The view from 90

Guest post by Robert Stein

Ed. note: A couple of months ago, my friend and fellow blogger Bob Stein turned 90. I meant to publish this wonderful post at the time, but, well, time got away from me and it's been a sporadic couple of months of blogging for me anyway.

It is, in any event, a timeless post, and I'm very happy to publish it today, belatedly. Bob has led an incredibly interesting life and he's seen some incredibly interesting things. What is truly encouraging (and amazing) is that as he looks not just back at America's and the world's messy history but out at the crazy world around him now, he retains a sense of hope and optimism that overrides doubt and despair. He sees the good, that is, even when it is hard to find.

I wish him all the best, and a (belated) happy birthday, from all of us here.

This is Bob's third guest post here at The Reaction, and the first since his reflections on the anniversary of JFK's assassination last November. (His first post for us was "A life in black and white: Personal reflections on race in America.") -- MJWS

Robert Stein has had a long career as an editor, publisher, media critic, and journalism teacher. A former chair of the American Society of Magazine Editors, he currently blogs at Connecting the Dots. 

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On March 4, 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated. It was my ninth birthday.

In April 1945, I was a 21-year-old foot soldier on the floor of a German farmhouse when someone shook me awake to whisper that FDR had died. 

Now, at 90, I am inevitably shaped by those years after a working lifetime as writer, editor and publisher trying to explain the world to others -- and myself.

The scenes around me today are filled with human folly, selfishness and shameless behavior, but that’s far from the whole story. My so-called Greatest Generation, which survived a Depression and World War, does not in retrospect seem so morally superior to those that succeeded it but only more limited in education, experience of the world and outlook.

Many of our virtues were rooted in ignorance: no TV, cable, computers, Internet, no electronics of any kind, only radios with music, soap operas and swatches of evening news lifted from newspapers (as a teenage copy boy, I wrote some of them.)

As a nation we were united, but in an innocence that also had its dark side -- racial ghettos, religious prejudice, rural isolation -- where only unseen white men, all Protestant, held power over our lives in government and business.

Women then lived no fuller a life than those in Nazi Germany: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church). Our mothers patrolled homes in house dresses, with only one exception.

Although we knew her as Mrs. Goldstein, nothing went with that matronly name, not the shimmer of clothes clinging to her trim body, or the beauty-parlor hair, the high-heeled shoes and face painted with makeup even in daytime, or the sweet perfume cloud that came into the living room in late afternoons when she kissed her son goodnight and dazzled the rest of us playing there with a cupid's bow smile on her way out.

She always seemed on the move to someplace exciting or, if my mother's mutterings could be believed, sinful. I had no idea what nafka meant, but Mrs. Goldstein gave our pre-teen senses a whiff of hope that the night life on movie screens existed somewhere in the real world.

Jump cut through decades: a World War; prosperous but Man-in-the-Grey-Flannel-Suit Fifties; JFK, the Youthquake, Civil Rights awakening and Women's Lib of the televised Sixties; a backlash of the Silent Majority and Watergate in the Nixon years; Reagan's "Morning in America" to paper over growing economic and political gulfs followed by Clinton's centrism and self-centeredness barely surviving Gingrich's loopy Contract with America; and then almost a decade of W's preemptive war and mindless tax cuts to bring us into the Obama years of almost total Tea Party collapse of the civility that held us together all that time, with racism showing its naked face.

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Remembering when Ronald Reagan embraced Apartheid South Africa

By Marc McDonald 

After many years of struggle, the evil system of apartheid in South Africa came to an end in the early 1990s, thanks to the brave efforts of Nelson Mandela.

But apartheid's end arrived with absolutely no thanks to Ronald Reagan, a man who embraced the racist apartheid regime.

In 1986, during the growing struggle against apartheid, Reagan used the words "immoral" and "utterly repugnant." 

Unfortunately, Reagan wasn't talking about apartheid. Instead, he was using those words to describe his views on the Anti-Apartheid Act, a proposed law that called for imposing sanctions against South Africa.

Reagan's position was too extreme, even for his fellow Republicans. Reagan's veto of the Anti-Apartheid Act was overridden by the GOP-controlled Senate in October 1986.

The Gipper's position really shouldn't have been surprising. After all, throughout the 1980s, the Reagan administration maintained close ties to the South African government. Reagan even demonized foes of apartheid, such as the African National Congress, as "dangerous and pro-communist."

It's no wonder that 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu called Reagan's policy "immoral, evil and totally un-Christian" during a visit to the United States.

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John McCain, hypocrite extraordinaire, freaks out over largely meaningless Obama-Castro handshake

By Michael J.W. Stickings

TPM:

President Obama's handshake with Cuban President Raul Castro on Tuesday was met with a mostly muted reaction from conservatives and Republicans. Invoking memories of the Munich Agreement, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) broke the right's silence with a harsh assessment of the gesture.

"It gives Raul some propaganda to continue to prop up his dictatorial, brutal regime, that's all," McCain said of the handshake between the two world leaders that took place at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela.

When asked if Obama should have extended his hand, McCain was quick to respond.

"Of course not," the senator said. "Why should you shake hands with somebody who's keeping Americans in prison? I mean, what's the point?"

Then, after a slight pause, McCain went there.

"Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler," he added.

Seriously. A fucking handshake. At a memorial service. For Nelson Mandela. It was the mature thing to do, nothing like the childish impetuousness that characterizes Republicans' interactions with pretty much everyone and everything. Maybe it signified a willingness to engage Cuba as a way of opening that country to liberty and democracy (as opposed to isolating it and enabling its totalitarian regime, as Republicans prefer), but maybe it signified nothing. So there.

But while we're here, remind me again who sold arms to Iran, who cozied up to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq War, who propped up dictators like Pinochet, Noriega, and the Shah of Iran, who kissed and held hands with Saudi royals, and, oh, who tried to make nice with Gaddafi?

Fucking hypocrite.

Late evening with Col. Qadhafi at his "ranch" in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man.
— John McCain (@SenJohnMcCain) August 15, 2009

Chris Matthews' delusion in Tip and the Gipper

By Richard K. Barry

If the New York Times had asked me to write a review of Chris Matthews’ new book on the relationship between ’80s era House Speaker Tip O’Neill and President Reagan, it would have pretty much been, at least in substance, exactly what David Greenberg wrote on Friday.

Beside having a good guffaw at the suggestion that so many wonderful things got done because of the friendly relationship between the two men, I would have pointed out, as did Greenberg, this:

But on the key legislative issue of Reagan’s presidency — the 1981 fight over his budget, which slashed taxes on the rich — O’Neill simply got rolled. Spooked by the president’s popularity, which surged after he was shot by John Hinckley in March of that year, O’Neill failed to compete with Reagan in the new age of media politics. Worse, he also came up short in his supposed strong suit — riding herd on his caucus — as scores of Democrats, fearing the tax-cutting bandwagon, defected to back the Reagan bill. The consequences — skyrocketing budget deficits and debilitating inequality — have plagued us ever since.

There other thing about the Reagan presidency that I find crazy-making is the suggestion, frequently accepted by the dolts on Morning Joe among other places, that Reagan presided over a period of peace, love and good will in which everyone felt included in America’s prosperity and to which we should return if we understand our own best interests.

Many insiders did indeed swoon over the president’s ready charm, but his election depended just as crucially on his very public meanness, his zest for the punitive — the vows to crack down on domestic spending, “welfare queens” and the Evil Empire. An account of Reagan’s triumph that locates the key in his Hollywood smile cannot explain the victories that the conservative movement continued to enjoy after his exit.

Yes, Reagan did usher in something, and we are now living with the ugliness of the Tea Party movement as a reminder of exactly what that was.

(Cross-posted at Raggy Waltz.)

Sane conservatives not so sane

By Frank Moraes

I will admit that there are some conservative commentators that are not completely loony. Examples are: Josh Barro, Ross Douthat, David Frum. Another is Norm Ornstein. I just saw him on Up with Steve Kornacki. And he said something that I hear from these kinds of conservatives all the time. The panelists were talking about the supposed New New Left movement that Peter Beinart has been pushing. One thing that Beinart reported was that young people are the only group who prefer socialism to capitalism. It was on that point that Ornstein had to bring out his "Reasonable Republican" talking points.

Ornstein said, "There's an opening for someone who's a little more libertarian. While you get a narrow plurality of millennials saying they prefer socialism, there's an antipathy toward government there in a lot of ways." I've heard this same kind of thing so often that it is becoming funny. Let's just start with it on the broadest of terms. The millennial generation is not interested in socialism out of any ideological commitment to a revolution of the worker. Their interest in it is simply a populist desire for a system that works better for themselves. Whenever conservatives are faced with a real populist movement, their response is always the same: libertarianism! I think this comes from the fact that that right wing pseudo-populists have always been bought off with libertarian platitudes. But that isn't going to happen with the millennials because they are actual populists who have actual economic needs.

Americans always claim to dislike government. But that's just the same as our dissatisfaction with the phone company: we wish it were better but that doesn't mean we want to stop having telephone service. What's more, younger Americans don't generally think that the government is bad by nature; they think that government is run badly. This is why they didn't vote for Mitt Romney, even though he ran explicitly as a technocratic libertarian. They knew that he would just be another slash and burn conservative.

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Michele Bachmann's influence: Credit where credit is due

By Mustang Bobby 

Rachel Maddow thinks that Michele Bachmann was far more influential in shaping the agenda of the modern Republican party than people give her credit for:

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She may have a valid point. Without Ms. Bachmann, would we now have people in the Senate like Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Lee of Utah? (We will always have folks like Louie Gohmert, Virginia Foxx, and Steve King battering against the walls of Congress.) 

As Ms. Maddow noted in her piece, Matt Taibbi warned us in 2011 against making fun of Michele Bachmann: 

You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger. 

Fortunately, his prediction did not come true; Michele Bachmann's ride to national prominence was accompanied with the same laugh-track that followed Charlie Sheen's career path, and the Mel Brooks method — laughter as the best weapon — did not enable her. 

It was inevitable that we would have gotten the growth of the fringe-right even without the able assistance of Ms. Bachmann. That destiny was set long before she came on the scene in Congress. One can make the case that it started with the Republicans' reaction to the election of Bill Clinton, or even as far back as the presidency of Ronald Reagan where the damp and fetid undergrowth of religious bigotry and patriarchy grew and spread as a response to Roe v. Wade and the progress of LGBT rights. The emergence of Barack Obama — a man who encapsulates every boogedy-boogedy stereotype of the Other and Liberalism that the GOP has been mustering since the defeat of Herbert Hoover — broke open the floodgates, and Ms. Bachmann, ever the opportunist, took full advantage of it. 

As Edward R. Murrow once said about another prominent Republican, she did not create this situation, she merely exploited it — and rather successfully. 

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

"Making it" in today's GOP

By Richard K. Barry

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole was asked today if he thought he and those in his cohort would have a place in the Republican Party as it is today:

Politico:

"I doubt it," he said in an interview aired on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if his generation of Republican leaders could make it in today's GOP. "Reagan couldn't have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn't have made it, cause he had ideas. We might've made it, but I doubt it."

What a statement coming from one of the grand old men of the Republican Party: Having ideas is a disqualification in today's version of the Grand Old Party.  

And this from The Washington Post:

The current GOP ought to be “closed for repairs” because it lacks a vision and is unable to strike deals with Democrats, Dole said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday”.

Yeah, but who's going to listen to this guy?

(Cross-posted at Phantom Public.) 

What, will these hands ne'er be clean?

By Capt. Fogg

There's a lesson to be learned from the trial of Guatemala's former dictator Efrian Rios Montt, ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’ said Ronald Reagan, surprised upon visiting him in Honduras that Central America was composed of several countries. But few Americans will care or will even be aware that at long last he's been found guilty of genocide and war crimes.

The things that went on in Guatemala  were gruesome, horrifying and heart-breaking but I don't have the stomach to relate even part of it.  You can read about it here and if you do, if you can tear yourself away from Boston Bomber stories, School shooting stories' da scores' and Cleveland sex slaves long enough, perhaps you'll take a further moment to meditate and perhaps agonize over the part our country, always howling about freedom as if we invented it, played in yet another sordid and brutal horror.

Yes, Rios Montt is a monster like so many Latin American monsters in Chile, Argentina and elsewhere, all of whom were supported by the Land of the Free and even placed in power by violent  US assistance.  Rios Montt whose  squads were supported and advised by and trained by the Reagan administration, wasn't a Communist you see and that's what counts and so it didn't matter that he raped, tortured, brutalized attempted to murder an entire ethnicity because they were better off dead than Red. better off dead than getting in the way of  the very few and very rich. Red of course means looking for some hero to improve life from the hopeless, unchanging, grinding, disease ridden, starvation and poverty Central American Kleptocracy needs in order to provide a most excellent life for people like Rios Montt and his generals.


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Thatcher gets no credit for ozone

By Frank Moraes 

There was a very interesting discussion on All In about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. I quite agree with what Chris Hayes says at the beginning of the clip below. But at one point, he asks Cass Sunstein if there is anything about Thatcher that liberals should applaud. Sunstein mentions the ozone layer: Thatcher and Reagan both pushed for the ban of the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Let's stop right there. (We might as well, he doesn't mention anything else that liberals might like about Thatcher.)

The reason that we got the ban on CFCs is that DuPont wanted CFC-11 and CFC-12 banned. Why? The patents were running out and they had brand new patents on the replacement compounds. So as usual, these great lions of conservatism were just doing what the corporations wanted. I assure you that there would be a stampede of Republicans calling for carbon taxes if it were to Chevron's and Exxon's economic advantage.

So no. Liberals should not give even the slightest bit of respect to the Rusted Out Iron Lady. In banning CFCs Thatcher was doing exactly what she did when she privatized state utilities: the bidding of the power elite. That's all she (or for that matter Reagan) ever did.

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(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Holding freedom hostage

By Mustang Bobby 

Paul Krugman writes that the Republicans have dusted off an old argument from years ago to block the agenda of President Obama and the Democrats. Instead of arguing the merits of, say, expanding Medicaid to people who need it, they now say that giving people a guarantee that they will have health insurance is an assault on freedom:

Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) "If you and I don't do this," Reagan declared, "then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." What you might not guess from the lofty language is that "this" — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.

These days, conservatives make very similar arguments against Obamacare. For example, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has called it the "greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime." And this kind of rhetoric matters, because when it comes to the main obstacle now remaining to more or less universal health coverage — the reluctance of Republican governors to allow the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of reform — it's pretty much all the right has.

They trot out this pony for lots of other things, too. Universal background checks and liability insurance for gun owners shreds the Second Amendment. Giving free or reduced lunches to impoverished children takes away the parents' rights to feed their children the way they see fit. Banning interracial marriage is an assault on the rights of states to protect their own traditions, and of course the one we've been hearing a lot of recently, permitting marriage equality is a blatant attempt to muzzle the freedom of the "religious" to bully and harass the LGBT community.

David Brooks' column last week where he said that granting gays more freedom actually meant less was a caricature of the argument, and this is how we know that they're getting down to the fumes. When they have to tell you that more is actually less and up is actually down; that more choice for more people is tyranny and that finding a way to stop a madman from sweeping a kindergarten with 154 bullets in less than five minutes is the last step before Stalinism, it makes you wonder at what point will it dawn on them how utterly contemptuous of freedom they really are.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Media accountability

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, I wrote about Liz Cheney's insane rant against Obama and Obamacare. The insightful health care policy observer Aaron Carroll wrote about the Reagan quote she used that freedom was over because of the evil which Cheney dare not speak its name. That evil, of course, is Medicare. Cheney conveniently left out that context for the quote because it only would have highlighted how wrong Reagan was and Cheney is with their hysterical domino theorizing.

Carroll puts it all into context:

Yes, Medicare was the death of freedom in 1961. It was tyranny. It was the end of America.

Last I checked, Medicare passed, and America is still here. Now it's Obamacare that will kill freedom, enact tyranny, and end America.

At what point do people who use such hyperbolic rhetoric stop and recognize that their dire warnings never come to pass? One would imagine that people who repeated Reagan's talking points back in 1961 might find it a bit humbling to see how wrong they were. You'd think they'd shy from repeating those arguments again.

But, no. They get op-ed space in the WSJ.

This, I think, is the real problem. No one ever loses anything because they are shown to be shockingly ignorant. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, no one wants to be around others who make them look bad. So someone like John McLaughlin is not going to fill his panel show with people who were right about the Iraq War or the housing bubble. The mainstream media will continue to be wrong about major policy issues because they don't want to admit being wrong in the past. Another reason is just that the people on the TV machine and in major newspapers are not there because they are right or smart; they are there because they are friends with with the people who run the TV stations and newspapers.

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We call them Republicans

By Frankly Curious

On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher, they did a segment with image confessions. It was pretty funny. You can find the segment over on WhoSay. But I thought this one was good enough to share.

I think that's pretty accurate. It isn't that I think Romney hates everyone. I think just like Rob Portman and most other conservatives, he doesn't give a shit about anyone but his intimate circle. Certainly it is true that Mitt Romney is the kind of guy who can't imagine what it's like to starve to death without actually seeing it happen.

This was also true of Ronald Reagan. If he heard about some kid dying of cancer, he'd write a check for fifty grand. But when it came to providing healthcare for poor children, he didn't really see the problem. Or you can think of the Woody Harrelson character in Seven Psychopaths who weeps over his dog but has no trouble murdering people for the smallest of indiscretions.

When they are in a movie, we call them psychopaths. When they are running for office, we call them Republicans.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Bob Woodward attacks Obama for "a kind of madness"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Back when Bob Woodward mattered.

Honestly, it's hard to believe that anyone pays attention to this idiot anymore:

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward attacked President Barack Obama on Wednesday, saying the commander-in-chief's decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier because of budget cuts is "a kind of madness."

"Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, 'Oh, by the way, I can't do this because of some budget document?'" Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

"Or George W. Bush saying, 'You know, I'm not going to invade Iraq because I can't get the aircraft carriers I need' or even Bill Clinton saying, 'You know, I'm not going to attack Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters,' as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?" Woodward added. "Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement. 'I can't do what I need to do to protect the country.' That's a kind of madness that I haven't seen in a long time."

Let's address this in order:

First, no, Reagan likely wouldn't have, but that's because he was an extreme militarist who didn't give a damn about the budget, in fact exploding the national debt with outrageous military spending. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, though, one could say that he was right to do so at the time because, you know, there was that whole Cold War going on and it was important to ramp up the military spending and spread the military's reach far and wide. I won't give him that benefit, but, regardless, it's silly to say that what was necessary then is necessary now.

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Progressive Music Classics: The Unacceptable Face of Freedom by Test Dept.

By Marc McDonald

(Ed. note: Here's another installment of Marc's ongoing series. For the full series, check out his site. Our last one was a couple of weeks ago, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" by Shriekback. -- MJWS)


Margaret Thatcher's declaration of war against labor unions in the 1980s kicked off a vicious attack on working-class people that ripped the nation's social fabric. British society never really recovered from the ravages of Thatcherism.

Like Ronald Reagan, Thatcher used the power of the state to force a radical, extreme form of bare-knuckled "Chicago School" economics on the nation. In both countries, the Top One Percent made out like bandits, but the middle class was ravaged.

Since the 1980s, Britain has come to resemble the U.S. in many ways. Like the U.S., Britain has seen the decline of its middle class. Britain has also experienced increasingly mediocre, under-funded social services and declining standards in public schools. Like the U.S. since 1980, Britain has become more and more a deeply undemocratic society that is increasingly ruled by an oligarchy and by multi-national corporations.

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Occasionally principled thoughtless assholes

By Frank Moraes 

This past weekend Republicans had yet another get together where they planned to figure out how to stop being a minority party without, you know, actually changing the party in any meaningful way. And I think it is important to remember that some of their great ideas are really not going to work. Recently, I've been hearing this one, "Never discuss rape." A better idea would be, "Pretend that you are for abortion exceptions." As I've noted, this is the real hateful position. But it continues to be the one that comes off the least repellent. It just is the case that being an abortion absolutist is going to get the Republicans into trouble.

And this brings me to my general advice for Republicans, "It's the policies, stupid." Last week, Bobby Jindal said that the Republicans had to stop being the stupid party. But any party that takes advice about how not to be stupid from a creationist who has done exorcisms is in deep trouble. And it isn't just that the Republicans are the party of stupid. They are also the party of hateful. Everywhere they seem committed to have no principle to being anything but thoughtless assholes. Except on abortion where their principled stands makes them thoughtless assholes.

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Republicans are a Christian Party

By Frank Moraes 

Conservatives are so cute! At least when they try to figure out why no one likes their party. It just never occurs to them that it might be, you know, their policies. Look: conservatives like their policies. It is the party of the rich that does the work of the rich. And a bunch of Christians and racists. Conservatives don't talk about the racists for a couple of reasons. One is that it is who they are. Another is that they don't believe in racism. Except reverse racism, where the powerless make the powerful cry. But that's just part of doing the work of the rich. Let us say no more about racism!

But Christians? There's something there. And Jonah Goldberg thinks he understands why Asians are not voting for the Republican Party. Back in December he wrote "The GOP: Not a Club for Christians." That's an aspirational title, because Goldberg fully admits that the Republican Party really does act like a Christian group: 

I've attended dozens of conservative events where, as the speaker, I was, in effect, the guest of honor, and yet the opening invocation made no account of the fact that the guest of honor wasn't a Christian.

Now Goldberg doesn't take offense to this, because he understand that he is one of them. After all, he's the speaker. But what about a Jew or a Buddhist or a Muslim who just happened to be in the audience? He might feel like an outsider.

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Progressive America: Reflections on Obama's Second Inaugural

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm really not sure how and to what extent President Obama will follow through on the progressive commitments he made in his Second Inaugural yeterday, but there's no denying that his vision was clear and that his rhetoric was in the right place.

Of course he has often been criticized by those of us on the left for not being enough of a man of the left, enough of a leader for progressive change, and deservedly so. Too often he has been a leader, or follower, of of the Beltway center, the compromiser willing to sell out core progressive principles for the sake of getting a deal done, too often willing to give in to an opposition that itself has no interest in working with him in good faith.

And yet there is hope as he embarks now on his second term.

And it is possible, just possible, that he will do for the left what Reagan did for the right, that he will indeed be, or at least try to be, the transformative figure many of us know he can be.

This was a speech of substance, unlike Bush Jr.'s second, which promised a global crusade but had nothing to back it up. It was a speech about America, about what America is -- what it was meant to be, what it has become, what it can be. It was a speech that proudly articulated a liberal-progressive understanding of America, and of America's promise, in stark contrast to the conservative view that has, in large part thanks to Reagan, come to dominate, and corrupt, the American politico-historical narrative.

This is America, the president said, a liberal America, a progressive America. A great deal has been accomplished in the face of steadfast, regressive opposition, and a lot remains to be done, but, yes, there is hope, hope grounded in the progressive vision of the Founders and in the accomplishments that have defined a nation.

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Thanks, NRA cowards, for the Connecticut bloodbath

By Marc McDonald

Thanks, NRA, for fighting any meaningful regulations that could help keep guns out of the hands of the violent and mentally ill. Thanks to you, guns can be bought in America as easily as a loaf of bread.

We also appreciate your work on ferociously opposing the Brady Act (which Ronald Reagan, by the way, supported). Rest assured, though, despite your crazy, paranoid fantasies, NO meaningful action will be taken on guns in the aftermath of this latest horrible bloodbath.

Thanks to you, dozens, if not hundreds of more children will be brutally slaughtered in the decades to come.

The NRA truly is a cowardly organization. For example, they cowered under a rock and waited nearly five days to offer any kind of response to the Connecticut bloodbath. How chickenshit is that? If they had the courage of their convictions, they would have spoken up sooner.

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Guns cheap, mental health expensive

By Frank Moraes 

I've already written about how I think the primary lesson of the many recent mass shootings is that we need to do something about the easy availability of guns. But I still think much more needs to be said about mental health and anyway, I'm not sure that I have a lot to add on the gun situation. Go watch Up with Chris Hayes.

When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he had a great idea to save the state money: close down most of the mental hospitals. This was a false economy, to say the least. I'm not sure what the correlation is exactly, but this decision happened shortly before California saw its ranks of homeless skyrocket.

This is not just a California problem, of course. Sy Mukherjee wrote an excellent article over at Think Progress yesterday, "It's Easier For Americans To Access Guns Than Mental Health Services." In it, he notes that for the poor, it is much cheaper to buy a gun than to buy mental health care. He has the data in the article. But I was really struck by this passage: 

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Never on Sunday

By Mustang Bobby

Today's edition of right-wing stupidity comes from Ron Christie, the sock-puppet commentator who shows up on MSNBC the way the Washington Generals show up at a Harlem Globetrotters game. 

He's all twitterpated because President Obama will be sworn in at a private ceremony on January 20, 2013 at the White House and the public won't be invited:

That's because January 20, 2013 is a Sunday, so the big public ceremony will be held the following day. It's happened before: both Dwight Eisenhower's and Ronald Reagan's second inaugural happened to fall on Sundays and this is how it was done.

But since it's President Obama, Ron Christie gets to prove that once again there is nothing this man won't do to shame America.

Sheesh.

(h/t: Blue Texan)