The NRA launches a new campaign to win over black voters with an African-American spokesperson from Houston, Texas who's supposedly both an "urban gun enthusiast" and a "budding attorney" (whatever that means). "Mr. Colion Noir" puts his argument in starkly racial terms: "No one wants to fight for protection, they want the government to do it. The same government who at one point hosed us down with water, attacked us with dogs and wouldn’t allow us to eat at their restaurants and told us we couldn’t own guns when bumbling fools with sheets on their heads were riding around burning crosses on our lawns and murdering us."
You might remember Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America joining in on a warning recently that Pres. Obama was going to send black people to take away white people's guns. They're trying to double-team us with race-based paranoia. They want to pit black against white and vice versa, in order to sell more guns. That's how stupid they believe most Americans to be and that's how soulless these dicks are. They can stop wrapping themselves in the flag now. They obviously have nothing but contempt for America.
Also in "fun with racism" news: white nationalists will be featured at this year's Crazy People's Action Conference... just like every year. How they continue to get a pass for this in the media is beyond me. We're not talking kinda-sorta racist-ish people here, we're talking fullblown, Seig Heil, "Vee iss der Master Race!" types. According to the report, an organization involved in CPAC "publishes a magazine called American Renaissance and hosts conferences under the same name, promoting the theory of 'scientific racism' and providing a forum in which Klan members, neo-Nazis, and David Duke followers can mix it up with the intellectuals of the white-nationalist movement." Seriously, how do they get away with this stuff?
Greg Sargent argues convincingly that Rand Paul is nothing but a headline-grabbing empty suit. I concur.
John Brennan was sworn in as CIA director today -- using a copy of the Constitution, not a Bible. Let the rightwing stampede of idiotic panic out begin.
But it seems rightwing panic isn't the only flavor. Some on the left are making a big deal about the fact that it was a draft of the Constitution without the Bill of Rights. It's an unintentionally apt metaphor -- fodder for a clever and pointed editorial cartoon -- but that's all it is. The whole swearing in is symbolic. He hasn't locked himself into some sort of pact and he isn't sending a secret message. People don't do that. Yes, he deserves a lot of criticism, but make it sane criticism. This is verging on Glenn Beck-level frootloopery, folks, and people tend to just ignore that. If you want to be heard, you want to be level-headed. If you want to be ignored, be loudly and stridently wrong.
Gun control groups got a seat at the table in the President's push to regulate firearms, but the price was so shitty I'm a little surprised they agreed to it: they had to sit down, shut up, and accept everything the President proposed. Getting meaningful reform is likely to be a long slog -- we're not getting everything we need this go-round -- so don't make deals like this again or it could be even longer. We get the best ideas through competition, not by playing Follow the Leader.
In a reversal too long in coming, Bill Clinton -- the man who signed it into law -- is urging the Supreme Court to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act. "When I signed the bill, I included a statement with the admonition that 'enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination,'" the former president writes in an op-ed. "Reading those words today, I know now that, even worse than providing an excuse for discrimination, the law is itself discriminatory. It should be overturned."
On the other side of the marriage equality debate, anti-gay crusader Peter LaBarbera gets right to the entire reason homophobes oppose same-sex relationships: they find them icky. Not a logical argument, just an emotional one. Give it all the weight it deserves.
Finally, South Dakota will soon allow guns in the classroom. And the solution to shark attacks is more sharks. Sounds like an excellent time to look into homeschooling, if you ask me.
[cartoon via McClatchy Newspapers]
