Author: Sebastian

Why is it that speaking out …

… against extremists and the paranoid, suddenly gets you labeled as fearful of losing control over a movement, and fearful of grassroots action?  No one has ever said the tea party movement is a net negative.  No one has said we’re very upset about all this emotional grass roots action in the town halls.  This is all very good for our Republic, if you ask me.  I even recently criticized a talk radio host for speaking out against it.

But I have to assume that if I’m a little uncomfortable walking under a WND/Birther/Threeper banner, that others, who like most Americans, are considerably less serious about their politics, and who don’t have terribly well developed political philosophies, are going to be uncomfortable with it too.  You can’t govern a nation from the fringe.  Bad things have happened historically when that’s been allowed to come to fruition.  In a Republic, you need a majority, or at least a sizable minority, plus acquiescence of the majority, in order to govern.  If conservatives want to enjoy the power to govern, which if you want to dismantle the New Deal State, you need to do for a while, you need a bigger tent than the fringes are going to give you.

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Labor Day Quotes

From Hudson County Sheriff Juan Perez:

t is most certain that handguns and other types of weapons only belong in the possession of law enforcement and military personnel. We lost a dedicated, professional and caring Jersey City officer in the person of Detective Marc DiNardo, slain by career criminals in possession of an automatic type of shotgun which was bought to our city from another part of the country. Certainly, these types of weapons should be prohibited from being manufactured, imported, or sold in the United States of America.

Emphasis mine.  So because New Jersey can’t keep dangerous people behind bars where they belong, the rest of us get to deal with not having pump shotguns (murder weapons) and handguns, both of which are highly useful at protecting ourselves against the same criminals that are murdering police officers.

Next quote from our token anti, MikeB:

Well, to them and to everyone else, I say guns are bad news for women. Those three great bloggers are the exceptions to the rule. The rule is, in America, too many women are at the mercy of too many men with guns.

Except women victims of murder are exceptions to the rule too.  80% of all homicides are committed against men.  It would seem to me that men have considerably more to fear in terms of being murdered than women do.  Nonetheless, women are the fastest growing demographic within the shooting community, and represent about 23% of the total shooting community.  So are these convincing enough statistics to keep MikeB from gender baiting in this debate?  Just because the Bradys do it too, doesn’t mean it’s a smart tactic.

UPDATE: Actually, of the 20% of women killed by homicide each year, women commit 10% of those murders.  When it comes to murder of intimates, 33% are committed with weapons other than firearms.  The gun homicide rate by gun of men onto women has been dropping precipitously since the 1990s, while the rate of non-gun homicide by intimates has actually increased.

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Look Who’s Caused a Stir

The Roanoke Times columnist from last week apparently caused quite a stir with his column, which highlighted that you could get a license to carry a gun without ever having touched one, just like 600,000 people do in Pennsylvania, and many other states that have no training requirement.  You can say it’s reckless all you want, but we don’t exactly have significantly more problems than other states that do require training, probably because LTC holders are a self-selected bunch, and not many choose to get an LTC if they don’t know anything about guns.

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Not So Popular Now, Eh?

Apparently sixty eight percent of Pennsylvanians don’t think our Guv is doing that great a job:

Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed say the two-term Democrat is doing a fair or poor job, compared to 29 percent who gave him a good or excellent rating. That’s an historic low for Rendell.

I almost get the feeling Rendell stopped trying after he got reelected.  After 2006, and after a huge defeat of Lynn Swann, he figured he didn’t have to work to please anyone, or worry about pissing voters off royally.   Now that rooster is coming home to roost.  If I were a Democratic hopeful for the Governor’s seat in 2010, I’d be more than a bit unhappy with Rendell’s behavior.  Pennsylvania has oscillated back and forth between Democratic and Republican governors since World War II.  Rendell seems to be doing everything he can to ensure that trend continues.

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I Can Sympathize

It’s getting harder and harder this day to navigate through the noise, Michael Silence quotes another blog post:

What was once this great way to connect with others, has become this never ending loop of barely keeping my head above the social media water line. I’ve literally lost sleep over the fact that I haven’t ever visited some of the my most loyal commenters or that I didn’t answer a question left in my comments section or that I have at all times at least two or three need-to-be-answered emails. My close friends’ blogs, I hardly have time to read those and when I do, my comments often amount to “great post,” which is apparently the “wrong” way to comment.

I can sympathize with new media overload. I find Facebook, for instance, absolutely impossible to keep up with. I check in occasionally, but no doubt I’m missing a lot. Twitter I actually enjoy and find useful.  For activism, I think it’s far and away a superior tool over Facebook, and I’ll even say over blogs in many respects.

Back in the beginning days of my blogging career, I used to follow a prodigious number of blogs on a daily basis.  Now I read some here, some there, during the week.  The list of blogs I hit every day is less than ten now.  In terms of finding out what other blogs were talking about, it’s easier to just follow a few aggregators, and use their editorial sense to find out what’s going on.  The more you continue in blogging, the harder and harder it seems to get to keep up.

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