By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Apr 18, 2013 at 11:41 AM ET
Check out below the meme posted on Senator Mitch McConnell’s Facebook page, and the comments made by the Senator’s team and others. Then let us know what you think:
SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.
On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.
Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.
I watch TV and read the papers like everyone else. We know what we’re going to hear: vague platitudes like “tough vote” and “complicated issue.” I was elected six times to represent southern Arizona, in the State Legislature and then in Congress. I know what a complicated issue is; I know what it feels like to take a tough vote. This was neither. These senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association, which in the last election cycle spent around $25 million on contributions, lobbying and outside spending.
Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.
I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.
People have told me that I’m courageous, but I have seen greater courage. Gabe Zimmerman, my friend and staff member in whose honor we dedicated a room in the United States Capitol this week, saw me shot in the head and saw the shooter turn his gunfire on others. Gabe ran toward me as I lay bleeding. Toward gunfire. And then the gunman shot him, and then Gabe died. His body lay on the pavement in front of the Safeway for hours.
I have thought a lot about why Gabe ran toward me when he could have run away. Service was part of his life, but it was also his job. The senators who voted against background checks for online and gun-show sales, and those who voted against checks to screen out would-be gun buyers with mental illness, failed to do their job.
They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.
They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.
This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.
Mark my words: if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s. To do nothing while others are in danger is not the American way.
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Apr 17, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
What would you think if you were at a dinner party and discovered you were seated next to this woman?
I would get very nervous and try furtively to move the name cards so I could sit next to someone who looked more like Richard Branson–who would allow me to enjoy whatever is being served for dinner and be able to digest it without sweating bullets about which fork I am using and trying to think of the name “Endive” to describe my salad.
Manners are very important. No doubt about it. It’s the oil that lets us navigate human relations smoothly.
But as I tried to explain to my daughter this past weekend in one of my non sequitur fatherly talk tangents, “If you have to chose which type of person to be—it’s more desirable to be a pleasant and approachable person at a party rather than be the person who merely knows how to send out the perfect party invitation.” Or something like that.
In other words, I wouldn’t mind reading Ms Manner’s book. But wouldn’t want to have to sit and discuss it with her. It just seems like she is always looking for a comma splice in ever conversation. And to point out that something from lunch is still on the corner of your mouth. I would probably tell her (politely) she had bad breath and “something on her nose” (even though she didn’t), just to help me level the playing field with her and relax enough to get through learning, again, which fork goes where. So I can, again, feel like a “manners failure” when I inevitably forget the rules again.
Whoever invented forks should have made a rule we only need one kind. A simple single all-purpose fork. That would have made eating a lot less stressful. And one less thing to feel ashamed about not ever being able to remember.
Manners violation confession. While out of town last week and eating at Asian restaurant, I picked up the dipping sauce for the steamed dumplings and drank the last few drops. I made sure no one was looking and took the chance.
It was worth the risk!! Even if I had a little on the corner of my mouth 30 minutes later.
By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Apr 16, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET
Parents of teenagers are used to over-reactions – if someone doesn’t laugh at their Facebook post, they’re despondent, or a bad hair day leads to “I’m too hideous to go to school today,” or my personal favorite, teens who stare at a completely full refrigerator and moan, “There’s nothing to eat!” This could be a valuable skill in politics – in fact, I used to hypothesize that moms of toddlers could solve even the toughest diplomatic crises (“Israel and Palestinian settlers, if you can’t agree on how to play nicely with the occupied territories, I’ll put you both in time out!”) But these days, I think the additional skills gained by dealing with teenagers could help even more.
Because our political system has become so virulently partisan, even the slightest policy proposal creates shock and horror – both sides are guilty of over-reaction on occasion, but lately the most flagrant example is this week’s Senate vote on background checks for guns. From the way the NRA and many politicians are reacting, you’d think Senators Manchin & Toomey had proposed banning assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, and any ammunition and were considering banning bows & arrows and fishing poles. Strengthening existing background checks and closing a couple of loopholes is a really mild step, and from all the times Wayne LaPierre has ranted about ‘bad guys with guns,’ it’s hard to understand why he is so opposed to making it slightly harder for a bad guy to get a gun. The whole thing smacks of teenage over-reaction – “Today, background checks, tomorrow, they’ll have to pry my gun out of my cold dead body” is logically identical to “if Jason asks Kendra to prom instead of me, I’ll never have a social life and I’ll die alone.”
We already regulate weapons – no one is screaming about the slippery slope caused by the fact that you can’t own a nuclear missile just in case the coyotes out back get feisty. And we already regulate a TON of products and services that haven’t sent us on a never-ending decline into fascism – so far the government isn’t coming after our cars just because they’re registered, and while food vendors do need licenses and health inspections, it hasn’t led to goose-stepping officers shutting down little Susie’s lemonade stand. So get a grip, gun lobby – and to help you stop acting like hysterical teen girls who couldn’t get Justin Bieber tickets, here’s a musical reminder of all the things that have survived being regulated . . .
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Apr 16, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Mr. Manners (My first advice column).
I think we need a Mr. Manners.
Miss Manners, in my opinion, talks too much and interrupts people in her mind before they can interject something. She doesn’t actually interrupt them, of course. But you can tell she wants to.
Which to me is disrespectful. Especially when you are already being lectured by someone about manners.
In fact, I think lecturing people about manners is rude. But that’s a different subject altogether.
Which leads to today’s question.
“Is it possible to be too polite sometimes?”
Yes! It is. A good example of this is Jimi Hendrix and the song “Purple Haze.” Jimi, of course, was a very well-behaved young man who liked to play the guitar and even wrote some songs. In one song, Purple Haze, he opts for the more informal “Excuse me, while I kiss the sky” over the more formal “Pardon me, while I kiss the sky.”
Had Jimi gone with the latter approach (which was preferred at the time in Great Britain), it would have been a musical disaster.
So never use more formal etiquette when it would cause a musical disaster.
Jimi Hendrix was respectful without seeming disingenuously polite –and was still musically appropriate.
I think that’s the key.
That’s the end of today’s Mr. Manner’s column. Which may not make much sense but compared to Miss Manners, rocks.
And “rocks” is preferable to the more for formal “is preferable.”
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 16, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Rand Paul’s speech at Howard University yielded about what would have been expected. The media focused on the crowd’s tepid reactions. Various liberal pundits dwelled on Paul’s awkward moments: the senator unwisely choosing a “did you know” riff that assumed his audience’s ignorance about certain historical points of reference, while he blanked on the name of Edward Brooke, a Republican who happened to be the only black man in the 20th Century who won a Senate election; and Paul’s tortured effort to contextualize his criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
If Paul was simply showing up as a token of “courage”, the kind of symbolism consultants push on candidates, he deserved the dismissive results he received. After all, at the root of such a strategy is not really bravery, but a cold willingness to use the kids who attended as props whose indifference lets him demonstrate resilience.
Assuming that Paul had a nobler goal, that of actually winning converts among Republicans’ single hardest to crack demographic, African Americans under 29, I would still call it a missed chance, from his perspective as well as theirs, and a reminder of why the gap between blacks and the political right is such a chasm.
First, there was Paul’s fixation on historical alignments that predate his audience’s grandparents. The men and women who heard Paul could have used a primer not on 19th century history or even pre-Voting Rights Act Dixiecrats, but on the GOP’s contemporary pattern of electing blacks, Latinos, and East Asian Indians to governorships or Senate seats. It would have been worthwhile to tell the many southern born black kids at Howard that it is Republicans who put a black man in Strom Thurmond’s old seat.
Paul devoted a lot of time to the dirty hands another generation of Democrats brought to the debate over race. But it would have been much more relevant for Paul to push his audience on why poverty and inadequately funded black school districts stayed so persistent during the decades of Democratic legislative rule in the South, a run that in the states many of Howard’s students return home to every summer, just ended in the last six years.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: Rand Paul’s Wasted Day at Howard
In the morning’s Daily Beast, The RP reports on how Democratic failure to frame the narrative on the recordings of a Mitch McConnell campaign staff meeting is consistent with the historical pattern that has seen Democratic incompetence greasing the path for McConnell’s 5 U.S. Senate victories:
Here’s an excerpt:
When Mitch McConnell, perhaps America’s most powerful Republican Senator, was caught on tape with senior aides lampooning then-potential opponent Ashley Judd’s courageous public admission of her past struggle with depression, you’d expect Kentucky Democrats to respond briskly to this vicious smear, right?
Wrong. Instead most Democrats – the state’s party chair and one state senatorhave been rare exceptions – have piled onto the GOP-driven, media-fueled bandwagon that’s instead been focused singularly on decrying the alleged behavior of two independently-acting twenty-somethings who may or may not have been involved in recording the meeting.
Sadly, the circular firing squad Democrats have again assembled comes as no surprise to observers of the state, who have watched for decades as McConnell’s national rise has been aided by his utterly inept opposition.
Students of modern campaign tactics remember Mitch McConnell’s first U.S. Senate race, in 1984, as a early and landmark triumph of negative attack-ad politics: The Roger Ailes-produced “Hound Dog” ad – which featured bloodhounds desperately seeking the “missing” incumbent Senator Walter “Dee” Huddleston – played a critical role in McConnell’s longshot victory. But the jar might never been opened had the lid not been loosened first by the primary challenge of incumbent Governor John Y. Brown, Jr. Brown ultimately abandoned his bid, but according to Al Cross, the dean of the state’s political journalists, Brown’s very entry revealed for the first time that the popular Huddleston was “vulnerable to defeat,” providing real legitimacy to a GOP challenge.
When McConnell sought his first re-election six years later, the internal Democratic warfare was even more perverse, and devastating. Party activists and insiders had coalesced around the candidacy of former Louisville Mayor Harvey Sloane, a well-known statewide figure with access to substantial funding. However, as Cross remembers, the then-incumbent Governor Wallace Wilkinson was steamed at Sloane for failing to support his gubernatorial ambitions – Wilkinson, after all, had served as Sloane’s state finance chair four years prior. So Wilkinson sabotaged his former ally first by recruiting a primary opponent who weakened Sloane and depleted his resources, and then by refusing to provide support in the general election. The governor’s personal pettiness may have proved the difference-maker in a race where McConnell secured just 52% of the vote.
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Apr 11, 2013 at 1:15 PM ET
Yesterday, I wrote this column for The Huffington Post, applauding Kentucky’s Lt. Governor Jerry Abramson and Auditor Adam Edelen for their brave announcements this week in support of marriage equality. Here’s an excerpt:
Edelen & Abramson
As I proudly watched public sentiment dramatically shift on the subject over the past few years, I still didn’t expect any active statewide politicians in my old (conservative) Kentucky home to join me. After all, a recently released 2012 poll showed that support for marriage equality among Kentucky voters dramatically trailed the national average — at an embarrassing 33% approval clip.
Worse, in the recently-concluded session of the Kentucky General Assembly, a vast majority of Democratic and Republican legislators joined together to override Governor Steve Beshear’s brave veto of legislation — posed misleadingly as a “religious freedom bill” — that could undermine ordinances in Lexington and Louisville that protect the LGBT community from job and housing discrimination. If politicians couldn’t stand for simple fairness, how could they be brave enough to support marriage equality?…
But then the unexpected happened. First Lt. Governor Jerry Abramson, the former uber-popular “Mayor-for-Life” of Louisville announced his support:
“I don’t believe government should judge which adults can and which cannot make a loving, life-long commitment to each other. That’s why both Madeline and I support marriage equality for all adults.”
And then, within a few hours, Auditor Adam Edelen — who at 38 is one of the Democrats’ bright young stars — declared his support, arguing:
“I believe equal protection of the law and equality of opportunity are central to the American experiment and they ought to apply to every American.”
Well, it turns out that the 33% statewide support for marriage equality might be a bit generous. Publicy Policy Polling (PPP), a Democratic-leaning consulting firm surveyed the statethis week and reported today the following news:
Support for gay marriage is on the rise nationally but it’s going to be a long time before Kentucky voters get behind it. Only 27% of voters in the state think it should be legal, compared to 65% who think it should be illegal. Even among Democrats there’s still 37/54 opposition. 52% of Kentuckians do though support at least civil unions for same sex couples compared to only 44% who believe those relationships should receive no legal recognition at all. That divide- opposition to marriage, support for civil unions- is what we find throughout most of the south.
So this clearly demonstrates that Abramson and Edelen — two popular politicians taking a serious look at the 2015 gubernatorial race — have taken a big political risk to do what they thought was right.
Accordingly, if you too support marriage equality, I urge you to thank Jerry Abramson and Adam Edelen for their statements. We are always bad-mouthing politicians that disappoint us. So, why not thank true leaders when they make a selfless, brave announcement? And if they accrue some political mileage out of their actions, it will encourage others to follow their lead and join the marriage equality bandwagon.
Click here to sign a petition thanking Kentucky Lt. Governor Jerry Abramson, and click here to sign a petition thanking Kentucky Auditor Adam Edelen.
By Artur Davis, on Thu Apr 11, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
It would not surprise me if there were six votes on the Supreme Court for getting and keeping the federal government out of the business of recognizing marriages. That would mean that when federal benefits and tax treatment turn on what is or isn’t a valid domestic union, that Washington has to defer to the state where a couple resides, and that state’s definition of what constitutes matrimony. It would also mean that the Court refused to put the evolving conversation over same sex marriage beyond the reach of actual voters and state legislatures.
That mixed bag, repealing the Defense of Marriage Act but declining to recognize that same sex marriages are a fundamental national right, would be roughly consistent with how the Roberts Court has navigated politically charged battles: upholding the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate under Congress’ taxing power instead of the more sweeping commerce clause; wiping out the most punitive provisions of Arizona’s immigration law but rebuking the Obama Administration for trying to thwart local law enforcement from sorting out whether criminal suspects even have a legal right to be in the country. To be sure, the high court can look suspiciously like politicians searching for a compromise, but their approach has virtues conservatives relish: appropriate skepticism about Washington’s tendencies to grow by swallowing major chunks of state authority, and deference to a public that still prefers the ballot box and the legislative chamber as the deciding grounds for disputes.
The more unpredictable question is how the left, which has been so ascendant on gay marriage, would react to being invited into a state by state contest that, based on the reactions to last week’s arguments, it is hoping to avoid. I will venture two predictions: first, liberals have probably passed through the easiest part of the fight. To date, their strategy has been one of stigmatizing opposition to gay marriage, and guaranteeing a social and professional price in establishment circles to any contrary point of view. It is a course that has built a narrative in the media and run up a string of victories in heavily Democratic states where social conservatives are suspect. National Republicans, who depend on that same media for oxygen and who have to raise cash in New York, Chicago, and Washington boardrooms as much as Democrats do, have been thrown on the defensive.
Read the rest of… Artur Davis: The Next Round on Gay Marriage
