We’ve seen Republicans make fledgling efforts here. Some have tackled this problem by trying to be nice to them. This was under the assumption that Mexicans are pissed about all the heat coming from the right side. Which is a fine assumption. Marco Rubio demonstrates the new tactic:

“What I think will honor our legacy as a nation, is if we can do something that respects the rule of law, but also treats these people in a humane and respectful way,” Rubio said.

If the deployment of “humane and respectful” doesn’t throw you, you haven’t been watching. This is a leap forward in discourse regarding them. It had previously been a habit to speak about Mexicans using terms like “criminal” and “parasite.” As it was with the guiding lights at The Heritage Foundation, who claimed they were lousy with stupidity:

The statistical construct known as IQ can reliably estimate general mental ability, or intelligence. The average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population, and the difference is likely to persist over several generations. The consequences are a lack of socioeconomic assimilation among low-IQ immigrant groups, more underclass behavior, less social trust, and an increase in the proportion of unskilled workers in the American labor market.

Jason Richwine lost his job over that. After it became a controversy, but still. Progress.

Or not. It seems with every step forward one of the Daddies feels the need to step up and speak his mind. Many Republicans are neither intellectually nor viscerally comfortable with being nice to Mexicans.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said Thursday that President Obama would not be president if it weren’t for the 1986 amnesty bill that Ronald Reagan signed into law.

Recall that Obama has damaged America beyond repair.

He said conservative estimates show that, on average, each of these people brought in five others, leading to 15 million more people in the country, most of whom voted for Obama.

“[T]hey have to admit that Ronald Reagan’s signature on the ’86 amnesty act brought about Barack Obama’s election,” King concluded on the House floor.

“[I]t’s clear to anybody that can do any kind of statistical analysis that Barack Obama wouldn’t be President of the United States without Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty act.”

I’m hoping they swallow the bait. They’ll be forced to face the issue on King’s terms: Should the Democrats keep winning? Or should America become North Korea? Tough choices.

The way out involves welcoming immigrants. After they try that, Republicans will stop pissing the Mexicans off. Don’t bet they’ll manage it soon.

“Here’s a dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people. And then they have the nerve to call it ‘entertainment’. But is that what it really is? Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?”

Given all the filth masquerading as pornography, that’s quite a complaint. Maybe then we’ve got two problems? It’s scheiße porn and cowboy shoot ‘em ups that are destroying society’s moral compass. And it’s gun violence that results (not that that’s a thing). So the problem is we’re disgusting, and gun control will never solve that.

Good on the NRA for pointing it out, we could use the reproof. I suppose that’s why, when they play coy with us later, I don’t mind. Nobody wants to be seen as a scold.

Speaking of that, the NRA’s ‘flagship publication’ American Rifleman just published their 10 Coolest Gun Movies:

Sure, “The Godfather” was more of a drama than an action film, but what other movie has influenced people’s perception of the world as much as this classic tale of intrigue, love, lust and power . .

Except for the intrigue, love and lust used for garnish, sure. Not that I think LaPierre etc. will embrace the violence-as-American-exceptionalism theme of the film, though that’s why it’s the best loved flicker ever. This is also a gun film, apparently? Guessing? Tommy guns, italian carbines and on and on:

While not rip-roaring with action, this film affected millions in many different ways with its cinematography, plot and underlying themes, such as how with determination anyone can become powerful, even if that power is of the criminal nature. Who has not dreamed of having the power and respect of Michael Corleone? That he built his empire through violence is only that much more alluring . .

Nope. The NRA just loves the regular Godfather. You ask me, they’re playing either the ‘Hollywood bad’ or ‘movie geek’ character too seamlessly.

• Empaths have the ability to scan another’s psyche for thoughts and feelings or for past, present, and future life occurrences. Many empaths are unaware of how this actually works, and have long accepted that they were sensitive to others.

Ann Althouse approaching. Must be prepared.

• An empath can sense the truth behind the cover and will act compassionately to help that person express him/herself, thus making them feel at ease and not so desperately alone.

Okay:

The word “umbrella” appears exactly once in Obama’s “Dreams From My Father.”
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I’m searching the text, because I’ve been thinking, this morning, about the fascination with Obama’s interaction with the Marine and the umbrella, and that set me looking into umbrellas as a famously Freudian symbol . .

See the ‘interaction’ between The Traitor, The Marine and The Folly Brolly:

Patriot reaction:

Marine: (To himself) “Don’t touch my uniform, you New Guinea c*cks*cker.”

You get why Ann wanted to mind-meld with “Obama’s interaction with the Marine and the umbrella.” Why, if you crane your cerebellum’s neck you can juuust catch a Freudian glance at IT’S AN UMBRELLA YOU SLOBBERING HOUSECAT. No gosh no, it’s not. It’s not after Althouse and her emoticlysms engage. Don’t you see, Timmy? The rain is irony, the President a castaway, and the umbrella is a hollow stump tucked inside the basement wardrobe where a shimmering portal to an unseen world of well heh I was just thinking about it . .

. . Obama, in Africa, falls to the ground between the graves of his father and his grandfather and cries.

“. . A light rain began to fall, the drops tapping on the leaves above. I was about to light a cigarette when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to find Bernard squatting beside me, trying to fit the two of us under a bent-up old umbrella.

‘They wanted me to see if you were okay,’ he said.”

. . beedle-oo beedle-oo beedle-oo . .

Flash forward, and he’s President. He is in the Rose Garden. It starts to rain. No man suddenly appears with an umbrella. He is getting wet and he is President — with plenty of airplanes and rifles and all of the world’s greatest military at hand — but he is still getting wet.

Blink. Blunk.

He has to order the Marine to shelter him. It isn’t Bernard squatting with a bent-up old umbrella. It’s a Marine in full-dress uniform, with a fine unbent umbrella, which is nevertheless not correct under the official — male, rigid — Marine Corps regulations. Where are the words of encouragement, the embraces, the strong, true love?

. . ?

Now, here is the whole world gathered around him. Was there ever anything more unlike the time when he was alone between 2 graves? And yet, back then, the moment a light rain began to fall, his brother was there, sent by others who loved to see if he was okay.

Blonk. Blink.

And here he is, the center of the whole world’s attention, and he had to call for the umbrella. He is not okay.

He is not okay. Miraculous. We should have expected this after a United Federation of Planets mission crashed on Betazed.

Karen Handel was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. After graduating in May 1980 from Frederick Douglass High School in Upper Marlboro, Handel attended both Prince George’s Community College and The University of Maryland but did not complete any degree. She then went to work for Hallmark Cards.

Hints. And glints. It begins, with the chunky teen’s college cocaine cruising and boozing, followed with not graduating, lou-wheez school is hard, and a glancing off the greeting card industry, plus an internship with the Marilyn/Wife of Dan/Quayle brain collective, then a subtle shirking at the Land’s End Peat Marwick, ascending to the Greater Fulton County Chamber of Commerce, the proactive non-profit business advocacy and community development organization with three principal objectives, who tasked her with running the operation whole shebang next big thing, where her trusted/best/only employee instantly embezzled every last nickel of the organization’s finances leaving Karen and Georgia’s job creators asscrack-slumped on the train tracks at the county line, feeding the crows.

Remember breast cancer?

But three sources with direct knowledge of the [Susan G.] Komen decision-making process told me that the rule was adopted in order to create an excuse to cut off Planned Parenthood. (Komen gives out grants to roughly 2,000 organizations, and the new “no investigations” rule applies to only one so far.) The decision to create a rule that would cut funding to Planned Parenthood, according to these sources, was driven by the organization’s new senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, a former gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is “pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood.”

Or should I say . . success?

In the 24 hours after the news broke, Planned Parenthood received more than $400,000 from 6,000 donors, followed by pledges of a $250,000 matching grant from New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a $250,000 gift from a foundation run by the CEO of Bonanza Oil Co. in Dallas to replace the lost funding.

Four days later, Komen’s Board of Directors reversed the decision and announced that it would amend the policy to “make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political”. Several top-level staff members resigned from Komen during the controversy. In August, Brinker announced she would leave her CEO role. The number of participants at various Komen fundraising events dropped 15-30% in 2012, compared to the previous year. It is unclear whether this was because of the initial decision to defund Planned Parenthood or the reversal. Karen Handel, the Republican Brinker protégé whose opposition to abortion was at the center of the Planned Parenthood controversy, resigned and has published a book on the controversy titled Planned Bullyhood.

Well Chauncey. There goes a winner.

Former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel announced her campaign for Senate on Friday morning, as the state’s Republican convention was set to kick off in Athens . .

Handel is the fourth Republican to enter the race for the seat of retiring GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss. Notably, she is also the first woman and first candidate who is not a member of Congress. GOP Reps. Paul Broun, Phil Gingrey and Jack Kingston are running.

Hmm. You think those guys might recall the years that she played banker to America’s abortion factory?

The [2010] primary campaign was particularly heated, and Karen Handel’s past membership in the gay rights group Log Cabin Republicans became an issue. When [Nathan] Deal used her membership against her, Handel denied that she had ever been a member of the group, which was an important and influential constituency when she was a commissioner. An investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution confirmed that she was on the Log Cabin Republican’s membership rolls in 2003 and 2004, and that she had signed a questionnaire affirming her support for domestic partnership benefits. Politifact rated her denial a “Pants on Fire” lie.

Ah, life. It’s a roller coaster in a shoulder-padded brocade jacket. Isn’t it?

“You don’t know what the FBI did. You don’t know what the FBI’s interaction was with the Russians. You don’t know what questions were put to the Russians, whether those questions were responded to. You simply do not know that. And you have characterized the FBI as being not thorough, or taken exception to my characterization of them as being thorough. I know what the FBI did. You cannot know what I know. That is all.”

With that, Louie grows furious. He literally turns red. He wants the AG’s head but – NO! – Louie’s time has expired. So he attempts to counter-attack Holder using a parliamentary procedure, the “Point of Personal Privilege.” Unfortunately the “Privilege” can’t be used to act like a Texas derpass. But Louie doesn’t know it, or doesn’t care, so on he blindly rants while the committee members ask him repeatedly to shut it. Finally, after growing fully crimson and unhinged, he blurts out the most magnificent defense of a dumb-dog congressman ever:

Three different ‘scandals’ sucking up the oxygen in the political room. My throat is tightening, my head is bobbing and my face is turning green. Can I say I don’t appear like this normally? I wonder who it is making it so darn difficult to breathe . .

Warning to reporters and sources: Assume all your communications are being monitored. Time to move back to the parking garage #longhotsummer

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) May 13, 2013

. . and it’s people like this. Matt Drudge. He’s the Walter Cronkite of conservative news, only with a thousand times more honest points. You earn those for service without palpable facts, accuracy, character or courage. And when he tells you that the government is targeting him and Jim Hoft . .

. . though he doesn’t know what a phone tap is, you can be sure he’s got the essential story right. He’s got the meaning of it. And that’s what you need to know in times like these, when they’re lining up to impeach the President, whether you like it or not.

D.C. turns on Obama
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei | Politico

The town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House.

More indications that the ‘scandal’ mess has become deadly serious business.

Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama – and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of this president to begin with, are starting to speak out. And reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.

Buy-in from all three D.C. stakeholders is an essential ingredient for a good old fashioned Washington pile-on — so get ready for bad stories and public scolding to pile-up.

Here we go. One: The leviathans who run Politico report on it. Two: Everyone in Washington (why not make it all of America, guys? [just you give us a couple of months, wink]) agrees with them. Or at least with their gossip, which is to say the breaking news they made up on the spot. Three: The need for serious reporting is so pressing that the headlines are outsourced to metaphors. [Note: The Founding Fathers originally meant to establish the bar for impeachment at "high crimes and turnings-on" but thought the former tilted toward the abstract.]

And how about that snazzy sub-hed? “Obama’s holier-than-thou rhetoric has left him with little reservoir of good will.” Do Jimmie and Mikey back up their journalism with quotes from anybody with any power in Washington? Anyone who could detail what and who exactly were “holier” and “thou”? No. But is that really what you want? Or is it this?

Armageddon For Prezzo As O’Bam Cast Out By Political High Priests
A LITURGY OF CARDINAL SINS AND HOLIER-THAN-THOU BEHAVIOR
Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei | Politico

I thought so. More tingly. That’s what you want to see when the lunatic 27%, plus the gullible Americans who presume they’ve been reading journalism, start lining up to impeach the President, whether you like it or not.

You wanna know another signal that it’s getting real? When the press go out of their way to warn you that the press think it’s only a matter of time:

Once the dogs are released, they bark, they bite and it takes a very long time to calm them down. . . Read Tuesday morning editorial pages of every paper for a taste of things to come. Or watch a rerun of Tuesday’s “Morning Joe,” in which reporters made it sound like Obama is a latter-day Richard Nixon.

“And it goes beyond even the story,” National Journal’s Ron Fournier, who covered the Clinton and Bush scandals and was once the AP Washington bureau chief, said on the show. “One common thing with Benghazi and the IRS scandal, is we’re being misled every day. We were lied to on Benghazi, on the talking points behind Benghazi, for months. We were lied to by the IRS for months and now they’re sending a clear message to our sources:

‘Don’t embarrass the administration or we’re coming after you.’”

The great Ron Fournier, who has come down with a case of Scandoliosis. It’s a disease that causes malfeasance to appear upon the body politic. Or it’s a disease that causes vicious lying, systemic corruption and Vince Foster’s assassinated left-handed corpse to materialize in the media, making it look as if a scandal lurked nearby. No one knows how one causes the other any more, we’re only aware the disease starts after ninety-nine bureau chiefs appear on Morning Joe and cry out “They’re lying! Now I’ve got to hide!”

But lo, unfortunately the truths are not those, but these. And they are sad, because they are facts and could stop a dazzling impeachment in its tracks. The administration came clean about the botched-up Benghazi talking points a few days after the attack, not months. The underlying crime was the attack by the terrorist militia, and nothing more. The IRS did screw up, but Tea Partiers ended up with tax-free designations anyway. No harm was done. And the DOJ feared they had a high-end CIA leak who detailed the role of an Al Qaeda operative in Yemen placed there by Saudi intelligence –two, three, breathe– and whom the Associated Press uncovered with their sourced reporting. This prompted the phone-logs judicial overreach, which is, also, in addition, after all, not a crime.

But then who would listen to me? I’m hardly Walter Winchell. It’s the journalists we charge with the awesome responsibility of knowing when it’s time to line up and impeach the President, whether we like it or not.

About an hour after school let out for the day, the student was getting a ride home from a school employee who also works a second job as an armed security officer, according to police. The employee was trying to put his gun into the glove box of the car when the weapon fired, hitting the student in the leg.

The man drove the student to a nearby hospital, arriving around 4:30 p.m., police said. The student was rushed into surgery with what police described as a “significant injury” to his leg.

Consider this: Though only about 35-40% of America own guns, we have almost as many guns as people. Almost 300 million firearms.

If we can’t cut down on this menace to civilization, can’t we cut down on the negligence? Can’t we foster some responsibility?

Because this is endemic violence by another name. It’s murder by stupid. And this needs to be stopped. This has to be punished. Your weapon misfires in public by any means, you go to prison. For 6 months. If it misfires within 100 yards of children, 12 months in lockup. If it misfires and hits someone, 5 years in jail. I’ll be much more tolerant of the N.R.A. after the penitentiaries start loading up with their yahoos.

It’s about time we figured out whether the Good Guys With Guns are really all that good. The word also means “adept.” You carry a killing machine into the public realm, the law puts you on the hook. It’s only right.

But think about it – if it’s taking pictures, it’s not a cell phone. If it has a McDonald’s app to tell you where McDonald’s is, based on your GPS location, that’s not a cell phone. If you can get Wikipedia or go to Google – that’s not a cell phone. If you can watch YouTube, that’s not a cell phone. Or Netflix.

Think about it.

THINK, dammit. But no you won’t because Newt just said ‘Wickee Pedia.’ Damn your petty intellect.

This device is something new and different. I’ve been calling it a handheld computer.

And he currently calls his car an “auto-MO-beele.” Newt might want to tackle the twentieth century before eyeing this one. And you, you wipe the chuckle snot from your face, peasant. Technically Newt is right, the doodad is a handheld computer. And it’s additionally a phone. So how about we call it . . The Compuphone? We good? I’m exhausted.

Burning books, again. The nerve. Sure we pretend to be denizens of a world whose currency is words and ideas. But we’re nothing but fascists motorbiking from town to town, torching television towers, firebombing libraries. Burning rubber your arm felt nice wrapped round my shoulder, and I-ee-eye had a feeling that I belonged. I-ee-eye could be someone, be someone.

Once the photo started going viral, university officials removed it from their website and insisted it was just a joke. Hilarious, no?

Joke or not, while academia constantly warns of metaphorical right-wing book burners, academic arson is literally happening on the left.

They literally burn books, the metaphor. But we pretend to burn books, literally. Oh kill me.

Stephen King and the Second Amendment
By Ron Capshaw | National Review

Stephen King has declared his support for gun control in an 8,000-word essay published by Amazon. In it, King condemns the NRA and advocates banning guns with more than ten rounds. He even goes beyond Obama’s pledge to protect hunting rifles and calls on hunters to give up “their sporting toys.”

He says he wants fewer guns in America. But . .

In The Stand, after millions of American citizens are wiped out by a “superflu” created in an Army lab, the libertarian argument of how helpless an unarmed citizenry would be in a country where only criminals and the Army have guns is validated in the book’s black-helicopter America.

And what happens?

Televised broadcasts show citizens in a lethal gauntlet between the army on one side and far-left terrorists on the other. Freedom of the press is eradicated as broadcasters are forced to read government propaganda with a gun literally pointed at their heads.

It’s like a nightmare.

In the more contemporary Desperation, a lone highway patrolman is able to capture whole groups of unarmed drivers. Without weapons, the captives are unable to prevent the police officer from killing a little girl. The captors escape and, rather than phoning the ACLU, obtain as many automatic weapons as possible.

It’s like some kinda horror show.

And consider the novel Cujo. Had the mother been carrying even a hunting rifle she could have shot the rabid dog within seconds of encountering the animal, and thus spared her son a slow death.

Suppose you’re a wisp of a girl. Yes, you, with your dirty pillows. Suppose you’re the type for gym shower shenanigans. Suppose you can juggle knives with your mind. Suppose you can turn John Travolta’s car into a bonfire. Suppose you can turn John Travolta into a bonfire. Who more than you needs a Laser-Sighted Bushmaster M4A3 16″ Patrolman’s Carbine? Nobody. Are your schoolmates going to tease you? Not any more. When they vote you Prom Queen, you can be sure they mean it.