Tag Archives: canada

Ben Carson Is Wrong About Hitler and Guns

by EdgardoCooney Posted on October 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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More guns, fewer holocausts?

Ben Carson said Thursday that Adolf Hitler’s mass murder of Jews “would have been greatly diminished” if German citizens had not been disarmed by the Nazi regime…”But just clarify, if there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would 6 million Jews have been slaughtered?” Blitzer asked.

“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson said…”I’m telling you that there is a reason that these dictatorial people take the guns first.”

This got me curious: Did Hitler take away everyone’s guns? As you can imagine, I know zilch about the history of gun control in Germany, so I surfed over to Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, for a quick refresher course. Here’s what they say:

In 1919, the Treaty of Versaille disarmed Germany. “Fearing inability to hold the state together during the depression, the German government adopted a sweeping series of gun confiscation legislation.” This was long before Hitler came to power.
In 1928 this legislation was relaxed. “Germans could possess firearms, but they were required to have [] permits…Furthermore, the law restricted ownership of firearms to ‘…persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a permit.'” Again, this was before Hitler came to power.
In 1938, Hitler relaxed the law further. Rifles and shotguns were completely deregulated, permits were extended to three years, and the age at which guns could be purchased was lowered to 18.

Now, Hitler did effectively ban Jews from owning guns in 1938. However, this is highly unlikely to have affected the fate of the Jews even slightly. The Nazis were considerably better armed and organized, and if Jews had taken to shooting them it would have accomplished nothing except giving Joseph Goebbels some terrific propaganda opportunities. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a good example of this: Jews fought back, and the result was a few dead Germans and 13,000 dead Jews.

The bottom line is familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of history: Hitler was popular. He didn’t need to take away anyone’s guns. Whatever you think about gun control, using Hitler to defend your position is a bad idea.

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Ben Carson Is Wrong About Hitler and Guns

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Oops. Putin’s Cruise Missiles Still Need a Little Work.

by JanellGlasheen Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess Vladimir Putin’s cruise missiles aren’t quite as awesome as he thought:

Cruise missiles fired by Russia from warships in the Caspian Sea at targets in Syria crashed in a rural area of Iran, senior United States officials said on Thursday.

Bummer, dude. Can we now have at least one day where we don’t have to hear about how Russia’s crappy military is going to upend everything in the Middle East and send the US scurrying for cover?

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Oops. Putin’s Cruise Missiles Still Need a Little Work.

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Ben Carson Apparently Doesn’t Know What the Debt Limit Is

by Elsa93Bfwninszx Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ben Carson:

Ryssdal: As you know, Treasury Secretary Lew has come out in the last couple of days and said, “We’re gonna run out of money, we’re gonna run out of borrowing authority, on the fifth of November.” Should the Congress then and the president not raise the debt limit? Should we default on our debt?

Carson: Let me put it this way: if I were the president, I would not sign an increased budget. Absolutely would not do it. They would have to find a place to cut.

Ryssdal: To be clear, it’s increasing the debt limit, not the budget, but I want to make sure I understand you. You’d let the United States default rather than raise the debt limit.

Carson: No, I would provide the kind of leadership that says, “Get on the stick guys, and stop messing around, and cut where you need to cut, because we’re not raising any spending limits, period.”

Ryssdal: I’m gonna try one more time, sir. This is debt that’s already obligated. Would you not favor increasing the debt limit to pay the debts already incurred?

Carson: What I’m saying is what we have to do is restructure the way that we create debt. I mean if we continue along this, where does it stop? It never stops. You’re always gonna ask the same question every year. And we’re just gonna keep going down that pathway. That’s one of the things I think that the people are tired of.

Ryssdal: I’m really trying not to be circular here, Dr. Carson, but if you’re not gonna raise the debt limit and you’re not gonna give specifics on what you’re gonna cut, then how are we going to know what you are going to do as president of the United States?

It sure sounds as if Carson doesn’t know what the debt limit is, doesn’t it? Kai Ryssdal tries manfully to get a straight answer out of him, and after the fourth try Carson rambles into a long disquisition on the infinite-time-horizon fiscal gap, at which point Ryssdal finally gives up. I guess I don’t blame him.

On the other hand, I’ll give Carson credit for something Ryssdal doesn’t: telling him what he’d cut in order to balance the budget. Carson is pretty clear about this: he would cut the government across the board by 3-4 percent via the simple expedient of keeping spending flat for everything. In real terms, this gets you to Carson’s 3-4 percent decrease. He says he’d do this for three or four years, and boom! Balanced budget.

Ryssdal badgers Carson about this, but doesn’t ask the obvious follow-ups: You’d cut Social Security 3-4 percent each year? Medicare? Defense? Veterans? If the answer is no—as it probably would be—then you ask Carson how he’s going to balance the budget with just the stuff that’s left over.

In any case, it’s pretty scary that a guy this ignorant of the basics of governance is doing so well in the Republican primary. Not surprising, maybe, but still scary.

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Ben Carson Apparently Doesn’t Know What the Debt Limit Is

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Quote of the Day: You’d Have to Be Nuts to Want a Leadership Role in the Republican Party

by UIVJodiexgz Posted on October 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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We all know that John Boehner quit the speakership because he was finally fed up trying to deal with the lunatics in his own party. But how about some of the tea party darlings, like Trey Gowdy or Paul Ryan? Apparently they feel about the same:

Gowdy insists he’s not interested in joining leadership, not in any capacity. He is funny, and biting, about the chaos of the present House.

“I don’t have a background in mental health, so I wouldn’t have the right qualifications to lead right now,” he says. Who wants you to be in leadership? “No friend does,” he says.

….“To me, just speaking as one member, the smartest kid in the class is Paul Ryan,” Gowdy said. “If I had one draft choice and I was starting a new country, I would draft Paul to run it. Not because I agree with him on everything, but because he’s super, super smart. And when someone is super, super smart and is not interested, that tells you something. It tells me a lot.”

By coincidence, this is sort of related to the conservative fantasy I talked about in the previous post. Folks like Gowdy and Ryan are smart enough to see it too, even though they’re both stone conservatives themselves. A leadership role wouldn’t give them the power to actually implement the conservative agenda, but too many conservatives these days don’t care. They’re living the fantasy that if only their leaders fought hard enough, they could win. So when they don’t win, it must mean that they didn’t fight very hard. Right now, there’s just no way to puncture that fantasy.

And why the squirrel illustration? Nothing to do with Gowdy or Ryan or the tea party or conservatives being squirrely or nuts. Honest! This is just our household squirrel, who was outside feeding his face a few minutes ago. So I went out and took his picture. And speaking of squirrels, here’s an interesting squirrel factlet: if you Google “squirrel saying,” 7 of the top 20 hits are about the difficulties that German speakers have saying “squirrel.”

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Quote of the Day: You’d Have to Be Nuts to Want a Leadership Role in the Republican Party

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Paul Krugman Explains the Latest Draft of the TPP

by LachlanPartlow Posted on October 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Suppose there’s a complex public policy proposal being debated and you want to know where you should stand. However, you really don’t want to devote a huge amount of time to diving into all the details. There are just so many hours in the day, after all.

One possibility is to simply see what people on your side of the tribal divide think about it. But that’s surprisingly unreliable. A better approach is to take a look at who’s opposed to the proposal. That’s what Paul Krugman does today regarding the final draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement:

What I know so far: pharma is mad because the extension of property rights in biologics is much shorter than it wanted, tobacco is mad because it has been carved out of the dispute settlement deal, and Rs in general are mad because the labor protection stuff is stronger than expected….I find myself thinking of Grossman and Helpman’s work on the political economy of free trade agreements, in which they conclude, based on a highly stylized but nonetheless interesting model of special interest politics, that

An FTA is most likely to be politically viable exactly when it would be socially harmful.

The TPP looks better than it did, which infuriates much of Congress.

Krugman describes himself as a “lukewarm opponent” of TPP who now needs to do some more homework. I’d probably call myself a lukewarm supporter. One reason is that the dispute resolution provisions, which provoked a lot of anger on the left, never struck me as either unusual or all that objectionable in practice. The IP stuff bothered me more, and that’s been improved a bit in the final draft. It’s still not great, but it’s not quite as horrible as before. So you can probably now count me as a slightly stronger supporter.

But I wonder what Republicans will do? They’re the ones who are ideologically on the side of trade agreements, and they’ve spent a lot of time berating President Obama for not putting more effort into trade deals. But with campaign season heating up, it’s become more toxic than ever to support any initiative of Obama’s. Plus Donald Trump is busily working his supporters into a lather about TPP. I wouldn’t be surprised to see quite a few defections from the Republican ranks.

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Paul Krugman Explains the Latest Draft of the TPP

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Let’s Not Rewrite History on Gun Violence

by MyrnaDegree Posted on October 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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“This is something we should politicize,” President Obama said last week after the gun massacre in Oregon. “It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.” Jonah Goldberg is annoyed that Obama said this even though he’s routinely spoken out against politicizing issues in the past. “He’s not about to try building consensus on gun violence among people of good faith,” Goldberg says. Then this:

Obama’s comments on Thursday highlighted the problem with his approach to politics. He would rather go for everything he wants and get nothing, but keep the political issue, than make progress on common ground.

Virtually none of the proposals on his gun-control wish list — more comprehensive federal background checks, closing the gun show “loophole,” etc. — would help bring down the homicide rate….Typically, mass killers don’t buy guns at gun shows. And a CNN analysis found that a comprehensive background check system wouldn’t have prevented any of the “routine” killing sprees Obama referred to, save one.

….After the Sandy Hook slaughter, there was a bipartisan consensus that more needed to be done on the mental health side. But Obama, fresh off reelection, rejected a piecemeal approach, largely preferring to go for a “comprehensive” solution. He ended up with nothing at all.

Um, what? Shortly after Sandy Hook, Joe Biden released the final report of his task force on gun violence. It contained recommendations in four areas, one of which was increased access to mental health services. Several bipartisan bills that targeted mental health did indeed get introduced, and I believe Obama supported all of them. So why didn’t they pass? That’s always hard to say, but the best guess is that it’s because they all cost money, and Republicans were unwilling to vote for increased spending. So they died. Obama’s preference for a “comprehensive” approach had nothing to do with it.

Beyond that, sure, Obama wanted comprehensive legislation. But in the end, this got whittled down to one thing: a bipartisan bill mandating universal background checks. It was watered down repeatedly, and was about as weak as possible by the time it finally got a vote. Despite massive public support, even from gun owners, it failed after an enormous effort to reach out to all those people of good faith Goldberg talks about. I think you can guess who voted against it.1

1It was 41 Republicans and 5 Democrats, in case you’ve forgotten.

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Let’s Not Rewrite History on Gun Violence

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Let Us Now Praise Authentically Stiff Politicians

by YoungT08gxixm Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brendan Nyhan thinks we spend too much time yakking about which candidates are “authentic” and which ones aren’t. For example:

George W. Bush and Al Gore were both born into powerful political families, but were perceived very differently. Mr. Bush successfully reinvented himself as a down-home Texas ranch owner despite being the son of a president with elite New England roots, while Mr. Gore was widely mocked as a phony who grew up amid wealth and power in Washington, especially when he invoked his childhood work on his family’s Tennessee farm. Again, one simple explanation for the disparate treatment they received is that Mr. Bush was a better political performer.

I would remind everyone that Brad Pitt gets paid millions of dollars for doing a very good job of pretending to be authentically charming. The ability to feign authenticity is called “acting,” and it’s a lucrative profession if you’re good at it.

Was Al Gore authentic? Hillary Clinton? Mitt Romney? Sure. Gore is genuinely sort of wonkish and stiff. Hillary is earnest and cautious around people. Romney is careful and detail-oriented. That’s authentically who they are. If they studied up and adopted a hail-fellow-well-met persona, everyone would think they were authentic, but they’d just be pretending.

If you prefer politicians who are bluff and emotional in public, just say so. If you can’t stand being around people who natter on about policy and guard their private lives, say so. But cut out the “authentic” nonsense. That’s not what this is about.

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Let Us Now Praise Authentically Stiff Politicians

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Bestselling Historian Explains US Foreign Policy: "Obama Is Prone to Submitting to Males Who Act Dominantly in His Presence"

by AdriannQCD Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Arthur Herman writing in National Review about geopolitical realities in the age of Obama:

If Vladimir Putin is the dominant alpha male in the new international pecking order, Barack Obama has emerged as his highly submissive partner.

There are various reasons why we are being subjected to the humiliating spectacle of an American president, so-called leader of the free world, rolling over on the mat at Putin’s feet.

Of course, there have been signs for years that Obama is prone to submitting to males who act dominantly in his presence. Who can forget his frozen performance with Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate in 2012….We’ve seen it in his interactions with China’s president Xi Jinping; his strange bowing and scraping with the Saudi king; and his various meetings with Putin, including the last at the United Nations on Monday where a tight-lipped Obama could barely bring himself to look at the Russian president while Putin looked cool and confident—as well as he should.

For every aggressive move Putin has made on the international stage, first in Crimea and Ukraine in Europe, and now in Syria, our president’s response has been largely verbal protestations followed by resolute inaction. Why should Putin not assume that when he orders the U.S. to stop its own air strikes against ISIS in Syria, and to leave the skies to the Russians, he won’t be obeyed?

But there’s more to Obama’s passivity than just pack behavior….

Seriously, what kind of adult talks like this? Or thinks like this? How can a historian, of all people, explain a moment in history as a serial dominance display between chimpanzees? I’m not even sure what the right word for this is. It’s not just childish or puerile, though it’s those things too. Disturbed? Compulsive? Unbalanced? I’m not sure. This is a job for William F. Buckley.

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Bestselling Historian Explains US Foreign Policy: "Obama Is Prone to Submitting to Males Who Act Dominantly in His Presence"

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The Shiny New "Sharing Economy" Is Sure Starting to Seem Awfully Old-Fashioned

by GertieFarfan Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Brian Fung writes today about Amazon’s new package delivery scheme:

Flex, Amazon’s new on-demand delivery service, promises to get your packages to you even sooner by hiring independent drivers to bring them to your house. As a lot of reports have pointed out, Flex is basically Uber for Amazon packages.

But, speaking of Uber, how will Amazon’s leap into on-demand logistics affect the rest of the sharing economy?

….Amazon Flex says it will pay its delivery drivers $18 to $25 per hour. They can elect to drive for two-, four-, or eight-hour shifts. In exchange, they need to supply your own car, a driver’s license and an Android phone so that they can install Amazon’s driver app….Compare that to ridesharing services whose drivers get to maximize their flexibility but whose income is more variable. For some, this trade-off may be worth it.

….Amazon Flex is betting that as the economy improves, there will still be people who are willing to work in the sharing economy rather than returning to full-time jobs….Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the sharing economy will become a $335 billion business by 2025 — up from $15 billion a year today.

Let’s slow down here. What exactly is the “sharing economy”? Originally it was sort of like renting. Time rhapsodized about it in 2011: “The true innovative spirit of collaborative consumption can be found in start-ups like Brooklyn-based SnapGoods, which helps people rent goods via the Internet. Or Airbnb, which allows people to rent their homes to travelers.”

Then it morphed into “Uber for ____” companies. Uber, of course, doesn’t really allow you to share your car with other people. It’s your car and you’re the only one who drives it. Rather, Uber provides infrastructure and scale that allows you to become an on-demand taxicab whenever your schedule allows it.

Now it’s apparently morphed even further. In some sense, Uber allows you to “share” your car with your passengers. That’s a stretch, but Flex doesn’t even provide that. The only thing you’re doing is “sharing” your car with the packages you’re delivering. By that standard, all of us are part of the sharing economy, since we “share” our bodies and brains with employers in order to accomplish tasks that our employer gives us.

In this case, Amazon is doing nothing more than hiring drivers as independent contractors so that it doesn’t have to pay benefits and doesn’t have to pay them if there aren’t any packages to deliver. (You can pick your own shift, but only if a shift is available.) The only real innovation here is that Flex might1 allow you to work odd hours here and there, which is convenient if you have other commitments that prevent you from working a normal schedule. Mostly, though, it’s just Amazon taking the 21st century mania for scheduling workers on a day-to-day basis and instead scheduling them hour-to-hour.

In any case, it now seems as though the “sharing economy” is any job that’s somehow related to a scheduling app and provides workers only with odd bits and pieces of work at the employer’s whim. In other words, sort of like manual laborers in the Victorian era, but with smartphones and better pay. No wonder PricewaterhouseCoopers thinks it will grow to $335 billion over the next decade. By that standard, I’d be surprised if it didn’t break $1 trillion.

1I say “might” because it all depends. Maybe jobs really are first-come-first-serve. Or maybe Amazon will start to favor workers who regularly take as long a shift as Amazon wants them to take. Or perhaps Amazon will start to push offers out to workers, and downrate those who don’t accept them frequently enough. Who knows?

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The Shiny New "Sharing Economy" Is Sure Starting to Seem Awfully Old-Fashioned

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Rumor of the Day: Gay Marriage Martyr Kim Davis Met With the Pope Last Week

by LayneI91ysavpze Posted on September 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s your spine-tingling rumor of the day, straight from Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican. He claims that gay marriage martyr Kim Davis met with Pope Francis last Thursday at the Vatican embassy in Washington DC, just before he left for New York City:

“The Pope spoke in English,” she told me. “There was no interpreter. ‘Thank you for your courage,’ Pope Francis said to me. I said, ‘Thank you, Holy Father.’ I had asked a monsignor earlier what was the proper way to greet the Pope, and whether it would be appropriate for me to embrace him, and I had been told it would be okay to hug him. So I hugged him, and he hugged me back. It was an extraordinary moment. ‘Stay strong,’ he said to me. Then he gave me a rosary as a gift, and he gave one also to my husband, Joe. I broke into tears. I was deeply moved.”

….Vatican sources have confirmed to me that this meeting did occur; the occurrence of this meeting is not in doubt.

Davis’s lawyers also say the meeting took place, and told WDRB News that although they don’t have photos of the meeting yet, they’ll release them as soon as they get them. Davis herself, though, is silent about all this—which seems a little odd since she hasn’t been shy about talking to the media before. So far there’s neither confirmation nor denial from the Vatican.

Did this actually happen, or is it a truly bizarre hoax? I cannot tell you. But I figured you’d want to know.

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Rumor of the Day: Gay Marriage Martyr Kim Davis Met With the Pope Last Week

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