A mashup of Clinton, Bush and Obama reacting to the news of Littleton, Blacksburg, and Newtown: Read More
Lest you conclude that progress in fiscal cliff negotiations is symptomatic of a weakened conservative appetite for taking the debt limit hostage, allow me to dissuade you. The truth is quite different.
See, for starters, the Club for Growth’s reaction to John Boehner’s latest budget offer. The nub of it is pretty straightforward: They don’t want Boehner to raise the debt limit, even temporarily. They’re still pushing a 2011 redux. Read More
I noted in my earlier post the oddity of the widespread notion that firearms are the reason we’re free in America. Having discussed this this weekend with a lot of people who deeply believe this and read many of the online debates, I can’t help but notice that this overwhelmingly white, predominantly very conservative group most often references the internment of Japanese-Americans and restrictions on gun ownership to black freedmen in the post-Reconstruction South as the key supports for their views.
The right to self-awareness is not be exercised along with the right to bear arms.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), who famously shot the Cap and Trade bill with a rifle to show his in-state conservative bonafides in a 2010 TV commercial, says it’s time to take action on assault weapons.
That’s a big deal.
This is a disturbing article. You have to read it to get the full feel. But the gist is that over recent years the town of Newtown, CT. tried to place some limits on the rise of what might be called extreme gun-owning and shooting in the community. It wasn’t a fight between gun-owners and non-gun-owners but traditional gun owner and hunters versus people shooting close to other people’s homes, shooting at unlicensed firing ranges, firing military style weapons, even firing into explosives. Read More
To a far greater extent than in previous negotiations with Congress, President Obama has been very explicit about his non-negotiables in fiscal cliff discussions with John Boehner. The biggest two are that marginal tax rates on high earners must rise, and the debt limit must be increased — and ideally removed altogether from the realm of legislative brinksmanship. Read More
President Barack Obama: “Are we prepared that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”
According to the Post, in his last discussion with President Obama, offered a half-way proposal on upper income tax hikes and offered to forego any debt-ceiling hostage taking for one year.
From TPM Reader JS …
I’ve lived in a small rural town close to Sandy Hook for about 25 years. (We moved up from NYC, in the late ’80s, for family and job reasons.)
Although I’m a liberal Democrat, my circle of friends and acquaintances includes some right-wingers who take it as an article of faith that we’re approaching an economic and societal collapse. I have a pretty good window into that world.