Author: Greg Saunders

Atrios is right, when you’re using something like this to convince people there’s a “thriving Republican punk music scene”, then you’re an idiot :

And, as a Republican, I’m proud to have John Cummings in our Party. You may know John as Johnny Ramone, of one of the best bands of all time, the Ramones. The Ramones are largely regarded as being the first punk rock band and they happen to be Republicans. In fact, Johnny Ramone was quoted in 2004 as saying, “I send money to the [Republican National Committee] and to Bush/Cheney. I will argue politics with people all day long. I am one of the few Republicans out here.”

Odd that conservatives would boast of having a dead Ramone in their ranks when one of the band’s most political songs, Bonzo Goes To Bitburg, was to protest St. Ronnie putting a wreath on a Nazi grave :

Remind me, how many times did the Republican candidates compare themselves to Reagan in last week’s debate?

Ohhh…how I love political stories like this :

When asked his favorite novel in an interview shown yesterday on the Fox News Channel, Mitt Romney pointed to “Battlefield Earth,” a novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. That book was turned into a film by John Travolta, a Scientologist.

Here’s a painting of Johnny Goodboy Tyler, the main character in Mitt Romney’s “favorite novel” :

An excerpt from Mitt Romney’s “favorite novel” :

“The probe and the pictures were on a metal that was rare everywhere and worth a clanking fortune. And Intergalactic paid the Psychlo governors sixty trillion Galactic credits for the directions and the concession. One gas barrage and we were in business.”

“Fairy tales, fairy tales,” said Char. “Every planet I ever helped gut has some butt and crap story like that. Every one.” He yawned his face into a huge cavern. “All that was hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago. You ever notice that the public relations department always puts their fairy tales so far back nobody can ever check them?”

“I’m going to go out and catch one of these things,” said Terl.

“Not with any of my crews or equipment you ain’t,” said Char.

Terl heaved his mammoth bulk off the seat and crossed the creaking floor to the berthing hatch.

“You’re as crazy as a nebula of crap,” said Char.

Seriously? Battlefield…Earth. By L. Ron Hubbard. Mitt Romney’s favorite novel? How many books has this guy read?

Lou Dobbs takes on CNN’s chyron for being too immigrant-friendly :

DOBBS: You know, it’s fascinating to me to look down at that lower third. You see that, Kiran? It says “Immigration Nation”.

What in the devil does that mean?

CHETRY: Well, we put it there because it rhymes, I think. It rhymes.

If that doesn’t work out, CNN could always try immigration “fixation”, “crustacean”, “stagnation”, “taxation”, “vibration”, “sedation”, “gestation”, “salvation”, “mutation”, “gyration”, “inflation”, “lactation”, or “damnation”. Y’know, since they’re such big fans of rhyming and all.

After seeing the news that Wiccan pentacles are now on the approved symbols for soldier’s headstones, I tracked down the official list of approved symbols on the Department of Veterans Affairs website. Needless to say, none of the thirty eight other symbols can compare to the coolness of the atheist symbol :

Why go with a cross or a star when you can have a gravestone that reminds people of this?

Building on Tom’s latest strip (which perfectly satirizes up every gun control “debate” that I’ve seen in the past week), it’s important to look beyond the conservative talking point that firearm regulations “don’t work” and ask why gun laws failed to prevent the tragedy at Virginia Tech. In the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the murder of 33 people was aided by – cue the passive voice – “legal loopholes” :

When a judge deemed Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho a danger to himself due to mental illness in 2005, that ruling should have disqualified him from buying a handgun under federal law.

It didn’t.

And his slaughter of 32 people last week has raised questions about the efficacy of instant background checks for firearms purchases by the mentally ill.

Under federal law, anyone who has been judged to be a danger to himself or others because of mental illness, as Cho was, should be prohibited from buying a gun.

His status should have been noted in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a database of people disqualified from gun purchases.

But, in Cho’s case, his mental status never went in the system.

That’s because the federal government relied on Virginia to provide the information, and Virginia law disqualifies a person from buying firearms only if they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital.

Cho was ordered to undergo outpatient treatment, but he was never committed. His appearance before the judge and his evaluation at a mental health facility did not show up when he bought the guns.

To view this disturbing news through the eyes of a second amendment zealot, Cho just slipped through the system. Whoops! There’s no way that anyone could have predicted this particular scenario. Since our best efforts to keep guns out of the hands of crazy people aren’t working, then the only logical answer is to give guns to everybody so they can protect themselves from the psychopaths who are “going to get guns anyways”.

The frustrating thing about all of this is that all of these “loopholes” aren’t accidents. They’re inserted into our laws on purpose as the result of the arduous compromises that go into every piece of gun legislation to appease the NRA. You can bet that the language in Virginia’s gun laws to prohibit gun purchases to people “only if they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital” was carefully worded and written in such a way that the law would apply to as few people as possible. Cho was able to buy firearms because at some point in the drafting of Virginia’s gun legislation, some gun aficionado writing the ban on selling weapons to the mentally ill decided to make a distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” commitment to a mental hospital. And what we saw last week was the direct result of that decision.