Multiple choice

*

Here is a pop quiz, based on a fact I learned yesterday. Your three choices are:

a. Bill Clinton
b. Ron Paul
c. Gabrielle Giffords

Which one do you think said this:

I have a Glock 9 millimeter, and I’m a pretty good shot.

Yeah, me neither. I heard it last night on Fresh Air; Terry Gross was interviewing a guy who just published a book about Glock. Here's something else you hit when you google "giffords glock":

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/09/01/gop-in-giffords-district-holds-raffle-for-glock/

Not being familiar with firearms, neither had I heard of "Glock foot," a condition sometimes contracted by law enforcement officials who switch from a Colt service revolver to a Glock and find out the hard way that the Glock's easy trigger action greatly increases the probability that one will shoot oneself when de-holstering the weapon.

Appropos of what, I do not know.

Last Giffords post, I hope

*

Before I leave the political aspects of the Giffords massacre behind in preparation for several days of phony debate and false equivalency to pollute mass media channels, I'll reprint below a comment on my post entitled "And Dove bars shall issue from the assholes of the righteous," contributed by that frequent and prolific Fifty50 visitor, "Anonymous." It evidently didn't make it to the comments section because Blogger thought it was too long or something, but it came through via email notification. Without further comment (except in the comments section):

yes, let bygones be bygones. Sage advice.

I put Fox news on (something always done with utmost caution) yesterday to see how they were reporting what MSNBC and CNN were doing their 24 hour work on. Hey, on Fox we could learn about smokeless cigarettes--a news infomercial since nothing else was happening in the country.

The right was momentarily caught unprepared to spin this stuff but guys like that "Fineman" give them a break to recover and crank up their propaganda.

The 74 yr old sheriff of Pima County AZ did the country a big service yesterday by stating very clearly what the hell is happening in AZ and in the US. Let Fox spin that. But many other issues are and should come up because of this, especially once the identity and circumstances of the other victims are made public.

Such as health care: the medical help the victims require as well as the mental health help guys like the shooter never get anymore (doesn't take a psychiatric degree to read that youtube shit and diagnose a schizophrenic).

Such as gun control: why the hell is a guy like that carrying around a police/ military style weapon? Why does he have access to it any more than he does to plastic explosives? And so much for the idiotic NRA rationale that in states like AZ with open carrying gunslingers the bad guys won't stand a chance. That could have been an NRA convention and, with that weapon, he could have hit 19 people just that quickly before anyone could react.

Such as the role of government: I didn't notice any private business dealing with that mess. Like evacuating the scene, like getting the injured to medical facilities, like the state university med school they were moved to itself. The public law enforcement entities handling the crime scene and investigation (city, county, state and federal--all taxpayer supported). No, the only role I noticed for the private sector in all this shit was the strip mall stage on which it took place. There is a very good reason for the taxes a society pays-- many of them demonstrated in this tragedy.

So lets sit back, take the "fineman's" advice, give our Randian and Paulian-worshipping brothers and sisters the benefit of the doubt, and hear what they have to say. Already the Alaskan snowbilly has pointed out that the "surveyor's" sights on her website were misinterpreted. Reload babe!

Achtung, "Howard Fineman" [updated]

*

For your information, "Howard Fineman," the only "connection" between 9/11 and the Giffords massacre is a cute little shorty named Christina Taylor Green, who will never walk the earth again. Thank you for your attention to this matter, you marinated schmuck.

PS: get a haircut.

Update: BoingBoing has the pseudo-hipster version of Finemanism---a pot-stirring but pointless foray into look-how-serious-I-am above-the-fray-ism. As with Finemanism, this sort of pseudo-philosophical prior restraint on discussing national-scale calamities and discussing relevant precursors has the effect of telling everybody to shut up until the right-wing noise machine takes command of the discussion, figures out a way to blame liberals and---even better---the victims themselves. After which our corporate mass media escort us off the topic and onto the next one of their choosing.