“Who knows? Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!???
The lede: Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a broad campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children … The industry’s strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for ‘junior shooters’ …”
Thousands of people, many holding signs with names of gun violence victims and messages such as “Ban Assault Weapons Now,” joined a rally for gun control on Saturday, marching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument …
Once the crowd arrived at the monument, speakers called for a ban on military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition and for universal background checks on gun sales.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the crowd it’s not about taking away Second Amendment gun rights, but about gun safety and saving lives. He said he and President Barack Obama would do everything they could to enact gun control policies.
As I’ve pointed out, the gun nut lobby has worked hard cultivating its image as rage-filled white male ogres who are stockpiling arms, a group that frightens or repulses normal people.
The only thing protecting it are feckless Democrats and the entirety of the minority GOP. They’ve lost any good will they might have had with everyone else.
And about the liberties I took with the photo: Yes, I put my fingers on the scale. But I didn’t have to.
When a kid I went to the original vomit bag as advertising hook movie, Mark of the Devil, for a Saturday matinee in Pine Grove. It worked. Everyone in my grade wanted to go.
Rated “V” for Violence. For the NRA, Wayne LaPierre and the insurrectionist lobby, that’s fair, dontcha think? It would be a heckuva grindhouse movie.
Foster Friess, the crazy Republican plutocrat infamous for going on television and making a witless joke about how women used Bayer aspirin for contraception back in his day, AND who bankrolled equally crazy homophobe Rick Santorum’s presidential bid … is now even more crazy, apparently.
In today’s Washington Times, the DC newspaper that lives to publish every single belief, everyday, in Republican Crazy World, Friess has evidently come to the conclusion that it’s possible for his party of nuts rabidly homophobic people to win the gay vote.
How do they do this?
By telling gay people in America the GOP is their protector against the creeping menace of sharia law. That is, they will continue to try and beat up on Muslims in this country and that will make gay people like them more. (Or maybe he didn’t really mean it and was trying to do anything to avoid talking about gay marriage. And WaTimes editors are desperate to reinvigorate the party with the weirdest things that can be thought up.)
Anyway, there can be no doubt it is an ingenious strategy, right there with having a woman hold a pellet between her knees as birth control.
An influential GOP donor said Friday that Republicans should do more to make sure that gay men and lesbian women do not fall victim to the sort of Shariah law practiced by hard-line Islamists.
Foster Friess, the the multimillionaire who helped keep Rick Santorum’s presidential dreams afloat in the GOP primary last year, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor that he wants to make sure that gay people are not killed in foreign nations because of their sexual preference.
Asked whether the Republican Party should embrace gay marriage, the 72-year-old investment manager said, “We have to protect the gay people in our country from Shariah law.”
There is no sharia law in the US. But every week, like clockwork, someone on the editorial pages of the Washington Times, insists there is. I always get a newsletter in my mailbox about it.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at that list. Soak in it, but only a little.
You could make a pretty bleak comedy about the diminishing group of white far right wing Americans and their needy character — a flaw that requires they shout to anyone in hearing how the president is like the German dictator.
There’s no place safe from electronic Pearl Harbor, not even lowly Huntsville, Alabama. Or rather, there’s no place the plutocrat cutpurses and their shoeshine boys in the national cyberwar industry find too small if there are taxpayer dollars to be taken off the rubes.
The only way the U.S. will improve its defenses against cyber attacks is if there is a modern-day, Pearl Harbor-like attack or if Americans get agitated enough to ask for answers, according to the former director of the National Security Agency.
Mike McConnell, an expert in cyber security and vice chair of Booz Allen Hamilton, said both Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks could have been prevented if the U.S agencies were were better equipped and if they worked in better cooperation with each other. All the intelligence needed was known, McConnell — who led the NSA from 1992 until 1996 and now serves as vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton — said. (In 2007 he was appointed as Director of National Intelligence by President George W. Bush.)
“We had all the pieces, but not the imagination” he told a Huntsville audience at the Chamber of Commerce of Huntsville-Madison County this evening. The event was sponsored by Birmingham-base law firm Sirote and Permutt PC.
The post informs Huntsville is the “No. 2 target in the U.S. for foreign intelligence efforts.”
They’re number TWO!
“With nearly 20 percent of Alabamians receiving food assistance, the state ranks above the national average,” reads a local Alabama news article from last summer. “Experts say this trend seems to be an increasing one.”
