3-year-old fatally shoots deputy's wife with his gun at Tennessee cookout
If you are not a plugged-in lobbyist or generous campaign contributor, but would like to meet with your senator, you might get the cops called on you if you contact his office and ask when he might be in town.
Limbaugh: In America today 90 million people aren't working. 90 Million. Last month, folks, 633,000 people stopped looking for work. The labor force participation rate grew by over half a million people in one month. Those are jobs that have vanished. Every one of those people is eating. And pretty much what they want to eat. And every one of them has a cell phone. And every one of them has no trouble getting around. And they all live somewhere.
Why are the unemployed allowed to eat? Why are they allowed to have a roof over their heads? Shouldn't they be in the gutter where they belong? Why are they allowed to use public transportation?
This is par for the course for Boss Limbaugh, but I just want to point out that this open disdain for the poor, the less fortunate, or those who are simply unemployed at this moment in time isn't something that dispatching Paul Ryan or Macro Rubio to inner cities is going to erase.
The demographics of being poor or unemployed are inescapably tied to race in this country. And as much we try to sweep the statistic under the rug, unemployment and underemployment is significantly higher among minorities and is rarely cited alongside the national average unemployment figure.
Of course many of those included in Limbaugh's 90 million non-working people figure are unable to work due to disability, those who are seeking a job but can't find one, and those who have exited the workforce permanently for retirement. This broad brush Limbaugh uses to paint America is the same toxic brush Mitt Romney used when he waxed about the 47 percent to a private gathering of the rich and shameless.
I wouldn't be surprised to find the Republicans running against the 47 percent by another name in 2016.
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In a poll conducted on behalf of the Democratic National Committee, the Benenson Strategy Group found that a large number of Americans have no idea how lax current gun control law is.
From The New York Times
Of the 50 percent of people who prefer enforcement over new laws — over half of whom are gun owners — 48 percent told us that federal laws prohibit the purchase of a weapon privately or at a gun show without a background check, while 10 percent simply admitted not knowing the rules. In other words, about 6 out of 10 people who believe we just need to do a better job of enforcing existing laws don't realize that those laws are far weaker than they think. And just under half of those who want better enforcement don't know that military-style assault weapons are, in fact, legal. [...]
A clear majority said they believe that the sale of guns to people on the terrorist watch list is banned. Another 29 percent said they don't know. Such sales are not banned, and the Government Accountability Office has reported that in 2010 alone 247 people on the terrorist watch list passed a background check and legally purchased guns.
Similarly, 33 percent believe that federal law requires authorities to be notified when people purchase large amounts of ammunition in a short period — also not the case — and 42 percent don't know whether it is illegal to buy ammunition over the Internet — it isn't.
And suddenly it becomes clear why the fear that the government is coming to snatch our guns (today) and the fear that of the government coming to snatch our healthcare (2010) is so similar.
Not only is the president dealing with an intransigent congress that's too afraid of the boogeyman to tackle gun violence in a serious way, he's also dealing with this. An ignorant populace that simply has no idea what's going on.
How much of this due to misinformation from the NRA and politicians, and how much is due to a lack of attentiveness on the part of the media is up for debate, but ultimately Americans have only themselves to blame for the next massacre.
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New Jersey Boy, 4, Accidentally Shot 6-Year-Old Neighbor In Head
It is the dawn of the super crab.
Crabs are bulking up on carbon pollution that pours out ofpower plants, factories and vehicles and settles in the oceans, turning the tough crustaceans into even more fearsome predators.
That presents a major problem for the Chesapeake Bay, where crabs eat oysters. In a life-isn't-fair twist, the same carbon that crabs absorb to grow bigger stymies the development of oysters.
"Higher levels of carbon in the ocean are causing oysters to grow slower, and their predators — such as blue crabs — to grow faster," Justin Baker Ries, a marine geologist at the University of North Carolina's Aquarium Research Center, said in an recent interview.
Over the next 75 to 100 years, ocean acidification could supersize blue crabs, which may then eat more oysters and other organisms and possibly throw the food chain of the nation's largest estuary out of whack.
Humans are really fucking things up, aren't they?
The U.S. Collects Less In Taxes Than All But Two Industrialized Countries
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Law Enforcement More Likely To Be Killed In States With Weak Gun Laws, Study Finds
And yet they're all pledging not to uphold any new gun control legislation.
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