With Plastic Gun Ban, Congress Votes to Kill a Cherished Gun Lobby Argument

Bad news for the people who think the Second Amendment term "well-regulated" means "not to be regulated." A long-standing gun regulation will be formally renewed at the White House today, proving that even the Tea Party-dominated House of Representatives sees allowing certain weapons to be legally owned would be ridiculously and needlessly pro-criminal.

CNN: The Senate voted unanimously on Monday to renew a 10-year ban on guns that cannot be picked up by metal detectors commonly found in airports, court houses and government buildings.

The law, which prohibits firearms made mostly of plastic, was set to expire at day's end.

It had drawn renewed attention recently due to its pending expiration and the advent of mainly non-metalic handguns produced by 3-D printers.

The House acted last week, and now the measure goes to President Barack Obama for his signature.

In a world where bottles of shampoo are perceived as a serious danger of terrorism, an undetectable firearm ban was really a no-brainer. And the current guns are undetectable, despite a steel fig leaf designed to create a loophole in law. "Currently, plastic guns made using 3-D printers comply with the law by inserting a removable metal block," CNN reports. "That has led to worries plastic guns could pass through metal detectors without being flagged by simply removing the block."

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Hillary Clinton and Republicans' Post-Logical Worldview

Today is the day that Hillary Clinton will no longer be Secretary of State. No more globehopping behind a desk bolted to the deck of a C-17. That's all John Kerry's job now. He'll probably do the job just as ably, but frankly, I don't see him wearing it as well.

But we tend to be remembered best for the last time someone saw us, which means that Clinton's name will most likely bring to mind her final appearance before the senate, where she slapped back grandstanding Republican know-nothings intent on cashing in on a tragedy in Benghazi, Libya. Many of those Republicans probably wish that memory would fade into history, but Clinton's not done with them quite yet.

In an interview with the Associated Press (her final interview as Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton revisited the Benghazi hearing and had unkind things to say -- not only about those she put in their place, but of Republicans in general.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is leaving office with a slap at critics of the Obama administration's handling of the September attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya. She told The Associated Press that critics of the administration's handling of the attack don't live in an "evidence-based world" and their refusal to "accept the facts" is unfortunate and regrettable for the political system.

[...]

"I was so unhappy with the way that some people refused to accept the facts, refused to accept the findings of an independent Accountability Review Board, politicized everything about this terrible attack," she said. "My job is to admit that we have to make improvements and we're going to."

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GOP Fights Akin-Like Lunatics of Their Own Making

Todd Akin has become a real headache for the GOP. But there are more of these headaches in the pipe. And those headaches are self-inflicted, like a hangover after an ideological bender. Observe:

ThinkProgress:

In a local television interview, Hillsborough County (New Hampshire) sheriff candidate Frank Szabo said that he values the life of an unborn fetus so much that, when it came to elective and late-term abortions, he’d be willing to kill for it:

But Szabo may have inflamed the issue further when asked if he would use deadly force to prevent an abortion.

“I would respond specifically by saying that if someone is under threat, a full-grown human being, if they’re under threat, what should the sheriff do? Everything in their power to prevent them from being harmed,” he said.

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GOP's Alternate Healthcare Reality

The score from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the current healthcare reform bill is in. Or, at least, preliminary numbers. Those numbers look very good. According to Chris Frates with Politico, the bill would reduce the deficit by "$138 billion over the next decade, but cautions that it has not yet analyzed all the provisions. So far, it has analyzed $82 billion worth of savings." In a bill designed to bring down healthcare costs, savings to the government from Medicare, Medicaid, and employee health plans should surprise no one.

The release of the numbers has been a game-changer, with wavering Democrats coming around to support the bill in droves. Which is, of course, bad news for Republicans who are determined to stop this from becoming law at any cost. The CBO numbers just made that a lot more difficult. One observer, Washington Post editorial writer Ruth Marcus, put it this way:

So Democrats will be pointing to this preliminary CBO score as if it is engraved on stone tablets. Republicans will proclaim their respect for the CBO and proceed to argue that its estimates should not be taken too seriously in this instance. This may come as a surprise, but I think the Republican argument is closer to correct. To crow, as did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that the package is "a triumph for the American people in terms of deficit reduction" is premature at best, delusional at worst.

"Republicans will proclaim their respect for the CBO and proceed to argue that its estimates should not be taken too seriously in this instance?" I'm sorry Ruth, but where have you been for the last ten years at least? They might do that if they had any shame or integrity or respect for truth. But they don't. Republicans lie. If the truth doesn't serve them, then the truth becomes irrelevant. They'll just make crap up.





For example, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele. Speaking to CNN's Rick Sanchez, Steele came right out and accused the CBO of lying.

STEELE: Can you just give me an honest number, Rick? How much do you really, legitimately think, adding, using the president’s number, 30 million people to a health care system that you just said doesn’t work is going to cost the American taxpayer? How much you think it’s really gonna? $940 billion dollars over ten years. So, you telling me an additional $940 billion dollars a year is going to make all of our problems go away?

SANCHEZ: According to the calculations that we did and according to the calculations the Democrats are announcing today, it’s going to save in the deficit for the United States citizens $1.2 trillion. Do you believe that’s not true?

STEELE: Ok, can I, I got two words for you — three words, three words.

SANCHEZ: Go, go.

STEELE: That’s a lie.

That's the Republican way. Don't like a fact? Then it's not a fact. Just dismiss it. You don't need to make any argument for your position, you just make the declaration -- it's not a fact -- and it's game over, you win. Republicans like to talk about healthy debate, but they don't debate. A declaration isn't an argument. If one side is determined to deny reality, what's there to debate?

Another GOP mouthpiece who's declared the CBO numbers untrue is Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh has called the numbers "meaningless," "a scam," "a fraud," "phony," And "a sham." His evidence of this? None. He just says it and that means it's true. By the same standard of evidence, I can tell you without any doubt at all that Rush Limbaugh has a wooden, prosthetic head -- and it's slowly being eaten by termites. How sad for him... a double tragedy, really. Not only is he literally brainless, but what he has instead of a brain is infested with destructive insects. Try to keep your courage up, Rush. We're all pulling for you.

Let's be clear here, the Republicans have no interest in having this debate. If they were to deal with this honestly, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on. This isn't about a disagreement over healthcare reform, this is just the GOP being pissy about being in the minority. It's also about the 2010 elections. But what it's not about is your rising healtcare costs and a non-system of healthcare delivery that can't possibly be sustained. There's a healthcare crisis going on in America -- it's happening right now -- and the Republican Party is playing politics with it. It may be an overused cliche, but it applies here; the GOP is fiddling while Rome burns.

If the Republicans want to have a debate on healthcare reform, then the time has come and gone. They had their chance to have that debate -- and they refused. Instead, they threw a tantrum and made up an alternate reality in which everything they wanted to be true was true and everything they didn't was a lie. Delusion is not debate.

-Wisco


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Slam Dunk Argument for Dealing with Global Warming

Strap in, because we're going to do some thinking here. Cruising through my RSS feeds last night, I came across this video posted in Peter Rothberg's blog at The Nation. "It's the best argument I've seen yet for taking immediate action on climate change," Rothberg writes. "The logic would seem undeniable even for the denialists."

Titled, "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See," it's less terror and more logic. It's also nearly ten minutes long so, for those who are short on time, I'll give you the abridged version.





Basically, it's a cost-benefit analysis of doing nothing about global warming vs. doing what scientists say we need to do. In order to get around the argument that climate change isn't caused by humans (or isn't even happening at all), the person who made the video -- Oregon high school science teacher Greg Craven -- basically gives equal weight to both arguments. In other words and for the sake of argument, the he assumes that denialists and climate scientists have an equal chance of being right. It's a coin-flip.

So, if the deniers are right and we deal with a non-existent problem, we have a global depression -- that's taking their worst case scenario and assuming it's valid (we'll deal with the problems with this argument later). If the deniers are right and we don't do anything, then nothing happens and everyone's happy.

On the other hand, if the deniers are wrong and we deal with global warming, we've still spent that money, but it turned out to be necessary. If we don't deal with warming and the deniers are wrong, then the worst case scenario is the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; famine, disease, death, and war -- in addition to economic collapse comparable to the deniers' worst case scenario for dealing with what they believe is a nonexistent problem.

So, all things being equal, the only logical choice is to deal with climate change. The consequences of the deniers being wrong are much, much worse than those of the scientists being wrong.

And the deniers' worst case scenario is pure BS. All we're talking about doing is moving from one technology -- burning stuff -- to another technology. We've done this hundreds -- if not thousands -- of times in human history and it's never resulted in economic collapse. Was the automobile bad for the buggywhip industry? Yeah, it was. But so what? All the jobs lost in that industry were offset by new jobs in another industry. We're talking about creating new technologies, new industries, new markets, and new jobs. How could this possibly be bad for the economy?

Some may recognize Craven's argument as a variation on Pascal's Wager, where philosopher Blaise Pascal argued that the safer bet was to be a Christian. If God exists, then you gain eternal life. If God doesn't exist, then you still spent your life as a good person. The philosopher argued that it was a bet you couldn't lose. But Pascal ignored variables that didn't fit his argument; the existence of other religions for example. The argument for being a Christian could just as easily be applied to being a Hindu or Muslim -- the possibilities weren't the 50/50 that Pascal presented. And, of course, life is finite, so the argument that you're out nothing if you're wrong about being Christian is flawed -- you're out a big chunk of that finite time wasted in church, for one. In contrast, Craven's argument encompasses all possibilities and rules out nothing, so it's there that the comparison to Pascal dies.

But Craven's argument does have one flaw; it assumes deniers are rational and will be swayed by logic. Experience tells me this isn't the case. If you want an example of how little facts and reason mean to many on the right, check out the latest piece by syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts.

I got an email the other day that depressed me.

It concerned a piece I recently did that mentioned Henry Johnson, who was awarded the French Croix de Guerre in World War I for singlehandedly fighting off a company of Germans (some accounts say there were 14, some say almost 30, the ones I find most authoritative say there were about two dozen) who threatened to overrun his post. Johnson managed this despite the fact that he was only 5'4'' and 130 pounds, despite the fact that his gun had jammed, despite the fact that he was wounded 21 times.

My mention of Johnson's heroics drew a rebuke from a fellow named Ken Thompson, which I quote verbatim and in its entirety:

"Hate to tell you that blacks were not allowed into combat intell 1947, that fact. World War II ended in 1945. So all that feel good, one black man killing two dozen Nazi, is just that, PC bull."

So, of course, Pitts wrote back. He included verifiable facts and proved that Thompson was wrong. Thompson didn't care. He made up reasons to dismiss the evidence and insisted that Pitts was a fool for believing the facts.

"To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth," Pitts writes. "We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe."

So Greg Craven's argument, though entirely logical and well thought out, won't make a dent in the deniers' minds. We live in a world where, despite literally having all the proof in the world that they're wrong, people insist on believing that Barack Obama isn't a US citizen. Where people believe that The Flintstones is a better representation of early humans than anything in the theory of evolution. Where people still believe there were WMD in Iraq, despite overwhelming evidence that there were not.

If truth is meaningless and facts are irrelevant, then logic doesn't stand a chance in hell.

-Wisco


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