April 26, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


GUN DEATHS


It's really perverse that people like Newt Gingrich try to blame societal violence on liberals. I'm sure they try to claim it's the "liberal media" TV shows and movies depicting violence that inspire violence by others. It can't be the easy access to and general glorification of guns, can it? What Hollywood does, after all, is free market capitalism. Violence sells. If it didn't sell, we wouldn't see an endless parade of violent movies and television shows. The number of deaths due to gun violence are appalling. As Bob Herbert points out here, more people have died due to gun violence since 1968 than in all the combat deaths in all of our wars. The column is linked at www.welcome-to-pottersville.com:


I had coffee the other day with Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, and she mentioned that since the murders of Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, well over a million Americans have been killed by firearms in the United States. That’s more than the combined U.S. combat deaths in all the wars in all of American history.
"We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence," she said. "As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days."

The first step in overcoming an addiction is to acknowledge it. Americans are addicted to violence, specifically gun violence. We profess to be appalled at every gruesome outbreak of mass murder (it’s no big deal when just two, three or four people are killed at a time), but there’s no evidence that we have the will to pull the guns out of circulation, or even to register the weapons and properly screen and train their owners.


IN THE REPTILE HOUSE


I don't feel the need to hear "what the other side is saying." I don't feel compelled to listen to Limbaugh or Hannity or O'Reilly or the other neofascists who love war, guns, inequality, and global warming. I can get a fair sampling just reading the letters page of The Fresno Bee. But this writer sums up what you hear when you venture in the reptile house of right-wing nut jobs. This column by Jason Rothenberg is at www.huffingtonpost.com:

If you, like me, find yourself wondering who the hell makes up this mysterious 33% of the country that still thinks Bush is doing a heckuva job, then this is the place to find your answers. It's a bit like going to the reptile house at the zoo. All those nasty little lizards and snakes behind glass. Little signs next to the tanks explaining where they live, and what harm they could do. No real danger to you. It's here, in the world wide web's very own reptile house, that you'll see the White House/Fox News/Drudge Report nexis reaching it's loyal foot soldiers. They've got it all. Global warming is bull ****. Stem cell research is murder. Tom Delay is not a crook. Cheney isn't pure evil. Bush is still the man. I'm telling you. It's genius. Looking for the "good news stories" out of Iraq that the mainstream media is ignoring. Look no further than The Corner. On The Corner, the surge is working. On The Corner, the economy is so good that you'd have to be an idiot (or a liberal) not to feel it. On The Corner, the fact that 5 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices are Catholic isn't scary, it's just a start. On The Corner, speaking out against this president's war is treasonous, but taking us to war based on a lie is not. In fact, on The Corner, it wasn't a lie. Saddam did have those damn disappearing weapons, and those damn hard to prove ties to Osama. If you believe any of those things, then get yourself on down to The Corner. You won't be sorry.