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

The fiscal cliff and the filibuster: Lawrence O’Donnell gets it wrong

1/10/2013 10:40 AM

Again, I have to listen to someone saying that Republicans broke Norquist’s pledge? Again I have to read ‘dump the filibuster’ posts on facebook? There’s Gingrich claiming that shutting down the government in 1995 (like the GOP is again threatening to do) is why Clinton decided to work with the Republicans, and that’s why Gingrich deserves credit for the only balanced budgets in recent memory. And then there’s Lawrence O’Donnelll gloating last week on his ‘Last Word’ show about how the Republicans haven’t voted for a tax increase since Bush the Rational’s administration, but they have now…wrong.

Let’s go over this one more time.

When Obama got into office, he and the Democratic Congress followed through on his campaign pledge: not only did taxes not go up on the middle class, they started to go down. Don’t ask a Republican about this, he’ll lie. Read the record, read the news from then.

The first tax increase on income since Bush the Rational left office is the 3.8% tax on capital gains that was included in the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) to fund some of it. This is why the wealthy funded so many SuperPACs trying to get it repealed. That tax went into effect 10 days ago. And remember, NOT ONE REPUBLICAN voted for that Act. Not one. 

All the income taxes that were going to go BACK up as part of the ‘fiscal cliff’ deal were the Bush/Cheney tax cuts from 2001. Rules in the Senate then used a PAYGO rule that could only be overridden by a 60-vote majority. These rules mandated that budget bills cause no net deficit over the scoring time window of ten years. But they allowed using expected on-budget surpluses in the calculation, like the CBO’s 10-year $3.1 trillion estimate in 2001.

Long story short, the Republicans an expiration date into the tax cut bill, returning the rates to their original levels just before the end of the ten-year window. With that small addition, they could pass it un the Senate’s reconciliation rules, which kept discussion to 20 hours, and prevented filibustering by the minority party, the Democrats.

They ran pretty much the same act in 2003, with Cheney breaking a 50-50 tie vote in the Senate, after reconciliation rules made the bill un-filibuster-able and aligned the expiration date on those dividend and capital gains tax cuts with the 2001 tax cuts.

So, in 2010, all of these tax rates were going back UP to where these rates were when Bush took office. Except that Obama and a Democratic lame-duck session decided to extended them all for two years, just to get another year of Unemployment Insurance for all the people that Bush the Dimmer had put out of work, and that his minions refused to provide employment for during the 2009-2011 Congressional cycle.

Fast-forward to 2012, post-election. Again, the tax cuts are about to expire. Only now, there’s the added ‘fiscal cliff’ of sequestration, a mandated across-the-board cut on everything in the federal budget. Between higher taxes for everyone and less output by the federal government, guaranteed recession in 2013.

  

Since the economy has been held hostage by the TeaBagger majority in the House, there is still massive unemployment. But the 2012 election definitely went against them by every measure, and Obama, having run on tax increases on the wealthy, follows through. The TeaBaggers drag their feet, and the date the tax cuts expire passes. 

This is VERY IMPORTANT.  

Because when McConnell gets almost all the Senate Republicans to vote to extend the middle class tax cuts, and Boehner gets almost all the House Democrats and a few of his moderate(?) Republicans to vote to extend the middle class tax cuts, no one breaks the pledge to Norquist. NO ONE votes to increase taxes on the wealthy. 

Because a tax increase on the wealthy was never on the table. 

The Bush/Cheney tax cuts for the wealthy simply expired, as those Republicans wrote them, to avoid all the House and Senate budget rules that would have prevented them from ever passing if estimates of budget surpluses and the costs of the cuts had been even close to accurate back at the beginning of the reign of Bush the Dimmer. 

Sure, Republicans planned to make them permanent. After ten years, no one would notice, right? But first they needed bigger majorities in Congress, and new budget rules. Instead, they got Obama and lost all of Congress from 2007 to 2011.

So no Republican voted to increase taxes, O’Donnell. Ten yard penalty for inaccurate gloating.

Which brings us to now, and the threatened shutdown.

The TeaBaggers are claiming tax increases are off the table, since we passed them. (We didn’t.) So now they’re threatening to shut down the government again, like they threatened in 2011, by not raising the debt ceiling. In 2011, this cost the US its super-duper credit rating, lowering it to ‘almost superduper’, but still, we took a hit because of these clowns.

And now Gingrich, a history professor, is rewriting history to cheer them on. His majority in the House in 1995-‘96 twice brought the US government to a stop, by sending Bill Clinton a balanced budget, balanced by making massive cuts and eliminating large parts of the government. Clinton vetoed them twice, and the citizens, seeing the Republicans show their hand on what to cut for the first (and ONLY) time in recent history, immediately sided with Clinton. When he instead proposed a budget that included tax increases, to levels we are now largely back at, and Americans approved, Republicans saw the writing on the wall. A bare few in the House voted with the Democrats against the Republican leadership, and the Democratic Senate followed. Between these increases in taxes and the dot.com boom, Clinton then had several years of surpluses.

Gingrich now tries to claim credit for getting Clinton to work with Republicans. The reality is that his incompetence gave Clinton the huge surge in popularity polls need to overcome Gingrich’s speakership, which ended soon after with his own party ousting him over ethics(!) violations, soon replacing him with Denny Hastert. 

You may have heard this name recently, regarding “the Hastert Rule”, which Republicans use: no bill comes to the floor for discussion unless the Republicans can pass it without any Democratic votes. So much for “across the aisle” or “bi-partisanship”.   

THIS is the big change that happened in the tax cut debate, Lawrence. This is the rule Speaker (and Republican) John Boehner broke, for the first time since Gingrich let that Clinton budget pass back in 1996. This is the real change worth noticing. And saving the nation almost cost Boehner his speakership.

Because, on the day those middle-class tax cuts were made permanent, Boehner had to ask himself the same thing so many Americans should ask themselves every day:

“Am I an American, or am I a Republican?”

Because, as Boehner showed, and as the TeaBaggers who voted against his continuing speakership demonstrated, you can’t be both.

1/10/2013 11:57 AM