No, You Don't Have to File for Intellectual Bankruptcy.

Debts Should be Honored, Except When the Money Is Owed to Working People

 

Not only is the sarcasm a swing-and-a-miss, but the comma is also gallingly inappropriate. I get that you’re trying to convey pause, but it just doesn’t work, dude.

Dean Baker

I hate guys named dean. Just like I would despise guys named “Magistrate,” “Professor,” or “Constable.” Women of the world: stop giving your children absurd names.  This is as applicable for ethnic abominations like JaJuan and DeAndre as it is for Aiden, Jayden, Brayden, Hayden and other non-rhyming ovary-producing names.

Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

Nice euphemism!

This seems to be the lesson that our nation's leaders are trying to pound home to us.

Yes, yes. The title is a jarring slap in the face to “the man” and your biting wit has deftly drawn us all into the article.

According to the New York Times, members of Congress are secretly running around in closets

Also known as “the Senate floor”

and back alleys

Also known as “K Street”

working up a law allowing states to declare bankruptcy.

I already presented a solution to this problem. The federal government allows the states to declare fiscal insolvency and agrees to guarantee the state’s debt. In return, the state is relegated to territory status until it gets its fiscal house in order. Simple. Brilliant.

According to the article, a main goal of state bankruptcy is to allow states to default on their pension obligations.

I think you/they are missing the point of bankruptcy; the states are already defaulting on their pension obligations. Bankruptcy restructures these debt obligations. Now if you want to argue debt tranches and subordinated debentures, then you have to acknowledge that state pensions are (probably…I didn’t do the necessary due dilligence, but I thrive on wild pronouncements) just as subordinated as other debt obligations…Unless you’re arguing that pensions obligations—because they represent the downtrodden, old, and poor—deserve a higher tranche than the one that has been contractually negotiated. In that case, I’d better not hear any arguments about how “this was the agreement and the state is breaking its word and the judicial system doesn’t work for the poor.” (I’m allowed to write an arduously long sentence when I’m imitating a moron.)

This means that states will be able to tell workers, including those already retired, that they are out of luck.

This happened to private-sector pensioners when the companies guaranteeing their pensions went out of business. This is called default risk. Companies like Moody’s, Fitch, and Standard & Poor’s make buckets of money for publishing their assessments of default risk. It’s called a bond rating, and California’s sucks. Illinois is what’s known as a “junk bond.”

Teachers, highway patrol officers and other government employees, some of whom worked decades for the government,

But most of whom coasted for decades on the state’s dole. (Don’t think I’m a heartless bastard; there’s a reason why productivity among government officials is rock-bottom)

will be told that their contracts no longer mean anything.

                                              

What about the investors who risked their fortunes to finance a struggling state? What about independent contractors who performed necessary services for the state under the understanding that they would be paid?

They will not get the pensions that they were expecting.

Depending on the specific circumstances, they may find their pensions cut back 20 percent, 30 percent, perhaps even 50 percent. There would be no guarantees if a state goes into bankruptcy.

Seriously, does this guy know what bankruptcy actually is?

There has been a concerted effort to bash public sector employees by either highlighting the few instances where pensions actually are exorbitant

Pensions haven’t existed in the private sector since the seventies; all government (nonmilitary—but those are federal) pensions are exorbitant.

or just making things up. Untruths about Goldman Sachs, General Electric or any other major company rarely appear in the media, and are usually quickly corrected when they do.

That is because these companies file annual and quarterly reports. Also, their employees actually work for a living producing something of value.

However, exaggerations or outright fabrication are a standard practice for those who report on state and local budgets when it comes to public employees.

This would be an excellent time for an example of such over-the-top wind-baggery.

The public has been bombarded with stories of public employees retiring with six-figure pensions while still in their early 50s. There may be some instances of such inflated pensions, but that is far from the typical story. If we look to New York State, the hotbed of bloated public budgets, we find that the state's main retirement system pays an average pension of $18,300 a year. For many workers this is their whole retirement income since they were not covered by Social Security.

$18,300 vs. $0 of productive activity. Just saying.

This is the general story of public pensions. Public sector workers are often better situated than their private sector counterparts, in that they even have pensions.

Welcome out of the seventies, dipshit.

But study after study shows that these workers paid for their pensions with lower wages than their private sector counterparts. It is tragic that so many private sector workers cannot count on a secure retirement,

Is it? That’s called freedom, Jack.

but it won't help them to make workers in the public sector equally insecure.

What the fuck is this nonsense? Are you seriously intimating that it’s private sector workers stealing from public sector workers? The goons who administer how we distribute monies collected from the productive section of the economy are accusing the productive ones of stealing from them. Fuck that!

And, there is the matter of paying debts. State governments are legally obligated to pay retirees the pensions they worked for just like any other debt.

In other words…nothing. You said absolutely nothing. The debt has the same debenture as everything else. Which means precisely dick. I hate you.

It is fascinating to see the interest by many pro-business conservative types in defaulting on this debt.

Oh? A return to fiscal solvency is out of character for “pro-business conservative types?”

Many of these same people have been determined to argue that homeowners who are underwater in their mortgages should pay their debts.

There is a vast gulf of difference between being underwater on a mortgage and being economically incapable of raising the funds to pay the mortgage. In fact, being underwater has absolutely nothing to do with bankruptcy. Being underwater merely limits the home’s liquidity. The mortgage-holders are still paying mortgage payments at the agreed upon rate. (Assuming fixed rate. Actually, scratch that. If you got an adjustable rate, you should be accountable to the risk. Plus ARMs have got to be rock-bottom with current interest rates. So there.)

They certainly have not been offering them any assistance in staying in their homes.

How do you know?

In fact, back in 2005, some of the same crew were busy rewriting the bankruptcy law.

This isn’t even close to being a sentence. Try again.

They wanted to make it harder for individuals to get out of their debt through bankruptcy.

Uh huh.

They felt it was so important the people paid their debts to credit card companies and other lenders that they actually applied the law retroactively. People who took out debt under one set of bankruptcy rules suddenly found that Congress had changed the rules after the fact and they would now be subjected to a much harsher set of bankruptcy rules.

Are you arguing that lenders should be responsible for pricing default risk into their rates? Does this not apply to Union negotiators? After all, what is a pension if not a loan to the company/city/state to be paid out in installments after retirement?

Let's see if we can find a pattern here.

I just did.

When families take out a mortgage in the middle of a housing bubble, which may have been misrepresented at the time of sale,

Yes, let’s base policy on a ridiculous parallel that assumes fraud.

the homeowner has an obligation to repay the money to the bank. When people take on credit card debt, they absolutely have an obligation to repay the bank -- even if it means changing the rules after the fact.

Is that sarcasm? Are you intimating that debtors don’t have the obligation to repay the bank or that changing the rules after the fact is okay?

However, when the government signs a contract with workers, it doesn't have to pay the workers' pensions if it proves to be inconvenient.

The point about bankruptcy isn’t that it’s inconvenient. It’s that it’s impossible. That’s why you’re filing for bankruptcy.

Of course, we may also throw in the fact that when the flood of bad mortgage loans issued by the banks threatened to push them into bankruptcy, the Treasury and the Fed give them trillions of dollars of loans at below market interest rates.

Which party supported that and which party [poorly] opposed that? Just sayin’.

There certainly seems to be a pattern here.

Morons bitching about things that they don’t understand? Yeah, that seems to be a theme.

The story has nothing to do with preferences for the market or government intervention.

Does the government interventionist understand that bankruptcy is necessarily government intervention? Which leas me back to my central thesis: this asswipe doesn’t understand what bankruptcy actually is.

The picture here is very simple:

This is why I’m astounded you’re having such a big problem making sense.

The rules get changed whenever it is necessary to make sure that money flows upward from ordinary workers to the rich.

Swing and a miss.

In 21st century America, upward redistribution seems to be the guiding principle.

Hopeless. Just hopeless.

Three Sneers for the Establishment!

I'll keep the prelude brief: the visual representation that evokes Dana Milbank to me is a little girl with a skinned knee wailing that his pain is the result of an unjust world. Now, of course, there is no justice for a dude being named Dana, but we all have our hurdles. Sack up, sir. Sack up.

Michele Bachmann's alternate universe

By Dana Milbank

Tuesday, January 25, 2011; 11:15 PM

The president was lofty.

Generally it’s not good to start a column with political wood.  I’m telling you, he’s going to shoot his wad early and flounder for a couple paragraphs at the end there. Only you would sexualize a Dana Milbank column. Oh Jesus, you’re back again?

"We will move forward together, or not at all - for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics," he said in hisState of the Union address.

Is he seriously citing platitudes as though they have meaning?

The official Republican response, too, aimed high.

Admiral Ackbar says: “It’s a trap!” Dana Milbank doesn’t compliment conservatives except to insult other conservatives.

"Americans are skeptical of both political parties, and that skepticism is justified - especially when it comes to spending," said Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. "So hold all of us accountable."

And then there was Michele Bachmann.

Told ya so. It’s hardly an impressive feat to predict something you’ve already read. I needed to inflate my ego, alright. You really don’t get Freudian psychology. I AM your ego. I’ve been feeding you for so many years, it was bound to happen.

As the leader of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, the Minnesota Republican gave her own, unauthorized response to the State of the Union,

Jesus, you make it sound like the Never Say Never Again of the State of the Union responses. She was solicited to give the response by the Tea Party Express.

live from the National Press Club, filmed by Fox News, broadcast live on CNN and telecast by the Tea Party Express. It had all the altitude of a punch to the gut.

What an absolutely terrible metaphor. Let’s deconstruct this one. First, altitude is a strange objective for a political speech. Politicians with “altitude” usually come off as detached, a universally acknowledged negative attribute for politicians. Secondly, a punch in the gut says absolutely nothing about altitude. The idiomatic basis for this rhetorical turd lies only in the idea of a “low blow.” Every toddler who’s ever seen a fight knows that “low blows” refer to hits below the beltline. Unless you’re 83 and living in Boca Raton, a punch to the gut is considerably above the belt line.

I’ve mired myself in specificity. I was wondering how deep you’d dig into your own pontificating bullshit. The point is that by avoiding an easy metaphor—as an example, “it had the altitude of the bunny slopes”—Milbank has, in effect, rendered the idea of altitude meaningless. God you love to hear yourself speak. I’m writing, jackass.

"After the $700 billion bailout,

Fact.

the trillion-dollar stimulus,

Fact.

and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks,

Fact.

many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have,"

Universally acknowledged interpretation of the Tea Party’s rise.

Bachmann said. "But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt,

Fact.

unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country."

Widely held conclusion of most of the right. None of this is extreme, belligerent, argumentative, or otherwise unseemly.

Armed with charts and photographs,

First Glenn Beck’s blackboard and now this…they’ve discovered PowerPoint! Are you mocking him there? Of course I’m mocking Dana Milbank. Well maybe you should be more clear to the reader(s) Doesn’t this little back and forth serve the purpose? Well yeah, if you want to rely on cheap little interludes like this. I’m good with it.

but not a word of fellowship,

Bachman’s address was 841 words due to time constraints. By contrast, Ryan used 1,669 and Obama’s address tallied 6803. When you have the constraints Bachman had, you tend to cut out the platitudes and get to the point. Even with half the content of Ryan and a little over a tenth of the content of President Obama, Bachman still managed to do the thing that Milbank criticized her for not doing:

“… but we still need all of us to pull together. We can do ths" –Michelle Bachman’s response to the State of the Union.

she railed against "a bureaucracy that tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill."

Uh huh…

The State of the Nation was conciliatory Tuesday night, as each side made gestures to the other, and lawmakers for the first time crossed the aisle to sit - and applaud - together.

Yeah. It was super gay.

But Bachmann and her fellow Tea Partyers raged on.

Nope. Just Bachman.Also, you spelled ‘Partiers’ wrong.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, for one, was not pleased. "Paul Ryan is giving the official Republican response," he said when asked earlier about her dueling response. "Michele Bachmann, just as the other 534 members of the House and Senate, are going to have opinions as to the State of the Union."

Awwww  snap. Gauntlet is down, bitches. You absolutely can’t pull that off, whitey.

For Republican leaders, it's more than a one-night problem. Bachmann is bidding to become the new voice of the opposition, replacing the titular leaders of the GOP.

My leg just got trapped underneath the giant grain of salt that comes with Dana Milbank expressing concern for the Republican leadership.

In the past week alone, Bachmann visited Iowa to test the waters for a presidential campaign and scored fifth in a field of 20 presidential candidates in a New Hampshire straw poll, besting such established figures as Mitch Daniels,

Who?

Newt Gingrich,

Is this 1998?

Mike Huckabee,

As we all said when Bill Clinton was in office, Arkansas isn’t a real state.

John Thune,

Neither is South Dakota. My God, you’re an elitist.

Haley Barbour

Nothing more than meh-worthy.

and Mike Pence.

::Swoon::  Butch up, Nancy. Real men don’t dance or swoon.

Returning to Washington, she hosted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a gathering of her Tea Party Caucus, then went for an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News and a keynote speech to the March for Life's annual dinner. And that was all before her Tea Party response to the State of the Union address.

Are these supposed to be character defaults or something?

Two dozen reporters chased her down a hall in the Capitol complex this week, seeking an explanation for the speech. "I never took this as a State of the Union response, necessarily," she said innocently. The title above the text of her speech her office released Tuesday night: "Bachmann's Response to State of the Union."

From the exact same interview: “I am not giving the official Republican response. This is not a competition. I’m very excited about Paul Ryan’s response, I think he’ll do a wonderful response. This was really a reaction that I was giving to people in the Tea Party.” The take-away is that she was parsing between response and reaction. The response is what Paul Ryan gave. A reaction is something that every news panelist over the next three days is going to give.

Party leaders, intimidated by the Tea Party activists,

The implication that Republicans are at war with the Tea Party is asinine. Certainly entrenched pols have something to lose from the shifting dynamic of the GOP, but anyone with a teaspoon of  common sense understands that the Tea Party is nothing new; the people attending these rallies have always been the silent base of the Republican Party, supplanted in influence for only a few frenetic years in the early 2000s by the religious right.

have little control over Bachmann. They denied her the party leadership post she sought, but when it came to her plan to upstage the authorized GOP response Tuesday night, the most House Speaker John Boehner could do was grumble that it's "a little unusual."

My God! There’s blood in the streets from the GOP insurrection!

Bachmann is more than a little unusual. Her greatest hits are now legendary: Her suggestion that President Obama and the Democrats are "anti-American,"

She’s not the only one. That’s what happens when you bow to foreign leaders, attend church with a radically anti-American preacher, and cozy up to domestic terrorists.

her caution that the census could be used to create internment camps,

Her caution was that the census has been used to populate internment camps.

"Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps ... I'm not saying that that's what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps."

The larger argument was one against the government amassing databases of unnecessary information.

her accusation that Obama is running a "gangster government"

He comes from Chicago and his Chief of Staff at the time was Rahm Emmanuel. If for no other reason than Rahm, that qualified the executive branch as gangsters.

and her request that people be "armed and dangerous" to fight climate-change legislation.

We listened to all this shit with the Giffords story. Don’t you have enough pie on your face? It wasn’t a call for violence in any conceivable way.

At a time colleagues have toned down their words, Bachmann went to Iowa and proclaimed: "If we want to kill Obamacare and we want to end socialized medicine, it must be done in the next election!"

Do you in any way disagree?

"It is my firm belief that America is under greater attack now . . . than at any time," she warned, voicing "grave doubt" about the nation's survival.

The Obama agenda has been ambitious in its deviation from politics as usual. Of course those that believe that the country was too liberal three years ago--and those constituents are legion—now believe that this is a dire time for the protection of the liberties that we hold dear. I would certainly quibble with her over the severity of some of our historical threats, but I certainly don’t disagree with her that vast swaths of American liberties are in jeopardy. If we lose them, then what’s the point of paying lip service to freedom?

She presented to the assembled Iowans a novel view of American history in which the "founders . . . worked tirelessly until slavery was no more." In Bachmann's version, "It didn't matter the color of their skin. . . . Once you got here, we were all the same."

Most of the founders did work to eliminate slavery from the United States. They determined that cohesion with the Southern states in the short-term—without which the Revolution would have been lost--was an asset that outweighed the moral blight of slavery. That work was not insignificant, nor was . The idea that Bachman, who evoked obscure historical tidbits like the Muskego Manifesto and quoted Lincoln, didn’t understand the basic historical chronology of the Emancipation Proclamation is an asinine game of gotcha. I could just as easily say that Barack Obama believed that there were 57 states. The arch of the speech—and it’s 1:30 in the morning so I listened to maybe two of fifty seven minutes—was the significance of American Exceptionalism. It’s a doctrine from which Milbank recoils in horror.

She was at it again Tuesday night. She ignored the bipartisan seating plan and placed herself between two other Tea Party House Republicans. Soon after, she was on air herself, reading out choice slogans: "failed stimulus . . . repeal Obamacare . . . government-run coverage . . . voted out the big-spending politicians."

So we disapprove of buzzwords now? Did you even listen to the State of the Union?

It was angry,

I, for one, am glad she didn’t try to blow sunshine up my ass.

and at times wrong, but Bachmann has gone far with that formula.

Backhanded compliments are far classier than rhetorical haymakers. I’ve had enough of Milbank’s prissy sermonizing about the crassness of Bachman’s earnest opposition. Good conservatives can not be afraid of being “gauche” in the eyes of Dana Milbank and his ilk. They’re children who can’t play games with established rules, so they make them up as they go along. This year the State of the Union is all about being conciliatory. But the next time the President or a prominent liberal gets feisty, you can be certain you’ll find Milbank in his corner. 

Paul Ryan: Man, Legend, Lumberjack.

It's been a while. My reader(s) might have thought that I got out of the game. I can assure you, I'm on it. Sadly, the post-Giffords opinion world has been a wasteland of semi-rational thought and unmockable drivel. That is, until Katrina vanden Heuvel came along. Oh, I brought along my friend. I call him the Heckler Inside My Head. Now you get three concurrent voices, two of which just happen to be me. I fear that shrinks will look back on this post when they commit me and say to themselves "So that's where it started."

Paul Ryan's State of the Union response

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Republicans have chosen Rep. Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, to respond to the president's State of the Union address tonight.

A good choice. Ryan is widely considered the leading expert in all things budgetary on Capitol Hill and took President Obama to task during the health care debate. While Ryan maintains his credibility as a deficit hawk, he did also give a yes vote to TARP and the auto bailout. Did he think these votes would ingratiate him with the left? If so, shame on him and his Chief of Staff, both of whom should know better. I generally mancrush pretty hard over Paul Ryan, so I’m willing to give him a pass since he appears to have found Reagan. (See what I did there? It’s a play on finding Jesus. Blasphemer. No, heckler inside my head, it’s not sacrilegious. There’s nothing sacred about syntax.)

Also this whole sordid circus isn’t about the State of the Union anymore. It’s “Date Night.” Great! I love Tina Fey. Stop it, HIMH. The imagery of Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk sharing a Coke with two straws is not an invitation for your hip pop-culture references or snide jabs, no matter how apt and hilarious they may be. It just makes me queasy. Plus Tina Fey is adorable. Lay off.

In the civility intermission that has followed the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabby Giffords just outside Tucson, Ryan will no doubt be respectful,

Of course, now two weeks after the fact, the paper foot soldiers of the left have given up the overt attempts to link the right to the shooting, and instead settled for the innuendo of association.

and sorrowful that he must dissent from the president's course.

Messaging note for the left: when supporting a guy that plays as much golf as Obama, veer away from words and phrases like “course,” “stroke,” and “tee up.”

Don't be fooled.

Ryan is an Ayn Rand-quoting zealot,

Is it possible to be a zealot of an ideology based on the elevation of the individual and the glorification of an ideal called “egoism?” If so, it would appear to be missing the point.

one of the Republican Party's self-styled "Young Guns."

More of the rhetoric that nearly killed Gabrielle Giffords. You bastards.

He's spent his adult life inside the Beltway,

Which puts him in the company of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, every Kennedy born since 1930, the entire staff of the Washington Post…

on the political right, with no experience in the world of business, labor, the executive branch or the private sector

Which puts him in the company of Barack Obama.

Incubated in a right-wing think tank,

Interesting tact: dehumanizing the opponent. I’m pretty sure it’s not civil though.

writing speeches for Jack Kemp and William Bennett, he was elected to Congress at age 28. Ryan became the most loyal of loyal foot soldiers

Remember: civility. We don’t want our language to evoke hatred or martial concepts.

in the Congress presided over by Tom DeLay and Denny Hastert, a fact Ryan now glosses over as he describes those Congresses as "corrupt."

Which they indisputably were, at least when you don’t look at them compared to the 110^th and 111^th Congresses. That’s a fragment. I know, okay. I’m trying to cultivate a casual and conversant writing style when interrupting someone else’s work. It helps the flow for the reader for my intermissions to actually sound like vocalized objections. This really impugns your moral authority to correct grammar, you know. I hate you.

Ryan has been dubbed a Republican "thinker" by national reporters desperate to find someone they can praise in a party that was extreme before the Tea Partyers came to town.

...This is the party that ran John McCain in 2008. The Republican Party never operated in the fringes. In fact, the reason that Bush’s late-presidency poll numbers were so low is because he lost his conservative base.

But, in fact, his rhetoric is a barely varnished echo of the ravings of Glenn Beck.

I’ve never been able to understand the glaring like of omission perpetuated by the left with regards to conservative commentators. If Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and numerous other right-wing voices are extremist ravings, then how are they so much more successful than their liberal counterparts?

He accuses Obama of a "treacherous plan,"

Boy some context would be both helpful and accepted journalistic practice.

saying that Democrats have a "hardcore-left agenda,"

Again, without context those three words are completely meaningless.

and claims that Democrats are steering the country "very far left, very fast"

Kimono. Missouri. Potpourri.

- a direction he describes as "completely antithetical to what this country is about."

Which is undeniably true. Obama has been very successful in enacting his agenda, but the reason for the massive conservative resurgence last year was the discomfort of that lurch to the left. From a purely nonpartisan position, if Ryan didn’t believe that the President’s agenda was wrong, then why would he oppose it? Political ideology is not a dirty and bitter thing. It represents our attempts to synthesize the lessons of economics, history, and philosophy in a universal compact between men. In short, if Ryan didn’t believe that Obama had overstepped the limited role of government as envisioned by the Founders, he wouldn’t be a conservative.

This sort of rhetoric, once scorned as sophomoric at best,

Only by the miserable dullards of left that were busy trying to smear the Tea Party. Another fragment. Shove it. Don’t think that by using poor sentence construction and invoking an implied subject that your grammar isn’t any less ghastly. You just used another implied subject yourself! Touche. Another Fragment!

::Error: Infinite Loop::

is now common currency

Rhetoric is not currency. No wonder the left always botches monetary policy.

on the Republican right. While Ryan will be careful to avoid such language in the GOP response to the State of the Union, he'll reveal his ideological zealotry

That’s the second time already you’ve used that word. Technically she used the form “zealot” before.

in the policies he will propose.

Most of those policies will come from Ryan's "Roadmap for America's Future," a budget manifesto published last year that The Post's Ezra Klein

AKA: the left-wing hack that was responsible for “JournoList” and a former Dean campaign worker. Also of note, Klein vindictively stated that Senator Joe Lieberman’s opposition to the Health Care bill meant that "willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score." Hey, you just got all of that off of Wikipedia. What can I say; I’m a lazy researcher.

aptly described as "nothing short of violent."

Careful now; we all want to be civil.

In a nation where the top 1 percent already captures 25 percent of the nation's income and possesses more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, the roadmap would give the richest households a new round of staggering tax cuts. It would reduce tax rates, eliminate taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest, and abolish the corporate tax, the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax.

The respected Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, drawing on estimates of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, concluded that the average tax cut for the top 1 percent of the population (with incomes over $633,000) would be $280,000. The richest one-tenth of one percent, who had incomes over $2.9 million in 2009, would pocket a handsome $1.7 million a year in tax breaks.

Okay, I just let her rant for two paragraphs. Let’s all catch our breath. … You can’t simulate breathing with an ellipsis. It’s a literary device to assist the pacing of the reader. Tell yourself whatever you want, Chief. To me it just looks like sloppy writing.

Anyways, I reject the premise that income parity should be a stated goal of the United States government. I reject the notion that the United States government should have the apparatus to shift income amongst its citizenry in an effort to meet these goals. Furthermore, the idea that tax cuts—whether in the form of rate reductions or code simplifications—injure the poor is both asinine and morally vacuous. Simultaneously, it inaccurately implies that the poor will have to lift a heavier burden—which is the simple immorality of a lie—and it establishes the rights of the poor to decide how the wealth of the affluent is apportioned—which is the dire depravity of a government-sponsored mugging.

Some of this revenue would be replaced by a value-added tax

Booooo VAT Tax! BOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Booooo!

that would raise the cost of every good Americans buy, ensuring that middle-income people would pay far more in taxes than they do now.

Actually, consumption-based taxes like the VAT disproportionately impact high-income consumers, you illiterate hag.

Some would be made up by drastic cuts in health-care spending. Ryan's giveaway to the rich would also drive up federal deficits and debt.

You can’t simultaneously criticize Ryan for wanting spending reductions and make a deficit-related objection to tax cuts in a stagnant economy. I don’t care what Paul Krugman says. Did I just say something? No, that italicization was only for emphasis.

Understanding the purpose of the "roadmap" is key to understanding Ryan.

So you’re telling me you understand Ryan? Great. This should be some very insightful commentary.

When he speaks of "fiscal responsibility," what he really means is that middle-class and working Americans will shoulder the responsibility of tackling debts and deficits, while multinational corporations and financial institutions will reap the benefits of favorable government policies and taxpayer-funded bailouts.

…

I believe you said something earlier about echoes and ravings? This is pure insanity. Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin. They don’t have any multinationals in Wisconsin. They barely even have nationals in Wisconsin, and most of those are still just dairy farms. So your theory—basted on your vast and unique understanding of Paul Ryan—is that he has a dastardly plan to spurn his entire constituency so that he can ingratiate scores of out-of-state multinationals to…have a laugh? Get re-elected? Because he secretly hates America? It seems like there’s a missing step in here.

His plan would unravel employer-based health care by ending the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance.

Under this plan, health insurance providers would be forced to sell insurance like car insurance providers. Consumers would naturally rearrange themselves into plans through market-based mechanisms, thereby providing a larger risk pool for insurers to draw from. This, in turn, would reduce costs and give consumers more control over their plans. This is a bad thing?

It would eliminate traditional Medicare, eviscerate Medicaid, and terminate the Children's Health Insurance Program. These would be replaced by a voucher system designed to lose value over time.

This is called weaning.

Ryan would also use "price indexing" to slash average Social Security benefits by 16 percent for those retiring in 2050

Just in case you’re 23 years old and still dumb enough to believe that you’ll actually draw from Social Security.

 and 28 percent in 2080.

Just in case you’re 23 years old and want to have a baby dumb enough to believe that it will actually draw from Social Security. That’s the great part about believing that the unborn still deserve human dignity; you get to insult and mock fetuses. You’re sick.

As head of the House Budget Committee - accorded what House Speaker John Boehner calls "stunning and unprecedented" power to shape the budget - Ryan is leading the GOP's charge to cut $100 billion out of "non-security discretionary spending" this year - requiring cuts of 20 percent in everything from the FBI to cancer research, Pell grants for students, Head Start and grants to public school districts.

Even a cadre of ill-placed dashes to avoid a comma splice can’t make this sentence readable. You’ve got some stones to bring up grammar. Let’s count: three dashes, two commas, and a stunning 67 words. Katrina vanden Heuvel, this sentence is a glittering monument to your colossal ineptitude as a writer.

Oh, and besides being a grammatical clusterfuck, it’s also politically shallow. What ever happened to “elections have consequences?” Republicans campaigned on fiscal responsibility and won in a landslide. Far from being fringe, these cuts are an electoral mandate.

This is a recipe, given the country's faltering growth, for increasing unemployment and misery.

Please, PLEASE stop reading Paul Krugman. I can’t deal with refuting his particular brand of economic nonsense more than once a week.

Ryan, of course, refuses to identify which programs would be cut,

Does it really matter? Let’s start with the ones that you thought would be disasterous to cut: the FBI, cancer research, Pell Grants, and Head Start. The FBI’s mandate has been slashed with the emergence of DHS, so its budget should also be cut. Cancer research should be entirely private-sector. No one needs Pell Grants when student loans are universally available and the country faces a shortage of technically skilled workers (like welders or electricians). Finally, Head Start is little more than a Kindergarten class for disengaged parents. Have you managed to piss everyone off yet? I haven’t insulted midgets yet.

or how deep the damage would be.

When sane people say “what’s the damage,” the damage refers to a high cost. When liberals say “what’s the damage” the damager refers to lower cost. Yet another way that the left’s entire world view is skewed so far it’s backwards.

 "I'm a budgeteer," Ryan says. "I just bring down the cap" - an utterly irresponsible description of budgeting, which is entirely a question of choosing priorities.

No, budgeting is entirely a question of scope and necessity. Cutting a program doesn’t mean that its goals are not a priority. We could make Ryan’s $100B of cuts simply by scaling back programs that have failed.

As a career politician steeped in the art of "framing" a poll-tested, focus-grouped message to make it palatable,

Read: he’s plastic and fake. He’s playing you. He wants your money. Project much, KVH? Don’t start giving Katrina vanden Heuvel cute little nicknames. Sorry.

Ryan will no doubt sound reasonable,

That nerve of this Ryan guy!

invoking basic American values,

That bastard!

promising that jobs,

That crosses the line.

growth and opportunity will result if only we adopt his priorities.

Son of a bitch!

But don't just listen to State of the Union platitudes. Consider the record and the proposed policies. Beneath that shock of unruly hair

Because we all know that the quality of the hair is the true measure of the quality of the politician.

is an ideologue with extreme notions

Again, this horse-faced trollop believed that the party that nominated John McCain was ideological and extreme.

that, if adopted, would endanger our future, and leave most Americans far worse off.

Her choice of words fascinates me. By denouncing Rand, vanden Heuvel is establishing herself as the voice for the collective. Yet here, when she makes her summation, she uses the language of rand. Instead of saying that the American People would be worse off, KVH…Ugh…instead opts to talk about American people individually. “Most Americans would be worse off” instead of “the American People would be worse off.” The difference is that vanden Heuvel regards this as a divided country. She appears to believe that the ties of nationhood are less binding than the ties of social class.

This, Ms. Vanden Heuvel, is why the American people call liberals socialists. This is why we know you to be extreme.

The Fall of the Myth of Bipartisanship

A Tale of Two Moralities

It was the most judgmental of times, it was the most permissive of times; it was the most virtuous of times, it was the vilest of times; it was the age of God, it was age of Satan.  These Dickens mimics doing anything for you?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: January 13, 2011

On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations,

What does that even mean?

to listen to each other more carefully,

No, listening to each other has nothing to do with either morality or imagination…

to sharpen our instincts for empathy,

Well empathy is certainly moral, but there’s nothing really imaginative about being empathetic.

and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

That’s a little bit imaginative, I suppose, but hopes and dreams are empty vessels—they have no morality unto themselves.

Those were beautiful words;

No, that was nonsensical feel-goodery. Morality is positive. Imagination is positive. Moral imagination must also be positive. No, jackass, it is complete gibberish.

On second thought, I may be too generous. If I were to read into it and actually assign a meaning to President Obama’s phraseology, I would argue that a “moral imagination” necessitates expanding our definitions of morality in creative and atypical ways to understand each others’ justifications for actions that would otherwise be immoral. For example, we should not pass judgment on a clearly troubled young man when he turns sociopathic and engages in a violent rampage against women and children. Instead, we should seek to understand his motivations, feel his pain, and seek to remedy the social woes that exacerbated his inner strife. After all, the forces that warped his soul to commit these acts warps our soul as well. If we empathize honestly enough, could you say for certain that you, given his position, would not have been driven to the same madness?

So which is it, Obama (or Krugman, for that matter)? Nonsense, or a moral equivalency for mass-murder?

they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.

Those desirous of reconciliation don’t boo the political opponents at a memorial service for murder victims.

But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. By all means, let’s listen to each other more carefully; but what we’ll discover, I fear, is how far apart we are.

No arguments here. The American right is the champion of liberty, and the left is the standard-bearer for the failed model of European socialism and an ever-expanding government.

For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best;

Which is convenient, from a guy urging that massive government intervention is the best way to spur on businesses, that income redistribution allocates resources most efficiently, and that spending is the only determinant of economic growth. Of course, everything from history to common sense tells us that businesses are stimulated by minimal government oversight, that the market allocates resources most efficiently, and that production is the most important factor in economic growth.

If your ideas were so bitterly wrong, you’d want to make the argument moral instead of pragmatic too.

it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs

Except the left has shown time and time again that the only thing that it believes in is moral relativism.

 over what constitutes justice.

…He’s just now figuring out that our differences are philosophical?

And the real challenge we face is not how to resolve our differences —

We mitigate and resolve those differences every night around the dinner table when we talk to our families, when we engage the news, when we listen to talk radio, at work and at home, every day we resolve these differences by forging ideologies for ourselves.

something that won’t happen any time soon — but how to keep the expression of those differences within bounds.

Of course he’s talking about limiting speech. How else would you describe “keep[ing] expression…within bounds?” Is flag-burning “within bounds?” Who sets the bounds for expression? If the First Amendment wasn’t designed to stand against idiotic impulses like this, what was it designed for?

What are the differences I’m talking about?

You just upended the First Amendment. I’m more concerned about why any writer would advocate limitations on speech than your allegations of social malady.

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy,

Except when the government decides that it’s not.

but one in which society’s winners are taxed

By which you mean punished, chastised, and disincentivized.

to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

It’s only right, the left believes, for the government to mandate that the affluent help the less fortunate. The verbiage, of course, takes us to the absurd implication that poverty is a matter of bad luck. Meanwhile, Krugman completely leaves out the nuance of voluntary gifting: charity. This isn’t about the wealthy doing what’s right—overwhelmingly, they do. Americans are more charitable than any other nationality on the planet. What’s more, the American right is significantly and undeniably more charitable than the American left. When people begin to believe that it is the role of government to level the playing field and impose equity, they lose the initiative to remake the world to meet their own assessments of right and virtue. Let’s call this Reason #1 that liberals are immoral people.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft.

The vehicle of government mitigates the criminality, but not much else. You are still taking from Peter to pay Paul (sometimes literally). The belief isn’t that Paul’s need is not great, nor is it that Paul should not be given sustenance; the belief is that our government was conceived to promote liberty above all other values. It is therefore neither the responsibility nor the right of the government to allocate money, regardless of the motives.

That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric:

Busted. Meanwhile we as a country have completely ignored the violent knee-jerk of wacko liberal eco-terrorists because we understand that this violence is not the goal of the global warming movement. Their craziness takes a completely different shape.

many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

Krugman acts like this handful of “activists on right” is the first group to ever believe that excessive taxation and regulation are antithetical to liberty and therefore tyrannical. Anyone who has even a semblance of understanding for the motivations for the Revolutionary War understand that taxation and representation were virtually the only grievances that the colonies had with England. This is why tea partiers wear tri-cornered hats and invoke the language of a battle fought almost 250 years ago: we derive our morality from words and deeds of the founders of this country.

There’s no middle ground between these views.

Even as much as I prefer division and partisanship as a means of resolving conflicts, this is absolutely asinine. Neither the founders nor anyone on the modern right is an anarchist. We all agree that there exists some role for government. We all even agree that government has the right to tax and spend. The question has always been how much, and for what purpose. The middle ground between these positions is virtually limitless.

One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care.

We’re trillions of dollars in debt. We are not wealthy.

The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

To his credit, there’s not a better way to describe the individual mandate of Obamacare.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not,

…are filling the airwaves with their drivel because they have built a myth around their own hazy recollections of the glory days.

pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it.

Also a myth. Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan say otherwise. Ford and Nixon notwithstanding.

As many analysts have noted, the Obama health reform — whose passage was met with vandalism and death threats against members of Congress — was modeled on Republican plans from the 1990s.

Who? When? Where? I have seen none of these analysts assessments. Every analysis of Obamacare from the right that I’ve seen has viewed the bill as an unmitigated monstrosity.

But that was then. Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not.

I’m relatively sure that’s why the Republicans read the Constitution on the floor of the House. That document, which liberals insist is not to be taken as scripture, is the source of legitimacy. If one side believes that the source of their legitimacy is “malleable” or a “living document,” then how can we trust a legitimate use of power?

When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.

I wholeheartedly agree. Right on. Can we finally drop the idea that bipartisanship is a virtue?

Regular readers know which side of that divide I’m on.

Embrace the Divide! (Requisite branding efforts)

In future columns I will no doubt spend a lot of time pointing out the hypocrisy and logical fallacies of the “I earned it and I have the right to keep it” crowd.

In future lambastings of your columns, I will no doubt spend a lot more time pointing out that your pointing out of hypocrisy and logical fallacies is baseless and shallow, that your mockeries are more juvenile than mine (quite a feat), and that you are advocating ideas whose only merit is the mindless deference to the collective.

And I’ll also have a lot to say about how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity, in which success depends solely on one’s own efforts.

Is this a mission statement, or are you actually going to try to defend these absurdities?

But the question for now is what we can agree on given this deep national divide.

In a way, politics as a whole now resembles the longstanding politics of abortion — a subject that puts fundamental values at odds, in which each side believes that the other side is morally in the wrong. Almost 38 years have passed since Roe v. Wade, and this dispute is no closer to resolution.

Except that it’s resolved; the courts have agreed that outright bans on abortion are unconstitutional because they violate a patient’s right to privacy. (Yes, the advocates of this decision are the ones taking naked pictures of you at the airport and demanding that all medical records be compiled in a federal database.) Of course, they’re wrong, but it’s resolved.

Yet we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so.

Yeah…where are you going with this, champ?

What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.

Is he really advocating that the abortion debate be a model for our national discourse?

Right now, each side in that debate passionately believes that the other side is wrong. And it’s all right for them to say that.

Everyone but Sarah Palin.

What’s not acceptable is the kind of violence and eliminationist rhetoric

Paul Krugman always wins the Buzzword Challenge.

 encouraging violence that has become all too common these past two years.

There has been no escalation in violent rhetoric. This is another one of those myths that has been completely rejected by anyone with a functioning bundle of neurons in their head. For God’s sake…they made movies about assassinating President Bush!

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds.

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun”

“I want to know whose ass to kick”

“I want you to argue with them and get in their faces”

            -President Obama

 We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.

No, I don’t want reconciliation. I want victory. I don’t want my views to assimilate with your views, Paul Krugman. I want everyone to reach a consensus that you have nothing of value to offer them, that your ideologies enslave them to a government and a false morality. You are wrong. Your words do not carry the weight of truth. Your voice can not claim the merit of self-honesty, and the things that you value aren’t worth the price you are determined to make us pay.

In short, fuck off, Paul Krugman.

Violent Support of Pacifism and other Contradictions

OP-ED COLUMNIST

A Flood Tide of Murder

By BOB HERBERT

Published: January 10, 2011

By all means, condemn the hateful rhetoric that has poured so much poison into our political discourse.

Thanks for your permission. I was, of course, waiting for approval from the Times’ editorial page to condemn a shooting rampage.

The crazies don’t kill in a vacuum,

Actually, the detachment from reality is a large part of what defines “the crazies,” This necessarily means that they are immune to the intervening sanity of a functional interaction with the world. Which is to say, “The crazies do kill in a vacuum.”

and the vilest of our political leaders and commentators

Frank Rich? Count it!

deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it.

Very well, and in all seriousness: Mr. Herbert, your constant fearmongering and deplorable exploitation of a tragedy to advance an agenda that impinges upon the personal freedoms of American citizens is deplorable. Your shrieks of outrage are hollow; your anger is transparent.  Your ability to look beyond the sins of your political compatriots and willingness to ignore the well-documented reflex for vitriol of the left is beyond disingenuous. What’s more, you are a vigorous contributor to the culture you claim to disown. You are an integral part of the mechanism you condemn. You do not have the moral authority to lecture me or any of us.  

But that’s the easy part.

Given the verbal contortions of the left-wing associations between Laughner and the right, it doesn’t seem to be very easy at all.

If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads.

In other words, the people that you obsess over (“sorry politicians”) and the people that you desperately aspire to be (“lame-brained talking heads”) are irrelevant? What does that make you, Bob Herbert?

We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely

Insanely. Where does that fall on the scale of text-message worthy adjectives from “for serious” to “OMG Becky!!!1!!”?

violent society.

Compared to what other societies? We haven’t started a World War, much less two, so you can knock off the Central Europeans and probably Japan. There has never been a genocide on American soil, so the Russians, Chinese, and most of the southeast asian countries aren’t really competitive. Africa has been a combat zone for 20 years, so we’re good there. India has massive problems with social cohesion that often results in violence, not to mention the ongoing spat with Pakistan. The middle east engages in ritualistic murder on a daily basis. Race riots in Parisian suburbs, IRA firebombings, Basque separatists. Columbian drug cartels. Mexican drug cartels. Venezuelan totalitarian thuggery. Canadian…hockey.

America’s good, thank you.

Still, let’s count the buzzwords:

The vitriol

Buzz.

that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric,

Buzz.

most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad

Buzz.

contributing factors

Buzz.

in a society saturated in blood.

Not a buzzword. Just hyperbolically gruesome imagery

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence,

There’s no one more reliable for statistical surveys than partisan political lobbyists opposed to the Constitution. We all still hate lobbyists, right? Trick question. Apparently we’re not allowed to hate anyone because hate kills puppies and nonpartisan politicians who aren’t actually dead. To be clear, I’m only mocking the posthumous glorification with which the media has adorned this congresswoman—never mind that she’s still breathing!

more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed.

Oh good. I was worried that it was an arbitrary date without any real significance. Can you tell me how many people have died baseball bat-related violence since Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers?

That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.

A well regulated and well fed Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear cutlery shall not be infringed.

Excluding the people killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,

Why exclude these victims unless you’re arguing that 9/11 was not emblematic of our culture, but of another culture. I’ll give you a hint: they yell “Allah akbar” before killing people.

more than 150,000 Americans have been murdered since the beginning of the 21st century.

13,636 per year. In a country of 300,000,000 people, that is a rate of .0045% for everything ranging from suicides to homicides (with various degrees of accidents in between). The statistics are not in Mr. Herbert’s favor.

This endlessly proliferating parade of death, which does not spare women or children,

Actually, considering that the statistics would take into account child-on-child and woman-on-woman crime, I suggest that we fervently reproach them for their roles in this. Especially the children.

ought to make our knees go weak.

You’re confusing gun violence with Justin Beiber again.

But we never even notice most of the killings. Homicide is white noise in this society.

Homicide is white noise in every society, except societies with primitive news-distribution mechanisms were homicide isn’t noise at all.

The overwhelming majority of the people who claim to be so outraged by last weekend’s shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others — six of them fatally — will take absolutely no steps, none whatsoever, to prevent a similar tragedy in the future.

That’s because most Americans reflexively understand that the steps that are proposed to “prevent a similar tragedy” are almost always counter-productive and necessarily infringe upon our deeply cherished liberties. I guarantee that before this column is finished, Bob Herbert will advocate impinging upon the Bill of Rights.

And similar tragedies are coming as surely as the sun makes its daily appearance over the eastern horizon because this is an American ritual: the mowing down of the innocents.

Get off your damn high horse and stop trying to project the sins of one deranged lunatics onto our entire society. I don’t blame you for Krugman’s meandering gibberish.

On Saturday, the victims happened to be a respected congresswoman, a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge and a number of others gathered at the kind of civic event that is supposed to define a successful democracy. But there are endless horror stories. In April 2007, 32 students and faculty members at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute were shot to death and 17 others were wounded by a student armed with a pair of semiautomatic weapons.

On a cold, rainy afternoon in Pittsburgh in 2009, I came upon a gray-haired woman shivering on a stone step in a residential neighborhood. “I’m the grandmother of the kid that killed those cops,” she whispered. Three police officers had been shot and killed by her 22-year-old grandson, who was armed with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle.

Sad, but irrelevant. What’s more, the motivations of the shooters in each instance was wildly different. This is why conservatives advocate harsher prison sentences including the death penalty. Punishment is a deterrent to all freedom-loving, prisonrape-fearing would-be assailants.

I remember having lunch with Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a few days after the Virginia Tech tragedy. She shook her head at the senseless loss of so many students and teachers, then told me: “We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

Not to pull out the statistical card, but the Virginia Tech shootings were included in that total, so statistically, one bad day at Virginia Tech meant about three other violence-free days…or at least diminished violence spread out over the rest of the year. Just saying.

If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns

By which you mean “circumvent the Second Amendment.”

while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment,

By which you mean “circumvent the First Amendment.”

and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.

By which you mean disowning a fifty-year legacy of violent civil disobedience faithfully cultivated by the left? Please.

Ordinary citizens interested in a more sane

FYI: more sane = saner.

and civilized society would have to insist that their elected representatives take meaningful steps to stem the violence.

Still no mention of prison sentencing?

And they would have to demand, as well, that the government bring an end to the wars overseas,

Oh that’s relevant. Should we also surrender in the “War on Poverty?”

with their terrible human toll, because the wars are part of the same crippling pathology.

The courage to take a stand for virtue? That’s not crippling. That’s liberating. What we need is not regulation; it’s freedom.

Without those very tough steps, the murder of the innocents by the tens of thousands will most assuredly continue.

Even with those steps, the murder of the innocents by the tens of thousands will continue. Outlawing guns is not productive. The surprising part of this story is not that the gunman had a gun—he would have found one regardless—it is that no one else did. Even in Arizona, with its relatively lax conceal carry laws, apparently not one of the bystanders was armed. That was probably because this was a meeting for liberal Democrats who think like Bob Herbert, but it’s difficult to believe that the body could would have been as high had someone in the crowd been armed.

I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Gabrielle Giffords story is big for the time being, but so were Columbine and Oklahoma City.

Both related only in that they were big stories.

And so was the anti-white killing spree of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo that took 10 lives in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., in October 2002. But no amount of killing has prompted any real remedial action.

True. A liberal’s disdain for harsh prison sentences never dies.

For whatever reasons, neither the public nor the politicians seem to really care how many Americans are murdered — unless it’s in a terror attack by foreigners.

Is this an argument that we should care less when we are attacked by foreigners? And they wonder why the American people still don’t trust them to keep the country safe.

The two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it.

Really? I assume that you can back that up. I contend that the two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are grief and anger. Both are productive.

The horror prompted by the attack in Tucson on Saturday will pass. The outrage will fade. The murders will continue.

Thanks a lot, Nostradamus. Really? Murders will continue? And here I was hoping that we were ushering in the Minority Report dystopia of “thought crimes.”

Gabrielle Giffords and the others killed and injured in this shooting are tragic figures. Our condolences to their friends and families are heartfelt and sincere. But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to cede our God-given liberties to sniveling cretins shouting “it’s society’s fault.”

We have guns for security, for sport, and for our livelihoods. We have guns. That is non-negotiable.