Good Morning!

1  I want to take a moment to salute the commenters here for a remarkable performance the past week regarding the re-emergence of the gun control debate following the Vegas Strip massacre. There have been a staggering 664 comments (so far) on the topic in various threads, two Comments of the Day (and another couple soon to be published), and a rare guest post. The level of discourse has been overwhelmingly high, and the sophistication and variety of opinion has been exemplary. Through all of this, there has been little of equal quality from the mainstream media and its pundits, while the quality of opinion and debate on television and from elected officials has been only slightly above the “Do something!” level still flourishing on Facebook. (I’m going to my Facebook feed now to pick a recent example. Let’s see…here’s one! This is a representative segment of the comments on this story on Mediaite, admittedly an especially dumb one, about MSNBC political analyst Steve Schmidt telling Bill Maher , among other simple-minded observations, that only seem relevant to the anti-gun hysterics, that  it is “harder to buy cough medicine than it is to buy an AK-47 or 50 of them”…

This guy is an idiot. Tell him to go buy cough syrup, then go buy an AK and come back in an hour and see what he has. I bet it would only be cough syrup.

is it in a liberal’s nature to murder unborn babies? just askin

It’s a birth control device for them.

Awww, you need attention

And you gave it

I live in your head

Why so many?

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Heroin is against the law, and yet we have a heroin epidemic. Automatic weapons, like the AK-47, are against the law and yet Steve Schmidt says they easier to get then cough syrup with codeine. He doesn’t even see his idiocy.

False equivalencies to justify your need to compensate, boring.

Well, you can get a semi-automatic one, but it’s a far cry from a military-grade automatic.

The left has issues with their vision. The unicorns that roam the landscape crapping skittles and pissing perfume block their view, I guess.

Damn you really are a mental nut case

Ugh.

Thank you, everybody.

You do Ethics Alarms proud..

2. In the category of “This is so obviously incompetent that I should have to write about it“  The IRS awarded a sole source $7.25 million contract to Equifax to verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud. This was after the credit company negligently allowed the personal data of millions of Americans to be hacked. The excuses being offered by the agency are hilarious. IRS officials claim they were forced by circumstances to issue the no-bid multi-million dollar contract to Equifax. The GAO calls this baloney. The IRS argued, in a letter to Congress, that the IRS  it was unaware of any fraud related to the company’s data breach.  No, it’s just that Equifax was incompetent and negligent to an inexcusable extent that ought to be criminal. Another defense offered by the IRS:  most of the data hacked by Equifax had already been revealed in previous corporate breaches, such as those at Target and Anthem.  WHAT? That’s like saying you are a trustworthy nanny because the child you let get run over by a car was already dying of cancer.

From Politico:

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle blasted the IRS decision.

“In the wake of one of the most massive data breaches in a decade, it’s irresponsible for the IRS to turn over millions in taxpayer dollars to a company that has yet to offer a succinct answer on how at least 145 million Americans had personally identifiable information exposed,” Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) told POLITICO in a statement.

Ya think?

A. Cancel the contract.

B. Fire the head of the IRS and anyone in the chain responsible for this decision.3.  A Facebook (and a genuine) friend posted this yesterday:

“Why hypocrisy is GOP’s middle name: Right-to-Life darling Tim Murphy resigns Congress after begging his mistress (half his age) to have an abortion.”

How pathologically biased and unable to see one’s own hypocrisy does someone have to be to pick yesterday, of all days, to accuse Republicans of hypocrisy, when the far larger news story was the revelation of the decades long history of sexual harassment and predatory conduct by Hollywood kingmaker and major Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein? The party of the “war on women” attack on the GOP embraced him. Barack Obama allowed his daughter to intern with him. Meryl Streep publicly praised him. Hillary Clinton let him hold fundraisers for her. Ashley Judd, who was the most vicious anti-Trump speaker at the women’s rally on the Mall, had been personally harassed by him. If there was ever a day in which the claim that either party’s supporters were more hypocritical than the other’s  was self-evidently absurd, this was it.

Amazingly enough, it was possible to make an even more head-exploding statement than my friend’s on this topic, though not surprising that The View’s loudest, dumbest leftist would be the one to make it. Here’s Joy Behar, during a Murphy-bashing segment on the show:

“I thought about how I had voted for Bill Clinton, who obviously had a little something under the desk. I also voted for John Kennedy in my youth, who had millions of mistresses, or whatever they called them in those days. Teddy Kennedy, who had Chappaquiddick…the difference between me and the people who voted for [Murphy] is the Democrats are not the family of values. They don’t go around taking abortion rights away from people or talking about gay rights being rescinded. They’re not hypocrites — they’re just dogs. You see the difference?”

OHnoohno…HERE I GO!!!!

I’m sorry…I was afraid of that. The second time reading that cretinous statement was too much.

First, Behar is lying. She was born in 1942. She would have had one shot at voting for Jack Kennedy, and it was in 1960. In 1960, Joy was 18 years old. 18-year-olds were not given the vote until the 26th Amendment was ratified in 1971. She also could not have voted for Ted Kennedy, having never been a resident of Massachusetts, the only place he ever ran for office. She might have voted for Robert Kennedy, another sociopathic misogynist, if he weren’t already dead by the time Joy could vote.

Second, it is of course hypocrisy for Democrats to simultaneously make feminism and the rights of victims of sexual predators a primary issue, and to declare Donald Trump unfit for office because he talked about “pussy-grabbing,” while at the same time cheering on a female Presidential candidate who was only in a position to run because she enabled her pussy-grabbing husband, still a Democratic icon, applauding a habitual feel-up artist like Joe Biden, and accepting the money of Harvey Weinstein.

 

Finally...Why, what an a attractive and admirable description of Democrats! With advocates like Behar, who needs detractors?

4. There’s no defending President Trump’s “calm before the storm” comment. It’s incompetent, irresponsible, reckless, and wrong, no matter what he meant by it. A President’s words can cause the stock market to do the Macarena; it can make foreign leaders panic, and the public afraid.  Does he Not understand that he can’t troll, as his clean-up team has suggested, or joke about life and death matters? Not so far, anyway. This is an abuse of his position, power, and the Presidency. It is hard, when one is an asshole to the bone, as the President is—he is far from the only one to fit this description—to learn to control it and limit Asshole Conduct Flare-Ups, or ACFU, but as the leader of the nation, Trump is duty-bound to make the effort. So far, I see no evidence that he is making an effort, or that he even understands that he should.