Weapons of Mass Murder Should Be Illegal

It’s time make hand guns like the Fort hood shooter used illegal. These weapons are easily concealed, highly powerful and with high capacity, easily interchangeable clips they allow a shooter to spray hundreds of bullets in a few minutes and reload in seconds. They are weapons of mass murder, serving only evil and have no legitimate purpose whatsoever. In fact their only purpose is to kill people, lots of people, quickly.

The Virginia Tech shooter fired 170 rounds in 9 minutes and left 32 people dead and 30 more people horribly injured. The Fort Hood shooter fired 100 bullets in 3 minutes. He had high capacity magazine clips with 20 rounds per clip. With a gun in each hand that’s 40 rounds before he has to reload and he reloaded more than once which only takes seconds when exchanging clips. Frankly, with barrages like that I’m amazed they both didn’t kill more innocent people.

If either of these shooters had to reload more often and spend more time doing it they would have been quickly overwhelmed by the crowd of people who were their intended victims. But these semiautomatic guns stack the deck entirely in the favor of the mass murderer.

If you want to have a revolver or a deer rifle for self defense and sporting purposes, fine. Can these weapons also be misused? Of course, but they don’t place the kind of overwhelming force into one person’s hands that these weapons of mass murder do. You say it’s your constitutional right to own weapons of mass murder? You’re wrong, you can’t own machineguns, grenades, bazookas or a host of other arms either. That is because they serve no legitimate non-military purpose while delivering much too highly concentrated destructive force, endangering public safety. Anyway, when the Second Amendment was written a very skilled musketeer could manage at most four inaccurate rounds per minute. Reality has changed with the times.

And for those of you naive enough to think you need these kinds of weapons as hedge against a tyrannical government. Think again. Look at the resistance in Iraq. They quickly found that fighting the American military with guns was a sure way to die. That’s why they resorted to tactics like car bombs and IEDs. Thinking you’d fare any differently with your little pistol is plain foolishness.

Yes, people kill people and with these weapons of mass murder one person can kill lots of other people in a few seconds. The only people who think we need these guns are the profiteers who make and sell them, their lobbying arm the NRA, gun nuts and just plain nuts. Of the 14 worst mass shootings in the last 40 years 7 of them have been here in America. This time we need to actually do something and rid ourselves of this kind of dangerous garbage before it happens again.

United Healthcare Against Reform But For Penalties

Yet another reason for me to hate United Healthcare, the health insurance company selected for me by my employer, largely because Wisconsin is not a competative health insurance market. 75,000 UH employees and that's just one insurance company!

Gee, do you think there's a little overhead cost there for our healthcare system? The entire U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the Medicare program for 100,000 million Americans has only 60,000 employees! Yeah no public option AND higher penalties for people who don't become customers in the custody of their monopoly. Nice. I wish I could fire their ass.

From Friday's Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/13/headlines

Insurance Giant Recruits Employees to Oppose Public OptionThe nation’s largest health insurer is recruiting employees to lobby against congressional proposals for healthcare reform. Newly released emails show UnitedHealth Group wrote 75,000 employees this week to ask them to lobby their senators against inclusion of a public insurance option in the Senate healthcare bill. Form letters provided to employees also call for imposing higher financial penalties on Americans who choose not to buy health insurance.

Names of the Dead Website

Congressman Alan Grayson, who gained in notoriety for succinctly summarizing the GOPish plan for healthcare "don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly," has created a website http://www.namesofthedead.com/ to honor the 44,000 Americans who die every year, because they don't have health coverage according to a Harvard University study and of course to shame those who would stand in the way of preventing the equivalent of twelve 9/11s a year, every year, year after year.

GOPocrits

The list of 55 GOPocrits who oppose the Public Option for others, but are on Medicare themselves http://weiner.house.gov/news_display.aspx?id=1364 is as follows:

Rep. Ralph M. Hall; Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett; Rep. Sam Johnson; Rep. C.W. Bill Young; Rep. Howard Coble; Sen. Jim Bunning; Sen. Richard G. Lugar; Rep. Don Young; Sen. Charles E. Grassley; Sen. Robert F. Bennett; Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers; Sen. Orrin G. Hatch; Sen. Richard C. Shelby; Rep. Jerry Lewis; Sen. James M. Inhofe; Rep. Ron Paul; Rep. Henry E. Brown; Sen. Pat Roberts; Sen. George V. Voinovich; Sen. John McCain; Rep. Judy Biggert; Sen. Thad Cochran; Rep. Harold Rogers; Rep. Dan Burton; Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon; Rep. Frank R. Wolf; Sen. Christopher S. Bond; Rep. Michael N. Castle; Rep. Joe Pitts; Rep. Tom Petri; Sen. Lamar Alexander; Rep. Doc Hastings; Rep. Cliff Stearns; Rep. Sue Myrick; Rep. John Carter; Sen. Mitch McConnell; Sen. Jon Kyl; Rep. Phil Gingrey; Rep. Nathan Deal; Rep. John Linder; Rep. Kay Granger; Rep. John L. Mica; Rep. Walter B. Jones; Sen. Jim Risch; Rep. Ed Whitfield; Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner; Rep. Virginia Foxx; Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison; Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite; Sen. Saxby Chambliss; Sen. Michael B. Enzi; Rep. Elton Gallegly; Rep. Donald Manzullo; Rep. Peter T. King; Rep. Ander Crenshaw

Old Glory Is So Yesterday

Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign http://wisdc.clearsender.com/tracker.php?link=220888262::239::59516 has written a great piece about "conservative" judicial activism and the danger to our Constitution and our democracy posed by a forthcoming Supreme Court ruling that could blatantly hand OUR government and OUR so-called representatives over to the concentrated power of the big corporations once and for all: http://www.wisdc.org/blog/2009/10/old-glory-is-so-yesterday.html

We the Corporations, in order to make it illegal to form a union, provide for our legal defense, promote our welfare and secure the blessings of resources to ourselves and our subsidiaries, do ordain this revised Constitution of the Corporate states of America.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” - Benito Mussolini

“When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” - Sinclair Lewis

"The really dangerous American fascists, are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. - FDR's Vice President Henry Wallace, April 1944.

Baucus Bill Bogus!

So now we find out, thanks to Bill Moyers (Indefatigable Defender of Democracy) and the Public Accountability Initiative's LittleSis database that the "heathcare bill" to be voted on tomorrow by the Senate Finance Committee was NOT written by Sen. Max (Prophet for the Insurance Profiteers) Baucus. The bill was in fact written by the former Vice President for Public Policy for Wellpoint Insurance, the biggest profiteer of them all. Talk about the fox guarding the people's house!

Read the Moyers article here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/10-0

My favorite passage from the article references David Graham Phillips who in 1906, (in the last Gilded Age) wrote "The Treason of the Senate" for Cosmopolitan Magazine including the following quote;

"Treason is a strong word, but not too strong, rather too weak, to characterize the situation which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be, and vastly more dangerous: interests that manipulate the prosperity produced by all, so that it heaps up riches for the few: interests whose growth and power can only mean the degradation of the people, of the educated into sycophants, of the masses toward serfdom."

The public outrage provoked by Phillips and other muckrakers contributed to the ratification of the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the direct popular election of senators, who until then were elected by easily bought-off state legislators. Where is our outrage today!

InFOXication and GOPish Sincerity

Glenn Beck rubs Vick's under his eyes to cry on cue and give the appearance for his teabaggin indoctrinants of heartfelt concern and sadness for America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kj4I2f0ZO6g

What a creepy and disturbing little deceptaCON / GOPropagandist he is.