Monday, April 8, 2013

April 8

The FBI is investigating the Rutgers Men's Basketball coaching staff. Because really, the Justice Department can only investigate things when they are convinced a crime has been committed and a sufficient case can be brought to win a conviction. Limited resources, yadda yadda yadda.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan's Board of Directors is trying to convince its shareholders not to fire Jamie Dimon as Chairman. Yep, you heard me...the directors are telling the shareholders to keep a guy who just blew $6.2 billion. Justice Department? "Nothing to see here. Move along."

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Concern Troll Joe Scarborough Is Handing Out Sensitivity Advice

Between Mika Brzezinski using her feigned outrage as a wedge to scold President Obama and his Kamala Harris remarks this past week, which earned her a gold star soundbite on just about every local news station in the country that night, saying:

"I'm sure he meant to pay her a compliment… but quite frankly, it just divides women and it just divides people up to separate them by looks and probably was a little ham-fisted. I just think the whole thing, the whole dynamic about women and their looks puts women under a lot of stress that they don't need. and they should be sort of talked about by their qualities at work, especially when he is introducing someone because she is the attorney general. I actually think, you know, he meant to do — say something nice. I think he made a mistake."

And Joe Scarborough calling out Quentin Tarantino as, "a pornographer of violence," and "a despicable human being" for "coarsing America's culture, by bloodying America's culture"– I can't tell which concern-trolling member of the Morning Joe circle of jerks was more out of line and more full of shit. I'll give Mika the benefit of the doubt on this one because she's surrounded by mentally-constipated has-been bobble-headed dipshits all morning who are emotionally incapable of apologizing for confusing chauvinism, for chivalry. But the fact that Mika Brzezinski criticized President Obama while professional chauvinist hack Joe Scarborough looked on nodding in agreement was just about too much to bear.

But I think it was Joe My-Tucked-Penis-And-Beady-Eyed-Glasses-Make-Me-Want-To-Fuck-Me Scarborough in his little MSNBC morning public opinion show-trial condemning Quentin Tarantino to death because the domestic terrorists of the NRA will threaten to assassinate him otherwise, has got to be the biggest pile of concern-trolling bullshit I heard all week.

Kudos, Joe. Only a fake intellectual douchebag like you could make George Will sound like the brains of your creepo-confederate wingnut bow-tie propaganda outlets.

Because any functioning imbecile knows that fake violence depicted in movies is just as bad as the organization that uses every mass shooting in the country to threaten the lives of public officials and sell more guns.

I'm sure Joe's outrage over Django probably has more to do with his fear of white people finding out that the slave trade was actually really fucked up and not at all like the not-so-badnarrative prevalent in right wing conservative textbooks, or that the trade was protected by guns, and slave-holding white men with their guns, and well-regulating militias with their guns, and so Joe took the coward's way out by speaking out against theater and depicted violence in the arts.

I have to wonder, though, if Joe actually understands that America has done some pretty fucked up things to their brothers and sisters.

Maybe Joe Scarborough is just a little worried that black people might see Django and rise up against the Joe Scarborough race of notoriously overachieving white men who have been benefiting from white affirmative action since birth and who make no apologies for it while they sit back and crack their subtle "keep-up, nigger!" jokes?

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Thom Hartmann On Gun Insurance

The idea of gun buyers having to purchase insurance for their gun(s)has been floated for quite some time, but Thom Hartmann has been making a particularly effective argument for the past couple weeks on his radio program, and in a recent article, using automobile insurance as a legitimate point of reference, he offers up some typically sensible solutions:

- Like cars, guns should be registered from the time they're manufactured to the time they're destroyed, so there's a detailed chain of ownership.

- Similarly, anyone who owns a gun should be required to have liability insurance, so if they accidentally or intentionally injure or kill somebody, the victim or the victim's family will receive monetary damages.

- Anyone who wants to purchase a gun should have to have an operator's license, like all car drivers do. And, they should have to undergo a gun proficiency test, similar to a driver's test, to get that license.

That's not even the best part, though. That comes when Thom Hartmann, knowing full well that wingnuts are willfully ignorant of American history and the Constitution, preempts the argument that, "driving isn't a right!" and in masterful construct, he explains the real-world basis for his reasoning:

We started car registration, licensing, and insurance back in the 1920s, when cars got fast enough and abundant enough that they started killing people. We realized we needed to put some accountability into the chain of ownership.

People may say that there's no right to have cars on roads in the Constitution, but they're wrong – it's in Article 1, Section 8, where Congress is given the specific power to raise and spend tax money to create roads. It became the law of our land years before the Second Amendment was passed.

Brilliant!

The point that line 7 of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution(establishing post offices androads)establishes a constitutional right to drive on those constitutionally-mandated roads which historically precedes the adoption of the Bill Of Rights and therefore the 2nd Amendment is one of the stronger arguments I've read.

And there are strict speed limits in school zones, too, punishable by all manner of regulation, while the NRA's solution to mass shootings putting armed guards in schools reads like the indignant ramblings of the owner of a windowless van with no plates speeding through America's school zones like intellectual pedophiles trying to remove not only the speed limits, but the whole fucking road.

Chris Mathews also pointed out over the weekend that the NRA suggesting we arm teachers and staff and even students while hiring armed guards to stand their ground on the playground while turning the visitor sign-in process into a bullet-marked window at a pawn shop are going to require background checks- criminal checks, mental aptitude tests, drug testing, periodic reviews and gun-training requirements.

They're running out of arguments, so the default position is obviously more death threats.

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