Tag: Rant of the Week

The Senate strikes down the Manchin-Toomey amendment, but protects a gun owner’s right to complete anonymity.

The Senate is unwilling to infringe upon Constitutional freedoms through the power of legislation, except when it wants to.  

Under the leadership of Jeff Zucker, CNN broadens the definition of news to include more goat holograms and murder dramas.

Lost a presidential race? If you failed at selling yourself, try pitching a product!

by Clare Kim, Last Word Blog

Former Republican presidential candidates like to speak out. Bob Dole, for example, spoke out for Viagra. Fred Thompson, for reverse mortgages. And now we have commercial spokesman Rudy Giuliani. [..]

“It is very unlikely that Republican presidential loser Mitt Romney will ever find himself in a position that his finances are so tight that he has to go pitch reverse mortgages on TV,” O’Donnell said. “But Paul Ryan… Marco Rubio… Chris Christie… we have seen your future, and your future is reverse mortgages.”

Rudy Giuliani hawks Lifelock identity theft protection

by Jillian Rayfield, Salon

What’s a mayor to do when he’s no longer mayoring? In the case of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the answer is appear as a paid spokesman for cable news commercial mainstay Lifelock.

Warning: Contents of this video may be disturbing for many.

Rachel Maddow reports on how much easier high capacity magazines made it for the Newtown shooter to maximize the slaughter he could commit, and shores the video from the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting today in which Sen Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) dealt with the naivete of freshman Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) before the committee passed an assault weapons ban.

152 bullets, 4 magazines, less than 5 minutes

Adam Lanza Researched Mass Murderers, Sources Say

by Dave Altimari, Edmund H. Mahony and Jon Lender

Before carrying out the Dec. 14 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Adam Lanza conducted research on several mass murders, sources close to the investigation into the shooting have told The Courant.

The Courant had previously reported that investigators found news articles about Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik at Lanza’s Newtown home. Sources now say that investigators found articles and other documents related to other mass murders in one of two bedrooms he used in the house that he shared with his mother, Nancy.

Lanza killed 26 people, including 20 first-graders, on the morning of Dec. 14 before taking his own life as police closed in. Lanza had first shot and killed his mother at their house.

State police gave the victims’ families, Sandy Hook teachers and first-responders an update on the investigation last week in which, sources said, they discussed the theory that Lanza was trying to outdo other killers.

Rand Paul’s filibuster comes to an end in the traditional way that all filibusters must.

STEWART: Those other senators are recent additions to the Senate, so I don’t mind them jumping into Paul’s filibuster, but you don’t get to jump in on the concern the executive branch might be trampling the Constitution train. If I remember correctly during the Bush torture, suspended habeas corpus, see if you can get the Attorney General to sign off wireless wiretapping while he’s in a coma years, I believe your response to that was… yeah.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that could mean the end of a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. At the heart of the case is the question of whether states with a long history of racial discrimination must still get permission from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws.

We’ll have to wait until summer for the Court’s decision. But we can take a pretty good guess about what one of the justices thinks about the VRA right now. In comments that drew gasps from lawyers listening in at the Court, he made no secret of his feelings about the law.