How to prove gun safety advocates right

Raw Story: A Kentucky lawmaker has confirmed that she accidentally discharged a handgun in her Capitol office on Tuesday.

State Rep. Leslie Combs (D) told WHAS that she was unloading the gun in her Capitol annex office when it discharged. A bookcase was struck by a bullet after it ricocheted off the floor.

Democratic state Rep. Jeff Greer was also in the room but was not injured in the shooting.

“I thought it was totally clear,” she said. “I am a gun owner. It happens.”

Exactly our point. This is precisely why people who aren’t interested in being perforated oppose allowing paranoiacs to drag guns along with them everywhere they go. Your need to feel safe from the boogeyman is not more important than my right to keep the number of holes in my head to a bare minimum.

These sort of accidents will happen. In fact, they happen every day. It’s become clear that the “responsible gun owner” is a far greater danger to the general public than the crazed killers they think they’re protecting everyone from.

It happens. Which is why you shouldn’t be allowed to wander around with a literal killing machine in crowded places. It’s just freakin’ common sense. That way, when it does happen, it happens well away from innocent bystanders.

These things are incredibly dangerous; it’s time we started treating them that way.

Teabaggers not done with kamikaze runs quite yet

Daily Kos: The Senate Conservatives Fund, a conservative political action committee founded by Heritage CEO Jim DeMint when he was in the U.S. Senate, has endorsed Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin, who is running a tea party challenge against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky GOP Senate primary next May. Louisville Courier-Journal:

"We have interviewed a lot of candidates this year and Matt Bevin is one of the very best. He’s principled, passionate, and has Ted Cruz-like courage,” said Matt Hoskins, the group’s executive director, referring to Cruz, the U.S. senator from Texas, who led the fight to shut down government in an effort to defund the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

So, if Kentucky Republicans are looking for the second coming of Ted Cruz, SCF says Matt Bevin is their man…

True to the headline, Sarah Palin is also making some pro-Bevin noise, which is probably not the world’s best news for Mitch. Right now, McConnell’s in a bona fide tossup with Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, who he’s currently trailing by two points. Split the conservative vote between McConnell and Bevin (who was previously destined to be a footnote) and Grimes is the obvious beneficiary. DeMint and Palin would be punishing Mitch McConnell, to be sure, but they’d also be helping Grimes. Cutting off your nose to spite your face seems to be a favorite Tea Party pastime.

Group behind McConnell recording a long-running clown show

Alex Seitz-Wald: Liberal super PAC Progress Kentucky is at the center of controversy after a Democratic strategist in the state said activists affiliated with the group bragged to him that they secretly recorded the audiotape of Mitch McConnell’s strategy meeting that was leaked to Mother Jones this week. If true, they could face criminal sanctions. The treasurer of the super PAC resigned this afternoon [i.e., 4/11/13].

Now, it’s worth stating that we don’t know for sure that Progress Kentucky produced the tape or is involved in any way — this is just the word of one Democratic strategist, who has an interest in distancing his party from the group.

But it’s not the first time the super PAC has gotten into trouble. In late February, they made a series of offensive “jokes” about McConnell’s wife on Twitter, attacking her for being Chinese-American. Even Ashley Judd felt compelled to issue a public condemnation.

But there’s something important you should know about Progress Kentucky: No one took its members very seriously in Kentucky, even before the slurs or the secret tape. I know this because I once quoted Curtis Morrison, who was one of what appears to be only two or three people associated with the group (he resigned in March), and a number of liberal activists in the state told me to never do it again.

“I feel inclined to warn you that he (and they) are a long running joke in Louisville,” a progressive activist and writer messaged me on Feb. 25. “Everyone in KY (liberals included & especially) can’t believe how much attention they’ve gotten in the national media, especially considering no one here takes them seriously (due to a long history of incompetence). An anti-Mitch group needs to emerge, but dear God, it is not Curt & Co. Just an FYI!”

How much of a mover and shaker is Progress Kentucky? Well, in the last cycle this “Super PAC” raised a whopping $1,005 and spent $18. So, in the grand scheme of political powerhouses in the state, Progress Kentucky isn’t one — not even remotely.

“Kentucky Democrats have never taken Progress Kentucky seriously. If you can’t raise more than $1,000 to defeat the most unpopular Senator in the country, you are not a remotely serious political organization,” a Kentucky Democratic operative told Seitz-Wald. The local political blog PageOne Kentucky calls the group a “walking disaster.”

In the end, Progress Kentucky has done more harm than good — as is the case usually, apparently. McConnell has bundled up the PAC with other liberal and Democratic groups when talking about the incident, using Progress Kentucky to broadbrush the entire left. Seitz-Wald writes that their ineffectiveness “won’t stop McConnell’s forces from trying to connect the audiotaping and the group to other Democratic groups, no matter how unfairly.”

Given how profoundly irrelevant the group is, it would be inaccurate to say that they’re why Democrats have a hard time winning in Kentucky. But they’re clearly not helping, either.

[photo by _gee_]

Pretty much everybody wants to be rid of Mitch McConnell

Raw Story:

A progressive super PAC in Kentucky is looking at getting in bed with the tea party in order to oust the six-term incumbent Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Hearing last week’s news that a coalition of tea party groups calling themselves the United Tea Party of Kentucky are targeting McConnell and interested in taking input from other outside groups, Progress Kentucky got in touch.

“What we’re finding — at least in this stage of the race — we’re finding that our interests align [with the tea party],” Progress Kentucky organizer Keith Rouda told Politico. “It’s unusual.”

Private democratic donors are getting in on the candidate-hunt too, Politico noted, offering to put money behind anyone who could credibly challenge the Senate’s top Republican. And all that cash can’t sound so bad to the United Tea Party folks.

“If he was interested in what we do and what we believe, he would be promoting legislation and putting forward small government ideas, but we haven’t seen that from him, so 30 years of media spin and political machine spin has run it’s course,” United Tea Party spokesperson John Kemper III told WSFA-TV.

The liberal argument for this de facto alliance would be that it’s worked before. The report tells us that the strategy could “lead to a candidate in the general who’s much more conservative, similar to failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who was heavily favored in the primary by people supporting Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO).” The primary race would be hotly contested, which means both Republican candidates would blow a lot of money on the primary, perhaps leaving them underfunded in the general.

The problem, of course, is that Kentucky’s a hard state for Democrats to win and the — very, very real — danger is that we could wind up with a Senator much farther to the right than McConnell. However, we would also wind up with a senator much less powerful than McConnell, so maybe there’s some advantage there. Keep in mind, Todd Akin hung himself with his idiotic rape theorizing — you can’t count on every Tea Party Republican to be as self-destructive.

On the other hand, McConnell’s approvals are in the crapper, so he’s not exactly a shoe-in.

Maybe it’s worth a shot or maybe it’s a waste of time. Personally, I think it’s worth it, if only to force the GOP to rejigger their senate structure. They’d probably come out of that a little less organized. And who knows, a Democrat might actually win.

News Roundup for 11/4/11

You're free to worship any god, so long as it's Jesus

-Headline of the Day-
"KY GOPer: I’m Not Criticizing Hindus -- I’m Inviting Them To 'Love And Know Jesus.'"

It looks like Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear is going to win reelection in a walk. Not surprisingly, this bothers his Republican opponent somewhat. So State Senate President David Williams looked around for something -- anything -- to drag Beshear down.

He thought he found it when "Beshear attended a groundbreaking ceremony in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, for a new factory run by FlexFilm, a company based in India that makes materials for packaging, printing, insulation and other purposes. The plant represents a $180 million investment, and is expected to create 250 jobs in Kentucky."

The groundbreaking including a Hindu ceremony called a bhoomi poojan and you can tell just from looking at the words that there ain't nothing Christian about it. It's got incense and people without shoes and god knows what-all, so Williams thought, "Gotcha!" and ran to the Lexington Herald-Leader. Beshear was caught in an act of "idolatry," offering "prayers to false gods."

"He’s there participating with Hindu priests, participating in a religious ceremony," Williams said. "They can say what they want to. He’s sitting down there with his legs crossed, participating in Hindu prayers with a dot on his forehead with incense burning around him. I don’t know what the man was thinking."

"If I’m a Christian, I don’t participate in Jewish prayers. I’m glad they do that," he dug deeper. "I don’t participate in Hindu prayers. I don’t participate in Muslim prayers. I don’t do that. To get down and get involved and participate in prayers to these polytheistic situations, where you have these Hindu gods that they are praying to, doesn’t appear to me to be in line with what a governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky ought to be doing... between his not being pro-life and his support for gambling and now getting down and doing Hindu prayers to these Hindu gods, I think his grandfathers wouldn’t be very pleased with Steve Beshear."

Turns out people thought this was a tad insensitive and what Williams thought was his big chance somehow turned into his latest fuckup. So he did the worst possible thing he could do in this situation; instead of just apologizing and letting it go, he decided to explain what he really meant.

Williams said he wasn't criticizing Hindus per se, he was just pointing out the obvious -- they practice the wrong religion. And so he invited them to "love and know Jesus."

With political chops like that, it's hard to understand how Williams is getting swamped. (Talking Points Memo)


-How's Herman doing so far?-


Click to embiggen

Not too well... (McClatchy)


-Bonus HotD-
"Deadbeat Rep. Joe Walsh, Who Owes $100k In Child Support, Receives ‘Pro-Family’ Award From Family Research Council."

Cut FRC some slack here. They didn't specify which family Walsh is supposed to be "pro-." It's probably someone else's family entirely. (ThinkProgress)

News Roundup for 8/3/11

Mamma Santorum's special homemade jelly

-Headline of the Day-
"Santorum To Give Out Free Jelly At Ames."

Religious nutbag Rick Santorum plans to play up his downhome folksiness to midwesterners by handing out jelly to Iowans. This strikes me as unwise.

See, Rick's already got a bit of a google problem. If you google up "Santorum," less than family-friendly results come up.

Given the nature of those results and the existence of a certain kind of special jelly that sounds like it's named after Kentucky, one would think that Rick would avoid attaching his name to "jelly" in the google machine. Seriously, it just seems to be going in the entirely wrong direction.

Given this development, I feel confident in making a brash and bold prediction: Rick Santorum will never be president. And he was so close, too. (Talking Points Memo)


-But don't compare them to terrorists!-



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(Sherffius)


-Bonus HotD-
"O'Reilly Blames Women's Health Care 'Breast Feeding Stuff' For High Unemployment."

It doesn't have to make sense, it's Bill O'Reilly. (ThinkProgress)

Griper Blade: Hillary's Math Problem

The candidate stood in front of a backdrop of smiling supporters, as candidates always do. One supporter waved a sign that read "COUNT EVERY VOTE," while Hillary Clinton advanced an argument that doesn't count every vote. "I believe that with your help we will send a message to this country because right now more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent,” Clinton said. “More people have voted for me than for anybody ever running for president before."

Hillary Clinton and her surrogates have been arguing that she's won the popular vote. But the equation it takes to reach sum takes a detour through BS land. Clinton is including Michigan, where Barack Obama wasn't on the ballot, and discounting caucus states that haven't officially released their numbers. So, if you count the elections that don't count and discount a few that do, Hillary Clinton has a whopping 26,000 vote lead. With 33 million votes cast, that's less than 0.0008% -- a figure known among math wizards as "nuthin'."

ABC News' Jake Tapper takes on Clinton popular vote argument and concludes it's mathematically challenged. "One problem with these claims," Tapper writes, "they don't appear to be true."...

[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]