12.21.12
Fiore: Condolencer-in-Chief
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The Monster from WhiteManistan shows up
Worst roll-out of position, ever.
UPDATED
Right on schedule, Wyane LaPierre of the National Rifle Association showed up on national television to prove he’s every bit the boogeyman one expected.
The only recommendations were to — first — stop making demons of assault gun fetishists and the NRA, and then to use the NRA to train paramilitary defense forces for all schools. Using a task force led by ex-right wing GOP Senator Asa Hutchinson who was last seen trying to get Bill Clinton impeached for having his dick sucked by someone not his wife.
Although LaPierre tried to sound sorrowful, the “put police officers” in every school theme coupled with his introductory tone of “we’re being victimized” made it into a defensive rant.
Some excerpts from transcription:
“There exists in this country a callous and corrupt industry that sells violence against its own people … video games.”
“How come my research staff can find Kindergarten Killer [an online game] but all of your [media research staff] can’t?
“Add another hurricane, a terrorist attack, add another natural disaster
[and the nation will descend into a violent nightmare, or something to
that effect]…“One thousand music videos portray life as a joke … and they all have the nerve to call it entertainment.
“In a race to the bottom video conglomerates compete … to violate every standard of civilized society.”
[At this point a little old lady, carrying a banner, got in front of LaPierre and started shouting, “The NRA has blood on it hands — ban
assault weapons now!” She was taken off but not before getting it in
a few times.]
“It is now time for us to assume responsibility for our schools … the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”[LaPierre then got querulous about what he knows the reaction to putting more guns in schools will be.]“I can imagine the shocking headlines you’ll be printing tomorrow…”
Blaming video games and entertainment has been in rehearsal all week. The only problem with the argument is that the country exports the same video games and entertainments to the rest of the developed world where they are met with great consumer relish. But those civilized countries are not ridden with massacres perpetrated by semi-automatic weapons.
And why is that? Perhaps because everyone can’t go to Dick’s or Walmart for the world’s best selection of consumer-tailored assault guns.
As for relying on the National Rifle Association to train the country in the defense of its schools, I rely on Who Is the NRA again to edify:
In the increasingly distant past, the National Rifle Association (NRA) largely advocated for policies related to hunting and marksmanship, but today its leaders are defined by unsavory conduct and the advancement of extreme, anti-government ideology. While the NRA innocuously describes itself as the “nation’s oldest civil rights organization,??? this portrayal serves only as a smokescreen to mask the fact that the organization is a rogues gallery of the most odious voices in the contemporary Conservative Movement.
One only has to look to the NRA’s leadership to discover that the organization is operated by a group of individuals who promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-immigrant animus, religious bigotry, anti-environmentalism, and insurrectionism … Moreover, while superficially bipartisan, the NRA is closely aligned with the most extreme elements in the Republican Party and has brought a number of the GOP’s most influential operatives into positions of power within the organization. The GOP and NRA are now locked in a symbiotic relationship.
While not a small force, the NRA is in the minority now. Get the pitchforks.
Updating: Had enough of the NRA and the lunatic white gun right? Just as LaPierre was speaking, another predatory multiple shooting. Here. And here.
More on the NRA leadership’s warped thinking in 2012, from earlier in the week.
Leave it to a feckless Democratic congressman, this one from West Virginia, to show his yellow streak. Afraid of the NRA? Definitely, in W. Virginia, where a jailbird won ten counties over the president in the 2102 primary.
From the wire:
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) has introduced one of Congress’ first pieces of legislation related to the tragedy in Newtown, Conn.: a bill to study the impact of violent video games on children.
“This week, we are all focused on protecting our children. At times like this, we need to take a comprehensive look at all the ways we can keep our kids safe. I have long expressed concern about the impact of the violent content our kids see and interact with every day,” said Rockefeller, who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Rockefeller’s bill would direct the National Academy of Sciences to lead the investigation on video games’ impact and submit a report on its findings within 18 months.
Reid should have Rockefeller ex-communicated for insulting the intelligence, wasting tax payer money and pissing off scientists. Who won’t want to do this because the already know this is a non-starter requested only for the sake of diversionary theater.
Leading NRA board member and public disgrace Ted Nugent in a snap from his Discovery channel show, just canceled, because even they are afraid of him now.
The WhiteManistan photo collage.
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12.20.12
Script advisor to Red Dawn
The remake of Red Dawn was laughed out of town. On Metacritic it was a well into the red 32.
“The film adopts a fringe conspiracy theory that has long been pushed by a small, right-wing coalition led by Newt Gingrich: that terrorists or a rogue state could devastate America with an electro-magnetic pulse, or EMP,” reads one review.
And boy is the guy who played Thor in The Avengers movie bummed. For Chris Hemsworth it was like being Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda.
[North Korea] is a mortal nuclear threat to the United States— right now …
they have a special kind of nuclear weapon that could destroy the United States with a single blow.
In summer 2004, a delegation of Russian generals warned the Congressional Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Commission that secrets had leaked to North Korea for a decisive new nuclear weapon — a Super-EMP warhead.
Any nuclear weapon detonated above an altitude of 30 kilometers will generate an electromagnetic pulse that will destroy electronics and could collapse the electric power grid and other critical infrastructures — communications, transportation, banking and finance, food and water — that sustain modern civilization and the lives of 300 million Americans. All could be destroyed by a single nuclear weapon making an EMP attack.
A Super-EMP attack on the United States would cause much more and much deeper damage than a primitive nuclear weapon …
You know the rest of the script from the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy.
As with Red Dawn, the part of the country that isn’t rabid ferret Republican Party — which is most of it — isn’t buying.
Roscoe Bartlett was sent home in November and it’s really going to be hard for the Cult to scrape up the same ton of fun they had when he was around.
Which leaves only the newspaper of lunatics and its imitators.
“[Two hundred] million Americans — would probably perish from starvation, disease and societal collapse,” it reads. Did that many people die in Red Dawn?
12.19.12
Christmas presents
“The EMP pulser with a special Antenna is capable of shutting down a computer at a distance of 15 meters,” it reads. Thirty four thousand dollars, cheap.
But my favorites are the $1400 can crusher and the $350 fish stunner.
Ever since Rep. Roscoe Bartlett was retired in November a whole bunch of fun has gone out of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy.
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12.18.12
Rats desert indefensible sinking ship
Corporate America liked WhiteManistan only insofar as its not a public relations nightmare or liability.
From the wire, the giant investment brokerage that holds much of the US domestic firearms manufacturing base in a consortium called the Freedom Group is bailing on it and Bushmaster.
A major private equity firm has decided that putting its clients’ money into a company that makes assault-type weapons isn’t a wise strategy.
At the same time a large sporting goods chain has said that, at least for now, it would not sell those types of weapons.
The decisions came as pressure rises for the government to do something about the proliferation of assault-type weapons that have been used in several recent mass shootings.
Cerberus Capital Management said Tuesday, after discussions with investors, that it would sell its stake in Freedom Group, a major weapons producer whose portfolio includes such well-known gun brands as Remington and Bushmaster Firearms.
“Separately, Dick’s Sporting Goods also said Tuesday that it would temporary stop selling guns at a store near Newtown and suspend the sale of ‘modern sporting rifles’ for all stores nationwide,” the piece adds.
However, that is trivial in comparison with a partial display of Walmart money-makers.
It’s possible to see how the gun lobby and its corporate backers can be beaten. Lacking the numbers of a genuine multicultural majority, allow them to loudly defend the right to purchase assault guns and high capacity magazines and to blame the horrific on other causes.
They became paranoid ogres over the years and the political will and interest was not there to show people what precisely it was they were up to. Now that everyone has been shocked by the tragedy in Newtown, let the ideological monsters of the gun right and NRA show the country what they really care about — still being able to buy Bushmasters because it’s right wing white guys and, damn it — leave us the hell alone, you’re trying to victimize us!
Shunning is a viable strategy. Cultivation of national revulsion toward an unacceptable sporting hobby and a covetousness toward horrendously inappropriate weaponry is a legitimate thing to do.
That how you make people lose in the voting booth. You tell their story, just as it is.
People may lose interest. It may fail. But it’s certainly worth attempting.
Hot manias from WhiteManistan
Like it or not, the Newtown massacre has exposed (in a very horrid context) one of this country’s more astonishing and frankly nauseating fetishes — getting hard over assault rifles if you’re white. And it’s not all white people, not anyone I know, and I’m pretty pale.
But in the last couple of years, [Newtown] residents began noticing loud, repeated gunfire, and even explosions, coming from new places …
Yet recent efforts by the police chief and other town leaders to gain some control over the shooting and the weaponry turned into a tumultuous civic fight, with traditional hunters and discreet gun owners opposed by assault weapon enthusiasts …
“Something needs to be done,??? said Joel T. Faxon, a hunter and a member of the town’s police commission, who championed the shooting restrictions. “These are not normal guns, that people need. These are guns for an arsenal …”
“It was like this continuous, rapid fire,??? said Amy Habboush [of the sound emanating from a private unregulated outdoor firing range], who was accustomed to the sound of gunfire but became alarmed last year when she heard what sounded like machine guns, though she did not complain to the police …
Mr. Faxon, the police commission member, who is a lawyer, said he wrote [a] new ordinance, which would have imposed additional constraints on shooting, including limited hours, and a requirement that any target shooting range, and the firearms that would be used there, be approved by the chief of police to make sure they were safe. This was no liberal putsch …
A modest proposal to curb the gunfire failed.
Anyway, “liberal putsch” is what I’d call an unfortunate choice of words by a writer striving to be interesting and colorful.
Hitler, who was not a liberal, or even remotely like anyone in Newtown, installed a machine gun in the Munich Bier Hall to control and intimidate an assembled crowd in the famous event from pre-World War II history that popularized the word ‘putsch.’ The next morning Hitler and his paramilitary force marched out to try and take Munich. Twenty people were killed in the skirmish that ensued, 16 of them Nazis. Hitler was sent to prison where he wrote Mein Kampf.
The Times piece also mentioned the enthusiasm for using semi-automatic assault guns to blow up propane tanks and Tannerite-packed targets at private gun ranges. It’s a sporting activity almost unavoidable if you’ve been paying attention the last few years. (A mind-rotting collection of homemade YouTube videos are here and here.)
Onward.
On the NRA, from Reuters, yesterday:
“One of great strengths of the NRA has been its bipartisanship,” said Jeremy Mayer, a political scientist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Now it’s almost all Republicans and it will be harder for the NRA to deal with a bunch of united and angry Democrats.”
It is expressed a bit too lightly.
The NRA, the leadership, if not the majority of its 4 million members, is a right wing extremist organization. It’s not rational.
I would imagine that most people who are not members have not actually read what its leaders have published in the past year.
Two columns, on the presidential election, are entirely motivated by a desire to frighten membership into contribution by describing a hidden Barack Obama conspiracy, one to be carried to its final nefarious end when he gained a second term.
This enemy-within conspiracy, with its roots said to be in the Justice Department and Operation Fast and Furious, is an across the board hidden operation, a treasonous collaboration with the UN to deprive Americans of their guns, put American gun manufacturers out of business through “a lawsuit [filed by the Mexican government] in a Mexican court against every U.S. firearm and ammunition manufacturer,” to have ammunition regulated by the EPA because it contains environmentally “toxic compounds,” and to make felons of everyone who owns a firearm.
This is the graphic used to illustrate one of the pieces. Do read the two at the links provided. They go right to the heart of a certain right wing white minority’s obsession with and coveting of heavy weapons.
It’s tin foil hat material, single-minded in the desire to instigate fear and paranoia.
The National Rifle Association is not a respectable or reasonable organization although many of its members (not its brain-trust) may be. And it is certainly not bipartisan in even a minor way. They’ve made themselves into ogres.
An Austin-area gun store owner is joining the gun rights debate with a controversial offer for teachers in light of the tragic shooting in Connecticut.
Crocket Keller of Keller’s Riverside Gun Store says if educators want to get a concealed handgun license, he’ll give them a discount. …
“We need to start thinking out of the box and deal with this violent culture,??? said Keller. “We need to lobby our various state governments to allow teachers to be armed.???
On gun sales, yesterday:
Customers fearful that assault rifles may soon be made illegal are buying now, before sales could be cut off.
We popped into 21st Century Firearms, a gun store in Bluffton.
President David Fillers says since Saturday, the shop has seen a huge uptick in sales of semi-automatic modern sporting rifles, handguns, ammunition, powder, primer, and even holsters.
Fillers says after he heard President Obama speak Sunday night of the need for changes in our approach to gun violence, he’s convinced a big battle could be brewing over possible bans to certain types of weapons.
He’s adamant that assault style rifles should not be outlawed.
” If you read the Federalist papers, our forefathers wanted to protect the same type of guns that our military had. They were concerned about tyranny, they were concerned about a government out of control,” Fillers said. — in Bluffton, Indiana
“You have other people say ‘My goodness, these schools can’t protect us, we’ve got to protect ourselves. We’ve got to buy guns.’ And you have other people who say, ‘They’re going to pass [tougher gun] legislation. I don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t have one. I’d better get mine now,'” says Hyatt.
Kay Duncan, the owner of Brass Balls Pawn Shop on South Main Street, said two customers who came in Friday said they were afraid of what President Barack Obama might try to do on gun control.
“That’s the first thing that came out of their mouths,??? she said.
She said the country has a lot of hunters who wouldn’t take kindly to the federal government trying to take their guns away.
“I just don’t think it would be wise for any gun law changes to be made,??? she said. “There are too many people who are armed. If you count the number of hunters who are licensed in each state, you have an army larger than our (U.S.) army.??? — Winston Salem
“We set a record for this store,” said Greg Burge, the owner of Beech Grove firearms as he straightened the inventory after a record number of buyers jammed the store this weekend. Many of those customers were buying in reaction to members of Congress calling for a renewal of the assault weapons ban. — Beech Grove, Indiana
Keep in mind that the president did zero on gun control in his first four years. But the NRA, and others, peddled this inaction as a hidden conspiracy in which, behind the scenes, coordinated forces in the Obama administration were moving to set the stage to take away America’s guns during his second term.
And now, with a massacre pointedly carried out with an assault rifle, a certain demographic of Americans — all in WhiteManistan — are rushing to buy even more, some of whom would probably say they are now utterly convinced that everything the right was saying about the president during the last four years on the Second Amendment was absolutely true.
They’ve made themselves into ogres (continued).
WhiteManistan is not all just Republican. It’s full of white libertarian kooks, too. Libertarians are right wingers who believe themselves too posh to be lumped in with run-of-the-mill GOP proles.
Here’s a take-the-cake piece in which libertarian Megan McArdle outdoes odious Ted Nugent for a day, recommending children (and everyone else) learn to rush shooters en masse when the gun fire starts.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm and Balloon Juice.
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11.21.12
The Empire’s Dog Feces
From the Daily Plaster Caster:
Electromagnetic pulse grenades are a favorite of sci-fi storytellers and videogame designers, a la Halo and Call of Duty. The Army evidently doesn’t want to be left out: It’s seeking a real-life version that can blast electromagnetic signals and fry insurgent bombs.
To be specific, the Army wants “High Power Microwave (HPM) grenades??? to “generate an electromagnetic pulse that could be used to defeat the electronics used to activate [homemade bombs] or that could be used to attack blasting caps,??? according to its latest round of research contracts with small businesses …
Less certain is how such a device would be used neuter a bomb detonated with minimal electrical parts, like the Taliban bombs that detonate when someone compresses a wooden pressure plate; whether it would inadvertently fry U.S. troops’ own electronic circuits; or how difficult (or expensive) it’ll be to develop an EMP grenade …
Keynsian socialist job program for small businesses run by the same crackpot electric engineers who’ve been trying to make them for the last twenty years.
“Certainly lobbing expensive EMP grenades throughout a building won’t prevent all IUD’s [sic] from unfortunately finding a target,” writes one unintentionally amusing commenter.
Reading and believing trash all the time makes it impossible for anyone to be anything but a second-rate person — something paraphrased from an old Official Boy Scouts Handbook.
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11.06.12
Roscoe Bartlett’s political career ends
Roscoe Bartlett, the Maryland House Republican whose entire career can be almost be entirely encapsulated by the phrase — Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy — saw his political career end about fifteen minutes ago when the Washington Post called his race for a faceless Democratic Party banker, John Delaney.
Bartlett’s political career for the last twelve years, summed up, here at DD blog:
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Bartlett, who won re-election at 84 in November, has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
However, out-of -power politicians (and you can make a good argument that Bartlett was never actually ever in any position of real power) don’t lose their membership in the cult. They just become pure lobbyists. And expand into plaguing the British.
Bartlett also has an emergent career as a grandfather to the survivalist/prepper demographic, that group of white people on the extreme right who think American civilization will soon come to a catastrophic end.
The tales of Roscoe Bartlett — from the archives.
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11.01.12
Roscoe’s last ride (continued)
Roscoe Bartlett, and others, in the trailer of a straight to Internet movie about the end of US civilization.
Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy eminence grise Roscoe Bartlett is approaching an election which the odds-makers say will end his political career.
Incumbent Republican Roscoe Bartlett, who’s held the seat since 1993, faces Democrat John Delaney, a financier from Potomac making his first run for public office. Libertarian Nickolaus Mueller also is on the ballot.
Kurtz gives Delaney the edge.
“Polls have it pretty close. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any Democrat in the state who thinks Bartlett’s going to win, and probably privately, most Republicans don’t think he’s going to win either.”
Kurtz says it’s telling that “the political arm of the House Republicans hasn’t given Bartlett a dime.” Yet it has given other vulnerable caucus members money.
“I think they see (Bartlett’s campaign) as a lost cause,” Kurtz says.
And from Bartlett’s district newspaper in Frederick, MD:
A recent poll shows that the race between Republican Rep. Roscoe Bartlett and Democratic challenger John Delaney for Maryland’s 6th District congressional seat is a dead heat.
The (Baltimore) Sun commissioned OpinionWorks to conduct the telephone survey of 610 likely voters. The survey took place from Oct. 20 to Oct. 25.
This may come as a surprise to all those who believed the 10-term Buckeystown congressman’s political career was on its last legs.
According to The Sun, however, this new poll may not reflect the voting on Election Day. Delaney, the story says, is coming on strong in the homestretch, while Bartlett “is not performing as well in the district” as GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Frederick, incidentally, is where the center of US bioterror defense, Ft. Detrick (and now the NBACC), is located.
This is where and scientist Bruce Ivins made his anthrax and a homemade country single as Creepy Bruce & the Country Boys.
Since the anthrax mailings besmirched the reputation of Ft. Detrick, many in the Frederick area refused to believe Ivins did the deed. This turned the politically savvy Bartlett into an anthrax-denier, one in a small but vocal cult which lobbied, and still lobbies, for a re-opening of the FBI case.
The many tales of Roscoe Bartlett — from the archives.
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10.30.12
Cult of EMP Crazy Chief: End of career in sight
Maryland’s notorious kook, House Republican Roscoe Bartlett, is nearing what appears to be the end of his political career as head of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby.
As long as I can remember Bartlett has been in congress, warning about how an enemy — North Korea, or terrorists, and now the special foe — Iran, will destroy American civilization with an electromagnetic pulse caused by a nuclear weapon detonated over the United States.
The Cult of EMP Crazy, aka as the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, would have been nothing without Bartlett. Year after year after year Bartlett pounded the issue from the House, as often as possible, even causing the formation of a commission, now years past, to study the threat. And conclude that the nation could be trivially returned to the age of horse and buggy. (Or as I used to like to put it, the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.)
As a consequence, Bartlett is the inspiration for now hundreds of vanity-published books from the survivalist crew, all distributed on Amazon, all exactly the same — about the end of western civilization by EMP.
But next week, odds are it will be over.
Roscoe Bartlett will go back to being a private citizen, beaten by a banker running on the Democratic ticket. Maryland was redistricted and Bartlett’s once safe red corner of it has been made part of another, mostly blue.
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Maryland’s ruling Democrats had a plan to oust 10-term Republican U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett …
Now the 86-year-old incumbent must persuade independent and crossover voters in the Washington suburbs that he is more of a centrist than his 92 percent rating from the American Conservative Union suggests. Meanwhile, the better-financed John Delaney of Potomac, 49, has been running a brisk schedule of events on his home turf.
Voter registrations in the district favor Democrats over Republicans, 46 percent to 34 …
Despite all the lobbying, Bartlett was never able to put into action any legislation to deal with electromagnetic pulse doom. But the lobby itself is loud, vociferous and incessant, writing books, articles and opinion pieces, casting movies and commercials, even spanning the Atlantic Ocean to plague the Brits.
Bartlett, for his part, has an obscure career waiting in the prepper/survivalist movement, where everyone is convinced America is about to end, anyway.
In the House, the mantle of Bartlett’s leadership of the electromagnetic pulse crazy caucus has been passed to the odious and stupid Trent Franks, GOP birther from Arizona.
Reads the Chronicle:
[Bartlett] recently voted to dismantle the Clean Water Act, block limits on mercury and carbon emissions and continue taxpayer subsidies to the oil industry …
Bartlett chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. He counts among his achievements a 2006 law barring condominium and homeowner associations from restricting how the American flag can be displayed and a 2001 law permitting the adoption of military working dogs after their retirement. He has also championed banning scientific research on chimpanzees, and he warns frequently that an electromagnetic pulse, such as that from a nuclear explosion in space, could disable all electronic devices.
The congressman who first brought the potentially catastrophic effects of an electromagnetic pulse event to the nation’s attention is now under fire from the electric power industry that has fought voluntary efforts to protect the national grid with hardened transformers.
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., is fighting for re-election against the influences of the powerful electric power industry lobby …
And in a quote from one of the old Electromagnetic Pulse Threat commissioners Bartlett pushed regularly:
“Millions of Americans and their children may well owe their lives and future prosperity to the vision, determination, and political courage of Congressman Bartlett in his unrelenting quest to protect our nation from natural and nuclear EMP …”
And at DD blog, this is probably the most admiring thing I’ve had to say about Bartlett in the past couple years:
Since Roscoe Bartlett has been at his cause for so long, one might legitimately ask what is the man’s legacy?
Striking fear into people who are not particularly perceptive is one of his signal achievements … Bartlett’s unstinting work aimed at describing the total end of US civilization in an instant is particularly resonant within the Christian right …
Bartlett, who won re-election at 84 in November, has been around longer than PEZ candy, parking meters and penicillin.
At the end of Maloof’s piece at WND, a plug for yet another book about electromagnetic pulse doom to throw directly into the trash:
In the [new tv drama Revolution], society has collapsed [due to mysterious electromagnetic pulses] and the country devolved into a collection of mutually hostile self-styled militias, private armies and warring tribes … It shows that basic necessities that Americans take for granted, such as widely available food and clean water, become inaccessible as millions die from starvation, disease or widespread violence.
[And so do shows about zombie hordes.]
A coming book, “A Nation Forsaken,??? suggests that the show actually may downplay the real threat.
Maloof doesn’t tell readers he’s the author, too. And that without old Roscoe, what audience there is for it wouldn’t exist.
Telling the tales of Roscoe Bartlett — from the archives.
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