Claiming that “guns don’t kill people; it’s people who kill people” disregards the fact that the “people who kill people” do so with guns. Incidentally, on the same day as the Newton massacre (why do they call it a “tragedy”? Tragedies are by definition events that could never ever and under so circumstances have been prevented, where the all parties involved had to chance but to follow their paths to the deadly end!) there was a massacre at a school in China: http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/14/world/asia/china-knife-attack/index.html. Total body count: 22 injured, no-one dead. Weapon of choice? Knives. Had the attacker used a gun, who knows how many would have died.

Experience shows us that violence does come to schools again and again, so maybe this is a danger we (I am a teacher) have to be aware of and accept. It is when violence comes in the shape of guns, rather than knives, baseball bats, flying fists or hand-rolled feces, that people die, so guns must be the factor that has to be addressed.

Germany, too, has seen school massacres. The worst were carried out with guns that were legally obtained and registered (by the families of the attackers). In most violent incidents in schools, nobody dies – because the attackers do not use guns, but knives and home-made pipe bombs. The pipe bombs more often than not fail to work, and killing someone with a knive is a far more physical thing than pulling a drigger from some feet away – and most attackers do shy away from this physical aspect.

I agree that in America, gun violence is a “cultural thing”. And yes, cultural things are hard to change. But this specific cultural thing needs to be changed! Hiding behind what some legislators more than 200 years ago might have thought wise is a poor service to those who died – and to those who will die in the next massacre.

The “inanimate object” argument is absolutely mindless. Anthrax is an inanimate object as well, but I’d prefer not to have an envelope full of it waiting in my mailbox. The definition of “assault weapon” assures us the “inanimate object” is designed for killing. You may decide that fails to disqualify them for public consumption, but can you at least be intellectually honest enough to concede that the only purpose of this “inanimate object” is to end human life?

And in an absolutely herculean (not to mention comical) example of right-wing cognitive dissonance, you actually muster up the nerve to lecture us on what “the founding fathers could have never envisioned”….in reference to the media exercising their First Amendment rights! But not, comically, in reference to a Second Amendment that bequeaths the public the right to own a black powder musket.

And here’s the question that no Second Amendment absolutist/gun fetishist has ever been able to answer: why are there laws preventing me from owning tanks, closets full of pipe bombs, and a beaker full of plutonium? Why can I not put a call into Vladimir Putin and put in a request for some of the Soviet Union’s surplus black market weapons of mass destruction? After all, doesn’t the Second Amendment assure me of a right to bear arms? If that applies to assault weapons that the founding fathers could have never foreseen, shouldn’t it also apply to any conceivable mode of “armament” with which I can purchase? And if you say no, why not? If the role of the Second Amendment is really to keep those uppity government tax collectors in their place, would there be anything that would terrify our government more than a civilian who could detonate a nuclear bomb or drive a tank into the Capitol? Is this not my constitutional right according to your delusional interpretation?

I don’t anticipate an answer to this–at least not a coherent one–because the nature of your argument is typical of the conservative worldview….molding a defense to custom-fit your preconceived preferences while never quite thinking through the implications or the potential excesses. In your case, an infatuation with a shiny object that goes “bang”–or else an ideological attachment to others who have infatuations with shiny objects that go “bang”–has rendered you incapable of rational discussion on the limits of “inanimate objects” that are needlessly ending the lives of thousands of people. There’s some truth to the conventional wisdom that the guns will still find their way to criminals regardless of laws trying to stop it, but not always. Adam Lanza, for instance, would not have been in a situation where he could have mowed down 26 people in an elementary school if he hadn’t lived in a home with someone who had an irrational fetish for assault weapons.

Ultimately though, I’d prefer it if the Democrats left this issue alone, because it’s a loser for them. The new consensus on the left seems to be that they no longer need pro-gun rural voters as their coalition of urban and suburban voters is now more than enough to comfortably win elections. The fact that John Boehner remains Speaker of the House despite his party losing the House popular vote by more than a million votes highlights the electoral limitations of this theory. And whatever the public support may currently be on banning assault weapons or high-capacity magazines, there are enough Joe Sixpacks out there under the NRA’s propaganda thumb to swing elections based on the premise that banning ammunition drums for AK-47s is one and the same as ATF agents coming to their door and taking away their Winchester hunting rifle. You did the NRA’s bidding and cynically conflated those distinctions in your writeup. As horrifying as Newtown and all these other preventable mass shootings are, there are too many other things at stake to boost the increasingly unhinged Republican Party by falling on the sword for this issue. I’d much rather take my chances on the limited likelihood of getting gunned down in a mass shooting by a lunatic who stole his gun nut mother’s assault rifle than die a more assured death at the hands of the metaphorical policy gun that the Republican Party is pointing at my head.

Your sad attempt at an “a-ha” moment regarding a few more cars going down the Janesville, WI, plant’s assembly line until May 2009, when Obama could supposedly stop the plant’s official closing in December 2008, shows how weak a hand you have in defending the indefensible. Bottom line Jay: If Ryan’s boss had his way, not only would the Janesville, WI, GM plant have shut down, but so would have each and every automobile plant open on American soil.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg with the equally serious lies about Medicare, the debt commission, and the credit downgrade. And when tell lies this easy to rip to shreds and you’re the guys who go first, you better be prepared to come back to Earth with an anchor tied to your leg when the other guys get their turn next week.

In terms of oration, Ryan wasn’t bad and there will probably be a small bounce just in terms of shoring up the few independent voters out there for a few days. Ultimately, however, the shell game Ryan is trying to play would be easy for a third-grader to get the better of, so serious people are ultimately not gonna let him get away with it.

I concur with you, however, that Condi Rice and Susanna Martinez were fantastic at a superficial level. Rubio was good tonight too. With that level of talent in the party, how on Earth did the GOP get stuck with these two morons at leading their national ticket in an otherwise very winnable election?

While you are correct in identifying Ohio as Romney’s biggest problem, he has more than that. He can’t be President without Virginia either, and there’s little indication he’s anything but a mid-single-digit underdog there. Nevada and Colorado are decidedly leaning Obama, and the biggest surprise to me is that Obama is holding up in Florida. Cycle after cycle, the polls are more generous to Democrats in FL than the election day results, but even so I would have thought Florida would be solidly in the Romney camp by now. And it would be if Romney had made the obvious choice and selected Marco Rubio as his running mate. I still don’t get that one, as on top of taking Florida off the table for Obama, Rubio would have likely been worth 10 points nationally with the Latino vote. Instead, Romney picks the spawn of Satan from Wisconsin who believes Mitt Romney should pay 0.87% in taxes and who fantasizes that the private health insurance market has any interest at all in absorbing the guaranteed multi-billion-dollar annual losses that would come from providing insurance coverage to 85-year-olds currently on Medicare. I won’t discount the prospect of Ryan helping Romney win Wisconsin, even though it still seems odds-against, but Ryan helps nowhere else….and Romney needs help elsewhere.

Obama has no chance in Missouri, and frankly I’m still not convinced that Todd Akin won’t pull a Michele Bachmann-style 2008 comeback amidst the increasingly right-wing electorate of Missouri even after saying something jarringly stupid. Frankly, Akin’s comments didn’t even really jump out at me as outside the boundaries of the usual Republican delirium. People who buy into the rest of the nonsense the party’s emissaries spew–and that includes the majority of the Missouri electorate–are ultimately not gonna be thrown off their game by what Akin said.

And it’s hilarious that you’re attempting to make a false equivalence between Todd Akin and Sandra Fluke. Seriously Jay? The message of Sandra Fluke is all upside for Obama. Anybody who’s wringing their hands with fury about government-funded birth control was a Romney voter in the first place. Meanwhile, the issue is a huge motivator for young, single women to get to the polls. Don’t believe it? Go to a college campus and single out five coeds to ask their thoughts.

Making Romney toxic couldn’t have been easier for Obama. And considering the centerpiece of Romney’s campaign is that his business background gives him unique knowledge on economic revival, it’s perfectly fair game for the Obama campaign to hit his glass jaw on what happened in the real world of Bain Capital. They clearly overdid it with the “Romney killed my wife” ad, but beyond that, the Obama campaign’s litigation of the issue has been reality-based and deadly effective. If Republicans want to nominate a guy who’s spent his life as a wrecking ball in the business world, prepare to pay the consequences.

Furthermore, the real dishonesty in this campaign is coming from the GOP–as always–and has escalated since the Ryan selection. But the content is so cartoonish and provably false that Republicans are gonna have a hard landing trying to spin them in perpetuity just as they did when they repeatedly insisted Sarah Palin “stopped” the Bridge to Nowhere in 2008 when every shred of evidence proved she was lobbying on its behalf from the get-go. Similarly, Romney-Ryan’s insistence that they will “restore” the $700 billion Obama “cut” in Medicare won’t hold up to two months of reality nor will the bald-faced lie of Obama “cutting the work requirements for welfare” as a 1980s retro-style appeal to Joe Sixpack to hate on the racial stereotype of the “welfare queen in the pink Cadillac”. To whatever extent the media are Obama’s allies, these lies won’t be allowed to survive the rest of the campaign.

You are correct that Romney needs to dwell on his business successes if he wants to win. The one part of Romney’s narrative that has stuck is this idea that because he ran a successful business due to family connections–and ran a successful Winter Olympics due to doubling the outlays from the federal government compared to any previous American-run Olympics–it means he has secret knowledge of how to navigate an economy successfully. It’s rubbish, and Romney’s vows to extract resources from a consumer base whose current rate of poverty is already the core problem for our economic paralysis will only make the economic situation worse both short-term and especially long-term, but the narrative is clearly working given Romney’s persistent leads in polls on the question of “who will be better in handling the economy?” but it’s the only card Romney has to play so he damn well better play it.

David Brooks makes a nearly seamless case for the diametric opposite of his intention. While David Brooks, Cory Booker, and a shrinking pool of VIPs who benefit from an economy centered entirely around financial three-card monte may fancy that this transformation has been to America’s benefit, the overwhelming majority of Americans whose excision from the middle class has directly paralleled this transformation don’t agree.

As it stands now, as Sean Hannity and fellow conservatives who in the past lobbied for legislation that helped push tens of millions of Americans off the taxpaying rolls now have the unmitigated chutzpah to tell us, “47% of Americans pay NO income taxes!” This is the consequence of a private sector that “transformed” in a way in which most of its participants’ services have been devalued, shrinking their taxable income in inflation-adjusted terms, shrinking their benefits package if they’re still lucky enough to employed, and leaving government as the only entity able to fill the holes left behind. When Romney and Brooks talk about “extending this transformation into government”, they mean cutting off the last remaining lifeline for the scores of millions of Americans left for dead in the Bain Capital economy.

That’s why, for all the hyperbole of irreversible damage being done to a top Obama campaign theme at the hands of the mayor of one of America’s most ridiculed cities and broadcast on a Sunday morning when 98% of Americans were to hung over to get out of bed, Cory Booker just did Obama a tremendous favor by catapulting Bain Capital into the centerpiece of the campaign. The more Obama gets to talk about the “transformation” of the American economy into its current state, with Romney’s political base of the white working class the demographic most likely to have been the cannon fodder of said transformation, the less likely voters from Portsmouth, Ohio, and Dubuque, Iowa, are going to be towards seeing the Bain Capital jobs assassin sinking his venomous fangs into government and finishing the wreckage he started on Wall Street.

As to the layout… I am right now using a *very* old machine – the best I have at the moment – and the layout does not quite look like it’s up to standard. The browser is Firefox 1.0, other specs read as “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041109 Firefox/1.0″ – if that makes any sense to you.

The signature/title *.png is on the left-hand side, the “home/about/…/search” links are also on the left side, but all this is above the text. The Google (shame on you! ;-) ) Ads, the Colophon, and the Meta blocks are at the bottom – right-hand end of the page.

Not the way it’s meant to be, I guess?

Apart from that, I find that the fairly big print, while being easy on the eyes, forces me to scroll a lot to get to the next paragraph, and makes the site look somewhat unorganized.

I hope this helps.

Greetings from Germany,
Janek

Even Sandra Day O’Connor, who voted to uphold McCain/Fiengold in 2003, was perplexed at this thought. And troubled at what the consequences will be.

Alito is clearly a know-nothing Bush lap dog. Nothing more. He proved that with his decision, his opinion, and his reaction to the President’s remarks during the State of the Union. He’s unqualified to be on that court. He’s the only one I say that about. But, rightfully so.

Its clearly a victory for Conservtives and a loss for Democrats.

And how ironic that you welcome replys on a decision about free speech, hail the decision as a victory for the 1st amendment, yet want to recind Marcia’s right to express hers on this forum.