Alabama Republican candidate for Senate Will Brooke shoots ACA, completely rips off Sen. Manchin

A second quality advertisement today comes from Will Brooke, who is running in Alabama for the Republican nomination for the Senate race. Invoking the Second Amendment, he gets in his truck, taking a print-out of the Affordable Care act with him out to where he can shoot it with a handgun, a rifle, and finally in super-dramatic-slow-mo an assault rifle (that music!), before eventually putting the whole deal through a Will-Brooke-branded shredder.

However, this is such a rip-off of Sen. Joe Manchin’s campaign ad from 2010:

Surprise, Wendy Davis isn’t the progressive hero she’s made out to be

It was just a of couple days ago that we learned that Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis thinks Texas’s gun controls are too strict. Now we’ve got this:

Wendy Davis said Tuesday that she would have supported a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, if the law adequately deferred to a woman and her doctor.

First, what in the hell is that even? What does “if the law adequately deferred to a woman and her doctor” mean? Okay, explain yourself:

“My concern, even in the way the 20-week ban was written in this particular bill, was that it didn’t give enough deference between a woman and her doctor making this difficult decision, and instead tried to legislatively define what it was,” Davis said.

That makes about as much sense. So, you support a 20-week ban, as long as there’s some kind of “deference” between a woman and her doctor?

Forget about this whole 20-week thing just being a completely arbitrary deadline with no reason except to force women to carry fetuses to term. Actually, don’t forget, because that’s around the time when doctors can tell if there’s going to be problems with the pregnancy, which may lead some to terminate. But of course, that would by no means be connected, just like requiring hospital admittance privileges to perform the procedure, even when there isn’t a hospital within hours of your clinic isn’t supposed to be just to shut down clinics. Of course not. Because, even though we’re against burdensome regulations, we feel only these regulations are necessary because…safety. Yeah, safety. See? We care more about women than workers!

I guess pretending you have a chance at winning an election in Texas means selling out some principles. Or, maybe she really, really believes it. I don’t pretend to know. But, why did she even stand for those so many hours? Deference?

New York Times Columnist Line of the Day

If you’re one of the three people who remembers this here blog from its hay-day, you have once in a blue moon checked out the New York Times op-ed page. You probably recognize the names of the columnists, who every day spout the most conventionally wise of the conventional wisdom. This is a feature that is dedicated to these folks, highlighting one line that is either funny, ridiculous, strange, or actually intelligent or well-written.

Today’s is a special installment. In a column today, Joe Nocera discusses The Gun Report, a project he started a year ago, that simply tracks and keeps counts of news reports of gun violence.

After The Gun Report had been up and running for a while, several Second Amendment advocates complained that we rarely published items that showed how guns were used to prevent a crime. The reason was not that we were biased against crime prevention; it was that it didn’t happen very often.

Remember, if you hit the NYTimes paywall, just open the link in your browser’s incognito or private browsing mode.

Tim Wise: "Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black"

CC photo from Flickr user JoeBehrSoCal

(Got from Ghost, but since he’s at work or the bar or something, I’m stealing it.)

Tim Wise nails it:

Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters – the black protesters – spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester – these black protesters with guns – be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.

Imagine that white members of Congress, while walking to work, were surrounded by thousands of angry black people, one of whom proceeded to spit on one of those congressmen for not voting the way the black demonstrators desired. Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob? After all, this is what white Tea Party protesters did recently in Washington.

Should probably read the rest. It’s pretty awesome.

(Via Blue Mass Group)