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.
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
A mashup of Clinton, Bush and Obama reacting to the news of Littleton, Blacksburg, and Newtown: Read More
Greg Sargent: “The demographic shifts that Obama and the Democratic Party appear to be profiting from may also mean Dems no longer need to tip-toe around the “God, guns, and gays” cultural issues (with God excepted, of course) that inflame the voters they are less and less reliant upon.”
TPM Reader MB responds to my piece on the guns and freedom unicorn … Read More
I had not anticipated the obvious fact that Newtown children will be attending funerals for their slain classmates.
Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan is joining us in the Prime Blog at 4pm eastern today to answer your questions on the Middle East: where the Arab Spring is going, the Egyptian constitution, the fall out of Gaza, and the real Libya.