Tuesday Open Thread [11.18.14]

Tuesday Open Thread [11.18.14]

David Roberts, a writer for Grist, has succinctly encapsulates what has been and is wrong with our politics over the last thirty years. And to be clear, it is something that is wrong with our current brand of post-modern conservatives, and not something that is wrong with anyone else. You must read them all....
From the Department of Obvious Findings: More Guns = More Crime

From the Department of Obvious Findings: More Guns = More Crime

Contrary to gun-nut dogma, "right-to-carry" laws don't reduce crime. They increase it.
"The totality of the evidence based on educated judgments about the best statistical models suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with substantially higher rates" of aggravated assault, robbery, rape and murder, Donohue said in an interview with the Stanford Report. The evidence suggests that right-to-carry laws are associated with an 8 percent increase in the incidence of aggravated assault, according to Donohue. He says this number is likely a floor, and that some statistical methods show an increase of 33 percent in aggravated assaults involving a firearm after the passage of right-to-carry laws.
Makes sense. Guns make the weak feel strong.
Democrats: Look What Two Parties By And For The Rich Got Us.

Democrats: Look What Two Parties By And For The Rich Got Us.

Hey DNC and State Party Chairs: Look at our reality. We've got the Presidency for two more years; the Repugnant party has both houses and the Supreme Court. What's more, they've got 68 out of 98 partisan state legislatures and 31 governorships. We, the party "of the people" came up just a bit short but your reaction seems just a bit muted given these dire circumstances.
Jobs For Delaware Graduates = Jobs For Political Hacks

Jobs For Delaware Graduates = Jobs For Political Hacks

Does anybody here remember the inception of Jobs For Delaware Graduates? I do. Pete duPont created this repository for some of his less-qualified lackeys back in 1978. It was basically modeled after other Federal jobs programs, but with the bar set so low that it could claim success even when said success was dubious at best, and would never have been accepted under federal requirements:
It was designed in 1978 by five working groups in Delaware, drawn from business, educational, workforce, labor union, and community leadership. The purpose of the organization was to address simultaneously with Delaware’s unemployment rate and the dropout rate (?).
So, you're saying to yourself, well, Steve, this is all well and good, but, so far your headline is false advertising. Ladeez & Gentlemen, meet the new President of Jobs For Delaware Graduates...STATE SENATOR NICOLE POORE. major conflict: Didja know that this ostensibly 'private non-profit' gets about $1.4 million annually from the Grant-In-Aid bill? Taxpayer money appropriated by the same General Assembly to which Sen. Poore belongs? And now she's drawing a salary from them. From the same $1.4 million?
“Carper, meanwhile, is a fake.”

“Carper, meanwhile, is a fake.”

Carper's perplexing support for the Keystone Pipeline (because it will "clear the decks" and usher in an era of bipartisan peace and prosperity) is helping people understand what a D-bag Tom Carper is. Bill McKibben writing for Salon is the latest to call our Carper for his self-satisfied and vacuous praise of the climate agreement with China, and his outright assholery for saying that the climate deal with China is so awesome that it will "outweigh" the ecological catastrophe that is the Keystone pipeline. I don't have any great hope that the Democrats will be able to replace Carper, but his astonishingly tone-deaf and horrible representation of Delaware in the Senate is leading me to the belief that a non-Teabag Republican would be an upgrade. A non-Teabag Republican siding with the GOP on this would only be hurting the country. Tom Carper hurts the country by supporting the equivalent of 400 new coal burning power stations. But he is also doing long term and permanent damage to the Democratic Party.