Saturday, April 13, 2013

Pulling to the Left is moving

First of all, a big thanks to you for reading this small blog over the last few years. I hope you’ll continue reading it at its new location – PullingToTheLeft.wordpress.com

All the previous entries have been recreated over there, and new posts will show up there from now on. If you’ve subscribed or are using a reader, please update the address.

Background checks are more popular than kittens

Americans like the idea of universal background checks for all gun sales more than they like kittens, baseball and apple pie, according to a new poll.

Now is the time…

This week's presidential media address has been done by the parents of a child gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Teabagger coward runs away from little kids

Teabaggers are so funny when they run away from little kids like cowards. And Stacey Campfield keeps repeating “you’re using children as props” and calls people who question him “union thugs” as he runs away. What a fucking asshole. But this is what teabaggers are all about.

Is Kermit Gosnell what anti-choice zealots really want?

By all accounts, Kermit Gosnell was running a house of horrors -- an illegal abortion clinic. He's now on trial, charged with seven counts of murder, among other allegations. He allegedly killed babies after they were born, butchered women, overdosed them, spread venereal disease with unsterilized tools and equipment, and basically played the role of the abortion monster that anti-woman zealots see in every women's health care clinic.

Right wingers are enraged that the media is not covering the story in all its lurid detail. (Ironically, some right wing media excoriating “liberal” media for not covering it were themselves not covering it. The irony is lost on them.)

But I think anti-choice activists should know that if they're horrified by Kermit Gosnell, then as they try to outlaw abortion and make it impossible to get one, the result will be more Kermit Gosnells, more illegal clinics and more back alley abortions with untold numbers of women being butchered and killed as a result.

But maybe that's what God’s holy warriors really want.

Background checks will cause ‘genocide’

Gun nuts are the biggest bunch of scaredy cats I've ever seen. They're always inventing new conspiracies to freak out over in an orgy of paranoid feargasms.

South Carolina’s Rep. Jeff Duncan (R) warned Thursday that attempts by the U.S. government to impose comprehensive background checks on gun buyers will lead to a wholesale slaughter of American citizens akin to “the Rwandan genocide.” According to Think Progress, Duncan made the claims on his Facebook page.

If Congress implements tighter controls on sales of firearms to people with previous mental health issues or run-ins with the law, Duncan said, it is because liberals are planning to create a database of Americans they want to kill.

He portentously warned, “Read about the Rwandan genocide, the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. Read that all Tutsi tribe members were required to register their address with the Hutu government and that this database was used to locate Tutsi for slaughter at the hands of the Hutu. (Since the government had the names and addresses of nearly all Tutsis living in Rwanda (remember, each Rwandan had an identity card that labeled them Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa) the killers could go door to door, slaughtering the Tutsis.”

Bryan Fischer is very afraid of the gay

Radical Christian cleric Bryan Fischer is afraid, very very afraid, of the gay. He’s warning his followers that “homofascists” (his term for gay people who want the same rights as the rest of us) are going to treat Christians like Jews in the Holocaust.

He’s warning that gay people, once they have total, absolute power (which surely they want, what with wanting to get married and all), will force poor Christians to wear badges like the Nazis did to Jews. And maybe even herd them into extermination camps. If gays ever get the right to marry the person they love, surely the next step is mass murdering Christians, right?

I’m only an amateur history buff, but when I look back I see no examples of gays ever doing anything like that to Christians. The only example I can find is the Nazis, who did what they did because they believed that God had made Aryans the master race and Jews the subhuman, “mud” race.

Not to mention what the aforementioned Nazis did to gays. But it seems Fischer forgot about that part, or at least hopes his uneducated audience doesn’t know.

If anyone’s in danger of being made to wear badges or herded off into extermination camps, it would be gays in danger from extremist Christians like Bryan Fischer. God help us if they ever get total, absolute power. Fischer, in a classic case of projecting, is showing us exactly what he’d like to see done to gays and anyone who doesn’t follow his extremist religion.

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Background checks

What many teabaggers might be afraid of if universal background checks for gun sales pass -- having a record of threatening the life of the president or other government officials in your background might become a red flag, and for many teabaggers, threatening the president and government officials is a way of life.

Right on cue

Even though 90% of Americans support universal background checks for all gun purchases, it doesn’t matter. As I wrote yesterday, Congress doesn’t really represent the majority of Americans, it represents the fringe, who exercise control over Republicans by threatening primary challenges.

And right on cue, the gun nut faction, at the behest of the NRA, is urging House Majority Leader John Boehner to scuttle any deal on background checks, no matter how many Americans want it.

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) and 40 Republicans are passing around a Dear Colleague letter asking Republicans in the House to pressure Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) not to take up a bill expanding background checks for gun purchases “without the support of a majority of the conference.” Boehner has brought measures to the floor that are not backed by a majority of Republicans several times in the past, breaking the Hastert rule and outraging conservative members.

And here it is, in a nutshell:

[…] The letter also notes that background checks are “opposed by the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, the National Association for Gun Rights, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and other national and state level pro-Second Amendment organizations.” It does not mention the overwhelming public support for the measure, however.

It doesn’t matter that an unprecedented majority of Americans want background checks. All that matters is that a small fringe opposes it, therefore it shouldn’t even get a vote.

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Attack for this, then attack for that

It's the GOP game we all know so well now: Attack President Obama for not doing something, then we he does it, attack him for doing it.

That's the game now with the proposed change to the way Social Security would figure out benefits and cost adjustments... First, the Republicans attacked Obama for not cutting Social Security, and now that he is, in effect, cutting Social Security, Republicans are - you guessed it - attacking him for it.