This is what the NRA stands for now.

Edgy, entitled white guys, strutting around armed, saying "What are you afraid of, haw haw?"

Liberals use protests and argument and peaceful resistance to apply political pressure. Rightwingers and corporations want to use guns. It's not anything other than that. It's not personal responsibility or home defense or what the founding fathers intended.

It's a scheme to sell more guns and to reclaim power by a dwindling minority, and it has the full support of interests which believe their money, along with the these dipshits' guns, should run the country.

They want to reel in civilization a few hundred years; make everyone question whether we really have a government and the rule of law. Maybe no one has to pay taxes, if there are enough guns. Maybe just people without guns need to pay.

Maybe a rancher or a mine owner gets to say what the law is. And hey, maybe slavery isn't completely off the table either. Did we really settle that, if you can set up armed camps and checkpoints, and dare "the feds" to do something over some COWS?

Next time maybe they'll rally around some poor mine owner defending his right to pollute from the commies in the EPA.

The NRA is selling this. Not target shooting or hunting or "responsible gun ownership." They are selling a paramilitary fantasy of physical threats to "government," which they have painted as the enemy. They are winding up some very confused, agitated people into a violent frenzy, for fun and profit.

And we are letting them.

Yes, we've heard the industry argument. It's ALEC bullshit.

There's no evidence the poor utility companies, with their community-permitted monopolies, are unable to collect enough revenue to maintain infrastructure due to grid-tied solar. This is something they are saying in order to dis-incentivize the growth of rooftop solar, which will eventually reduce the demand for coal, etc. It sounds vaguely logical out of context, but no factual support is offered for this proposition, and of course all the other cost benefits of rooftop solar are completely discounted.

It's a dishonest rationale.

For example, what about the infrastructure savings due to people producing part of the power they use? Enough of those, and you're going to need fewer substations, or even fewer power plants.

What about the reduced cost of transmission when power is generated closest to the source of use?

And what about the fact that we need as much incentive for additional solar power as possible? The goal is not to keep utility companies in exactly the same posture they have always been in. That is just not going to be possible, unless they want to jump in and invest.

Brother vs. brother? Seriously?

Wow is this situation ever completely not like Cuba or Vietnam or Cambodia, or the Civil War, or any other real fight between real opposing forces.

Dealing with a few racist yahoos or tax protesters isn't a "war."

Militia nuts don't have that kind of ubiquity or power. They're the same handful of paranoid right-wingers we had when Clinton was in office. They put on $3,000 worth of tactical gear, and they fantasize about taking down "the feds." Or the minorities. Or the tax collector. Whatever wad of crazy they're chewing on. Sometimes they mix a few together.

THEY fantasize that everyone will stop in awe of their patriotism and lay down arms at their feet or whatever, but that's not an actual thing that might happen.

Because they don't have an actual cause. They think the U.N. is coming to take them to FEMA death camps in black helicopters, and you don't have to pay taxes if your name isn't written in all capital letters. That kind of thing.

This was about COWS.

Dangerous? Of course. Witness the plan to put the women up front so they'd be killed first. They've got all kinda "plans," these geniuses. Cowardly, violent ones. They're definitely willing to hurt people.

But it's not an "insurgency," nor are there so many kooks in these militia groups that taking them down would require "brother vs. brother."

They will pull something stupid and they will go to jail, or they will fight and they will lose.

Could it be ... entitlement?

Which is exactly their argument. It's "their" country, so everybody better watch and not make them mad, or people will be killed.

Liberals have won on every social issue, going back to slavery. And going back to slavery is the resentment of people who feel their geographic isolation or their heritage or their race or religion should be a ticket to some kind of superiority. And if it isn't, a violent, bloody tantrum will be thrown. School girls blown up. Clinics and clubs attacked. People dragged behind cars and sniped from the hills.

This is a deep cultural problem, and it's tied into a lot of other problems. The NRA sells this mindset in its newsletter. Miles and miles of tactical gear and combat style weaponry, lightly leavened with a few insane screeds about the power-mad (and suspiciously dark-skinned) Democrat in the White House. We went through a similar tantrum when Clinton was in office. Then nothing, until Obama.

As someone elsewhere pointed out, we need to be leery of these types hooking up with their likewise entitled bretheren in the economic elite. We've already seen black-rifled goons in boonie hats and camo gear guarding mining sites.

It's an ugly, leering threat, and it has everything to do with a perceived loss of cultural dominance going right back to slavery. To them, every minority group that gains some semblance of equality is a direct theft from them. Every liberal protest is a foreign commie threat.

And it's all enabled by the existence of a centralized federal government, which in their minds would work better as a loose affiliation of rural fiefdoms, where their preferred colors and creeds can be enforced with violence. Just like in the good old days.

They ARE terrorists, and while avoiding bloodshed is always the goal, we cannot afford to walk away from a bunch of self-styled guerrillas who think pointing rifles at federal cops over a few cows is a nice way to spend the weekend.

Where is Homeland Security, so busy tracking Occupiers and coming down with the force of a thousand hammers where a bank window was broken or a financial district's traffic flow was threatened? Where is the bear mace and the riot shields and multi-agency task force?

Apparently a lot of idealistic kids with laptops and a compelling idea is a more important threat to more important people than armed militias openly calling for murder. It certainly makes an easier target.

^An excellent nutshell for the whole thing. I hope everyone reads it.

Obsessing over personalities and motives is destructive and beside the point.

Do we, or do we not, as liberals, progressives, and Democrats, think the surveillance state that has exploded since 9/11, is too opaque, lacking in informed, responsible oversight, and pursuing an egregious overreaching, particularly in the realm of digital information?

Do we support the idea of "whistleblowing" by insiders where legal means to reveal government wrongdoing are blocked?

If so, do we change our positions on these things based on whether we "like" the whistleblower, whether it potentially embarrasses a Democrat, or whether we suspect the person in question has personality issues or ideologies not exactly like our own?

It seems like what ought to matter is the truth. Did we gain something here? Are we asking questions long overdue? Are we pursuing reform as a result? Looks to me like we are. On the other hand was "America" harmed in some way if political embarrassment does NOT count?

If the argument here is that Snowden, Greenwald, et al, are political opponents of Democrats or the President, what is the relevance to all of the above? It's not as though the effect of all of this was primarily anti Democrat or anti-democratic. Rightwingers in our country are not coming at Dems on the basis of the NSA scandal. Republicans love the surveillance state. It's full of money and power and secrecy. Those are their hallmarks, not ours.

This type of whistleblowing is absolutely on our side of the fence, or at least it has been traditionally. But we're supposed to forget all that and circle the wagons because we suspect Snowden's motives? What kind of people are we if our priorities begin and end with not what people do, but who they ARE, or who we say they are? That's a rightwing attitude. Stealing's not stealing if you're a big bank. Lying's not lying if you're in politics. Spy agencies run amok get swept under the rug when our guy's in the Whitehouse.

I'd care about motives if it looked like Snowden was trying to really screw U.S. security. There is no evidence of that. This is not the way that is done. It would have been infinitely easier to disappear with that thumb drive without saying word or contacting the press. It could have been traded for a mountain of cash instead of a life on the run. And there are far unfriendlier and more extremely political mass media figures than Greenwald or the Guardian to partner with.

If we really care about Democratic politics and leadership, we should be obsessed with standing for what we say we do, not with whose ox gets gored in the process.

How about when lenders did the lying themselves?

No. Enron was not a bigger crime.

Easier to prosecute? Definitely. But not more egregious and not by a thousand percent as damaging an example of law breaking and willful malfeasance than the suprime / housing bubble collapse and all its associated shenanigans.

There was crime, and fraud on a massive scale, and much more could and should have been done, going well back into the Bush years.

I'd say both administrations failed catastrophically in that regard. But tossing Taibbi under the partisan bus because he dared to point out something everyone knows -- that efforts by anyone to bring anyone to account for any of this have been pitiful -- does not hold up to scrutiny for good faith.

Here's some of Taibbi's excellent work on a civil trial illustrating just one area of fraud going on throughout the mortgage crisis:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/lurid-subprime-scams-unveiled-in-long-running-fraud-trial-20131212

The point is we missed a VERY LOW bar.

Every Apple product I've bought still works. Every other brand

broke. Save the Commodore 64 and the Atari 2600, if they count. Still functional as far as I know, in whatever boxes in whatever attic they're in.

The Departed:

- No name IBM AT clone -- motherboard self-immolated

- Dell Pentium something or another -- power switch failure and some other random self-shutdown nonsense.

- HP laptop -- spontaneous motherboard meltdown

- HP laptop -- case cracked and separated (*never* dropped, by the way) in such a way it couldn't be opened or closed

____________

The Living:

- SO's first gen MacBook Pro
- Her newer MacBook Pro,
- Our iMac that's older than any HP / PC product I've ever owned
- Two first-gen iPods
- First-gen iPhone
- First-gen iPad
- Ipad 2
- Ipad 4
- Two iPod nanos of different generations
- Two newer iPhones

- All operational and issue free, save hard drive replacements on the extremely hard-working MacBook Pros, which Apple repaired adroitly for reasonable out-of-warranty costs, and in one case threw in a free new MacBook keyboard / faceplate, just to be nice.

Both co-workers who switched to Android phones from iPhones a year or two ago had catastrophic technical failures. Something about those "user replaceable batteries" went kaflooey.

So, no, it's not hype and marketing. These machines are better. Which is probably why it's never Apple people starting rants about how their equipment is so much better than everyone else's.

They already know.

Edit: And that's without getting into the bloatware and constant "security updates" from Microsoft. Jesus, it's been so long I almost forgot about all that endless crap. The anti-virus b.s. alone was ridiculous.

Edit: Totally forgot the 486 clone I had in the early 90s. Arrived with a glitch in the power button and had to be shipped back and replaced immediately. I forget how it died. Or it might actually have been theoretically functional when I replaced with the Dell. Still more trouble than any of the Apple stuff.

Yeah. No. What he said was wrong.

- We DID go in to grab their resources. Check Cheney's pre-war divvying up the oil fields for energy companies

- We left the country an ungovernable shambles, still on fire and wracked by destruction

- We absolutely did NOT abide by international standards of anything. We kidnapped, tortured, and murdered people without charge or proof of wrongdoing -- and that's according to US.

Obama did not cause the Iraq war. Obama did not vote for the Iraq war. But he tried to defend the indefensible, and in so doing muddled the facts and rationalized and dissembled.

Did he have any choice? Maybe not. Every time, forever, that the U.S. tries to tell another country it is selfishly and inexcusably using force on another country under a transparently fake rationale, there will be Iraq. Not our first crime of that sort, but it's the one we will never be permitted to forget.

This is another reason we should have prosecuted the war criminals. If we'd ever planned on being taken seriously as any kind of moral arbiter of responsible international citizenship, that is what we had to do. We didn't. HE didn't.

Of course, if he apologized unreservedly, Republicans would pillory him for being "weak."

But "context" doesn't help anyone here. Iraq is a flaming pile of bad that America created, and its shame cannot be swept aside or excused or explained or talked around. We are a non-entity in the world of self-righteous international conduct, and there is nothing Obama can do about it, but that doesn't mean his attempts to do so succeeded, either.

It is what it is. An inexcusable, inexhaustible reason to call America a hypocrite any time it tries to judge another country for horrific aggression in the name of freedom.

Not his fault. But not within his power to repair, either.