Shootings, Thoughts & Prayers, Jan 6, 2nd Amendment, Durham Dropped

3 Powerful Minutes Worth Watching:

  • Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara is sick and disgusted at politicians who seize on mass shootings to advance a political agenda.
     
    Specifically, Michael is sick and disgusted at New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who is a cold, calculating politician who is exploiting the Texas atrocity to bully his pet political agenda through the legislature.
     
    I dunno. The pet political agenda in question seems to be preventing more shootings of little kids in school, shoppers in supermarkets, congregants in worship, and travelers on the highway.
     
    I’m okay with Constitutional questions as part of a political debate. I have a problem with indignant demands that the pet political agenda of gun safety be postponed indefinitely for the sake of sensitivity.
     
    And I am unwilling to let more and more victims be murdered in order to alleviate Michael A. LaFerrara’s reverse peristalsis reflex. Pass gun safety and issue him a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
     
  • Andy Borowitz reports on Republican anger at Canada for the crazy policy of holding back new gun sales rather than banning school doors.
     
  • In the Ant Farmer’s Almanac, the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump know how to put a stop to mass shootings. Seems they know the root cause from personal experience.
     
  • Frances Langum watches Fox so you don’t have to, as the discussion goes to getting rid of Biden.
     
    Election? Who said anything about 2024? He must be impeached. Now!
     
    On what grounds?
     
    For favoring regulation of guns.
     
  • At The Moderate Voice Paul Boxer looks to research, studies, and resulting science. He has 5 specific ways to reduce school shootings.
     
  • PZ Myers knows more than the NRA, and it’s adherents, about the 2nd Amendment as well as those who wrote it and wrote about it.
     
    Does bring to mind a 2nd Amendment scholar who attacked my superficial knowledge which, he said, was based solely on Hamilton’s Federalist 29. He then revealed his own source of knowledge:

  • 2nd Amendment absolutists occasionally talk about the importance of having arms to take up against the government. Scotties Playtime has an example of how that plays out.
     
    And, then there is this:

  • Nojo explains, with a pair of simple photos, two approaches to the 2nd Amendment.
     
  • Hearing on the Jan 6 coup attack begin this coming week. CNN reports on messages sent to Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as the lynch mob went after legislators and Vice President Pence. tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors uses the CNN report to construct a timeline of that attempt to keep election loser Trump in office. And he finds, in a word, an easily missed key to even more criminality.
     
  • In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson takes an astonished look at new evidence in the hands of the Jan 6 Committee. It ties together an explicit plot to violate election law that goes back to 1887. Trump wanted the document kept secret because of client-lawyer privilege. A judge ruled that the privilege does not apply to criminal conspiracy.
     
    The notable sentence in that decision:
    The document likely furthered the crimes of obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
     
  • Vixen Strangely at Strangely Blogged watches the indignant rage of former Trump aide Peter Navarro at being arrested for dodging a subpoena. He was actually treated like a criminal. Don’t they know who he is?
     
    And here is what furious anger looks like:

  • The Propaganda Professor follows a Dinesh D’Souza exposé that proves voter fraud in the 2020 defeat of Donald Trump. He does this by using electronic tracking and video surveillance to reveal nefarious campaign activities that turn out to be legal, routine, and unremarkable.
     
  • News Corpse finds more anger and outrage on screen at Fox Network as they try not to cover the humiliation in court of Bill Barr’s appointed prosecutor John Durham.
     
    Targeted lawyer John Sussmann is found not guilty of anything at all.  
    Sussmann went to the FBI with some evidence of a whole lot of foreign cell phones mysteriously being used near the Trump White House. Shouldn’t the Feds investigate to see if there was a security leak?
     
    Hillary Clinton, in the middle of her campaign, said okay to her staff who wanted to give that same evidence to a reporter in hopes that he would investigate to see if there was any there there.
     
    Sussmann went to the Feds on his own. He was well known to be involved with the Clinton campaign. An agent kind of sort of remembered asking Sussmann if he was there on her behalf, and kind of sort of recalled Sussmann saying that he was just there on his own.
     
    Bill Barr’s prosecutor charged Sussmann with lying to the FBI. Which would somehow prove that other unrelated investigations into Mr. Trump had been plotted by Hillary, in some cosmic conspiratorial sense.
     
    Durham couldn’t demonstrate anything and the jury came back with the only verdict possible.
     
    Boy howdy! Fox is furious as all hell.
     
  • In Hackwhackers, we travel to TrumpLand, where legal problems multiply. In Georgia, Trump tries a political revenge hit against Brad Raffensperger. Brad wins re-election as Secretary of State by a large margin, then testifies in the Trump find me 11,780 votes case.
     
  • The Palmer Report takes a look at the Republican approach to the Jan 6 investigation. The secret, written down, plan to undermine next week’s hearings by diverting attention elsewhere, suddenly leaks out, gets publicized, and highlights next week’s hearings.
     
  • In Nan’s Notebook Nan examines the coming abortion decision in light of the 1st Amendment. It turns out a great many religious people are required by faith to accept a very different view than prohibition.
     
  • Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has the polling numbers on abortion. Seems most Americans support the right of each individual woman to decide for herself without government helpfully instructing her.
     
  • Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo of Rewire News Group do podcasting, point out that official treatment of every pregnancy as a potential crime scene will make every pregnancy more dangerous.
     
  • Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit has figured out, and with compelling logic, who is responsible as a 4 month old baby dies, and dies horribly.
     
  • North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz investigates and exposes the Gay PRIDE Agenda.
     
  • There was a bit of misinformation floating about the internet for a while. Something about a school district recommending that minority students be graded differently than their more harshly treated white classmates.
     
    It serves as a reminder of how falsehoods acquire a sort of internet immortality.
     
    A tweet was, fortunately, withdrawn but the discussion, and the contribution of Cato’s Julian Sanchez, survive.

  • In Happiness Between Tails da-AL sees Julia Child, with her cooking show, as a television trailblazer.
     
  • Infidel753 seems to have a bit of trouble accepting the Bible as the word of God.
     
    One small part of his critique:
     
    The Bible itself confirms that God is capable of deceptive behavior; for example, he allowed Abraham to believe he was sincere in demanding the sacrifice of Isaac, right up to the last moment. There are various interpretations of why he did this, but the fact remains that God here is depicted as willing to deceive a human when it suits his aims.
     
    It reminds me of my own long ago conversation with a visiting creationist. He insisted the Bible was inerrant, making the age of everything everywhere about 6,000 years.
     
    I asked him to explain ancient fossils and light from stars and galaxies billions of light years away.
     
    He answered with what I later learned was called the Omphalos hypothesis. The earth and all creation was made with the appearance of age. That’s what he said. The appearance of age.
     
    From my own account years ago:
    I suggested that, if God had gone through that much trouble to give his universe the Appearance of Age, it seemed to me a bit unsporting for us not to surrender to his will and believe in all those contrived eons.
     
  • In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce remembers what it was like as a youngster when he was prescribed eye glasses that pretty much advertised that his family was on welfare. Well-off kids often treat welfare kids with a degree of brutal behavior that we only know as routine for adults.
     
  • Reductress displays 6 wonderful outfits to wear on the beach, that will not make you look old. They will actually make you old.
     
  • SilverAppleQueen contemplates work, and decides to go outside to run.
     
  • YellowDog Granny posts a brief history of being bothered.
     
A few tweets I thought worthy:

And I’m allowed a few of my own:


Days later:

– Podcasts –