THE LONG KNIVES ARE COMING OUT

Dick Armey dished some insider dirt on Freedom Works to ABC News and really trashed the people he left behind:

Armey said his fight with Kibbe was prompted by "pretty underhanded stuff," essentially a battle over royalties being paid to Kibbe instead of FreedomWorks for Kibbe's book "Hostile Takeover." Armey claims FreedomWorks' staff provided research and marketing help for the book and Kibbe tried to get Armey to sign a memorandum saying he did not use the organization's resources.

"We had a very dysfunctional organization that was being used primarily at that time scheduling all kinds of things in the interest of establishing a reputation for Matt and selling his book," Armey said.

"I actually had a court case, a case I could have taken and I did consider doing so, but we decided we wanted to try and handle it quietly outside of the press pursuant to the condition was I could not work with these guys anymore. You can't take people who you indisputably understand to be dishonest and dangerous to the organization in their dishonesty and continue working with them."

"In 2012, Freedomworks spent its time monkeying around with Glenn Beck, didn't put money in critical races.

MAKE SOME POPCORN AND GRAB SOME BEER...

Michelle Malkin agrees with Krauthammer that Pres. Obama, the Kenyan Marxist Community Organzer who's supposedly an incompetent, lazy boob, is to blame for the current civil war in the GOP over whether or not to continue tax breaks for the top 1%.  I think Sam Donaldson is closer to the truth:

Sam Donaldson to tea party: ‘It’s not your country anymore – it’s our country’
By Samantha Kimmey
Wednesday, December 26, 2012 11:57 EST
THE RAW STORY

“It’s the Tea Party and thinking of the Tea Party and people like that that are driving the Republicans out of contention as a national party,” he said.

Donaldson said that he had a particular aversion to the campaign slogan “We want to take back our country.”

“Guys, it’s not your country anymore – it’s our country and you’re part of it, but that thinking is going to defeat Republicans nationally if they don’t get rid of it,” he said.

WILL THE GOP BUDGE? PROBABLY NOT

Steven Kornacki points out that since Eisenhower, a significant part of the GOP's base has been rabidly opposed to any of the succeeding Democratic presidents and I'd add that even Eisenhower had problems with some of these freaks.  Andrew Sullivan observes that the freaks will probably not budge: "Since their ideology is all about creative destruction...what do they have to lose by wreaking havoc?"  According to Nate Silver, the freaks are pretty safe in their congressional districts, so right now it seems likely that freaks will lead us into another recession.  :-(

MUTANT COMMUNITY ORGANIZER SUBVERTS POLITICAL PARTY

This shows that Dr. K needs to take a LONG vacation:

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer believes President Barack Obama has used the fiscal cliff to start an "internal civil war" among House Republicans.

BAD IDEA

I was pretty much OK with Wayne LaPierre's suggestion to put a cop at every school but I am not OK with Arpaio's idea to put one of his wackos in ANY school:

Sheriff Joe Arpaio Deploying ‘Armed Posse’ To Protect Schools
by Meenal Vamburkar | 12:32 pm, December 28th, 2012
MEDIAITE

JEEBUS GRIFTERS ARE REALLY ANNOYING

(h/t Frederick Clarkson)

Mike Huckabee is still on his campaign to blame America for Newtown and similar tragedies and concluded a recent rant with this:

...then we ask "well, where was God?" And I respond that, as I see it, we've escorted him out of our culture and marched him off the public square and then we express our surprise that a culture without him reflects what it's become.

I'd like to see the Huckster booted out of the country.

UPDATE: Huckabee had plenty of company.

JOHN LOTT IS WRONG AGAIN...

I recently heard him on a talk radio show claiming that the homicide rate in England & Wales has skyrocketed because of stricter gun laws and referred people to the British Home Office for the data.

I downloaded the statistics from 1990 to 2011-12 and graphed the data for homicides:

in 1997, the British government passed a firearms control act mostly in response to the Dunblane Massacre. As you can see, there was an increase in the number of homicides through 2002/03 after which the numbers decline rapidly. Lott falsely that for the 16 years after the firearms act, homicides have only increased.

AN EASY QUESTION...

In Reason, Jacob Sullivan asks who is too unbalanced to be armed and I have 2 quick answers:

MARK LEVIN
DICK ARMEY

THE POWELL MEMO'S UNFILLED REQUIREMENT

In 1971, Lewis Powell wrote a memo to the director of the US Chamber of Commerce outlining a plan to fight back against the Dirty Hippies.  It marks the beginning of the modern conservative war on liberal culture and values and in hindsight reveals a glaring weakness of modern American conservatives: mediocrity.  Powell was sufficiently worried about this to include the paragraph in the memo:

Quality Control is Essential

Essential ingredients of the entire program must be responsibility and “quality control.” The publications, the articles, the speeches, the media programs, the advertising, the briefs filed in courts, and the appearances before legislative committees — all must meet the most exacting standards of accuracy and professional excellence. They must merit respect for their level of public responsibility and scholarship, whether one agrees with the viewpoints expressed or not.

GREAT SUMMARY OF GUN VIOLENCE FACTS

(h/t Barry Ritholtz)

SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog has 5 superb graphs of relevant gun violence facts and I think this is the most important one because it shows a "statistically significant correlation between homicide by firearms and ownership of firearms"...

TOO MANY LOOPHOLES

Online gun sites are a threat to Americans...

Guns-for-Sale Websites Show Ease of Acquiring Firearms
By Alison Vekshin & Edvard Pettersson - Dec 24, 2012 10:55 AM MT
Bloomberg News

Online gun sellers are facing greater scrutiny after the second-deadliest shooting in U.S. history, spurring a nationwide debate and proposals to limit the availability of firearms.

“Under current law, there’s a gaping Internet loophole which enables gun websites to facilitate illegal gun sales that result in gun crimes and gun deaths,” said Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project at the Washington-based Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and a lawyer representing Vesel’s family. “Felons, the dangerously mentally ill and domestic-violence abusers can buy guns no questions asked.”

There’s no background check required for private gun sales in most states, Lowy said.

And so are gun shows:

Private sellers at America's ubiquitous gun shows can sell any weapon to anyone without even asking for identification. Buying a semi-automatic at a gun show is as easy as picking up a loaf of bread in a supermarket.

Bloomberg has been pressing for years for a change in the law. Last year he released a video recorded at a gun show at which an undercover investigator was sold a gun even though he told the seller he could not possibly pass a federal background check.

MORE EVIDENCE

I'd like to find out how the nut near Rochester got his weapons.

• Shootings in Texas, Wisconsin kill two police officers
• Two N.Y. firefighters shot dead in ambush: police

ROBERT BORK WAS ALSO A BARBARIAN

(h/t DougJ)

WAGGISH has a few quotes from this freakshow and I found this one the most interesting:

The fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolutionary theory. Michael Behe has shown that Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it.

MAYBE THE ADVISERS ARE AUTISTIC?

(h/t Anne Laurie)

The Boston Globe has yet another post-mortem of the Mitten$ campaign and it includes this sentence:

One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts.

I think we all saw in 2008 that Mitten$ is basically unlikable and if there were any doubts, one could start listing the weirder parts of Mormonism.

LET'S FOLLOW THIS LOGIC A LITTLE FURTHER

The NRA's Asa Hutchinson compares armed school guards to air marshals, so how come there's no analogous "Do Not Fly" List?

NOTE: After only 13 comments on the above story, CNN has stopped further commenting.

ALL THE ROMNEYS ARE LIARS

Mitten$ began running for President in 2006 so Tagg is full of shit...

Mitt Romney ‘had no desire to run,’ son says
By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 3 hrs ago