Gun Advocate Insults Reagan as Senile

Posted on Saturday, January 19, 2013 by Doug Marquardt

In an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Erich Pratt of Gun Owners of America suggests that Reagan only supported gun control because he was senile.

ANDREA MITCHELL (HOST): What’s the problem with registering a gun? If you have a bushmaster, first of all, why would you have one?

PRATT: President Reagan owned an AR-15.

MITCHELL: And he supported gun control. He advocated…

PRATT: In his later years. We have to keep that in account.

Awwwww snap! So much for Reagan’s golden rule (don’t trash your fellow Republicans).

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Brooks Pitches Both Sides At Fault Meme

Posted on Saturday, January 19, 2013 by Ken

David Brooks has written a widely panned article offering his wrongheaded logic as to how  it is Obama’s fault that the Republican party seems so loony tunes right now.

While most of Brooks’ critics pan his take that Obama is somehow at fault for Republicans coming across like whacko’s because he is so moderate, I fault him for going to the “both sides are equally at fault for the horrible state of our politics right now” meme.   To Brooks, Obama and Democrats in general are plotting the death of the Republican party as we know it, and that will lead to 4 more years of extremism and whackadoo weirdness from the right.  Brooks is not looking forward to the next 4 years under that scenario.

Brooks would like the president and Democrats to proceed with an agenda everyone can agree upon.  He helpfully offers several initiatives which both sides should agree upon, and believes tackling the low hanging bipartisan fruit will help build more trust and bipartisanship between the two sides.   Brooks calls this the crawl before you walk plan.

The odd thing about Brooks’ list is that Obama fully supports these measures, and finding support amongst Republicans has proven impossible, as Chait details.   For Brooks to contend that all Obama has to do to work with Republicans is to push policies they agree upon shows a willful ignorance of Obama’s first term.   These are the same Republicans who repeatedly sponsored legislation, then voted against their own bills if Obama supported the law.

Obamacare is nothing but conservative policy, proposed as the Republican response to Hillary Clinton’s health care initiative.  It was 1st passed into full fledged law by the Republican nominee for president in 2012.   The plan was fully supported by Republicans from Newt Gingrich to the Heritage Foundation right up until 2009.   Somehow, when Obama started supporting a 20 plus year old Republican construct, that very same policy  turned into an unconstitutional usurpation of our freedom and God given rights!

If Obama were a power mad socialist dictator, why didn’t he ram through a single payer health care system?  Single payer is the benchmark for liberals.  A system based upon an individual mandate requiring citizens buy private health insurance is largely a failure from the perspective of the left.  The best that can be said for it is that it’s a step in the right direction, but we have a lot of work to do if we are going to have the real ideal “liberal” health care system.

Obamacare’s roots in the conservative movement is hardly the lone example of Obama pushing overtly Republican policy only to have that party decline to accept yes for an answer, because Obama agreed with them.  There were the 6 Republican Senators who voted against their own deficit commission proposal because Obama supported it, providing the exact number of no votes needed to kill their own proposal.

Cap and Trade used to be the Republican policy to cap carbon emissions.   Yet the very same GOP members who once sponsored Cap and Trade have completely reversed course.  No less a conservative stalwart than Sarah Palin completely reversed position on Cap and Trade, from supporting it in the 2008 election to opposing it less than one year later, when Obama proposed it.

Immigration reform is another example.  John McCain went from authoring the bill which the Bush administration pushed for in 2006 to renouncing his own plan when he was running for president less than 2 years later.

Another tried and true Republican tactic is to negotiate to have their policies added to legislation, only to retract support for the bill when it comes up for a vote.   This tactic should be labled the Dems kick while Lucy holds the ball play.   Last year Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina objected to the Veterans Jobs Bill because it did not contain several provisions he wanted.  Those provisions were added, but Senator Burr voted with the vast majority of Republicans to block the bill anyway.  There were 58 votes to move the bill forward, but 60 votes were required so the Republican minority successfully blocked passage.

Essentially, what Brooks is really trying to get at here is that it is not entirely Republicans fault that things are so awful in Washington right now.  Democrats are also at fault for not doing the easy work which everyone can agree upon, allowing Republicans to start working in a bipartisan manner.  By not just picking the low hanging fruit, Democrats are contributing to the status quo, so both parties are to blame for the current state of affairs.  Quite frankly that is poppycock, and not just because Republicans can not actually accept yes for an answer if the yes is from President Obama.

The one thing that allows Republicans to maintain a modicum of legitimacy is for the rest of us to pretend that they are only half responsible for the state of our political system right now.  Both sides are not equally to blame for this.  If anything the broken political system we are struggling with right now is a triumph of conservative ideals, because they are the party that hates the government.

Why anyone determined to prove how ineffective their own job is at what it is meant to do would be  selected or elected to that job is quite simply beyond me.  Elect me so I can prove to you how completely eff’d up the government is, just like I’ve always said.   It’s like going to a job interview to be a police officer and talking up the criminal career you intend to pursue if selected.  I want to be a firefighter, so I can watch neighborhoods burn.  Choose me!  That is the essential premise of the modern Republican politician and the sooner we recognize this and call if for what it is, the better off we’ll be.

Republicans turning the American system  inside out and making the citizenry distrust the government is not both sides ruining it for all of us.  It is a self fulfilling prophecy.   The blame for it should be placed where it belongs.   As soon as we decide to have a government worthy of our votes, we will vote for people who do not hate the insitution they are sent to ”serve”.

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Part of Jindal’s Tax Plan: Poor Will Have to Die Quicker

Posted on Thursday, January 17, 2013 by Cindy Rose

Remember back in 2009, when Sarah Palin made up that nonsense about “death panels” in the Affordable Care Act and told her Facebook fans:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care.

Then Michele Bachmann, Tea Party Mad Hatter, perpetuated the lie when talking about the Medicare Advisory Board:

“…what many people have labeled the death panels — because these unelected bureaucracies will decide what we can and can’t get in future health insurance policy.”

Then in 2012, Paul Ryan jumped on the “death panel” bandwagon in a desperate attempt to scare seniors into voting for Romney, telling them the health care law:

“puts a board of 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in charge of Medicare who are required to cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for current seniors.”

Well guess what America – we just got a death panel all right, but it didn’t come from “Obamacare”, it came from Republicans; and it’s hardly a panel, in fact, it’s made up of 1 guy – Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

As part of Jindal’s cost cutting measures, Think Progress reports:

According to New Orleans CBS affiliate WWLTV, Louisiana residents over the age of 21 who are on Medicaid — the public insurance program for disabled and poor Americans — will stop receiving hospice care benefits at the end of this month. That means that low-income Louisianans with terminal illnesses, debilitating disabilities, and chronic long-term medical problems will no longer have access to the essential home and medical care that they need.

Of course Louisiana can’t afford to keep the “less productive” in the state alive, because that money went for the $1.1 billion tax break he’s given residents, and his future plan to eliminate state and corporate income taxes.

Wonder if there’ll be as big an outcry about Jindal’s death panel as there was about the bogus one. I’m not holding my breath…

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To Thine Own Self… Lie

Posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2013 by Cindy Rose

If you’ve ever wondered why Conservatives continue to fall for the over-hyped b.s. that they belong to the “family values” crowd, I just might have the answer. Consider the Christian organization “Alliance Defending Freedom” (ADF). The ADF describes itself this way (my emphasis):

“The Alliance Defense Fund is a servant organization that provides the resources that will keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel through the legal defense and advocacy of religious freedom, the sanctity of human life, and traditional family values.”

The ADF’s “traditional family values” means their version of what a family is, and focuses only on protecting the children of their type of family (for example, they legally support anti-anti-bullying efforts. Evidently God fully supports beating up and harassing children who have gay parents, or are gay themselves, if that bullying is done by “Christians”). Anyway, it turns out Lisa Biron, one of their esteemed lawyers, has just been convicted of:

  • eight counts of a federal indictment charging transportation of a minor with intent to commit criminal sexual activity
  • sexual exploitation of children
  • possession of child pornography.

Now, you might expect outrage and condemnation to come pouring forth from the “family values” crowd, and some sort of public statement from ADF regarding a development so embarrassing and counter-productive to their cause; but you’d be wrong. Nary a peep; zip, nada, zilch. I spent part of yesterday scouring conservative sites looking for anything about Biron’s case, 18 sites to be exact, and only one mentioned the case or its outcome: WND, on its Faith page; here’s what they posted:

(Toronto Sun) A New Hampshire lawyer known for her work with an anti-gay Christian legal group was found guilty Thursday of several sex charges after she drove a 14-year-old girl to Canada and forced her have sex on camera last spring.

The FBI indicted Lisa Biron, 43, on charges of transportation of a minor with intent to commit criminal sexual activity, sexual exploitation of children and possession of child pornography.

U.S. Attorney John Kacavas said the investigation began last September after an 18-year-old man reported he met a woman on Craigslist who showed him videos of a minor child engaged in sexual activity.

They then give you a link to the Toronto Sun to “read more”. What they failed to mention about this story, is that Ms. Biron is a parent herself; in fact, the child she has been found guilty of exploiting and prostituting… is her own. While I would not normally get into the specifics of a victim, it is public knowledge, and it matters here.

The right wing and “family values” phonies like to claim at every opportunity that gays should not be be allowed to adopt children because they pose a threat to the well-being of those children, even claiming that:

… gay couples adopting children are committing “child abuse” and only adopt with the goal of “recruiting them into the homosexual lifestyle.”

The reason this argument plays so well to the “family values” dupes is that actual crimes against children, occurring in their own back yard, are censored to keep the flock in the dark. Which brings me to the main point of this post.

The other sites I searched for mention of this case, produced error pages, or reported the search had returned nothing. The following “top-rated” conservative sites allowed this story to slip quietly through the moral outrage cracks (links are to error pages):

The right-wing-holier-than-thous are able to perpetuate their myth of “family values” by simply refusing to talk about the deviants who walk among them. They’ve actually racked up some big numbers in that area, there are more than 50 cases found here alone.

The fact is, “Homosexual adults are no more likely than heterosexuals to abuse children.” Then again, the abuse of children is not really what concerns the “family values” types; their anti-gay agenda is what matters, truth be damned.

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Ejecting from Afghanistan

Posted on Monday, January 14, 2013 by Marc Belisle

AFGHAN FIGHTERS WATCH SEVERAL EXPLOSIONS FROM US BOMBINGS IN TORA BORA MOUNTAINS“Geography is destiny.” –Unknown

Afghanistan is a treacherous land.  In every sense of the word.  Soon we will be leaving it behind.  President Obama announced in a January 11th joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai that American troops would be relegated to a “support” role as early as this spring, and all Western combat troops will be removed by the end of 2014.  This announcement passed without fanfare, but it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the beginning of the end of the longest war in American history, to look forward to being formally at peace for the first time since that sunny Tuesday morning over a decade ago, and to understand why withdrawal is the only rational decision at this point.

On August 9th, 2010, I submitted to the Brussels School of International Studies a 50-page masters dissertation entitled “Greed and Grievance in the Graveyard of Empires.”  My dissertation analyzed how aspects of Afghanistan’s society and economy support the Taliban’s survival.  At the outset of my research, I was generally supportive of the US/NATO mission in Afghanistan.  By the time I had finished, I was passing around a freelance editorial to every newspaper in the country arguing that we needed to get the hell out of there, pronto.  No one would publish it.  Last summer, I met a special forces veteran who had served as a combat linguist during two tours in Afghanistan at a bar here in Washington, DC.  I told him about what I had discovered in my research and he told me he agreed with my conclusions and that I was lucky I hadn’t had to learn it the hard way.

What I learned is that Afghanistan is one big vicious cycle composed of smaller cycles.  The three most dooming feedback loops are the violence cycle, the Pakistan/Taliban cycle and the opium/corruption cycle.  Combined, these dynamics make it impossible for anyone to pacify and develop Afghanistan. Continue reading →

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Democrats Will Choose Their Best Candidate in 2016 – Male or Female

Posted on Monday, January 14, 2013 by Cindy Rose

shoeLately, some writers and groups across the web have begun to discuss the idea that because women were such huge Obama supporters in the 2012 election, they now expect something in return: a female presidential candidate in 2016. Politico’s Burns and Haberman wrote a piece recently that began:

Prominent Democratic activists and women’s groups are determined to ensure the party fields a powerful female presidential candidate in 2016, drawing encouragement from a 2012 cycle that saw Democrats win female voters by a lopsided, 11-percentage-point margin and elect several new women to the Senate…

…The challenge that hangs over both parties, but especially Democrats, is finding the right woman for the job…

What’s this writer’s opinion about that? Baloney. The biggest challenge facing the Democratic Party is finding a candidate that can match Obama’s appeal across so many voting blocs. The idea that a party choose the gender before the credentials is an insult to women – hello, Sarah Palin!

Even as a staunch feminist, I reject the idea that a) “women’s groups” should choose the candidate, and b) because women helped (and I emphasize helped) elect President Obama, that means we are due a female candidate. The President won among many groups, as The Center For American Progress has reported:

African-Americans 93 percent
Hispanics 71 percent
Asian-Americans 73 percent
Women 55 percent

If we use the ridiculous line of thinking that “we’re owed”, the truth is, three groups would certainly be “owed” ahead of us.

Then there’s the question of President Obama’s cabinet, and cracks about it being a “boys club”. Charlie Rangel, who I admit I’m not a big fan of, was recently spewing his version of this cabinet nonsense on MSNBC’s “Jansing & Co.”:

“It’s as embarrassing as hell… We’ve been through all of this with Mitt Romney. And we were very hard on Mitt Romney with the women binder and a variety of things.

I kinda think there’s no excuse when it’s the second term. If it’s the first term, you could see people got to know who is around and qualified in order to get this job, number one …

I had thought that it could be the Harvard problem where people just know each other, trust each other. And women and minorities don’t get a chance to rub elbows and their reputations and experience is not known … so in the second term, these people should be just as experienced as anybody, any other American.”

That’s idiot logic on so many fronts. President Obama could have chosen an entirely male cabinet, and I would not find it “embarrassing as hell” unless certain choices weren’t qualified to have the job. And what’s “the Harvard problem”; do Harvard grads intimidate Mr. Rangel, because now he’s sounding like a Republican.

As Emily L. Hauser points out in her piece on this nonsense:

The feminist movement (to the extent that there is one thing that can be called that) is about bringing women’s humanity to bear on every aspect of life… President Obama has spent his Presidency expressing his dedication to feminist values. Over and over and over (and over and over) again, he has done the work and forwarded the ideas necessary to actually change the reality in which women and girls live, to not pay lip service to our humanity but to acknowledge and act on it.

… 43% of Obama appointees have been women … Not to mention that if the GOP had not successfully hounded Susan Rice out of the nomination process last month, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now…

Back to the Politico post. Neera Tanden, who heads the Center for American Progress, told Burns and Haberman:

“It’s critical that we have a woman on the ticket in some form or fashion…”

EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock stated:

“We expect to see a woman on the ticket in 2016. We’re going to do everything we can to ensure that there’s a woman on the ticket in 2016.”

While it would be a huge thrill for many women, including myself, to see a woman Democrat elected President, gender should not be the critical or decisive element for a 2016 candidate. Feminism is about leveling the playing field, not stacking the deck. The addition of Sarah Palin to the McCain ticket in 2008 did nothing to improve McCain’s standing with women, as the Center for American Women in Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University reported:

Women’s votes were a significant factor in Senator Barack Obama’s victory, with a sizable gender gap evident in the election results….Women strongly preferred Obama to Senator John McCain (56 percent for Obama, 43 percent for McCain), unlike men, who split their votes about evenly for the two presidential candidates (49 percent for Obama, 48 percent for McCain).

In addition, the Pew Research Center found at the time:

Sarah Palin appears to be a continuing – if not an increasing – drag on the GOP ticket….Women, especially women under age 50, have become increasingly critical of Palin: 60% now express an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 36% in mid-September. Notably, opinions of Palin have a greater impact on voting intentions than do opinions of Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate.

Why, because she wasn’t qualified, and many women saw the choice of Palin for what it was: blatant pandering.

The current atmosphere in politics makes recruiting and elevating more women candidates not only smart policy, but an essential one, and the Democratic Party needs to channel more of its resources toward that end. Over the next few years, a number of viable 2016 Democratic candidates will begin to emerge; and Democrats will ultimately choose their candidate, man or woman, based on much more than the single issue of gender.

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Nice Try Donald, But Some Say Your Dad Was An Orangutan, Birth Certificate Or No.

Posted on Saturday, January 12, 2013 by Ken
Some say Donald Trump is not 1/2 Orangutan, but others do not agree.

Some say Donald Trump is not 1/2 Orangutan, but others do not agree.

Bill Maher challenged Donald Trump to present his birth certificate in order to prove that Trump’s father was not an Orangutan.   Maher offered $5 million if Trump can prove otherwise, and Trump rose to the challenge by releasing his “certification of birth”.

Some say this is proof that Trump is not 1/2 Orangutan, but others do not agree

Some say this is proof that Trump is not 1/2 Orangutan, but others do not agree

It  must be noted that the certification of birth was not good enough to prove the citizenship of Barack Obama before he produced his long form birth certificate, so why would we be satisfied with Trumps birth particulars based on the above document?

However, it must be noted there are several issues with the form provided that serve to only further cast doubt on the species of Trump’s father.  For example the supposed line that is meant to verify the humanity of Donald’s father does not actually name the species of the father at all!  It only reads “FATHER/PARENT’S NAME:  FRED C TRUMP”.  It doesn’t read “Human father/parents name”.  For all we know Fred may indeed be an Orangutan because the birth certificate really does not address the issue of the species of the father!

In fact it may interest the reader to know that Donald Trump was born in N.Y. City, but the location of his conception is not precisely known.   Those who have questions about this are only left to speculate.  Was the conception in some sort of large ape enclosure in a zoo?  Or the deep jungles of Asia?  We should demand the answers to these questions before just accepting Trump’s version of all this.

Mary Ann Leod, listed as the MOTHER/PARENT, was a philanthropist.  Philanthropists have been known to give time and charity to animal causes.  Some say that Mary Ann Leod may have become a little to giving *wink wink, nudge nudge* when it came to a particular Orangutan that she was supporting, resulting in the surprise birth of her son Donald.  Just to be clear on this, I am not claiming that I believe Donald Trumps mother had sex with an Orangutan,  I am just reporting what some people say.

Also note how the designation of  “FATHER/PARENT” is very malleable as far as any sort of guardianship is concerned, but does not actually establish paternity.  In fact most states have laws which automatically give the husbands name as the FATHER on the birth certificate, whether the mother had some sort of weird fetish for great apes, or not.  Again, not that I actually would say that Trump’s mother had a simian fetish mind you.  I’m just reporting what some are saying here, that is all.   It is up to the FATHER to establish paternity and challenge their status on the birth certificate if they choose to do so.  One can imagine the embarrassment which would have attended such a test so it is easy to imagine the scenario in which Mr. Trump simply accepted his half simian child as his own son, rather than sully the name of Mary by disclosing the truth of the matter.  So why didn’t the ’parents’ take the tests to establish paternity?  Some say it was to avoid a scandal which would have rocked the city of New York and the scientific community!

Now Donald is threatening to sue if Maher does not give the $5 million to Trumps choice of charities.  There is simply no way that suit will actually go anywhere, because if Trump really pushes the issue he would be forced to undergo a DNA test to prove he was not 1/2 Orangutan.   There is already speculation in the scientific community that Orangutans, not Chimpanzees are the closest relatives to humans.  With human/ape dna already providing a 96% match what would happen if Trumps DNA matched something like 98% of Orangutan DNA?  He can not risk that embarrassing outcome, which some believe is probable, so he will not pursue the case far enough to have to take the test.

By the way, another striking feature of commonality between Humans and Orangutans is that we are the only ape species to have a hair line.   Considering Trumps oddball, primal,  hairline some may speculate that Trump is the true pinnacle of Orangutan evolution. Perhaps we could test the theory by releasing Trump into the wilds of Asia where the entire Orangutan species may come to worship him as a living god!

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Dear Republican Rape ‘Experts’: Read Some History

Posted on Saturday, January 12, 2013 by Ken

Here is Ga. House Representative Phil Gingrey on the statement by Todd Akin that a woman’s body has ways of “shutting that whole thing down” when it comes to pregnancy caused by rape.

“He’s partly right on that.”

Gingrey pointed out that he had been an OB-GYN since 1975.

“And I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?

The bolded highlight is my addition, because I think it is unbelievable that an OB-GYN would spout this nonsense. Gingrey should have his license yanked by the state medical board. 

In October I posted about the history of victorious armies using rape as a tool to impregnate the women folk of the societies they conquered. Just a few days ago I learned of one of the most surprising consequences of that practice as conducted by the one and only Genghis Khan.

Khans medieval attitude towards the people he conquered is best demonstrated by this quote widely ascribed to him:

The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.

Just to be clear here, these wives and daughters were not being tenderly held in the arms of Khan of their own free will. In fact Khan was so prolific at raping the women of conquered cities that 1 out of every 200 males in the world today are believed to be his direct descendants. There is a very high concentration of Khan descendants in certain areas of Asia, with as many as 1 in 8 males having his genetic marker.

The spread of his DNA was not just a function of him having many wives and a large harem. His DNA is spread across the breadth of the old Mongol empire, from the western shores of the Pacific to Europe.

This prolific genetic legacy can only be explained by the practice of Khan, and his descendants, defiling the local women when they conquered a city.  To somehow allow that the women who were treated in such a horrible manner were willing accomplices is completely wrong headed.   Those facts, along with the countless other examples provided by the human history of warfare, is incontrovertible proof that women’s bodies do not have some mysterious way of shutting down pregnancy caused by a rape, despite the repeated claims of right wing blow hards.

It is just silly that the history of mankind has to be pointed to as proof of the obvious here. Some things we know just from common sense, not to mention the certainty we have gained from advances in science.  Some things were understood even by ancient societies which lacked 1/100th of the scientific understanding we have today. It is just ridiculous that Republicans would deny the obvious out of some misguided attempt to deny a woman’s right to choose, and then continue to deny the obvious when they get called out for it.

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Up In Arms

Posted on Saturday, January 12, 2013 by Marc Belisle

hitler“Their paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present. We can’t even begin to address 30,000 gun deaths that are actually in reality happening in this country every year because a few of us must remain vigilant against the rise of imaginary Hitler.” –Jon Stewart

Imagine you are Hitler.  You are trying to be reincarnated as the person who could take over America the way you took over Germany.  How would you do it?  Who would you come back as?  A general?  A politician?  A banker?  A religious leader?

The lunatic fringe of the far-right gun nuts is attempting to hijack the gun control debate.  Since Newtown, the American public has generally awakened to the fact that the Second Amendment line between individual rights and public safety needs to be redrawn.  However, the gun nuts don’t want us to have that conversation at all.  So they have retreated to their Alamo: a circle-jerk of egomaniacal crowing about how they need to save the Republic from tyranny.  I realize that these people don’t represent the mainstream of conservative thought, but their footprint is growing, the cottage industry that fuels their ideology is pervasive, their role in this discourse is not insignificant, and they are too dangerous to be ignored.  It only takes one armed messianic lunatic to change history.

Continue reading →

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Lunatic Fringe Take Two

Posted on Saturday, January 12, 2013 by Cindy Rose

yeagerWe showed you James Yeager’s first video in our article “James Yeager: Poster Child For Why We Need To Rethink Assault Weapons“. Evidently, he felt he needed to clear things up a bit; so, because of his superior intelligence and all, he made a second video. He is now angry at gun owners who don’t agree with him because, and I never knew this, if you’re not ready to go out and start killing people, you lose the right to have an opinion.

Here are a few excerpts from video 2. He starts out sounding like he might have some fragment of rational thought left:

“I was mad when I said it, and probably allowed my mouth to overrun my logic.”

So what does he say when he’s putting a more “logical” spin on domestic terrorism? (Warning, I’m using his exact language, which includes the expletives):

“To the hundreds of people who have emailed me and sent me legal advice, I didn’t ask you for your fucking opinion.”…

…”All you fair-weather, fucking second amendment people who say I’m doin’ a disservice to the gun community, by saying that I’m not gonna stand for the tyranny, fuck you. Our country wasn’t founded by fuckin’ fair-weather pussies; either you’re in or you’re out, and if you’re out don’t call yourself a fuckin’ second amendment advocate. If you’re not prepared to go all the way, then you’re not prepared to go anywhere.”

Now, “Let’s go to the video”:

YouTube Preview Image

I think my favorite part is:

 ”There are unedited videos that people have stolen from me; if you’re one of the people that have stolen my video and you’ve uploaded it onto your site, please take it down. It’s my property, take it down.”

My response to Mr. Yeager? To borrow one of his favorite expletives, “Fuck him.”

First of all, if a guy makes a statement on the Internet that he’s going to start killing random people, he has pretty much lost his “personal property” argument, especially if the bonehead provides a “share” link for his video, as he did with the one above. In the second place, free speech belongs to non-lunatics too, and people deserve to be warned about this guy, especially in the state where he lives (which is alas, the state I live in, where rooting out lunatics is full-time work).

As Ken reported, Tennessee has revoked Yeager’s concealed carry permit. Yeager boasts that he has caches of guns “all over the country” as well as in other countries. Of course, while this could be nothing but bravado, one look at the eyes of this nut job has to make you wonder.

He has also posted a message from a “friend” on his Facebook page that includes this scenario:

“Tens of millions of Americans will refuse to comply with an order that is clearly a violation of the explicit intent of the Second Amendment…

After a number of carefully-planned, highly-publicized, and successful raids by the government, one or more will invariably end “badly.” Whether innocents are gunned down, a city block is burned to ash, or especially fierce resistance leads to a disastrously failed raid doesn’t particularly matter. What matters is that when illusion of the government’s invincibility and infallibility is broken, the hunters will become the hunted.

Unnamed citizens and federal agents will be the first to die, and they will die by the dozens and maybe hundreds, but famous politicians will soon join them in a spate of revenge killings, many of which will go unsolved…

The 535 members of the House and Senate in both parties that allowed such a law to pass would largely be on their own; the Secret Service is too small to protect all of them and their families, the Capitol Police too unskilled, and competent private security not particularly interested in working against their own best interests at any price. The elites will be steadily whittled down, and if they can not be reached directly, the targets will become their staffers, spouses, children, and grandchildren. Grandstanding media figures loyal to the regime would die in droves, executed as enemies of the Republic.

You can expect congressional staffs to disintegrate with just a few shootings, and expect elected officials themselves to resign well before a quarter of their number are eliminated, leaving us with a boxed-in executive, his cabinet loyalists trapped in the same win, die, or flee the country circumstance, military regime loyalists, and whatever State Governors who desire to risk their necks as well…

It will not be pretty. There will be no “winners,” and perhaps hundreds of thousands to millions of dead.

Yet, this is the future we face if the power-mad among us are not soundly defeated at the ballot box before they affect more “change” than we, the People, are willing to surrender to would-be tyrants.”

No, Yeager and his pals aren’t dangerous.

It should be pointed out that reaction to Yeager’s idiocy is mixed. There are the typical comments referring to him as a “patriot”, which is a joke, with one guy going so far as to claim the government “pushed him into this rage”, and that “tyranny is ruling us now”. Puleez! Save the melodrama for your fellow yokels. Spend a year in Sudan, Zimbabwe, or Somalia, then you can talk to us about tyranny.

Surprisingly, some rational types are weighing in on Yeager’s own Facebook page:

◊ “…you’re not really this dumb right? threatening to kill someone is not part of the 1st amendment. if you think it is i suggest you read it again. it is however grounds for judicial action.”

◊ “Yeager needs to have all his guns confiscated and be banned for life from owning any firearms. He is clearly psychotic.”

◊ “Watching his rant, it’s clear he doesn’t posses the clarity of mind, or the mental discipline to rise up as a leader in anything more significant than a toilet cleaning brigade.
To put it simply, he’s just a punk with guns.”

◊ “You are clearly too immature and irresponsible to own a gun, sir. And if the government decides to come to your trailer home and take your weapons, they will do it. And we will all be grateful!

Now according to Tennessee’s WSMV, Yeager has appeared in yet a third video, with one of those “unnecessary” legal advice folks – an actual lawyer, and is trying to backtrack:

“In another video I said some pretty volatile stuff, which I apologize for. I do not – in any way – advocate overthrowing the United States government. Nor do I condone violent actions toward any elected officials.”

Day late, and a dollar short I’d say; his previous unedited, non-legally represented tirade speaks for itself, and exposes him as the domestic terrorist he is. Sorry, gotta cut this short, have to find out where that banjo music’s coming from…

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