JOURNALISM? WE DON'T NEED NO STINKIN' JOURNALISM

For those who missed it, Pres. Obama did NOT issue any executive orders about gun control but David Weigel found 7 reporters who FAILED to notice the difference between "actions" and "orders."

I used LexisNexis and found a few more bozos:

ALAN COLMES: One of the things the NRA has done and one of the things the president did yesterday is he has got 23 executive orders, one of them is that he's going to insist that there be data so that we understand what gun violence is in America. IMUS IN THE MORNING, 1/17/2013

HARI SREENIVASAN:...The president signed 23 executive orders this week, calling for such things as more research into gun violence. PBS NEWSHOUR, 1/18/2013

KRISTI LU STOUT: And he signed 23 executive orders that include opening a national dialogue on mental health, improving background checks and doing a better job of enforcing current laws. CNN INTERNATIONAL, 1/18/2013

RENEE MONTAGNE: And I'm Renee Montagne. President Obama says he's done what he could on his own. Yesterday he signed 23 executive orders related to gun control. NPR Morning Edition, 1/17/2013

LAWRENCE O`DONNELL: The president announced he would sign 23 executive orders giving law enforcement, schools and mental health facilities some additional tools to help reduce gun violence, including strengthening background check systems. MSNBC, THE LAST WORD WITH LAWRENCE O`DONNELL, 1/16/2013

A SIMPLE GAME - "PICK THE COMMIE"

This is from a USA Today article, "Stocks soar 85% in Obama's first term":

UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS

This is an extremely popular gun control idea. Pew found that 85% of Americans support this and both CBS and FOX News polls found over 90% of Americans think this is a good idea.

YES, THERE IS A PONY IN THERE

Stephen Hayward at PowerLine has an article about his own fantasies of what the Left really thinks and it's pretty much worthless except for this tidbit about one of my favorite illiterate pundits:

The same can’t be said of Sean Hannity, whose conservatism is sincere and passionate. But that’s part of the defect of his show (both radio and TV); he gives up in depth and persuasiveness what he exudes in pure loud partisanship, to the point that he is hard to listen to. I always have to tune out his radio show when he starts shouting at and berating liberal callers.

TALK RADIO GOSSIP

About a month ago, Mark Levin spent about a minute castigating radio marketing consultants and last night he mentioned that he wasn't going to talk about Lance Armstrong or Manti T'eo even though other hosts have.  He said that they only did this because consultants told them to do so in order to increase their ratings.

I interpret these statements to mean that conservative talk radio is in trouble.

THE DEBT THAT ATE AMERICA

(h/t Nate Silver)

Well, not so much, really.  Despite recent borrowing to make up for the Great Recession, the WSJ reveals that our interest payments overall are declining because we've rolled over past debt to take advantage of historically low interest rates:

The interest on the debt load is only costing us about 1.5% of GDP, thanks to the the record low interest rates that we’re paying out in the markets, thanks to the sluggish economy and fact that the Fed has been buying up large chunks of Treasurys. Today the 10-year yield is only 1.41% for instance. Obviously, the shrewd move for Uncle Sam to make right now is to lock in as much of these low rates as possible for as long as possible.

Here's the WSJ graph - the light blue line is the interest rates on the debt:

DAMN - MAYBE THERE IS A GOD AFTER ALL...

Maple Bacon Ice Cream

Recipe courtesy Claire Robinson, 2011 Show: 5 Ingredient FixEpisode: Beachy Keen

• Recipe categories: Meat, Bacon, Dairy, Sugar,

STORIES I'M NOT INTERESTED IN...

Aaron Swartz, Lance Armstrong, Manti T'eo and Ray Nagin.

YES, GUNS ARE DANGEROUS IN SCHOOLS

The Raw Srory has this little gem:

Chatfield School co-directors Matt Young and Bill Kraly announced last week that they had hired retired Lapeer County Sheriff’s Dept. firearms instructor Clark Arnold as a security guard in response to the December mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

But by Wednesday, the school had admitted to The Flint Journal that the retired firearms instructor had made a “made a breach in security protocol” and left his unloaded handgun unattended in the school restroom “for a few moments.”

If a professional can do something this stupid, what about a non-professional?

RIGHT-WING CULTURE CHANGE

(h/t Atrios)

Maybe 10 years ago I walked over to the local hardware store to buy something and when I reached the small parking lot, a middle-aged man was walking with a pistol in his hand.  My first thought was: I'm dead.  I guess the guy just carried as part of his routine or something but I didn't ask him.

Digby writes about a similar events in California and asks:

DOES THIS MAKE YOU FEEL SAFE?

The NRA and other gun nuts apparently want this open carry to be normal behavior in America and that leads to an obvious question: How can we tell the good guys from the bad guys?

UPDATE: The pic is from Utah, not California.

MARK LEVIN'S ON A HATE ROLL TONIGHT

I only caught about 40 minutes of his show but in that time he expressed disgust with Tom Brokaw, Bob Schieffer, Joe Scarborough and Gov. Chris Christie along with several "mainstream media" outlets like ABC and NBC.

WHAT FATS LIMBAUGH WON'T TELL YOU

You may recall that Wayne LaPierre of the NRA suggested we put cops in all the schools. It seems that Pres. Obama found this art least partly convincing because it is among the "executive actions" he plans to take:

Providing incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.

REMEMBER ALL THE FUSS ABOUT ANITA DUNN?

According to Glenda Beck and other wackos, she was supposed to be a Chicom or something?  Well, in light of all the stink the wingnuts have made about gun control, maybe we could call them the real Chicoms because of this Mao quote:

"Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

Andy Dean has a promo for his radio show in which he says the same thing as the last main clause.

ONE DOWN...

Our boycott of Rush Limbaugh's advertisers has almost crushed Dial Global:

Dial Global moves closer toward voluntarily de-listing itself from NASDAQ.
The process took longer than anticipated. Last November 15, Dial Global expected that “the de-listing will take effect on or about December 6.” That announcement precipitated a one-day drop in “DIAL” stock from $2.02 a share to 47 cents. It closed yesterday at 29 cents, as the company filed its Form 15 – “suspension of duty to file reports.” It listed 263 holders of the common stock. Back before Thanksgiving, Dial Global said “the board considered numerous factors, including the compliance costs” associated with being public and “the relatively limited historical volume of trading.” The syndicator probably also was caught up in the advertiser response to Rush Limbaugh’s February 29, 2012 remarks about Georgetown student Sandra Fluke. Rush is syndicated by Premiere Networks, but the cold draft was felt around the talk radio world.

THE NY GUN CONTROL LAW

I haven't heard all the gasbag coverage of this law but I have heard Hannity denounce it and as far as I know, not one gasbag has mentioned this section of the new law.

Cuomo gun bill has 'Journal News clause'
By DYLAN BYERS |
1/15/13 2:46 PM EST
POLITICO

In addition to expanding New York's ban on assault weapons and implimenting new measures to keep guns away the mentally ill, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's new gun legislation package includes a "Journal News clause" that would prohibit newspapers from publishing the names and addresses of gun permit owners.

WILL WE EVER LEARN?

I was thinking that the French military operations in Mali were for the good but Glenn Greenwald reminds me that life is more complicated than I usually imagine:

Second, the overthrow of the Malian government was enabled by US-trained-and-armed soldiers who defected. From the NYT: "commanders of this nation's elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials." And then: "an American-trained officer overthrew Mali's elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists."

In other words, the west is once again at war with the very forces that it trained, funded and armed. Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies. Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.

MORE EVIDENCE

Police ID 18-year-old slain in South Tucson
20 hours ago • Veronica M. Cruz Arizona Daily Star
Police have identified an 18-year-old man who was shot and killed Saturday in South Tucson.

Jacob Michael Leon was shot in the chest near South 10th Avenue and West 29th Street at about 2:45 p.m., Lt. Jeff Inorio, a South Tucson Police Department spokes- man, said in a news release. Leon was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

CONSERVATISM IS A FRIGGING CULT

Years ago I read someone's snark about conservatism: It can NEVER fail, it can only be failed and I found the same sentiment from Cliff Kincaid, a wingnut activist:

“We have to think about impeachment for abusing executive power,” says Cliff Kincaid, who runs America’s Survival, a collection of Web-based groups portraying the nation as threatened by socialism, the United Nations and liberal culture. “The Republicans seem not to realize that Obama is a Marxist who wages class warfare and could not qualify for a sensitive government position based on his associates and his character.”

Kincaid, based in Owings, Md., recognizes that impeachment is a long shot, so he is focusing on pushing the GOP rightward. “We can survive Obama,” he says, “but is there another Reagan-like conservative who can lead the charge? Romney refused to run as a conservative. We had a failure of conservative candidates and conservative media, not of conservative philosophy.”

You can find out more about Kincaid here.

WAS ANN COULTER CORRECT?

She claimed that the homicide rate for just the white population of the US was the same as the white population of Belgium and the responses I read didn't give the facts of the matter.

The FBI has murder statistics for 2011 here and there were 5,825 white victims and 6,329 black victims. I couldn't find census estimates for 2011 but I did find the actual numbers for 2010 and I'll use those numbers instead:

TOTAL WHITES 223,553,000
TOTAL BLACKS 38,929,000

For 2011, the FBI determines that that overall murder/negligent homicide rate is 4.8 per 100,000.  The rate for the white population is 2.6056 per 100,000. The rate for the black population 16.2578 per 100,000. Thus, the black rate is about 6.24 times the white rate.  Finally, according to this OECD report, in 2008 the overall homicide rate in Belgium was 1.7 per 100,000.  I didn't find any breakdown by race.

So, Coulter was wrong but the homicide rate among blacks is very disturbing and strongly suggests that we need to give special attention to this problem among black Americans.

UPDATE: Matt Springer at Science Blogs also looked at the data and arrived at similar numerical results.

AMERICAN PARANOIA

This I can't blame directly on usual conservative radio gasbags but people like Alex Jones, the hosts of Coast to Coast AM and Ground Zero make good money spreading and creating political paranoia.

Man who helped Sandy Hook kids is harassed by conspiracy theorists
By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News | The Lookout – 5 hrs ago
YAHOO NEWS

A man who found six children in his driveway in Newtown, Conn., after their teacher had been shot and killed in last month's school massacre has become the target of conspiracy theorists who believe the shootings were staged.

“I don’t know what to do,” Gene Rosen told Salon.com. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘How much am I being paid?'”

Rosen, a 69-year-old retired psychologist who lives near Sandy Hook Elementary School where the shootings took place, says his inbox is filled with emails like this one:

How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?

PEW POLL ON GUN CONTROL

Pew didn't bother to ask absurd questions like "Do you support confiscating all guns?" and concentrated on mostly real issues:

FATS LIMBAUGH IS GETTING AMUSING

Today he argued that Democrats think people are "inherently bad" but isn't that exactly what most Christian denominations teach?   He also whined about the restoration of the payroll tax rate despite complaining that the original cut endangered the Social Security program.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

(h/t Avedon)

This guy is academic who lives in Australia but I still find his numbers hard to believe but they are correct.

Fair Work, Fair Pay: Lessons From Australia
Monday, 26 December 2011 07:58
By Salvatore Babones,
Truthout | News Analysis

Across the Pacific in Australia, the national statutory minimum wage is $15.51 an hour in Australian dollars. Over the past three years, the Australian dollar has been roughly equal in value to the American dollar, so the figure in American dollars is about the same. One Australian dollar roughly equals one American dollar.

Only about 2 percent of Australians, however, are covered by the minimum wage. The rest are covered by industry-wide agreements that are negotiated by the government on behalf of workers. The minimum wage in most of these agreements (including, for example, for adult fast food workers) is $17.03 an hour.

Part-time and temp workers don't get these benefits. Instead, they get paid an extra 20 percent to 25 percent in cash compensation. As a result, a part-time, entry-level adult fast food worker in Australia makes a minimum of $21.25 an hour. Oh, plus health insurance. That's universal in Australia.

The unemployment rate in Australia today is 5.2 percent.

MOTHERS AGAINST DRUNK DRIVING

MADD started in 1980 and out of curiosity, I downloaded the NHTSA accident files between 1975 and 2010 in five year intervals.  For each year, I totaled the Drunk Driving events and made a graph:

The left axis is the number of events. Note that from 1999 on, the category Drunk Driving is overcounted because for some reason the NHTSA counted an event as "Drunk" if ANYONE involved, not just the driver, was drunk.

Overall, it looks as if MADD had an effect on the rate of drunk driving in America and I suspect an effective approach to gun violence will need a similar organization.

I HOPE THIS GOES VIRAL

I have previously used the Heritage Foundations annual ranking of countries by "economic freedom" to show that socialism and economic freedom are compatible (here, here, and here) and now Think Progress has taken the same approach:

1. Hong Kong: The semi-autonomous city inside China has a universal, publicly run health care system: about 80 percent of Hong Kong hospitals are government owned and operated. While private supplemental insurance is available, it’s more expensive than public services.
2. Singapore: Singapore is often cited as a free-market health care system that works. But one of the centerpieces of the Singaporean model, as conservative David Frum notes, is a government mandate requiring citizens to place a certain percentage of their income in “medical savings accounts” to ensure they can pay for routine health care costs out of pocket (when their income is inadequate to pay, the government pays direct subsidies a la Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion). Hardly seems consistent with DeMint’s point that health care mandates are “slippery slopes” towards the death of freedom.
3. Australia: Australia has a single-payer system in which, like Canada, doctors are privately employed but all Australians are eligible for insurance coverage through a government-run provider called Medicare.
4. New Zealand: The Kiwi government has made most services free or nearly free to all residents; the government covers roughly 80 percent of national health care expenditures and directly owns and operates about half of all health care services in the country.
5. Switzerland: This Swiss system is closer to the American health plan post-Obamacare than most other national systems; Switzerland has both privately owned health care and privately-provided insurance together with an individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Interestingly, Swiss insurers are legally prohibited from profiting on the basic, mandatory insurance package.
6. Canada: Our northern neighbor is, of course, the most famous example of a single payer system in the United States.
7. Chile: Like Singapore, Chile mandates that individuals pay into health savings accounts to cover health care costs and supplements the accounts of poor Chileans. It also has both publicly and privately run health care services.
8. Mauritius: A tiny island nation in the Indian ocean, Mauritius has government-run health services that cover roughly 70 percent of the country’s health expenditures, with private supplemental practices making up the remainder. All government health services are provided free of charge to Mauritian citizens, which has helped the country improve quality of life for its citizens markedly in the past two decades.
9. Denmark: As in Mauritius or the United Kingdom, the Danish government owns and operates the vast majority of the health care system.

TED CRUZ CITES JOHN RAWLS(!?)

Erica Greider in The Texas Monthly provides a very interesting quote from Sen. Ted Cruz:

“The reason I’m a conservative is very simple,” he said. “Conservative policies work.” That is, he continued, fiscally conservative policies work for the 47 percent; they facilitate entrepreneurship, for example, and encourage people to chase economic mobility. Cruz, then, is calling for what he calls “opportunity conservatism.” What does that mean? “It means that conservatives should conceptualize and should articulate every domestic policy with a laser focus on easing the means of ascent,” he said. “That we should talk about policy with a Rawlsian lens.”

First of all, conservative economic policies don't work. Second, conservative social policies not only don't work, they are rejected by a clear majority of Americans. Third, it is inconceivable that the Party of the Free Market Fairy will support a liberal (Rawlsian) approach to society.

SHORTER SCOTT RASMUSSEN

The GOP is doomed.

AYFKM, CORKER?

Sen. Corker is concerned that Chuck Hagel may not have the temperament to be SecDef when his own party is chock full of freakshows like Sen. McCain and Rep. Bachmann.