He's a Nut and He's Allowed to Own Guns

Do I feel good about saying that about someone who just lost his 14-year old son? Yes because he can say this:

"Every round in the gun is your responsibility. When it fires you need to stand to account for it. That's what I've spent the last two days doing, accounting for my operating error."

An operating error? I think he needs to spend the rest of his life accounting for the "operating error." Do I believe he's going to? 

The shooting has not changed his views of guns, he said. He still intends to keep them in the house and use them for self-defense of his home and family.

"I can't fix this. It's just a great loss, but thankfully we'll see him someday. I have a feeling he's on a great lake out there."

I'm doubtful. 

Asclepias and Labs of Democracy

Why can't we all have nice governments like California does?

Asclepias (milkweed) is the orange plants in front, bordered by a couple of apple trees and the yellow coreopsis in back. No Monarchs as yet. 

Matt's Gun Policy

This has been a long time coming and God was it worth waiting for.

Funiciello said both bills are an overreach of federal authority.

He said local gun boards should be elected in each municipality to determine, on a case-by-case basis, whether residents should be allowed to buy guns.

“We elect responsible people who we feel are good with their guns,” said Funiciello, a bread company owner and political activist from Hudson Falls. 

For now, I'm just going to paste the comment I left. Might come back to this.

“We elect responsible people who we feel are good with their guns,” 

What does that mean? All I can think of is Annie Oakley (or Sarah Palin) shooting a silver dollar out of the air. It sounds as tho non-gunowners need not apply. Illegal to be sure.

That brings up that many boards wold likely skew to everyone or no one gets a gun, tho. How many blacks in the South (or Boston, to be fair) would have gotten a gun 50 or 60 years ago? Good thing there's no prejudice anymore.

Then there's, do you want to be on a board turning down a psychopath's gun application? And betting he doesn't get one anyway? Being sued might be the least of your worries. If the board is going to make a sound decision, they're going to have to have access to criminal and mental health records, presumably. Is that a problem?

These are questions off the top of my head. I trust there are brighter people in the Derrick and Stefanik campaigns who can come up with better inquiries. Maybe even the local media can before they make an endorsement this time around.

You Go, Gretchen

I hadn't even seen that she'd been fired. Then, I don't pay a lot of attention to Fox News.

Gretchen Carlson, a broadcast veteran, claims in a sexual harassment lawsuit that she was let go from Fox News on June 23 as retaliation for rebuffing Roger Ailes' sexual advances.

And Steve Doocy:

In 2009, Carlson says she complained to a supervisor that Steve Doocy, one of her co-hosts on Fox & Friends, "had created a hostile work environment by regularly treating her in a sexist and condescending way, including by putting his hand on her and pulling down her arm to shush her during a live telecast."

Carlson accuses Doocy of "severe and pervasive sexual harassment" off the air and "generally attempting to put her in her place by refusing to accept and treat her as an intelligent and insightful female journalist rather than a blond female prop."

Had she ever watched the network? Yes, Gretchen, you were a blond female prop. Nonetheless, good luck in suing the shit out of them. 

Since I'm Bookmarking The Atlantic Today

Here's another article on the devolution of the Republican Party.

When it comes to latinos, Donald Trump has a muse: Ann Coulter. Last June, when Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” in his presidential-campaign announcement, the comment took many journalists by surprise. But that’s because many journalists hadn’t read Coulter’s work. 

And the bigger surprise is that Coulter is Trump's muse or that many journalists had not read her work?

Coulter is right. California, where Latinos now outnumber non-Latino whites, offers valuable lessons about what American politics will be like as the share of Latinos grows in the country as a whole. But those lessons suggest that the Trump insurrection will fail miserably. If the Golden State is any guide, the Trump campaign does not herald the beginning of a mass nativist backlash against Latino immigration. It heralds something closer to the end.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that in the article. 

The same study found that viewers of Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly were more than twice as likely as viewers of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to think Latinos take native-born Americans’ jobs, and 30 percent more likely to believe that they were on welfare.

Conservative media have, in turn, created a fertile market for anti-immigrant Republican politicians: Buchanan in the 1990s; Tom Tancredo, who in 2008 tried to parlay his opposition to George W. Bush’s immigration reform into a presidential run; local anti-immigrant crusaders such as Kansas’s secretary of state, Kris Kobach, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona. Trump is only the latest in a string of GOP politicians who have used hostility to immigration to build their political brand.

Fair, balanced and xenophobic as hell. Oh, an just to make the loss of the Hispanic vote complete. 

 Miranda Hernandez's grandparents lost everything when they fled Cuba in the 1960s. She grew up thinking of the island as "North Korea with nice beaches," she said. 

But when four young Cuban-Americans started a program sending peers with similar island ties to explore their heritage after U.S.-Cuba detente, she applied.

On Friday, after a week in Havana visiting entrepreneurs, artists and relatives she'd never met, the 20-year-old senior at the University of California, Berkeley flew home with impressions certain to upset many of her grandparents' generation. 

"Right off the bat I'm going to say honestly it's not that bad," she said on Thursday afternoon as she visited the Havana apartment where her mother lived as a young girl. "A lot of people perceive Cuba as a terrible place where people aren't happy, but that's not the case." 

Voting For Chaos

Interesting article in The Atlantic this month. Really, just linking to it because it's a little long. I read it in the print edition (cuz I'm old), but it's nice to be able to bookmark it here.

No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him.

Trump, however, didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

This is what irritates me about the 3 locals that endorsed Funiciello. They were endorsing chaos. If the district sent a Republican or a Democrat at least that person has a group to work with. A Green is totally outside the stream. It's insane. 

Elise Jumps Aboard the Trump Train

And Casey Jones is still at the wheel. Congratulations on making the right decision, congresswoman. And, by right decision, I mean the one that gives Mike Derrick a better shot at being my next congress-critter. 

North Country congresswoman Elise Stefanik is saying much more explicitly that she will support Donald Trump in the presidential election.