Month: July 2016

 
From Capt. Fogg at The Swash Zone:

I hate to jump on bandwagons and for sure, everyone who writes on blogs will be writing about all this, either trying to make sense out of madness, or adding to it.

I don’t want to add to it or to look for blame or offer an interpretation that no one wants to read — but I do have questions. Why do arresting officers work themselves into an incoherent lather, screaming hysterically so that anyone they’re addressing is more likely to panic than to comply? Anyone who has handled firearms for long enough will realize that when you have your finger on the trigger, guns go off when you least expect it.

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From Iron Knee at Political Irony:

The National Rifle Association usually doesn’t mince words when defending the right of Americans to arm themselves. But we now have a case where a person, legally licensed to carry a concealed weapon, was stopped by the police for a broken taillight. He informed the officer that he had a firearm. The officer asked him for his driver’s license and he reached for his wallet, and the officer shot and killed him.

Normally, I suspect the NRA would be howling. But this case is different. The dead man is an African American. I guess they believe that the second amendment doesn’t apply to black people.

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From Tommy Christopher at the Daily Banter:

It was an embattled week for FBI Director James Comey, who drew the ire of Republicans for announcing that his agency would not be recommending charges against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then spent the better part of Thursday getting grilled by Republicans over it on Capitol Hill. There were a few people angry at Comey for smearing Hillary Clinton as he was clearing her, but for the most part, Democrats tripped all over themselves praising Comey because they agreed with his conclusion.

But as the week drew to a close, and the Comey spectacle dominated the news, it became clear to me that the FBI director needs to be fired, and not for anything he did with regard to Hillary Clinton. President Obama should fire Director Comey because he’s on the wrong side of the problem that killed Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week.

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• Infidel753, a nearly always astute internet presence, has severe medical problems, and feels “alienated from the American liberal internet” over gun control and other issues. He announces that he will no longer be with us, at least for a while. Our loss.
   
  Ironically, I had recently mentioned Infidel as one of the few bloggers capable of presenting a good case against gun control.
   
  Elvis has left the building.
  Sad to see him go.
  Hope he returns.
   
• Jerry Wolfe at Dog Bless Us One And All cannot resist his addiction to ClintonHate. Bill Clinton’s dumb-as-a-head-of-lettuce visit with Loretta Lynch is not enough opportunity. Not only is Jerry certain about improper process-tampering, but now the life of the Attorney General is in danger. After all, remember all the one time Friends of Bill who ended up murdered by the former First Couple of Killers? Remember how Ron Brown died in a plane crash?
   
  Yeah, that’s what he says.
   
• Last Of The Millenniums carries the message as Andy Borowitz appreciates the depth of the latest investigation of Benghazi.
   
• Jack Jodell at The Saturday Afternoon Post contemplates the boorish whoppers told by Mr. Trump and the desperate contortions of mainstream reporting to be balanced rather than truthful.
   
• The Big Empty finds a campaign ad pretty much guaranteed to convince all but the lost souls of the hopeless to oppose Donald Trump.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors quotes Republican Senator Ron Johnson, WI, on whether insurance companies should be able to cancel coverage for any client who develops cancer.
   
• Oh wow. Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson has a near death experience, and writes an open letter of sorts to the driving slacker who nearly killed him.
   
• Max’s Dad tries to take a break from gun and death issues and ends up at a concert, where he celebrates Ringo Starr.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Melody begins with the apparent contradiction between God’s omniscience and human free will, writing about the curious Christian resistance to curiosity.
   
  Her starting point reminds me of the late Isaac Bashevis Singer, who summed up the argument, “We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.”
   
  I sometimes have to struggle with impatience at the occasional Christian embrace of incurious certainty. I have for years carried with me this, from Jesuit philosopher Thomas Merton. It helps me maintain.
   
• Flags are at half-staff by Presidential order for five officers murdered by sniper during a peaceful protest in Texas. Officers had been posing with protesters moments before shots were fired.

  Additional prayers in Missouri for a police officer shot from behind during what ought to have been a routine traffic stop in Ballwin, here in St. Louis County.

Gun Laws: We Will Not Tolerate Disruption

Historical parallels are not always historical repetition. Sometimes they are coincidence. Sometimes parallels rhyme.

We can find more than a single parallel with the recent house sit-in the goal of which was to keep American manufacturers from selling weapons to ISIS.

Transcript

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From Capt. Fogg at Human Voices:

None of this will surprise you if you’ve read my libertarian drivel before, but safety is going to be the end of us as a free nation. Well, not the concept of safety, but that power to demand it arrogated by a corporate oligarchy and the forced paternalism it profits from. Teach your kids to cross the street? That’s criminal – just forbid them, to or better: make it impossible.

With all action there is risk so why allow action? With all freedom there is risk but with absolute isolation from risk there is absolutely no freedom. The urge to take the steering wheel away from us and by that to take private cars and the new birth of freedom they brought — to take that away from us continues to increase even as intimations of the failures of such technology begin to appear.

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From libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara at Principled Perspectives:

My last post dealt with the column Newark teen recognized for tackling race issues by the New Jersey Star-Ledger’s Barry Carter. Carter describes the work of a black student at Delbarton, a private NJ high school, to foster better race relations at the school through his “Diversity Among Peers” initiative, for which he won the Princeton Prize in Race Relations. As a result of his efforts, the student, Shawn Ohazuruike, had just received the Princeton Prize in Race Relations. I noted that, despite his good intentions, Shawn’s cloaking of his initiative in the “diversity” premise reinforces the racist foundation of racial disharmony, thus undermining his goal.

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From Vincent at A wayfarer’s notes:

I listened this morning to Peter Hennessy being interviewed by Paddy O’Connell on Radio 4’s “Broadcasting House” (starts at 54:11). His views on the impact of Brexit largely match my own. It took an hour or so to transcribe, but has saved the much greater effort of trying to cover similar ground in my own words.

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From Dave Dubya at Freedom Rants:

Why would any sane person consider voting for Trump? Good question.

I’m NOT considering voting for Trump as the way to “make America great again”. That’s not going to happen. Only fools and fascists fall for that crap. Trump would only bring xenophobia, racism, war, torture, group punishment and more medieval methods to deal with problems of our modern era.

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From conservative T. Paine at Saving Common Sense:

On the day following the 240th birthday of our nation, FBI Director James Comey concluded a long federal investigation as he made a damning statement of facts regarding former Secretary of State and would-be United States President Hillary Clinton’s egregious and illegal use of a private email server and the transmission and reception of highly classified information. (See the attached video for a summary.)

The facts that Director Comey laid out were so devastating that one could only surmise that the recommendation for an indictment must follow.

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