transparent National Rifle Association.
………
Adam Levitin, who teaches bankruptcy law at Georgetown University Law Center, said the ruling was not surprising, calling the NRA’s petition “a poster child for a bad-faith filing.”
He said he did not think the organization had good arguments for appeal, noting that LaPierre’s position as head of the organization could be at risk in such a move.
Hale’s decision follows a weeks-long hearing that revealed details about alleged mismanagement and excessive spending by top officials at the influential gun lobby, including LaPierre, the NRA’s controversial leader for the past three decades.
A trustee has not been appointed, which is a fly in the ointment, but I am happy about this ruling.
It isn’t often that you hear terms like, “Failed to provide the proper oversight,” “Personal expenses were made to look like business expenses,” and that their regulatory issues with the New York AG are, “Not a legitimate reason for filing bankruptcy.”
It’s extremely rare for the trustee to say things like this, or to call for a bankruptcy to be halted, or to call for appointing a trustee.
The NRA is in a world of hurt, and if there is any justice in this world, Wayne LaPierre will end up sharing a cell with Matt Gaetz and Roger Stone.
The National Rifle Association’s hopes of end-running a legal challenge in New York were dealt a serious blow on Monday when a Justice Department official rebuked its leadership and called for the dismissal of its bankruptcy filing or the appointment of an outside monitor to oversee its finances.
Lisa L. Lambert, a lawyer in the United States Trustee’s office, which is part of the Justice Department, said the “evidentiary record clearly and convincingly establishes” that Wayne LaPierre, the longtime N.R.A. chief executive, “has failed to provide the proper oversight.” For a number of years, she added, “the record is unrefuted that Wayne LaPierre’s personal expenses were made to look like business expenses.”
Mr. LaPierre and the N.R.A. had filed for bankruptcy not because of any financial distress, but as a strategy to avoid litigation in New York, where the attorney general, Letitia James, is seeking to shut down the organization and claw back millions of dollars in allegedly misspent funds from Mr. LaPierre and three other current or former executives.
………
“The N.R.A. is in real trouble,” said Adam J. Levitin, a professor specializing in bankruptcy at Georgetown University. “The U.S. Trustee rarely gets involved in this sort of motion, much less urges dismissal, a trustee or an examiner. I cannot see an outcome where the N.R.A. comes out unscathed. I think the real issue is what remedy the judge grants.”
John Pottow, who teaches bankruptcy at the University of Michigan Law School, called the trustee’s intervention “a glaring signal of profound dysfunction” at the N.R.A., adding that such an intervention by the trustee “doesn’t happen very often.”
“The N.R.A. has stated that it is seeking refuge from the New York attorney general’s actions and wishes to change its state of incorporation,” she added. “That can be done outside of bankruptcy. It is not a legitimate reason for filing bankruptcy.”
Shut them down, take their domain names, and take their mailing and donor lists.
Don’t allow LaPierre to resurrect his scam under a different name.
The ammosexuals community will doubtless find another outlet for their political priorities, after all, they have won the war against common sense gun laws for a generation, but at least that new organization won’t rob them blind.
Near Pueblo, Colorado there is an LGBTQ owned and operated ranch named, “Tenacious Unicorn,” and they have guns.
I generally support restrictive laws on firearms, but I understand that the political battle over gun control is lost, or at least that it is lost until people who are members of oppressed minorities start packing heat, as shown by the highly restrictive gun control law signed into law by Ronald Reagan when black people started packing heat.
Also, if the right wing realizes they the people who they try to bully might be armed, maybe they will think twice before attempting to intimidate progressives.
It’s the Feel Good Story of the Day:
A year ago, transgender rancher Penny Logue found the dome. Fed up with a hostile landlord in the city and fearful for their safety amid record-high deaths in the transgender community nationwide, Logue and her business partner, Bonnie Nelson, sought refuge in the rural, open rangelands.
The geodesic dome perched on sprawling acreage in the remote Wet Mountain Valley on the eastern flank of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range, near the rural ranching hamlet of Westcliffe, Colorado. They were intrigued. “Domes are funky and cool and a bit against the status quo — and they help the planet,” Logue told me. So they bought it.
………
They bought the dome, and by March, with the pandemic raging and a divisive presidential election roiling, relocated to the valley and created the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch, a community of gun-loving, transgender, anti-fascist alpaca ranchers. While they already knew the financial, physical, and emotional challenges of operating a successful ranch, they had no idea that the Wet Mountain Valley had become a cauldron of right-wing conservatism — home to militias, vigilantes, Three Percenters — anathema to the ranch’s gender-inclusive, anti-racist, ecological politics.
But rather than retreat, the unique LGBTQ+ community, around a dozen strong, asserted its right to exist. They armed up and began speaking out, quickly developing a local reputation that galvanized other local rural progressives. In the process, they’ve showed how queer communities can flourish. “We belong here,” Logue told me this past November. “Queers are reclaiming country spaces.”
Custer County, Colorado,where the newly formed Tenacious Unicorn Ranch is located, is named after George Armstrong Custer. It was founded in March 1877 — nine months after Custer’s defeat at The Battle of Little Bighorn — and its overwhelmingly white, rural and conservative population hovers at around 5,000. While Colorado as a whole has shifted left in recent years, Custer County has tacked right: In every presidential election since 2008, when John McCain carried the county by 63%, the percentage of Republican votes has steadily increased; Trump won with nearly 70% in 2020.
………
The ranch exists at a philosophical intersection that is immediately evident inside the dome, where a wall displays prized firearms — Bonnie’s sniper, a Springfield AR-15, two 12-gauge shotguns and a 22-rifle — and flags for The Iron Front, the anti-Nazi symbol used by 1930s paramilitary groups, which now symbolizes anti-fascism and intersectional Pride. Pride flags with colorful stripes — pink, rose, yellow, green, pewter, black, white — bedeck the wall, celebrating asexuality, agender identity, lesbianism and nonbinary gender identities.
Since Logue founded the ranch in 2018, its frontier libertarian ethos has attracted social justice activists and gun-rights advocates, all seeking sanctuary. “We’re a haven. We offer work, we offer shelter, we offer peace,” says Logue, gesturing toward the expansive open space surrounding us. “There are a lot of people who visit for upwards of a week and just enjoy their time away from society,” Nelson added.
………
Logue and her cohort seek to challenge the patriotic myths — about Manifest Destiny, liberty and freedom — that their Wet Mountain Valley neighbors double-down on in The Sentinel. “The American frontier or ‘the American West’ wasn’t conquered with rugged individualism,” she said. “It was conquered by communities sticking together. … Nobody did that by themselves.” Their social mission — akin to that of mutual-aid networks and similar to anti-fascist groups like The Redneck Revolt as well as leftist pro-gun groups like the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association — stems from their political commitments. “It isn’t through harsh words and violence that you defeat fascism,” Logue told me. “It’s through building community, but only if you can stay alive long enough to do it. That means you have to be armed — because fascists are armed, always.”
This is something they’ve learned firsthand. “There are militias in the Wet Mountain Valley,” Logue said. “They’ve showed up armed and threatening.” That spurred the ranchers to arm up. “Moving here demanded gun ownership,” she continued. The ranchers watched from their front porch with a high-powered scope and sniper rifle — the Springfield AR-15 on the living room wall — staking out visitors loitering at the end of their driveway. The visits ceased. It’s rumored locally that militias unofficially “patrol” their surroundings to establish dominance. “In order to be treated as a human, you have to show you can defend yourself more than they can hurt you,” Logue said. “Then you can reach equality.”
The situation was made even worse because FedEx has a policy of requiring employees to turn over their cell phones at the beginning of a shift, which means that loved ones could not contact them, and they could not call the police.
Officials with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department identified the eight victims of the mass shooting at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis on Friday night, more than 20 hours after the gunman opened fire on Thursday.
Families of people who worked at the warehouse were gathered at a hotel in the hours after the shooting, waiting for news. FedEx employees are not allowed to use their phones on the floor of the warehouse, complicating the reuniting of employees and their loved ones.
The victims were identified by the police as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74. Some family members of victims who were Sikh provided different spellings and ages: Jasvinder Kaur, 50; Amarjit Sekhon, 49; and Jaswinder Singh, 70.
Officials said the gunman, a 19-year-old, was a former employee of the company whose mother had warned law enforcement officials last year that he might try to attempt “suicide by cop.” An F.B.I. special agent confirmed that the gunman had been interviewed by federal agents in April 2020, and that he was put on an “immediate detention mental health temporary hold.”
He was not charged with a crime, and the agent said that a shotgun was not returned to him.
………
The violence in Indianapolis comes only weeks after mass shootings last month at spas in the Atlanta area and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., renewing pressure on lawmakers in Washington to address America’s deep-seated problem with gun violence.
Officials used a common word — “another” — to define the tragedy.
………
The atmosphere was fraught at a nearby hotel on Friday as families of workers at the facility waited for word about loved ones, many of whom were not allowed to have their cellphones at work.
(emphasis mine)
There are many things that I missed from the before times: Restaurants, movie theaters, bars, and theater immediately come to mind.
There are also things that I really do not miss, in person meetings, commuting, and especially mass shootings.
At the very least, I had hoped that the pace of mass shootings would not return to their pre-pandemic levels so quickly.
Of course it was in Colorado, you had Columbine, Aurora, Aravada, Aurora again, and now Boulder.
It appears that mass shooters are to Colorado what Florida Man is to Florida.
Please, let’s set about to prying their guns from their cold dead hands.
Almost forgot, thoughts and prayers:
A gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers in Boulder on Monday afternoon, the latest in a grim litany of mass shootings in Colorado — this one including among its victims a police officer who was first to respond to reports of shots fired at the grocery store.
The suspect was taken into custody, but there were few answers in the following hours. Officials said it would take days to investigate the large crime scene and to notify families that their loved ones had been killed.
………
A gunman killed 10 people at a King Soopers in Boulder on Monday afternoon, the latest in a grim litany of mass shootings in Colorado — this one including among its victims a police officer who was first to respond to reports of shots fired at the grocery store.
The suspect was taken into custody, but there were few answers in the following hours. Officials said it would take days to investigate the large crime scene and to notify families that their loved ones had been killed.
It’s Colorado, so my guess is that their response will be to ……… loosen gun laws even further.
In Oregon, a girl’s softball team in Lake Oswego raffled off an AR-15 to fund a team trip.*
A pastor there did not like this, and when he found that tickets were already sold, he bought a large number, in the hopes of getting the weapon, and destroying it.
The Rev. Jeremy Lucas brought an olive branch to a gun fight recently, hoping for a mellow outcome. It began when he won a semi-automatic rifle in a local raffle, then revealed his plan to destroy it and was mostly congratulated for his stand. But the 44-year-old Episcopal priest’s token attempt to take another gun off the streets did little to keep the peace. In response to his gesture, Lucas got threats and demands for his arrest. ……… Lucas grew up in Alabama owning and shooting guns. But he sees the AR-15, America’s most popular rifle, as a danger to society. It is one of the weapons of choice among today’s mass shooters, from Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 to the shooting last month of four teens, three fatally, by another teen near Seattle. ……… When news about his win and plans to destroy the gun began to spread, Lucas got Facebook thank-yous from relatives of some of the Sandy Hook victims and encouragement from hundreds of others. Donors replenished the $3,000 he’d used from the church coffers and then some. Bishop Michael J. Hanley, head of the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon, sent his huzzas as well. “It was a wonderful thing and actually filled me with a certain amount of glee that he could pull it off,” Hanley said in a statement. “Probably more of us need to act in this way, jumping into the unknown consequences of doing good deeds.” But not everyone saw it that way. Some unhappy commentators suggested Lucas had violated Oregon’s new gun law by failing to have a background check conducted on a parishioner to whom he’d given the weapon for safekeeping. Then there were the “critics and trolls” on social media and on news websites, Lucas wrote on his blog, “lobbing their hate and vitriol.”
There are lots of responsible gun owners out there, and then there is the Ammosexual contingent, who shouldn’t be trusted with a butter knife.
*I know what you are thinking, “In Oregon, you must be kidding?” That’s because you don’t know that Oregon in the 1920s was the most KKK dominated state in the nation.† †Oregon’s original constitution literally banned black people from the territory.
In America, support for some gun control policies, such as universal background checks, is above 90% percent, and yet mass shooting after mass shooting fails to incite action from politicians. The popular explanation for this failure to act, so well evoked by commentators like Igor Volsky, is that the NRA has bought and paid for many politicians, who refuse to vote against their paymasters to support common sense gun control measures. And it’s true that the NRA has used its leverage and war chest to apply pressure to politicians and beat back gun control efforts However, this NRA-centric narrative is inadequate to explain why efforts to control America’s gun violence epidemic keep failing. Recently, we analyzed two separate data sources about Americans’ attitudes toward guns and gun control, and found that there is major, less-examined factor that influences the gun control debate: the racial identity and racial attitudes of gun owners, and those who support or oppose gun control legislation. Put simply, America’s gun problem is a white supremacy problem in disguise.
This is not a surprise.
The modern history of gun control begins with restrictive gun legislation signed into law in California in the 1960s by Ronald Reagan.
It was in response to the open carry activism of the Black Panthers, which culminated with them walking into the state legislature packing heat.
The rather tepid Gun Control Act of 1968, followed California’s law, and this, along with white panic over the perceived threat of Black radicals led to the NRA going batsh%$ insane, and now we have a significant portion of our political process driven by the paranoid ammosexual movement.
Cleveland officials said Wednesday that they will uphold the right of protesters at the Republican National Convention to carry firearms even as they expressed opposition to the state’s open carry laws. Speaking to reporters in advance of the Republican National Convention next week, both Cleveland Mayor Frank G. Jackson and police Chief Calvin Williams they were bound by the state’s laws allowing people to carry guns even if they disagreed with them. ……… “It’s the law in this state. As police chief, I’m bound to uphold the law in this state,” he added. ……… Cleveland has banned a wide array of items inside a broad zone in downtown Cleveland around the convention site, including water guns, toy guns, knives, aerosol cans, rope, tennis balls and others. But because of Ohio’s open carry laws, protesters who legally own a firearm will be allowed to carry it near the convention center.
For their next trick, Ohio Republicans are going to gargle with Plutonium, or French kiss cobras, or some other damn fool bit of lunacy.
Specifically Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut.
As much as I hate praising a vice chair of the Wall Street loving New Democrat Coalition, particularly one who is an alumnus of the Vampire Squid, but he is right when he announces that he is going to boycott the Congressional moment of silence for the Tampa shooting victims, because it is hypocritical political theater that is used to excuse cowardly inaction:
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) says he won’t participate in any more moments of silence on the House floor for victims of mass shootings out of frustration that they don’t lead to action on gun control. In a House floor speech on Monday, the day after the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., Himes said the moments of silence offer a symbol of lawmakers’ lack of a legislative response to mass shootings. “Silence. That is how the leadership of the most powerful country in the world will respond to this week’s massacre of its citizens,” he said. “Silence. Not me. Not anymore. I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity and tepid smugness of a House complicit in the weekly bloodshed,” Himes said angrily.……… ……… “As you bow your head and think of what you say to your God when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of innocents, there will be silence,” Himes said. Himes first declared his boycott of future moments of silence in a series of tweets late Sunday night, writing that they “have become an abomination.”
He may be a conservadem, but he’s completely right on this issue.
The moment of silence is a completely hypocritical excuse for doing nothing.
A man who called 911 to proclaim allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group, and who had been investigated in the past for possible terrorist ties, stormed a gay nightclub here Sunday morning, wielding an assault rifle and a pistol, and carried out the worst mass shooting in United States history, leaving 50 people dead and 53 wounded. The attacker, identified by law enforcement officials as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old who was born in New York, turned what had been a celebratory night of dancing to salsa and merengue music at the crowded Pulse nightclub into a panicked scene of unimaginable slaughter, the floors slicked with blood, the dead and the injured piled atop one another. Terrified people poured onto the darkened streets of the surrounding neighborhood, some carried wounded victims to safety, and police vehicles were pressed into service as makeshift ambulances to rush people to hospitals. Joel Figueroa and his friends “were dancing by the hip-hop area when I heard shots, bam, bam, bam,” he said, adding, “Everybody was screaming and running toward the front door.”
Of course, we have calls for effective gun control, but, as always, we can expect them to come to nothing.
Police in Santa Monica, California, arrested a man intent on attacking a nearby gay pride parade on Sunday, hours after a terrorist opened fire at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing at least 50 and wounding over 50 more people in the worst mass shooting attack in modern U.S. history. 20-year-old James Wesley Howell was arrested in Santa Monica after assault rifles and chemicals capable of creating an explosive device were found in his vehicle early Sunday morning, police say. He reportedly admitted to officials that he was planning to “harm” the West Hollywood gay pride parade that was taking place about seven miles away later Sunday.
The attack on a gay club in Orlando in which 50 people were killed and more than 50 wounded — now the largest mass shooting in U.S. history — demonstrates how potential threats are escaping the FBI’s vast counterterrorism dragnet. While it’s unclear whether gunman Omar Mateen’s inspiration was hatred of gays, the Islamic State, or something else, attackers like him are the intended targets of the FBI’s post-9/11 prevention program. Federal law enforcement’s top priority today is to stop the attacker of tomorrow. But Mateen’s mass shooting is an example of how dangerous men slip past the FBI’s watch while federal agents focus on targets of questionable capacity. ……… According to The Daily Beast, whose reporter quoted an unnamed “senior law enforcement source,” Mateen was a person of interest to the FBI in 2013 and again in 2014. The Intercept has been unable confirm independently from sources that Mateen had been under FBI investigation during those years. If the FBI had in fact investigated Mateen, his capacity for violence would have been easily verified: He had a state firearms license. With connections to homes in Martin and St. Lucie counties, Mateen would have fallen under the jurisdiction of the FBI’s Miami office, which has among the bureau’s most active and aggressive counterterrorism units. The Miami FBI investigated the so-called Liberty City 7 in one of the earliest and most controversial post-9/11 counterterrorism stings, and prosecutors in Florida’s Southern District have prosecuted dozens on terrorism related charges in the last 15 years. ……… For more than a year ending in April — a time during which investigators will now be looking for any clues from Mateen that might have been missed — the FBI in Miami focused on a counterterrorism sting that targeted James Medina, a homeless man with mental problems. ……… According to the FBI’s affidavit, the informant, not Medina, came up with the idea of crediting the planned attack to the Islamic State. “You can do all that,” Medina told the informant. “Yeah, we can print up or something and make it look like it’s ISIS here in America. Just like that.” ……… Does the FBI’s focus on men like Medina and Suarez — questionable targets of questionable mental fitness — prevent agents from identifying and investigating armed and dangerous men like the one behind what is now America’s worst mass shooting? It’s a question the FBI, which has faced little congressional scrutiny over its counterterrorism program, has never been forced to answer. The Orlando shooting isn’t the first case to raise this question. In 2011, when the FBI investigated Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, agents did not deem him a threat. Instead, at about the same time, the Boston FBI started a nine-month sting operation against Rezwan Ferdaus, who had no weapons and no connections to international terrorists, and whose mental wellness had deteriorated so much that he was wearing adult diapers at the time of his arrest on terrorism charges.
I’ve not heard about a successful FBI counter-terrorism operation that did not involve them using informants to manufacture the a high profile arrest in a very long time.
It’s pretty clear that the FBI desperately needs some adult supervision.
This past week, a Milwaukee toddler fatally shot his mother after finding a handgun in the back seat of the car they were riding in. The case drew a lot of national attention given the unusual circumstances: Little kids rarely kill people, intentionally or not. ……… Last year, a Washington Post analysis found that toddlers were finding guns and shooting people at a rate of about one a week. This year, that pace has accelerated. There have been at least 23 toddler-involved shootings since Jan. 1, compared with 18 over the same period last year. In the vast majority of cases, the children accidentally shoot themselves. That’s happened 18 times this year, and in nine of those cases the children died of their wounds.
The National Rifle Association has decided to rewrite classic fairy tales, because they need more guns: (Not The Onion)
The National Rifle Association has taken some heat this week after attempting what it saw as a family-friendly approach to to gun rights: inserting guns into classic fairy tale stories.
As part of its new family-oriented website, NRA Family, the organization reimagined popular fairy tales by arming the main characters with guns. The stories, which the NRA posted on its site and in the site’s newsletter, feature illustrations and stories by Amelia Hamilton, a conservative blogger and author.
The first, published on March 17, is called Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns), a new spin on the classic Brothers Grimm story. Instead of being nearly eaten by the witch, the brother and sister duo rescue another boy with guns loaded. They then to return to their village and tell their parents, who storm back guns-a-blazing to capture the witch.
Another story published Friday is a take on Little Red Riding Hood called—you guessed it—Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun). It follows a similar narrative, with both granny and Little Red packing heat and using their guns to scare the wolf so he can be tied up and carried away.
I guess that this makes sense in a twisted way.
Most of the classic fairy tales have their origins in pre-Christian tales of pagan gods, and the NRA worships at the altar of Smith & Wesson, so at least there is symmetry.
Joe Steffen, a former aide to former Maryland Governor Robert “Badhair” Ehrlich was forcibly retired from his position when he got caught planting false stories about Martin O’Malley. (Someone caught him bragging)
Because of his reputation as Ehrlich’s hatchet man, and the glee with which he did his work got him the nickname, “Prince of Darkness”.
He blogs occasionally, and muses on Maryland politics with a focus on the Republican party, which can frequently be rather illuminating.
You know, I can remember when former Governor, Bob Ehrlich, was running for Governor the first time, the time that he won, the time I was still in his employ, that he and a few others from the campaign were in contact with the National Rifle Association (NRA) – in an effort to get the NRA to LOWER its rating of Ehrlich’s time in Congress from an “A” to a “B.” I don’t recall who it was that Bob and his chosen spoke with at the time, but I do know that the NRA obliged Ehrlich’s request. The reason that the soon-to-be one term Governor made the request is because Bob didn’t want to be going after that office against liberal firebrand and dumbass, Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend as an “A” rated NRA supporter. The reason he didn’t want THAT was because at that time the NRA was viewed none too favorably in Maryland, and Ehrlich figured that an “A” rating from them would likely sink his chances at attaining the Governorship.
First, I find it interesting, though not surprising, that the NRA gamed its own rating system to benefit a Republican candidate.
It’s also interesting just how a good NRA rating is poison in Maryland, or at least that it was in 2002.
Given that Steffen is complaining about Governor Larry Hogan’s tepid moves regarding expanded carry of firearms in Maryland (thank you, Governor), it appears that the politics have not changed much in the state.
It also is another bit of evidence that the NRA has become a blatantly partisan organization.
It’s why you read stuff from people that you disagree. You learn stuff.
As to his categorizing Kathleen Kennedy Townsend,(KKT) Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter as a, “liberal firebrand and dumbass,” I disagree with the former, not because she wasn’t a liberal, but because the term, “Firebrand,” implies the ability to generate political heat, and KKT could not generate enough heat to light a match.
As to dumbass bit, I have repeatedly noted that KKT was the worst candidate in the history of the Kennedy clan, and arguably the history of history. (She kicked Ehrlich’s ass in the debate, and still got beaten like a rug in the election.)
A new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a whopping 71% of Americans surveyed believe the many shootings and other acts of mass violence in we’ve seen in 2015 are now a permanent part of life in our country.
That’s compared with just 21 percent of Americans who think the violence this year — from Charleston, S.C., and Oregon, to the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. — has been unusual and won’t happen as often in the future.
……… Murder here is easy to commit — because weapons and ammunition that tear at human flesh are easily obtainable. And once murder is committed, it is far harder to solve than it should be — because the devices that are repositories for incriminating evidence are increasingly beyond the reach of law enforcement. Police on Thursday reported that all four weapons used by killer Syed Farook and his wife-accomplice, Tashfeen Malik — two assault rifles and two handguns — were bought legally. The two had a guerrilla-sized stockpile at home: a staggering 2,000 rounds of 9-mm. bullets and 2,500 rounds of .223-caliber rifle ammunition. Also in the home: 12 pipe bombs and hundreds of tools that could be used to build IEDs or pipe bombs. In what country is it legal to collect enough weaponry to go to war? In ours, thanks to gun laws crafted and protected by lawmakers obedient to the National Rifle Association.
(emphasis mine)
On their cover, they call Wayne LaPierre a terrorist.
I agree.
What’s more, the News understands that the apocalyptic language and policies of the NRA are not effectively opposed by the standard civil and polite hand wring that we see on the editorial pages of other papers.
Prayers aren’t working. White House hopefuls on the Democratic side of the aisle called for stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino that left at least 14 dead. But after yet another mass shooting in America, GOP presidential contenders were conspicuously silent on the issue of gun control. Instead, the Republicans were preaching about prayer. ……… Democrats — even those not running for office — slammed the GOP presidential candidates for offering prayers instead of action. “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) posted on Twitter. “Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing — again.” Some critics accused Murphy of religious insensitivity, but he didn’t waver in a statement later Wednesday. “My heart aches for the people of San Bernardino,” he said. “I cannot express the profound sadness I feel each time a new community grieves and endures the same pain that brought Newtown to its knees three years ago this month.”
In addition to the Daily News‘ magnificent statement on Republicans resort to religious hypocrisy as an alternative to action.
I would like to add three bits of information to provide some perspective.
The third bit is a some historical perspective: Twice as many people were murdered in San Bernardino as were killed in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.
And still, the Republican response to a call for action is, “I’m too busy praying.”
At least 14 people were killed and 14 others injured in a shooting at a San Bernardino, Calif., center for people with developmental disabilities, Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said. (Reuters)
At least two attackers opened fire at a holiday party for county employees in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and injuring 17 others in what the city’s police chief described as an act of domestic terrorism.
Five hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials swarmed a residential neighborhood not far from the complex where the shooting occurred after police “located what appeared to be the suspects’ vehicle,” Sgt. Vicki Cervantes, a San Bernardino police spokeswoman, said during a news conference.
Officials exchanged gunfire with the suspects, she said, after finding a dark SUV that appears to match a description given by police earlier in the day. Two suspects — a man and a woman — were killed during this shootout, Jarrod Burguan, chief of the San Bernardino Police Department, said during an evening news conference.
A third person was seen running away, and it is unclear if that person was involved in the shooting today, Burguan said. That person was in custody late Wednesday afternoon, he said. Authorities were still working on seeing if there was a third person involved in the shooting or possibly any other people, he said.
This year 
