The Learning Curve Isn't A Flat Line, But It's Close.

Lot of déjà vu lately. I keep hoping we’ll build on this weird monster we have now, this internet. Because apparently, satellite news available around the world, 24-7-365 in every timezone, just isn’t educational enough.

But some things just keep happening in the world, even when spectacular examples force us as humans to learn how to prevent them.

Let’s start with fires in night clubs. Up to 234 dead in Santa Maria as I write, according to the BBC. Certainly more than died in that Rhode Island fire in 2003, known as the Station Fire. A hundred dead, ten years ago, for exactly the same reason: indoor fireworks, no fireproofing, too many people, not enough exits.

Did you notice ‘ten years ago’? Do you remember how much coverage this got? It made international news. I’ll bet the guys who ran the club, and who ran the town of Santa Maria knew about it. The band might not have. They were still children when it happened.

Meanwhile, another worker fire in India. Or was it Pakistan? They were all the same country once, so for this matter, I don’t care. I do care that America had the Triangle Fire over a hundred years ago, yet these continue to happen in the corner-cutting operations around the world, wherever poverty is leveraged by cheap bastards.

And the common thing in the concert fires and the worker fires…other than fire, of course, is the incredible greediness of the owners of the businesses. Can’t take a chance on someone getting in free through a side door, or sneaking out for some air during a shift. Far cheaper to lock every door but one than to hire people to watch additional doors. Or as we like to call them, ‘Fire Exits’.

And then there’s the amazing pollution in China that we’ve been seeing pictures of. Looks like LA in the sixties and seventies in the summer, or Denver in the winter, or a dozen other major American cities back then. Which is why we have the EPA. And catalytic converters, and stack scrubbers, and monitoring, and fines. And those are part of the reason why you haven’t seen pictures like this from American cities lately. Except it took years from when we knew what to do until when we could get it done. Why? Greedy bastards who were afraid their profit margin on cars or coal or electricity or gasoline would be sucked up by cleaning up after themselves. As usual, wrong. But how many died before we learned?

Like the intro to an old TV show went, “we have the technology, we have the capability...” We just don’t have the sense to use it. That’s the species ‘we’, not the nationalist ‘we’.

Of course, there’s plenty that we could learn from the better results other countries have from their health insurance systems and their gun laws, for example. From the storm barriers the English and the Dutch already have to prevent things like Hurricane Sandy from decimating a city or a country.

And then there’s how we treat each other. I won’t even get into what we should have learned about war. But when someone points at how much better we Westerners treat women than some other countries do, I remind them it’s only a matter of inches. Only the number of inches of leg a woman shows in public before it’s her fault, because ‘she was asking for it.’

So much we still have to learn, as a species, in order to do a better job of being stewards of the land, and our brothers’ keepers and all that. 

You’d think the things some of us have gotten right, the rest of us would get on board with.

You’d think.  

And you’d be different from most.

The Filibuster, Redistricting and Breadlines: The Long Game

To start with, I called 'no filibuster change' back on January 4th.
I can prove it: I called it in the to the Randi Rhodes radio show. (She even mentioned it on yesterday's show.) Not that I wasn't calling my electeds,  asking for a repeal of the 1975 filibuster change that made it so that the majority had to prove it had 60 votes, rather than the old, conservative version, that had the minority having to prove it had 41 votes. This is what Norm Ornstein at AEI recommended. (Look him up.)

But there was only one thing Reid could have offered to get McConnell not to give Reid the big F-U and filibuster Obama's tax deal: no real filibuster reform.

When Reid started playing with the Senate calendar, claiming that the first day of the session, Jan 3rd, hadn't actually ended by the time the Jan 4th workday was over in Washington, I was pretty sure of what was coming.

And I was right.

With the other political news that's been coming this month, I think I'm glad, too. After all, we're gonna need the filibuster after the GOP gets the House, the Senate and the White House back by 2016's elections.

Here's why, and how.
1) The House is GOP-owned now, and is stopping almost every initiative the Dems and Obama want to enact. And if you think they capitulated on the debt ceiling, you haven't read this. They capitulated alright, to Grover Norquist.

2) The 2014 election is going to suck for Dems. In the House, Republican-run states are re-redistricting (that's not a typo), while in the Senate, there are even more Dem seats to defend, in even redder states, than there were in 2012.

And that was with all the Obamaniacs coming out to vote this year. But we've seen how well they show up for the mid-terms, haven't we? 2010 is how we ended up in this f-ing mess.

So when 2015 rolls around, after the next mid-terms, the GOP will be running both the House and Senate, both full of GOP drones voting on strict leadership lines, running the GOP's cut-taxes, cut-services, cut-enforcement playbook.

At least we'll still have Obama to veto stuff, and the GOP won't have two-thirds of either house, so it won't be able to override his vetoes.

But that's only for his last two years. Then the shit hits the fan.

3) I've written here before about the GOP plan to change the way presidents get Electoral votes, rather than actually face up to the demographic changes that let Obama give Romney a 5-million-vote ass-kicking in November. There's absolutely nothing unconstitutional about their plan, since it's how Nebraska and Maine have done it for years, at least for the votes related to a state's House seats. The new filip is the allocation of the votes related to a state's Senate seats: these would no longer go to the candidate who won the state's popular vote, but to the candidate who won the most congressional districts in the state, which the Republican legislatures in these states can draw and redraw pretty much at will, to assure that majority.

When I wrote that piece above, a good friend recommended I stop scaring people. Now that this plan is common news, I don't see the point. 2016 is going to be a real shitstorm.

Remember, the Supreme Court said it was fine that Tom DeLay redistricted Texas twice after the 2000 Census, in 2001 and 2003, that second time giving 'W' the only House gains he got during his 'landslide' in 2004. Why not as many times as the GOP wants, in as many states as it they own?

And as long as the redistricting makes sure blacks and hispanics have a few districts that will elect them, the ever-so-pliant Supreme Court will give these new redistricting plans a pass, and screw the Voting Rights Act.

So 2016 stands a real good chance of the Dems winning a thin majority of the popular vote, and the GOP getting a huge majority of the Electoral votes. That's if Dems run a candidate with the same party support they gave Gore and then Kerry. Which is, not much.

But if Hillary runs, giving all her supporters from 2008 a second bite at the apple, and giving most of the Obamaniacs the excuse to vote for a 'third term for Obama' through his first Secretary of State, Dems could win by a margin even larger than the 2012 spread.

And still lose the Electoral College by a huge amount.

At which point we may find out how many of those "law-abiding gun owners" are willing to stand up for the framers of the Constitution, or for the GOP. And it's gonna be ugly.
REAL ugly.  

There was a way out of this, back when we'd seen how the GOP ran elections (2000) and how they would redistrict again and again (Texas 2003) to gain any advantage. Screw the future, says the GOP, we'll take whatever advantage we can get, right-damned-NOW. A way out of this, back when Dems had the House, the Senate, and the White House. That golden filibuster-proof 42-day period back in 2009, after Franken was finally declared the winner but before Teddy died.
But we wasted it doing ObamaCare. (That's snark, for those who care.)

Our Constitution gave us a way out, in Article I, sxn 4, saying "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators."

See that? "...but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations." This clause underpins the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the Help America Vote Act of 2002.  Each fulfilling its intention, by helping or hindering American voters, by the Democrats and the Republicans, respectively.

Congress could have regulated how ALL states draw their Congressional districts to prevent this crap, and could have specified how often it could be done (like maybe 'ONCE as soon as practicable after each Census'), and could have specified that all Electoral votes go to the winner of a state's popular vote. All possible. All by simply writing into law the two-centuries-old customs of the United States.

Not a chance now.

There will be a steady string of Republican presidents who lose the popular vote but take the White House anyway, with those Republican-run state legislatures successfully fending off the 'popular vote' initiatives already passed by several states, and the Supreme Court continuing to point out that it's all Constitutional, even if it's nowhere near how the Founders intended our government to run. And with those Republican presidents appointing 40-year-old party faithfuls as replacements for Ginsberg and Stevens, the split on the Supreme Court will become 7 - 2 for decades, ruling against citizens, and in favor of the GOP and their corporate owners.

The only weapon the Democrats will have at the national level will be the Filibuster. And someone not afraid to use it just as often as the GOP does now.

But that won't last, because the GOP leadership has proven it won't be squeamish about changing any rules, including nuking the filibuster, once it's back in the majority in the Senate. So the filibuster will last until the first session of the 115th Congress, Jan 3rd, 2017, when the Republicans have all three houses: Senate, Representatives and the White one up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

I do see how the Democrats will eventually get back into majorities at the federal and state levels.
And back into the White House.

But your children aren't going to enjoy those bread lines.

IBM Demonstrates Why the NRA Is Stupid, In a 30-Second Commercial.

You've probably seen this one recently.

As a cop leaves a donut shop and drives into the night, his voice-over talks about how his job has changed. "Used to be about catching crooks. But now, police analyze crime data, spot patterns, and figure out where to send patrols. " Jump cut to an unsavory character in a beaten, rusting muscle car, also driving through the night. And a picture of some clerk, loading cash into a deposit bag at another convenience store. Back to the cop: "Now, the city's cut crime by up to 30%...", as the cop and what we know now must be a crook, cross paths at an overpass.  The clerk again, zipping up the cash. The crook, parking behind the store, and marching towards the front door as he pulls on gloves to prevent finger prints. A car backs away from the front door, revealing the cop, leaning against his car in the next space, with a cup of coffee in hand, greeting the would-be crook. Who sees it's not his night, turns, and walks away.

Fun commercial, brilliantly simple explanation of a simple but straightforward idea. One that the NRA got Congress, through the Todd Tiahrt Amendments, to forbid.

See, if we change that line to "The ATF can analyze crime data, spot patterns, and figure out where to send agents to prevent sales to criminals", then you have what the Tiahrt Amendments were passed to prevent. Yes, I said "prevent". Written by the NRA.

I wrote about these awhile back, but now everyone's talking about them, on MSNBC, on KTLK 1150AM in LA, even on a couple of news shows on NPR. Between these Amendments to the federal statutes on guns, and other existing laws, the situation is this:

No matter how many guns you buy at one time, the information (type and quantity) is not included in the background check.

No matter how often you buy guns, the federal government is not allowed to keep the results of the background check for more than 24 hours, and they're forbidden from comparing them, even in those twenty four hours, with any other background check results.

This includes both ends of the transaction. So if you go into Guns-R-Us and pick up a hundred AR-15s and a couple thousand rounds of ammo, you can do it again tomorrow, and the next day, until your army is armed, or until Guns-R-Us runs out of inventory.

And Guns-R-Us, while supposed to keep records of those sales on paper, and records of their inventory, can only have either of those records inspected more than once a year. With significant advance notice. And without penalty if they can't find the paperwork, or lost some of those AR-15s, or Glock pistols, or whatever fell off the dock in back.

So the one-percent of gun dealers responsible for over 50% of the sales of guns used in crimes can no longer be identified or prosecuted. (By the way, those stats are from the last time they analyzed data they were allowed to collect. It was those results that caused the NRA to write the Amendments and Todd Tiahrt to get them passed.)

The only way left to prosecute the few dealers who are spoiling it for the rest of the 'law abiding gun owners' and their dealers, is to catch them in the act. In a sting the ATF named after a famous movie. What was that? "The Quick And The Dead"? No. What was it?....

Anyway, that's how the clowns at the NRA turned the ATF into those three monkeys that see no, hear no, and speak no evil about gun dealers.  And made monkeys out of the rest of America.

The IBM commercial ends saying  "Let's build a smarter planet". Let's. And let's start with smarter gun sales tracking, by repealing the Todd Tiahrt Amendments. And with a smarter approach to the NRA.

A one-finger salute.

OK, Let's talk about home defense.

A million years ago, from '90 to '92, I lived downtown, in a real loft, converted from a real train freight storage building. The building was deep in an industrial no man's land then. Gorky's Brew, TV Tacos, a half mile north, and south, below the 10, on Adams, a strip mall with a Thrifty's drugs and a free-standing El Pollo Loco in the parking lot. And that was about it.

It had artists and industrial design wannabes, gliiter across the barbed-wire enclosed parking lot from the t-shirts one guy was grinding out with a dozen ladies in a double unit. All the cats that roamed the property shed glitter, and sparkled when your car lights cought them at night.

When the Rodney King riots came, we got it in big screen sensurround. The husband of the dominatrix that lived below me dragged his projection TV to the edge of their sliding doors and our little community of artists and such all sat outside in the parking lot and watched Channel 9's chopper-cam show us our Thrifty's being looted while it burned. There wasn't much wind that afternoon, but as the hours went by, the smoke from those blocks away filled the air. As did the sirens and the continuous sound of helicopters. Like I said. Sensurround.

When I realized my neighbor, a retired LAPD, wasn't around, I went and knocked on his door. His girlfriend said, "Oh, he's on the rooftop, doing high sentry." I climbed the access ladder screwed into the brick wall, shouting ahead of me, "Paul, it's Kelley, I'm coming up. Can you hear me?" I didn't come over the wall at the top until I heard him shout back, "OK."

He was sitting in a lawn chair I guess he kept up there. He had a shotgun across his lap, and was looking southwest, towards our Thrifty's, through a small pair of binoculars. He had a semi-automatic pistol in a holster lying on the roof next to him. We stood there and watched the city slowly become a nightmare. He told me about getting a head's up from a couple of friends on the forc e, then following on his scanner as things fell apart, wondering whether it was safer to drive to the freeway and get his girlfriend out of the way, or stay here and hold the fort.

I told him about the Korean-lettered church van that passed me in the little red Fiero he always kidded me about, heading east into downtown from Santa Monica, where I worked. I'd been doing 80, and as the van passed me, I could see men with straight black hair and long guns staring through the windshield and pointing at the rising columns of smoke that became more frequent, on either side of the 10, as we approached downtown. To this day, when I pass the tall block building that 'Avon' cosmetics shares with 'Pep Boys' automotive, I remember how it looked with smoke pouring off its roof.

"You know how to use a shotgun?" Paul asked eventually. "I gotta go down and take a piss." No, I said, not a pump, just a two-shell that breaks, like my grandfather used for hunting pheasant and dove down in Missouri. And that's when I got a lesson on how to load and unload a pump shotgun. "If you fire it, it'll damned near take your shoulder off if you're not expecting it," Paul told me. "If you can, stay relaxed and go with the recoil, and let your arm and hand use it to pump the next shell into the chamber." He picked up his holster, clipped it to his belt, and disappeared over the side of the roof, leaving me with a shotgun, half a dozen shells, and a police scanner that also got the am/fm radio bands. After another hour of listening to the news, and watching the sun set, it was obvious no one was coming to burn the place down. The winos never came down here. The feral dog pack barely came north from under the freeway where it operated. No one came here who didn't have to. Especially not tonight. I climbed down and rejoined the crowd around the projection TV.

A couple days later, Paul and I were sitting in his van, eating El Pollo Loco carry-out in the parking lot where the Thrifty's had burned to the ground, but the chicken joint still stood. Thinking about living in the land of earthquakes and, apparently, riots, I asked my ex-cop buddy what would be the best firearm to have in the house for protection.

"None. If you've got a gun at home, you stand a much bigger chance of being shot with it, or shooting someone, in your family, or a neighbor, with it." I couldn't tell if that was an official police-line he was reflexively repeating, or if he really felt like that.

"OK, but if I decide I want a gun for home protection, what would be the best? A semi-automatic pistol like you've got, or a rifle with a few clips of ammo, or.."

He cut me off. "Shotgun. Pump shotgun." "Like what you showed me on the roof the other night?" "Yes." "Why a shotgun?"

And here's the lesson I got from that night, about the best firearm, (if you HAVE to have a firearm, something I've never seen the need for) for home protection.

1) You barely need to aim it to hit the intruder somewhere. That 'shoot for the head' or 'hit em in the middle' crap goes out the window when things are actually happening in your home, especially since you aren't trained for it. And target practice doesn't count except to get used to the mechanics of pump, fire, pump, fire, and the noise that goes with it.

2) As mentioned, the NOISE. That fucker's LOUD. Even if somehow you miss, you just woke up everyone in your apartment building or every house on the block. A bad guy doesn't want to stick around with all those witnesses looking out their windows, or calling in a 911 of 'Live fire!'

3) And speaking of neighbors, shotgun fire won't kill a baby sleeping in it's crib five units over, or folks watching TV in the house across the street. What doesn't hit the intruder gets stuck in the walls or the floor unless you point it straight down at the floor. (Remind me to tell you sometime about my grandfather, a guy he put in jail, and the family grand piano.) You read every day about those distant deaths from pistols, whether revolver or semi-auto, fired in the street in anger and revenge, or the monster clip on a rifle, fired into the air on New Year's, that kills some father a mile away when the bullet comes down. Doesn't happen with a shotgun.

So that's what I know about arms for home defense.

White guys (and it's almost always white guys) who have to have more, and bigger and heavier and louder, seem to be stuck at the same point as Rand Paul and his Ayn Randian crowd: "Nobody can tell me what to do. Don't try to make me." And to both groups, I have some advice.

Grow up.

Kobayashi-Maru Lesson May Make Obama The Last Democratic President

I did a little analysis last November on the election we've just been through. I showed it to a friend, who read it over twice, and then made me promise not to mention to anyone. But now that Rachel Maddow used it as her last piece on tonight's show, I thought I'd add my own take.

While in Star Fleet Academy, the future Captain Kirk, as a student, was faced with a tactical problem which had no solution. Instead of failing as other students always did, he solved the problem by changing the rules. The problem is known as the Kobayashi-Maru test.

The GOP is facing its own Kobayashi-Maru. Women hate them, non-whites despise them, the young have no use for them, the 99% voted against them, and then there are the gays. Every growing demographic in America is voting against them, overwhelming the dwindling aging uneducated white male vote. It is an unwinnable test, since the GOP is unable to change who it hates.

But the GOP has learned to change the rules in order to pass the test. They intend to change how we elect our president.
Barack Obama may be the last Democrat in the White House for thirty years.

And you fuckers staying home in the 2010 election cycle, electing the people who would redistrict the nation after the 2010 Census, will be remembered long after Obama is a footnote.

The results of the 2010 elections, and somewhat in 2012, were that Republicans now completely own and operate the governments of several states that vote blue statewide, but vote Republican in the rural areas. So several of these states are now working to pass laws to change how they hand out Electoral votes:

Instead of the winner of the state's popular vote winning the state's electoral votes, the state will give them out by number of Congressional districts a candidate wins in the state. And since Republicants in these states draw the districts, they can tilt the balance.

Can't happen? Nebraska and Maine already do it. Have for years.
But as long as the Republicants are doing this, they might go for broke, and assign the two Electoral votes each state has for its Senators on the basis of which candidate won the most districts, not the most votes statewide.

Doing this in states that are reliably Red, like Utah or Alabama, might actually give a Democrat an Electoral vote for the district that holds their biggest city, where most Dems are. So they won't do it there.

They'll do it in states that they hold, but which usually, or occasionally, go Democratic. They tried in Virginia in 2011, and in Pennsylvania in 2007. And they lost the White House the next year both times. Republicants may always be wrong, but they're always persistent, too.

Here's the math for the Big Five I expect to do this before 2016. They all went for Obama in 2012.

                           Votes      CDs       Rep-Dem split

Wisconsin           10           8             5 - 3      

Florida                29           27           17 - 10  

Ohio                     18           16           12 - 4    

Michigan             16           14           9 - 5      

Pennsylvania     20           18           13 – 5  

(Votes is total Electoral Votes, CDs is Congressional Districts, R-D Split is how many CDs went for each party in 2012.)

And the result of using this new rule, handing out all Electoral votes in these five states by these new rules, if they'd been in place in 2012? 

56 CD-based Electoral Votes + 10 Senate-based Electoral Votes = 66 votes change from Democrats to Republicants, 

and the 332-206 Electoral landslide for Obama

becomes a 272-266 squeaker for President Romney

No shit. And don't think they won't try it. They're already briefing it at the RNC in Washington. And Obama may be the last Democratic president in my lifetime. 

  

Go Ahead, Define “Law-Abiding Gun Owner”

1/14/2013 9:38 PM

I heard on  the news this morning that the football player that offed his girlfriend and then “took his own life”, in the words of the squeamish, actually was drunk on his ass when he pumped nine cartridges through his semi-auto handgun and into his girlfriend, then put one through his own ‘-OH’-soaked brain.

This was a legally bought handgun (as far as I know) which means he passed a background check.

He was one of the “law-abiding gun owners,” until suddenly, he wasn’t. He became a raving criminal. And then a dead one.

The freak that shot twenty first-graders (for fuck’s sake, FIRST GRADERS!) and six school personnel who were trying to stop him, had started off the day by shooting a “law-abiding gun owner”, one who’d bought, trained on, and stored safely, under lock and key, five different arms, including a couple of semi-auto pistols, and at least one AR-15 Bushmaster .223 cal “American Sport Hunting” rifle, like the one the looney used to kill all those goddamned innocent children. In fact, exactly that rifle. Because that was his mother that owned all those, and kept them in the same house as the whack-job she apparently ‘couldn’t handle anymore’ and may have been planning to commit to an institution. But she thought keeping five guns in the house with him was a fine, “law abiding gun owner” thing to do. Until he pointed one of them at her head and started his march to fame.

Everybody, including Insane LaPierre of the NRA, wants to point the finger at mental health as the problem. That it’s mental health, not guns in the home, that cause all these destroyed families and wasted lives. And not the lack of actual gun safety, gun registration, gun sales tracking, all the little things that barely come close to gun control.

Because for gun control, we have to rely on the “law-abiding gun owners” like this bozo linebacker, Belcher, who couldn’t hold his liquor, his dick or his temper, but sure could hold a gun. Or Nancy Lanza, who bought all those guns legally, and did everything to be a safe, competent owner, except live in denial of where the real threat was. In her home.

And then there’s all those other “law-abiding gun owners” or wannabe gun-owners who’ve been overwhelming the sales counters at  gun shows lately, because ‘Tyranny is coming again’ and ‘Obama wants to take your guns’. The believers of these lies, by definition, demonstrate the same  incompetence as Mrs. Lanza in judging real threats, which come at the moments when “law-abiding gun owners” become drunk, or angry, or tired. Tired of their husbands beating them, or of their wives cheating on them. Maybe surprised by their child sneaking home late. Or just worn down by how life is treating them, how it’s just not working out.

And then those “law-abiding gun owners” become killers, or suicides, but definitely criminals, criminals that we should keep away from guns, now that we know they’re nuts, or incompetent, or depressed.

Oh, wait, they weren’t criminals. They were “law-abiding gun owners,” just a bullet ago.

1/14/2013 10:19 PM