Author Archives: cassandra_m

About cassandra_m

"You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas." -Shirley Chisholm

Wednesday Open Thread [1.9.13]

When can you say an idea is gaining momentum? The WSJ had an essay on Saturday calling the War on Drugs a Failure. To be sure, this essay did not appear on the famously wingnutty WSJ Opinion page, but still. I’m intrigued by these articles that point out the high cost of some of our worst social decisions — it is looking like we are trying to give ourselves permission to get smarter and stop throwing so much money down the drain:

One moderate alternative to the war on drugs is to follow Portugal’s lead and decriminalize all drug use while maintaining the illegality of drug trafficking. Decriminalizing drugs implies that persons cannot be criminally punished when they are found to be in possession of small quantities of drugs that could be used for their own consumption. Decriminalization would reduce the bloated U.S. prison population since drug users could no longer be sent to jail. Decriminalization would make it easier for drug addicts to openly seek help from clinics and self-help groups, and it would make companies more likely to develop products and methods that address addiction.

Some evidence is available on the effects of Portugal’s decriminalization of drugs, which began in 2001. A study published in 2010 in the British Journal of Criminology found that in Portugal since decriminalization, imprisonment on drug-related charges has gone down; drug use among young persons appears to have increased only modestly, if at all; visits to clinics that help with drug addictions and diseases from drug use have increased; and opiate-related deaths have fallen.

Interesting idea. It will be hard to get law enforcement types, their suppliers and enablers to let go of this river of money, though.

Then on New Year’s Day, the NYT discussed how states are pulling back from using the death penalty.

A distinguished committee of scholars convened by the National Research Council found that there is no useful evidence to determine if the death penalty deters serious crimes. Many first-rate scholars have tried to prove the theory of deterrence, but that research “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” the committee said.

A host of other respected experts have also concluded that life imprisonment is a far more practical form of retribution, because the death penalty process is too expensive, too time-consuming and unfairly applied.

The punishment is supposed to be reserved for the very worst criminals, but dozens of studies in state after state have shown that the process for deciding who should be sent to death row is arbitrary and discriminatory.

Plus death penalty cases cost taxpayers alot of money. Money that most states just don’t have. The good folks at the Delaware Repeal Project are working on getting the First State to abolish the death penalty. Join them (and like them on Facebook) to help them with this goal this year.

And for your Point and Laugh opportunity of the day — the Birthers are BACK and they want to impeach Chief Justice Roberts if he swears in President Obama. Who — if you need reminding — do not think that the President is a natural born citizen of this United States of America. Just when you think these people cannot be any more stupid, they reach a new height of stupidity and silliness.

What interests you today?

New Wilmington City Administration Starts Today

Dennis Williams is being sworn in this morning as the new Mayor of Wilmington. As the NJ notes this morning, Williams’ is behind the curve in filling out leadership positions (he started in August) and a handful of folks I know working for the city don’t know what jobs they are expected to do.

In the meantime, Williams knows enough about how he wants to expand the Executive Office to have proposed increasing the cost of this office by $470,000. This expansion comes as the city is facing its own fiscal cliff — or at least a million dollar for the coming fiscal year. According to the NJ:

Even with a projected 15 percent tax hike, Wilmington is still facing an anticipated deficit close to $1 million in the next fiscal year, Sears said. The deficit is projected to grow the three years after that, from $3 million in 2015 to $5.5 million in 2016 to $8.1 million in 2017, Sears said.

This 15% tax hike was floated by Bill Montgomery and seems to be an item of faith within the city. Williams committed to not raising taxes while on the campaign trail. So how do you ask for an almost half million dollar operating budget increase when facing this kind of deficit and you aren’t planning on raising taxes? I don’t know, and I wouldn’t count on the City Council (other than Bud Freel) to put this thing through the wringer and do what is best for taxpayers. I’m betting that the City Council will just rollover on this increase (except for Bud Freel) and work to figure out how taxpayers can be on the hook for an expansion of a city government that is pretty big in the first place.

It is important to pay for the government that we want. It is also important to *deliver* the government that we want and it is pretty plain to me that there isn’t much clamoring for adding more executive staff or paying executive staff more money in the city — certainly not without some demonstrated serious improvement in the current operation. And when you are turning over staff, the odds are you will pay more in salary to new hires. But this increase also includes new staff — a thing that I’d think would be alot smarter to do once we are all clear on what we can actually afford in terms of new staff.

And while I’m at it — it is interesting to me that both Wilmington and the State of Delaware finds cause and rationale to increase the salaries of its executive corps. It is almost as though collective bargaining works if the Chief Executive goes to bat for you, but heaven help your salary and collective bargaining position if you aren’t in that Executive’s inner circle.

Williams gives his inaugural speech at tonight’s City Council swearing in. The festivities are at The Grand and start at 6:30 (the reception) and the swearing in begins at 8PM. I think that WDEL usually broadcasts the swearing in and inauguration speeches if you don’t want to go to The Grand.

Jake Tapper Signing Books in Wilmington on 14 January

On Monday (next Monday!), January 14th, Jake Tapper (from ABC News, now at CNN)) will be in Wilmington signing books and participating in an event to discuss the topic of this book with 4 of the participants. Tapper has a recent book, called The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor. This book tells the story of an attack on an American outpost in Afghanistan — Compound Outpost Keating — where 53 American soldiers were attacked by 400 Taliban fighters. There will be two events on the evening of the 14th:

First, the Ninth St. Bookshop will host a book-signing featuring Tapper at their bookshop from 5 until 6. Remember that the bookshop has moved from Ninth St to a glorious new shop at 730 N Market St.

Second, at 6:30 the same evening, the action moves up to The Grand, where Tapper will be joined by 4 of the soldiers from that battle for a moderated discussion until 7:30. Tapper will be signing his book again after this discussion at the Grand until 8:15.

Both events are free to the public (you clearly have to buy a book to get it signed) and seats at the Grand event are free, but first come, first served.

Monday Open Thread [1.7.13]

The Sunday Yack Shows yesterday were full of discussions of Government Shutdown if the GOP doesn’t get what it wants to raise the debt ceiling. From here, it looks like they want the Democrats to propose a bunch of budget cuts that the GOP can run against in 2014. Have I got that wrong? As you think about the stupidity of this demand, you might want to read this piece from The Atlantic, which asks, Are People Being Unfair to the House Republicans? Steve LaTourette is interviewed and asked to defend the 112th GOP caucus.

: Q:The deal [Fiscal Cliff -Ed.] did pass the House in the end, though the majority of Republicans, including Majority Leader Eric Cantor, didn’t support it. But then Boehner decided not to hold a vote on the bill to fund relief money for victims of Hurricane Sandy. What happened there?

LaTourette: The Sandy thing could have been handled better. But Boehner had expended so much political capital on the tax bill, and now these same 20 to 60 people were grousing that [the aid money] was unpaid for. You look at the roll call on the tax bill — Boehner votes yes, and every other [member of the GOP leadership] except Cathy McMorris Rodgers voted no.

During the roll call on the tax bill, I walked into the cloakroom, and Boehner was sitting there. I said, ‘This Sandy thing is really important. We’ve got to do something.’ He said, ‘Not tonight.’ I asked if we were going to do it tomorrow, and he said no. He said, ‘After this mess, I just can’t do it tonight.’

Q: I don’t understand. Was he just exhausted? Was he afraid the votes wouldn’t be there?

LaTourette: He had expended a lot of political capital to get the 85 votes [on the fiscal-cliff deal], and he felt a little betrayed that the other members of the elected leadership walked on him. And the last piece was, as you saw during the Speaker election [Thursday], this sort of insurrection was forming against him. There was a fear that if he put $60 billion, no matter how worthy, of unpaid-for emergency spending on the floor, the insurrection would become bigger than it was.

Q: How about that insurrection — doesn’t that prove that Boehner is a weak leader who can’t control his caucus?

LaTourette: I think it’s ridiculous. They should kick them all out of the Republican conference. The picture in Politico of a sitting Republican member of Congress on the floor with an iPad showing a screen with a whip count to deny the Republicans the speakership of the House is asinine. This is what I’m talking about: These guys are OK when it comes to ideology and dogma, but they don’t have a clue how to participate in the legislative process.

I don’t know what their objective is. If it was to deny the speakership to Boehner and hand it to Mrs. Pelosi, I don’t know how their cause would have been furthered. If it’s to force the vote to a second ballot to make some demands, well, who the hell do these people think they are? Twelve out of 233, and they’re making demands? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

Translation — even the GOP has issues keeping their caucus on the straight and narrow.

Speaking of caucuses that don’t always go where you want them to — NPR did a story on Saturday discussing President Obama’s On-Again, Off-Again relationship with progressives. A key takeaway to internalize right now:

MOLLY BALL: It’s truer now than it ever was that the math just hasn’t really changed in Washington. The Congress is still constructed the way the Congress was constructed then. Democrats made incremental gains in the Senate and in the House, but they didn’t change the basic math. And that means that these policy fights ahead are going to run up against exactly what they’ve run up against the last four years. Even if Obama is feeling newly liberated by his re-election, he’s going to have to turn a lot of votes to make any of this possible.

Quite right.

Looks like John Brennan (who had to recuse himself in 2008 because of the “enhanced interrogation” business he was involved with) looks to be nominated as CIA Director. And Chuck Hagel also looks like he will be nominated as Secretary of Defense. Hagel is being targeted by the GOP who seem to find Hagel insufficiently occupied with the security of Israel. I’m not crazy about the Hagel choice (we really do have good Dem choices now), but delighted that he is agitating Congressional Republicans and maybe even AIPAC. Perhaps someone will remind the world that the DOD’s first, second and third order of business is the defense of this nation, not Israel.

So what interests you today?

Sunday Open Thread [1.6.13]

Who knew there would be snow and ice this AM? The traffic reports were full of issues, so I stayed home instead of going to Philly today. This is what I’ve been reading:

Bruce Bartlett is not optimistic that the deficit will be fixed.

Historically, what has moved Congress to enact big deficit-reduction packages was the prospect of quick improvement in terms of inflation, growth and interest rates. Given that deficit reduction today is very unlikely to improve any of these in the near term, deficit hawks lack any real payoff from a grand bargain.

And it is why the GOP is waiting for Democrats to propose the tough stuff, while stupidly threatening not to pay the bills that Congress racked up.

How the party of so-called fiscal responsibility is talking itself into not raising the debt limit.

The goal is to present to both the public, and perhaps rank and file Republicans who don’t fully understand the nature of the debt limit threat, that the consequences would be fairly modest — to foster a climate in which raising the debt limit without legislative concessions from Democrats will be impossible.

But for two years now, experts — from academia to the Treasury Department to the Congressional Budget Office — have warned in plain terms that the actual consequences would be much worse: a recessionary drop in spending at best and a calamitous debt default at worse.

And we know how this goes, right? The media will get hooked into the drama and will never ask a single one of them why it is that they don’t just send their cuts/budget to the White House. It’s like everyone forgets that spending bills originate in the House just so that they can have their high stakes drama.

ProPublica reports on 5 of the dark money groups of the last campaign and how they reneged on their IRS-application pledges to stay out of politics. Surprise. The question that is left is why — exactly — the IRS still shows these groups’ applications as pending when they are CLEARLY in violation of the commitments of their applications.

This week marks the end of the Jim Baker era of Wilmington politics and Andrew Staub at the News Journal writes a fine assessment of Mayor Baker’s legacy in the city.

Shell’s botched attempt to move an oil rig from Alaska to Seattle was apparently incentivized by the idea of taking advantage of a tax loophole that would have saved them $7M in Alaska state taxes. FAIL.

What interests you today?

Saturday Open Thread [1.5.13]

If you are still recovering from all of the revelry and working on getting back to it on Monday, maybe you’ll have some time to sit down with a cup of hot something and read some of these longish pieces from recent publications.

Dave Weigel discusses the Failure of Peterson-ism. This is the Pete Peterson (plus his wealthy pals) project to eliminate Social Security and Medicare and enforce some austerity on the rest of us:

But do what, exactly? Here’s the current problem with Peterson-ism: As scary as it seems to liberals, as clear as it may be that Peterson wants to build momentum for entitlement cuts, the actual work of these groups has moved us no closer to those said cuts.
And it’s had quite some time to try. The modern era of anti-deficit pressure campaigns began in 1992. Democrats, at that time, were the party that panicked over budget deficits, warning voters that these shortfalls would bankrupt the entitlements they loved. Ross Perot’s campaign for president was predicated on “shared sacrifice” to cut the then-$4 trillion debt. When Paul Tsongas quit the Democratic primary, he joined Peterson to found the deficit-hawkish Concord Coalition, up and running when Bill Clinton won the presidency.

Last month’s Atlantic provided some detailed reporting on The Insourcing Boom. Starting with the revival of manufacturing at GE’s Louisville Appliance Park, this looks at the trend of American manufacturers bringing their manufacturing back to the US.

In the midst of this revival, Immelt made a startling assertion. Writing in Harvard Business Review in March, he declared that outsourcing is “quickly becoming mostly outdated as a business model for GE Appliances.” Just four years after he tried to sell Appliance Park, believing it to be a relic of an era GE had transcended, he’s spending some $800 million to bring the place back to life. “I don’t do that because I run a charity,” he said at a public event in September. “I do that because I think we can do it here and make more money.”

Immelt hasn’t just changed course; he’s pirouetted.

What has happened? Just five years ago, not to mention 10 or 20 years ago, the unchallenged logic of the global economy was that you couldn’t manufacture much besides a fast-food hamburger in the United States. Now the CEO of America’s leading industrial manufacturing company says it’s not Appliance Park that’s obsolete—it’s offshoring that is.

And if you dig into this, it is looking as though bringing the manufacturing of some of its appliances back to the US, GE is not only making some of them *cheaper* than they did in China, but they are able to sell them to consumers for less money. American skills also factor into this. No where can we see paying more taxes as part of this calculation, but hey. There’s plenty of stuff that will likely never be made here again, but bringing back the building of the more technologically advanced stuff makes sense, because there is still a great deal of added value in American workers.

An amazing mea culpa from the IMF’s chief economist on austerity — I don’t think that this is getting anywhere near enough press. Seriously.

Consider it a mea culpa submerged in a deep pool of calculus and regression analysis: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist today acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth.

This is the demand problem all over again. Withdraw the demand created by government spending, and — if private spending doesn’t race in to fill the gap — you have an economy that will contract.

And this is dead-bang right:

If the federal government wants to get you, your basement arsenal will not be much protection.
We spend about as much on our military as the rest of the world put together. If you get to thinking another American Revolution is in order, it’s a guarantee you’ll be outgunned.
This would appear obvious. It’s apparently not. The nation’s debate on guns is forced to accommodate people who believe they are poised to stand up to an Obama-led reign of tyranny, egged on by interest groups claiming to stand for freedom but who are mostly interested in selling more guns.

What interests you today?

Bipartisan Reading

Ross Douthat’s column in the NYT last Saturday recommends that we spend some time in 2013 challenging our political selves by regularly reading from at least one source that is not in your partisan political comfort zone. He reasons that since this is not a national election year, we’ll be abit safer reading “across the aisle” (apparently the hyper partisanship dies down in off election years) and end up challenging what we think we know or at least understanding better our political opposites.

This means that for a blessed 365 days you can be a well-informed and responsible American citizen without reading every single article on Politico, without hitting refresh every 30 seconds on your polling-average site of choice, without channel-hopping between Chris Matthews’s hyperventilating and Dick Morris’s promises of an inevitable Republican landslide.

Of course, being a well-informed and responsible American citizen is probably best achieved without making Politico a staple of your reading diet. And I’m not crazy about the equivalency between Chris Matthews and Dick Morris. But Douthat has some guidelines for this venture:

First, consider taking out a subscription to a magazine whose politics you don’t share. […]
Second, expand your reading geographically as well as ideologically. […]
Finally, make a special effort to read outside existing partisan categories entirely.

Douthat expands some on each of these guidelines, so it is worth reading the entire column. This thing reads as a Conservative Instructs His Liberal Readers — you’ll note that the vast majority of recommendations are right-leaning, and even he pushes the notion that somehow Reason, The American Conservative, Public Discourse are “the non-Republican right”. Right.

Still, I’m interested in this idea. Mostly, I think I get what is going on in the current GOP (and the “non-Republican right”) because of their great message discipline and ability to get their issues laundered into the MSM. So if I am reading dKos, Booman, Salon, and some specialist blogs, I think I get a good overview of not only what they are saying but a good critique of it. Douthat would tell me that this is not a genuine encounter with the ideas, however. Fair enough, but I can only dedicate but so much time of my day to reading. And I prefer to read material that works harder at informing me than in insulting my intelligence (why I don’t read Politico), which takes alot of the GOP-leaning material quite off of the table for me. If you start with denying climate change or poo-poohing evolution or the Laffer Curve, then I’m done. Because I know the difference between a differing POV vs the denial of facts in order to sustain a POV.

But everyone seems to think that there are smart GOP writers and thinkers out there, so I thought that DL readers might want to help produce a list of those (and/or their publications) worth seeking out to read this year. So who do you think are worthwhile writers or thinkers on the right?

Sunday Open Thread [12.30.12]

Looks like we need one of these! We’re still in light blogging mode as we all still busy celebrating holidays and friends and family. Personally, this is my favorite time of the year. How are your holidays going?

President Obama was on Face the Nation this AM, talking with lazy David Gregory about the fiscal cliff, how Republicans can’t figure out how to say yes to anything, AND that this is not a “both sides do it” issue (repubs are clearly the issue), Bengahzi, Chained CPI, pours water on the armed guards in schools stupidity, and the need to do immigration reform now (this is about 28 mins long):

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

WTF is wrong with people? A woman in NY is arrested and charged for shoving a man in front of a subway train. Why? Because she thought he was Muslim.

Joe Biden is Back for a Second Run at Gun Limits Good:

Mr. Biden was at the White House when the Newtown massacre occurred. With the shootings coming just days before the 40th anniversary of the car accident that killed his first wife and baby daughter, an aide said, “all he could think about was those parents getting the same devastating phone call” that he once did.

After Mr. Obama assigned him to develop a response, Mr. Biden followed his 1990s script, inviting law enforcement leaders to the White House to harness their ideas and public credibility. “I’ve been in Washington over 20 years, and this was unique,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “There is a sense of importance and urgency to this issue.”

Ms. Feinstein plans to reintroduce the assault weapons bill with a more inclusive definition, banning even those with just “one or more military characteristics.” It identifies 120 guns by name whose manufacture and sale would be banned, and it would outlaw certain modifications used to bypass the last law.

What interests you today?

Sunday Open Thread [12.23.12]

Anyone in the mood for an Open Thread? Most of us are deep into Christmas preparations and celebrations, but if you are touching base with us here, let us know what interests you this weekend. Since it is the Holiday Season here, you can expect posting to be light by the Editors here who are scattered to the four corners of the earth this week. Here are a couple of things that caught my eye while I’m waiting for the cocktail hour:

Wayne LaPierre was on MTP today, where by multiple accounts, David Gregory roused himself to grill LaPierre fairly rigorously. (I didn’t see it, did you?) LaPierre was well into his Up Is Down rhetoric this morning if this clip is representative:

And it didn’t help that the man was literally frothing at the mouth. LaPierre has been getting quite the pushback on his The Cure for Guns Is More Guns bullshit. But be on the lookout for when the media is tired of not being able to budge LaPierre and this becomes the newly laundered wingnut solution. Even the conservative New York Post thought LaPierre was nuts:

Oh, and how about this for responsible gun stewardship by a leader of the NRA — NRA Leader’s Son Fired at Another Motorist During a Road Rage Incident. Clearly this motorist would not have had a problem if he had an armed guard riding shotgun. Oops!

Alex Pareene over at Salon has been working on his 2012 Political Hack List and aguess who is Number 1? Politico!

When you see a joint Allen-VandeHei byline, you can safely expect the worst. When fellow Politico big shots John Harris and Jonathan Martin write a piece, they report on politics. When Allen and VandeHei write, they craft narrative. If the narrative bears no little relation to reality, or is simply self-serving spin from a professional political operative, no matter: Now the narrative is “out there,” because Politico is proud of its ability to create its own buzz and then report on that buzz.

Allen and VandeHei’s 2012 campaign was a wild roller-coaster ride of shifting narratives, starring campaign heroes and goats who occasionally switched from one role to the other in the space of a few weeks.

Just go read the whole thing — it is the PERFECT summary of everything that is wrong with that kind of reporting. PERFECT. More of this year’s Hack List can be found here, and includes the WaPo, Newsweek, The Drudge Report, HuffPo, MSNBC and CNN among others.

Let’s close out with one more responsible gun owner: Retired police officer shoots and kills his son, mistaking him for a burglar.

And I almost forgot! Today is Festivus, and we always have alot of problems with you people. So feel free to use this Open Thread to air your grievances, but save your feats of strength for the head of your own households.

Mayor Bloomberg Wants the Violence to Stop

NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg is mad as hell and he wants Congress and the President to work to stop the gun carnage.  He’s been at this for awhile, even creating a SuperPAC this past election that (I think) had a more winning track record than the NRA’s SuperPAC did.  He took to the airwaves today with a room full of victims of gun violence to call for very specific actions from Congress and the President.  It is worth every minute to watch this (approx. 6 minutes):

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This launches an initiative called Demand a Plan, designed to mobilize people who want to do something to push our legislators towards some actions that might help to reduce the number of gun deaths. He’s gotten survivors and families to tell their stories and provides suggestions of actions that citizens can take. But the three actions he suggests Congress and the President take are good starts:

  • President Obama should use his Executive Authority to appoint and seat an new ATF Director;
  • Congress should pass the Fix Gun Checks Act — which would require background checks on ALL sales of guns; and
  • Ban assault-type weapons and high-capacity magazines, and make gun trafficking a felony.

Bloomberg has been trying to change the conversation around gun violence for awhile now — maybe President Obama should give him an official role in doing just that.

Mental Illness Is A Problem, But It Isn’t The Same As Our Gun Problem

I’ve been reading a great deal about the Sandy Hook shooting and shooter and have been intrigued by the effort by so very many to try to make this incident be about the astonishing inadequacy of our mental health system. If you read carefully, there aren’t any credible diagnoses of Adam Lanza’s mental condition (certainly by no one who could make that diagnosis). All there is are reports that he may have been on the ASD spectrum, reports that seem rooted in a comment by the shooter’s brother and some comments from classmates of Lanza’s. The other thing that is out there is the rationalization — that somehow it is a given that this person was mentally ill because sane people don’t perpetrate this kind of violence. Both of these narratives — without good support — help to shift the conversation away from the the plain fact that it is amazingly easy to acquire the means to quickly disrupt a community with massive acts of violence.

One of the major injustices of American life is the lack of access to adequate mental health care. This woman’s story (I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother) tells the tale all too well. Between an inadequate number of facilities and practitioners, insurance that won’t cover the need, and the challenges of long term treatment of some issues, we’ve largely made sure that the mentally ill are left to the kinds of strategies that this mother tried to keep it all manageable. You can imagine that this mom and her other kids were largely held hostage to this one kid’s issues and potential to do harm. And yet for all too many, the best management skills of parents is about all there is for treatment of young people. Criminalizing these folks or leaving them to the state isn’t a functional choice — there’s little treatment down that route, just jail cells other containment. And everyone is right — it doesn’t have to be this way.

On the other hand, Lanza’s violent crime may or may not be due to mental illness, but the fact that the tools of unspeakable violence were readily available to him is still the problem that our society continues to enable. Because the ready availability of those tools are available to everyone — not matter your mental health status — and it is for certain that it is not all mentally ill people who are damaging our communities and threatening our safety. In fact, it is the mentally ill who are especially vulnerable to the perpetrators of violent crime. But focusing on mental health as the symptom, we get to gloss over the fact that we won’t be eliminating dangerous people — if anything, because a fair number of them are quite sane.


This graph clearly shows how violent a place the United States is. (From the blog’s discussion of this graph: The following figures are from the OECD for deaths due to assault per 100,000 population from 1960 to the present. As before, the most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.) This time series documents deaths by assaults of all kinds, not just guns, but this should break the heart of every citizen. How can this be us? And while these deaths are on a decline, we are still a clear outlier — we are still subject to an entire industry fronted by their political arm hellbent on scaring us in to the false security of guns that will save us from the ever growing hordes. But go back and look at that graph. That isn’t a story of mental illness.

Blow up a Federal building and manufacturers, sellers and buyers are required to live with a new regulatory regime designed to be able to track where these chemicals go and with whom. Try to make meth from OTC cold medications, and buyers of the same OTC cold medications now have to produce photo ID and sign a certification so that law enforcement can spot trends in buying habits. Hijacked planes created the metal detector scans and baggage inspections designed to reduce the opportunity to bring coercive weapons on board. Planes flown into buildings lock down airports and passengers in imperfect and sometimes useless ways that are supposed to prevent these machines from being weapons of mass destruction.

Yet massacre after massacre, death after death, our response is the same. Nothing. Or I should say, the usual handwringing, the usual political suspects trying to make it difficult to discuss the danger that guns (or certain ones of them) present to all of us, and the idiotic “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Planes don’t kill people, people flying planes kill people. Right? The people are the common denominator here and when people fly planes into buildings, we don’t mind figuring out how to make that project alot harder in the future, and at considerable inconvenience to the rest of us. Weapons like the Bushmaster .223 aren’t for hunting or personal protection and yet their efficiency at slaughtering people is unmistakable. (This is the same gun that the Beltway sniper used too) It only took the people in Britain one school slaughter to ban most handguns. And while Great Britain does still experience deaths via firearms, it does so at a rate 30 times less than ours (per capita).

I want more of us to have Mayor Bloomberg’s attitude:

But Bloomberg has gone further than anybody, both in pointing out what should be the obvious, and in calling on President Obama to step up to the challenge. “It only happens in America,” he said today on “Meet the Press.” “And it happens again and again. There was another shooting yesterday. Three people killed I think in a hospital. We kill people in schools. We kill them in hospitals. We kill them in religious organizations. We kill them when they’re young. We kill them when they’re old. And we’ve just got to stop this.”

And to make sure you tell your government representative everywhere that you want it to stop too — and that these representatives need to commit to some leadership on this thing.