Transpondster
"Don't ever tell anybody anything."
-jds
-
LANSING — Changes to the concealed weapons law passed the state House and Senate late Thursday, allowing trained gun owners to carry their weapons in formerly forbidden places, such as schools, day care centers, stadiums and churches.
A separate bill also requires the Michigan State Police, rather than local law enforcement, to maintain gun-permitting records. Police said it was crucial to have at least one agency hold on to records, citing the I-96 corridor shooter case last month, which was solved in part by going back through gun records. That bill was waiting on concurrence by the Senate early today.
The bill expanding where concealed weapons can be carried now goes to Gov. Snyder for his signature.
This bill was passed by the Republican majority in Michigan’s state Senate. Just yesterday.
People are glad Romney didn’t win, but it’s worth noting that the real difficulty — and the places where the Koch Brothers and other people of extreme wealth are pouring their money — is in more local and statewide races. That’s where the local judges and legislators can do real damage with ridiculous things like relaxed gun laws. But also ‘tort reform’, diminishment of women’s rights, damage to education, violation of worker rights and worker empowerment, discouragement of new energy sources, and lifting of pollution controls. Mayors, state representatives, state senators, governors, and state judges can do a *lot* of damage, even without controlling the US Congress or Presidency. Especially with the justices currently on the Supreme Court.
-
Photo reblogged from NBC News on Tumblr
DeMint will leave Senate to head Heritage Foundation
(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP)
South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, an influential Republican who has helped prod his party rightward, will step down from his seat in January to become the next director of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Let’s hope this is a sign that he believes his whack-o wing of a nutty Party (capital ‘P’) is losing influence. But it’s probably just about the money and better parties (lower-case ‘p’) he’ll enjoy working (and I use that word loosely) at a think tank.
-
Some day, someone will write a riveting psychological portrait of this guy. I’m not criticizing; if he had run, the person in this photo might have won. Just saying it must be a really interesting story.
-
Via Gawker:
In an interview with a local NBC station, [Maine’s Republican State Chairman, Charlie] Webster, said that he suspects there may have been some voter fraud in Maine on Election Day because “there were dozens and dozens of black people who came in and voted.”
“In some parts of rural Maine, there were dozens, dozens of black people who came in and voted on Election Day. Everybody has a right to vote, but nobody in town knows anyone who’s black. How did that happen? I don’t know. We’re going to find out….
I’m not politically correct and maybe I shouldn’t have said these voters were black, but anyone who suggests I have a bias toward any race or group, frankly, that’s sleazy.”
-
Next, and this part I find mind-boggingly absurd, the web address was located at “https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca”. Notice the “s” after http. This denotes it’s a secure connection, something that’s used for e-commerce and web-based email. So far, so good. The problem is that they didn’t auto-forward the regular “http” to “https” and as a result, many people got a blank page and thought the system was down. Setting up forwarding is the simplest thing in the world and only takes seconds, but they failed to do it. This is compounded by the fact that mobile browsers default to “http” when you just start with “www” (as 95% of the world does).
By 2PM, I had completely given up. I finally got ahold of someone at around 1PM and I never heard back. From what I understand, the entire system crashed at around 4PM. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I decided to wait for my wife to get home from work to vote, which meant going very late (around 6:15PM). Here’s the kicker, I never got a call to go out and vote. So, who the hell knows if that end of it was working either. So, the end result was that 30,000 of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. We lost by fairly small margins in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado. If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake.The Unmitigated Disaster Known As Project ORCA
Supposedly, this was the Romney campaign’s secret mobile app that was supposed to take GOTV efforts to the next level. Just to cite one flaw: the ‘welcome packet’ never instructed the poll watchers/vote counters to pick up their ‘poll watcher certificate’, so they were all turned away the morning of the election and had to go to some other location to get it. This, evidently, was due to someone not proofreading the instructions and noticing that ‘Chair’ was listed twice, but ‘Pick up Certificate’ wasn’t listed at all.
And this was written by a Romney volunteer…
-
![(via Claire McCaskill’s Stylish Daughter on What It’s Like to Become an Election Night Meme - Politics - The Atlantic Wire)
This is kind of a great article.
Does [your mom] try to veto stuff?
I have a muumuu that she said she’d pay me to burn/never wear again.
Is this different from that time your mom talked about you on the Senate floor and The Daily Show picked it up? [For everyone else: During a September 2011 hearing on the post office, McCaskill said her mom had kept a box of letters she had written to her in college. “My kids are in college now,” McCaskill said. “I don’t have a box like that. In fact, I had to impose a rule: You cannot get money by text message. I was getting like this gibberish spelling — ‘Need money 2day’ — you know, it is ridiculous.” Jon Stewart’s reaction: “That is the most masterful Jedi knight mother guilting I have— Claire McCaskill just entered the fact that her children don’t write her enough into the congressional record.”]
This is better than that, if only because she basically called us out on being awful children on the Senate floor.
What about when your mom tweets about you?
Oh man, she’s lethal with her iPhone camera. We try to monitor her, but sometimes she goes rogue and tweets pictures of us sleeping on the campaign RV. She tweeted a grainy picture of us waiting in line to vote earlier in the day without us knowing.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md6gy9mdfi1qeyudjo1_250.jpg)
This is kind of a great article.
Does [your mom] try to veto stuff?
I have a muumuu that she said she’d pay me to burn/never wear again.
Is this different from that time your mom talked about you on the Senate floor and The Daily Show picked it up? [For everyone else: During a September 2011 hearing on the post office, McCaskill said her mom had kept a box of letters she had written to her in college. “My kids are in college now,” McCaskill said. “I don’t have a box like that. In fact, I had to impose a rule: You cannot get money by text message. I was getting like this gibberish spelling — ‘Need money 2day’ — you know, it is ridiculous.” Jon Stewart’s reaction: “That is the most masterful Jedi knight mother guilting I have— Claire McCaskill just entered the fact that her children don’t write her enough into the congressional record.”]
This is better than that, if only because she basically called us out on being awful children on the Senate floor.
What about when your mom tweets about you?
Oh man, she’s lethal with her iPhone camera. We try to monitor her, but sometimes she goes rogue and tweets pictures of us sleeping on the campaign RV. She tweeted a grainy picture of us waiting in line to vote earlier in the day without us knowing.
-
![The day of Trump’s official endorsement came February 2, just after Romney beat back another conservative primary rival — this time, Newt Gingrich — by carpet-bombing Florida with attack ads. The campaign was riding high, hoping against hope that the Trump endorsement would help them rally Republicans behind his candidacy so he could begin focusing on the general election.
As part of their negotiations, the Romney campaign had agreed to announce the endorsement with a press conference held at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. The Donald was having the time of his life, roaming around the lobby and holding not one, but three separate press gaggles. He bragged about the lengths to which the campaign had gone to court him, and he made a point of plugging his hotel.
“You can see why it’s number one in Nevada!” he declared. Campaign aides could be seen rolling their eyes, but they were under strict orders to keep him happy, a campaign official said.
At one point, Trump looked out over the press section — comprised mostly of a few local reporters, and the campaign’s typical traveling press — and squinted at Andrea Saul as he fished for compliments. “Andrea, have you ever had this many reporters at an endorsement?” he asked. “Never,” she responded, dutifully.
He then turned to a campaign advance staffer, and asked the same question. He hesitated at first, but then offered, “It’s more than normal.” Trump nodded, satisfied.
But for all the campaign’s herculean efforts to appease Trump and his outsize ego in pursuit of conservative approval, Romney hardly looked comfortable on stage as his newest supporter delivered a grandiose — and vaguely self-serving — address. When it was time for the photo op, Romney angled, ever so slightly, away from the camera. And when he had to come to the microphone, he looked as though he couldn’t believe what he was doing.
“There are some things you just can’t imagine happening,” Romney said. “This is one of them.”
Even one of Trump’s aides conceded, of the afternoon, “[Romney] looked about as sheepish as you can get. He looked like a guy going to a dentist’s office.” (via The Donald Problem)
I’m not BuzzFeed’s biggest fan, but this is a great article.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md4xmaXMoN1qeyudjo1_500.jpg)
The day of Trump’s official endorsement came February 2, just after Romney beat back another conservative primary rival — this time, Newt Gingrich — by carpet-bombing Florida with attack ads. The campaign was riding high, hoping against hope that the Trump endorsement would help them rally Republicans behind his candidacy so he could begin focusing on the general election.
As part of their negotiations, the Romney campaign had agreed to announce the endorsement with a press conference held at Trump’s Las Vegas hotel. The Donald was having the time of his life, roaming around the lobby and holding not one, but three separate press gaggles. He bragged about the lengths to which the campaign had gone to court him, and he made a point of plugging his hotel.
“You can see why it’s number one in Nevada!” he declared. Campaign aides could be seen rolling their eyes, but they were under strict orders to keep him happy, a campaign official said.
At one point, Trump looked out over the press section — comprised mostly of a few local reporters, and the campaign’s typical traveling press — and squinted at Andrea Saul as he fished for compliments. “Andrea, have you ever had this many reporters at an endorsement?” he asked. “Never,” she responded, dutifully.
He then turned to a campaign advance staffer, and asked the same question. He hesitated at first, but then offered, “It’s more than normal.” Trump nodded, satisfied.
But for all the campaign’s herculean efforts to appease Trump and his outsize ego in pursuit of conservative approval, Romney hardly looked comfortable on stage as his newest supporter delivered a grandiose — and vaguely self-serving — address. When it was time for the photo op, Romney angled, ever so slightly, away from the camera. And when he had to come to the microphone, he looked as though he couldn’t believe what he was doing.
“There are some things you just can’t imagine happening,” Romney said. “This is one of them.”
Even one of Trump’s aides conceded, of the afternoon, “[Romney] looked about as sheepish as you can get. He looked like a guy going to a dentist’s office.” (via The Donald Problem)
I’m not BuzzFeed’s biggest fan, but this is a great article.
-
I hadn’t heard of paper.li before, but this is an interesting concept: create your own online newspaper, and fill it with the news stories that are important to you. Or, just follow other people’s curated ‘papers’, like this one.
-
John Lydon (Rotten) on the state of the US Presidential election cycle.
[Via Current TV)
-
But here’s the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no.
For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.
Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.
Lest you think that this was just a personal slip, consider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips.
This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.
And when Mr. Romney waxed rhapsodic about the opportunities America offered to immigrants, he declared that they came in pursuit of “freedom to build a business.” What about those who came here not to found businesses, but simply to make an honest living? Not worth mentioning.Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times -
![Laurene Powell Jobs, with Chelsea Clinton, watching Bill Clinton’s DNC speech.
[via HuffPo]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma25vtow8M1qeyudjo1_500.jpg)
Laurene Powell Jobs, with Chelsea Clinton, watching Bill Clinton’s DNC speech.
[via HuffPo]
-
Tommy is making a salient point about something.
…but not relying on a teleprompter.
-
Which is exactly what rock bands are supposed to do, all day, every day.
Three members of Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot go on trial on Monday, in a case that has divided Russia and inflamed the religious establishment.
They were taken into custody in February after singing a song protesting against President Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s main cathedral.
The song outraged the Russian Orthodox Church. It accused them of blasphemy.
Supporters say the case reflects the state’s growing intolerance of government opponents.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich caused outrage when they sang a song that implored the Virgin Mary to “throw Putin out”.
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has said the performance, which took place at the altar of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, amounted to blasphemy.
The women are facing the charge of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred or hostility and could face up to seven years in prison.
Pussy Riot made headlines around the world late last year when footage of their controversial public perfomances at Moscow landmarks such as Red Square attracted millions of viewers on the internet.
-
I didn’t watch the Olympic ceremony, but this Conservative (Tory) member of Parliament really HATED it!
Labour (the ‘liberal’ party) replied with its own tweet: “Labour source responds to @AidanBurleyMP : I think Mr Burley has made an idiot of himself enough without us commenting”
![Laurene Powell Jobs, with Chelsea Clinton, watching Bill Clinton’s DNC speech.
[via HuffPo]](http://p.twimg.com/A2FDGcUCIAAae9G.jpg)
