When Gun Nuts Abandon Guns as Their Method of 'Tyrant-Killing'

For a while now, I've been arguing that the gun lobby's and Tea Party's interpretation of the Second Amendment amounts to advocating terrorism. There's no small amount of bullying thuggishness in the threat to start shooting "tyrants" if you don't get your way. They would have us believe that the founders intended that constitutionality be tested not by the courts, but by wild-eyed, poorly-informed loons who believe that "unconstitutional" means "something I don't agree with." And that the remedy for an unconstitutional law or act isn't to reverse it in the judiciary, but to start blasting. Luckily, people who feel the need to hide behind piles of guns and ammo aren't exactly paragons of courage, so the threat had remained a threat.

Until now.

New York Times: Two letters that contained threats to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — one addressed to him, the other to a lobbyist who works on his gun control campaign — have tested positive for the deadly poison ricin, the authorities said on Wednesday.

The first letter was opened at a New York City mail center in Lower Manhattan on Friday, the police said. Although staff members at the mail center do not appear to have become ill, several police officers who came into contact with the letter’s contents “indicated some mild symptoms the next day, including diarrhea,” and they are being treated in hospitals, the New York Police Department’s spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said on Wednesday afternoon. “They’re being checked out as a precaution.”

The second letter, which was opened on Sunday in Washington, was addressed to Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Mr. Bloomberg helps run and finances, officials said. Mr. Glaze opened the letter, an official said. No injuries were reported, Mr. Browne said.

"Both letters were identical in content, bore references to the debate over gun regulation and contained written threats to Mayor Bloomberg," the report tells us.

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Bachmann's Career Dies as it Lived -- Running Scared from Any Hint of Accountability

During her presidential run, soon-to-be former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann developed a reputation for having a rocky relationship with the press. It wasn't so much the media's fault, as it was Shelly's.

Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News (Aug., 2011): CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon says that Marcus Bachmann, the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, and two members of her campaign staff pushed him into a golf cart during a campaign stop at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines before Bachmann's victory in Saturday's straw poll.

"She came out, after speaking for just a couple minutes," Lemon said on CNN. "There were other reporters and cameras there. And I asked her very respectful questions: 'How do you think you did in the debate last night?' and 'How do you think you're going to end up in the Ames Straw Poll?' And her two campaign aides started elbowing me."

Lemon continued: "I told them, asked them not to elbow me. And then her husband Marcus started doing the same thing. And then he elbowed me into the cart. And I said, 'You just pushed me into the cart.' And he goes, 'No, you did it yourself.'"

The entire incident struck Lemon as odd, since he was just doing general reporting. "We weren't asking any 'gotcha' questions," he said. The same story covers a similar incident with ABC's Brian Ross, who was "manhandled" by Bachmann security after asking a question about Bachmann's tendency toward migraine headaches.

"I was never closer than 10 or 12 feet to her," Ross said later. "The people around her recognized me and came up and identified themselves as with the staff said they knew who I was. And the blocking was all about me. Other cameraman, other reporters were allowed to get close." See, Ross is scary because he's ABC's investigative reporter

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Has 'Rebranding' Actually Made the GOP More Tolerant of Racism?

After Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama in 2012, many in the Republican Party decided it was time to spiff up the Grand Old Party's image. The Republican candidate lost women and minorities, leaving the party with mostly white Christian male voters -- a demographic on the decline as time goes on and no longer numerous enough to swing an election. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus commissioned an "autopsy" of the party's losses and followed by announcing a "rebranding" effort to reach out to minority voters. "If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity," he said.

Unfortunately for all involved, that effort never got beyond the conceptual stage. Part of the problem was that the party had let themselves become captive to populist grifters like Sarah Palin. Serious rebranding would mean shutting down her branch of the party, with its exclusionist messaging and its reliance on perpetual white victimhood. So she and others like her pushed back to protect their gravy train. But the bigger problem was the reason GOP voters found Palin so appealing in the first place -- the aforementioned exclusionist messaging and reliance on perpetual white victimhood. You could rebrand to attract minority voters, you could remain unchanged to keep the current batch, but you could not do both. Republican voters believe in Reagan's racist "welfare queen" myth, with minority voters living off welfare at the expense of white workers. They believe in the form of Affirmative Action -- existing largely in their paranoid imaginations -- that promotes disqualified jobseekers and college applicants, while keeping deserving white candidates down in order to maintain some fictional quota. In short, despite the fact that the very wealthy in this country are disproportionately white and male, they believe that white males are the most oppressed people in America.

That's not going to work very well as a minority outreach message. It soon became clear that the GOP would have to change some policies stances to attract new voters -- and they weren't interested in doing that.

In fact, you could argue that the mere call for rebranding only made things worse. Rightwing conservatives are called reactionaries for a reason; they don't come up with changes to policies or the status quo, they react to and resist them. Look up "conservative" some time. When a conservative says they want change, it means they want to change something back. This isn't change at all, but the opposite. It's an undoing of change -- a dismantling of progress. And so, in their contrary and reactionary little hearts, a call to rebrand became a call to dig in. And a call to reach out to minority voters became a call to let their racist flag fly.

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