Thursday, October 31, 2013

House Republicans Admit that Barack Obama is a Good President

In a surprising turn of events, Republicans admit that Barack Obama is actually a pretty good president. 

Coming off of a blistering defeat during the debt limit and government shutdown battle, House Republicans were hunting for payback.  Unfortunately, they weren't able to find anything significant, like evidence that the President, under false pretenses, knowingly plunged the country into the longest and most expensive war the country’s history.  They couldn't even find anything titillating, like the President [really, really] enjoying the company of an intern in the Oval Office.  The Republicans had to settle on … wait for it … wait for it … a website that  didn't work properly when it was first released. 


When a broken webpage is the worst thing that you can find against your mortal enemy, a man who runs over puppy dogs for fun (sorry, wrong person, that was Dick Cheney), then it’s a pretty strong endorsement of that person.  So, you see, the Republicans have finally admitted that Barack Obama is a pretty good president.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

I Want a Rocket Launcher


I find it interesting that the NRA, and many gun owners, are making such a fuss about regulating assault rifles and large magazines.  They insist that weapons bans are a breach of the Second Amendment.  This is interesting because there have been limitations on weapons for many years.  In 1934, Congress passed the National Firearms Act (NFA), in response to the gangster violence that grew out of Prohibition.  The NFA put tight restrictions on machineguns (their wording) and various sawed-off weapons.  The NFA was rewritten in 1968 in response to a court case.  The rewrite extended the act to include “destructive devices” (bombs, missiles, poison gas, etc.).  The Constitution guarantees the right to keep and bear arms.  However, it doesn't specify that people have the right to own any arms they desire or the right to bear those anywhere they so choose.  The Supreme Court has, on several occasions, upheld laws that regulate arms.  An assault weapons ban would simply be a matter of degree.  If an assault weapons ban would infringe on the Second Amendment, then you can argue that bans against fully-automatic weapons (machineguns), grenades, and cannons also infringe on our Second Amendment rights.  In fact, if the Second Amendment guarantees our right to own any weapon we desire, then, taken to its logical conclusion, the Second Amendment gives us the right to own nuclear missiles; it's just a matter of degree.  Personally, I just want a rocket launcher so I can eliminate slow drivers that insist on driving in the fast lane of the highway.    

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

We Need to Arm Our Teachers


NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre, proposed putting armed police officers in all schools to prevent school massacres such as those in Newtown and Columbine.  I think that school resource officers are great, but the idea that they can prevent a school massacre is just plain silly.  Is one officer going to protect the whole school?  At Columbine there were multiple shooters, so the officer would have had to be at 2 places at once.  My daughter’s high school had more than 10 buildings, so a shooter could have easily gone into one building and killed many students and teachers before a police officer in another building even knew what happened.

No, putting a police officer in every school isn't the answer; we need to arm teachers so that every classroom has a person with a gun.  None of the 7 million teachers in the U.S. are mentally unstable, so we won’t have any problems with that.  I’m sure that there would never be a teacher going through a nasty divorce that would get fed-up with a classroom of angelic junior high students and go off the deep end.   People with guns never get jumped, so an angry student could never take a gun away from an armed teacher and start shooting.  Of course, each armed teacher would regularly have tactical training like police do, so they would never accidentally kill innocent people during an incident.  After all, trained New York Police officers only directly shot 3 innocent bystanders when they fired 16 rounds at a murder suspect in front of the Empire State Building last year, the other 6 innocent bystanders were injured by ricocheting bullets that were fired by the police.

Yes, armed teachers are definitely the way to go.