Tag: Rant of the Week

Pro-DOMA lawyer Paul Clement thinks the struggle for gay rights has just been too successful, so it therefore must end in failure.

“Liberals have to stop gloating about Sarah Palin getting dumped by Fox News,” Maher began, “even though it happened less than a day after Bobby Jindal told his fellow Republicans to ‘stop being the stupid party.’ That’s just a coincidence. A wonderful, hilarious coincidence.”

Since the losing party never gets to pick the president, Republican legislators propose allocating electoral college votes by congressional district.

New Rule: Someone has to tell America’s gun nuts to stop wetting their Army surplus pants about losing the 2nd Amendment. It’s not not your 2nd Amendments rights that are under attack it’s all the other ones.

It used to be that law enforcement couldn’t search you without probable cause. But now we are becoming a quasi-police state, where one minute you’re home quietly reading Fifty Shades of Gray, and suddenly, there’s a SWAT team in your living room waving guns. And you’re goiong “no, no! Kat Williams lives next door.”

Now, last month when no one was taking anyone’s guns from anybody, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to reauthorized a program where they can collect data on any American citizen and hold on to it forever. They can look at your e-mails, your texts, your Skypes …. and not a peep out of the crowd that’s always birching about what the framers intended. In fact the answer from almost everyone seems to be, “oh, what the hell the airport screeners have already seen  my ass anyway.”

The Facebook generation especially doesn’t seem to care that Big Brother knows everything about you. What books you read; what movies you watch; your Match.com account; your other Match.com account when you’re feeling a little freaky and want to meet the sortnof woman your other Match.com account wouldn’t approve of.

Call me old school but I don’t want the Feds googling what I’m googling. It’s bad enough when NetFlix pries into my private life: “If you watched “The Walking Dead” in zombieland, you might also like this interview with John McCain.”

I don’t want the government doing that: “You downloaded this article favoring the legalization of marijuana, you mght also like being incarcerated.”

You know they always say these programs are just to catch terrorists, heh, the next thing you know they’re using them to shut down the pot dispensaries. And that place was right on my way home. Now I’ve gotta go to Valley Village.

Doesn’t anyone care that this is the new normal? I guess not because gun nuts don’t care and neither do liberals. When Bush did warantless wiretapping. oh, he was wiping his ass with the Constitution. But when Obama does it, oh well, whatever helps Jessica Chastain find bun Laden, we’re good with that.

Yeah, both parties compete mightily to appear to be the greater champions of out our freedoms but the only the only thing that has bipartisan support in Washington. is not giving a shit about privacy. And when you talk to the NRA types, as I like to do down at my local Moose Lodge, they actually believe that what protects their rights isn’t laws, or courts, it’s if they have a gun. They think that’s what keeps the government from going too far. Without guns Obama would become an emperor and force everyone to gay marry, but he can’t because a guy in Kentucky named Skeeter has a .22.

Except that, you know while you guys were buying guns to protect your other guns, sittin’ up on the porch there waiting for Obama’s negro army, to come confiscate your weapons and go all Django Unchained on your ass, that’s when we lost all the stuff in the Bill of Rights about trials and juries and warrants.

You see the Red Coats they never wanted your guns, they wanted your liberty and that’s why the Founding Fathers said you could have the gun, dumb ass. And now the only right we have left is the guns and left nothing left to use the guns to protect. We’re like a strip club with a million bouncers and no strippers.

Maddow said she was troubled by the secrecy with which the strikes were carried out, since the Obama administration’s policy is to refuse to talk about them.

“The most amazing thing about this as a matter of policy is that it isn’t a matter of policy,” she said. “…The fact that we know that these things are happening and that our government considers these things deniable is frankly one of the more Orwellian things about being an American in the 21st century.” [..]

“We may or may not like what our military does in wartime, but the expectation … [is that] we get to know what they’re doing,” she said. “Our political leaders can be voted out of office if we do not like what they have the military do. We do not have that luxury, that accountability, when our government does not admit to what we do.” [..]

“Why are we now supposed to believe … that regardless of how things have gone under his leadership so far, it all might change and get a lot more accountable and a lot more transparent if he gets this big new job?” she asked. “It is kind of hard to believe that he’s going to go run an agency so he can go give some of that agency’s authorities away.”

Rachel Maddow says good bye to the outgoing members of the 112th Congress, from the ludicrous to the legendary, and takes a look at the political conditions and pending issues on the first day of the new year with a new congress.

The NRA’s solution to the gun violence in this country is more guns.

   “So today, the NRA announced that it has a solution. Complete solution to gun violence in America, mass murders in America. Their solution is the national school shield program, a police officer with a gun in every school.

   Now, he didn`t announce a national movie theater shield program with a police officer in every movie theater in America. Wayne LaPierre has in fact never spoken one word about 6-year-old Veronica Moser Sullivan, who was murdered in that movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, along with 11 other people, and 58 wounded, 58.

   All of that, death and savagery was delivered from an ammunition delivery system so big it isn`t called a magazine. It`s called a drum. It holds 100 rounds.

   Wayne LaPierre is the lobbyist who made it possible for the mass murderer in the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater to be able to shoot and kill and wound so many people without reloading even once.

   The law Senator Dianne Feinstein pushed through Congress in 1994 made large capacity ammunition delivery systems illegal. Wayne LaPierre made them legal 10 years ago. Wayne LaPierre made no public statement whatsoever after the movie theater mass murder.

   After that mass murder, so successfully used the weapon systems that Wayne LaPierre made available to him. Instead, Wayne LaPierre simply sent out a letter, a letter asking for money, asking for contributions to the NRA over and above dues. And as with every solicitation of money Wayne LaPierre has ever made, he lied to every poor fool who fell for it.

   He said in his letter asking for money, quote, “Nothing less than the future of our country and our freedom will be at stake.”

   Wayne LaPierre did not announce today a national shopping mall parking lot shield program, because Wayne LaPierre has no suggestion about how to prevent or even in some way inhibit, maybe just somehow reduce the possibility of what happened to 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was murdered because she chose to stand in a parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, and listen to her Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.

   Wayne LaPierre is all for having a police officer protect 9-year-old girls in school, but anywhere else a 9-year-old goes in America, a movie theater, a shopping mall, she is on her own. And we know now, she is on her own against the best equipped mass murderers in the history of the human race.

   That`s right. We`re number one. USA, USA, we`re number one. No country in the world has better equipped mass murderers than the United States of America. And that is thanks to the lifetime work of Wayne LaPierre.

   Every day since 1977, Wayne LaPierre has been making sure that mad men in America can fire any gun they want, and any bullet they want, at any children they want, at any teachers, at police officers, at the president.

   The solution Wayne LaPierre suggested today to stop school shootings has already been tried in many places across America, including Columbine High School, where 13 years ago 12 students and one teacher were shot dead. Columbine High School had an armed sheriff`s deputy at the school that day and every day prior to that. But when the moment came, the deputy could do something to stop the mass murders.

   There was a good guy with a gun in the parking lot in Tucson when the madman there opened fire on Gabby Giffords and the men and women and children in the parking lot. But the good guy with the gun could do nothing to stop what was happening because he realized he could not get off a clean shot. A shot that he couldn`t be sure would not kill one of the innocent bystanders.

   Stuck in the middle of Wayne LaPierre`s speech today was his bottom line. He said that gun and ammunition control advocates, quote, “perpetuates the notion that one more gun ban and one more law imposed on peaceable, lawful people will protect us.”

   So there is Wayne LaPierre saying that he is opposed to anymore laws. Not one more law, not a law banning the 100-round ammunition drum that was used in the Colorado movie theater. Not a law banning the 30-round ammunition magazines used in Sandy Hook Elementary.

   Not a law banning assault weapons. Not a law tightening access to ammunition. Not any kind of law that would make it in any way even slightly more difficult for a mad man to obtain the very best tools in the world for up close mass murder. Not one more law.

   It is now impossible to count how many people Wayne LaPierre owes an apology to. There are all of those who have been killed by weapons that became available after he made sure the assault weapons ban would not be renewed. There are the parents of the dead, the brothers and sisters of the dead, the children of the dead.

   And then there are millions — truly, millions and millions more, because in his most vile fundraising letter before the last presidential election, Wayne LaPierre actually said this about what would happen if Barack Obama was reelected president of the United States. Quote, “The night of November 6th, 2012, you and I will lose more on the election battlefield than our nation has lost in any battle any time, anywhere.”

   There is Wayne LaPierre claiming on election night that he, who of course avoided service in the war of his era, the Vietnam War, that he lost more on election night this year than, quote, “on any battlefield in the history of our nation.” Wayne LaPierre lost more on election night than 1.3 million Americans who have lost their lives in war.

   He lost more than the relatives and the descendents of those 1.3 million Americans. He lost more than all the amputees, double amputees, brain-damaged amputees that our wars have produced.

   How could Wayne LaPierre ever, ever find the words to deliver an adequate apology for that filthy insult to the American war dead, and to those of us who have lost loved ones in war? Those of us who have lost loved ones in the war that Wayne LaPierre personally avoided service in.

   Of course, there are no words. No words. And the apology will never come, and we can now see through that psychotically self-centered statement that Wayne LaPierre made, quote, “I will lose more on the election battlefield than our nation has lost in any battle, any time, anywhere” — we now see that the mind that could shape that sentence is almost, almost as twisted, almost as damaged as the minds of the mass murderers Wayne LaPierre keeps supplied so well in America.”

h/t Diane Sweet at Crooks and Liars for the full transcript

Actor and singer Mandy Patinkin lets loose with a righteous rant on terrorism and personal responsibility during an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report