So the Supreme Court is taking up guns again:
The Supreme Court set the stage for a historic ruling on gun rights and the 2nd Amendment by agreeing today to hear a challenge to Chicago’s ban on handguns.
At issue is whether state and local gun-control ordinances can be struck down as violating the “right to keep and bear arms” in the 2nd Amendment.
A ruling on the issue, due by next summer, could open the door to legal challenges to various gun control measures in cities and states across the nation.
The case also will decide whether the 2nd Amendment protects a broad constitutional right, similar to the 1st Amendment’s right to free speech or the 4th Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
If federal law overrides state & local law when state & local law is more lenient, then what argument is there for it not to override when state & local law is more strict?
I popped back onto TPM briefly today & commented on the Senate Finance Committee’s public government-option amendment vote:
Anyone else find it disgusting that the “public option” is the part considered controversial while the idea of forcing people to buy insurance who can’t afford it just gets glossed over?
Note that I didn’t let on that my main issue was the ignoring of the previous intervention that made health care so expensive in the first place. Nope, just left that the proposal isn’t that much of a departure from the current system. I got the following as the 1st response:
Not at all. We are “forced” to pay taxes that are used for the common good, wear helmets when riding a motorcycle, register and insure our cars, follow regulations limiting dumping toxic chemicals into the air, sea and land, pay into disability and social security, get a license before we practice in many professional fields and drive on the right side of the road. We are prevented from discriminating against others due to race, sex and age, build structures that are ADA-compliant and follow all manners of laws that may not directly benefit ourselves but improve the lives of everybody and assist in maintaining a functioning society. The only other options are chaos, or living as a hermit. Society requires structure, and no society has ever survived based on purely voluntary compliance.
Does anyone else imagine a bot tossing this out at the press of a button?
What people need isn’t credit, but MONEY. There’s a difference.
“Remember, never point your gun at anything you don’t intend to put a hole in“:
An eastern Missouri man is dead after accidentally shooting himself while teaching firearms safety to his girlfriend. KSDK-TV reports that 40-year-old James Looney of Imperial died of a gunshot wound to the head. […] Witnesses told authorities that Looney would put the guns to his head, ask his girlfriend if she thought the gun would go off, then pull the trigger.
The safety mechanisms worked for the first two guns. But the third gun fired. Looney died Saturday at a hospital.
Simultaneously the worst and BEST firearms safety lesson possible. A Darwin Award awaits you…
In case anyone was wondering about the banks:
Tired of the government bailing out banks? Get ready for this: officials may soon ask banks to bail out the government.
Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors. That would enable the fund, which is rapidly running out of money because of a wave of bank failures, to continue to rescue the sickest banks.
The plan, strongly supported by bankers and their lobbyists, would be a major reversal of fortune. (emphasis mine)
How odd. So how is this fund usually filled?
The FDIC maintains the [Deposit Insurance Fund] by assessing depository institutions an insurance premium. The amount each institution is assessed is based both on the balance of insured deposits as well as on the degree of risk the institution poses to the insurance fund.
-Wiki entry on the FDIC.
Whoops…looks like a case of drastically optimistic low-balling on that premium. Thus, the reason the banks & their lobbyists prefer loaning the government the money — ironic, what with the bailouts an’ all — becomes screamingly obvious. Let’s go back to that first article…
A hallmark of the financial crisis has been the decision by successive administrations over the last year to lend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to large and small banks.
“It’s a nice irony,” said Karen Shaw Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, a consulting company. “Like so much of this crisis, this is an issue that involves the least worst options.”
Bankers and their lobbyists like the idea because it is more attractive than the alternatives: yet another across-the-board emergency assessment on them, or tapping an existing $100 billion credit line to the Treasury. […] Bankers worry that a special assessment of $5 billion to $10 billion over the next six months would crimp their profits and could push a handful of banks into deeper financial trouble or even receivership. And any new borrowing from the Treasury would be construed as a taxpayer bailout that could open the industry to a political reaction, resulting in a wave of restrictions like fresh limits on executive pay.
Translation: “We don’t just want you to save our asses, we want to make a profit off of you saving our asses, disguised as us helping you.” A game of three-card monte looks like less of a screw-job in comparison to dealing with these people.
Q: How does a wheelchair-bound man with no legs commit domestic violence & resist arrest?
A: “Who cares, let’s zap him & beat him anyway!” said the cop…
Reading this bit by Cunning Realist re: the economy & the popularity of conspiracy theorists, I realized something that should be injected into the current debate somehow: the proper reverse of conspiracy — the idea that a relatively small group runs everything and is responsible for bad outcomes — is not normal thought, but elite worship, the idea that a small group is responsible for all the good outcomes. Consider the treatment of the Clinton years for example, and how when the economy was seen as running smoothly (which we now know was based on false growth, bubbles the lesson of which we completely ignored when they popped, insisting on inflating more) this was credited to a group that generally included Bill himself & a couple of his advisers, Alan Greenspan, and the CEOs of a few large multinationals.
Obviously powerful people have disproportionate influence. That doesn’t mean they can move mountains though. You can only distort so much before the brick-wall limiter marked Reality slams everything back in place.
Figures that an exchange on one of those talking head shows would produce a WTF moment when I don’t watch it:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You were against the individual mandate…
OBAMA: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: …during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don’t. How is that not a tax?
OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here — here’s what’s happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average — our families — in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I’ve said is that if you can’t afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn’t be punished for that. That’s just piling on. If, on the other hand, we’re giving tax credits, we’ve set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we’ve driven down the costs, we’ve done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you’ve just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that’s…
Taxes = government saying “pay us or else…”. The individual mandate = government saying “buy health insurance, or pay us. Or else…”. Whether you call it a tax or not doesn’t really seem to matter, does it? As for supporting something that he trashed during the election season: DBSIWTC.
Obama citing this as yet another falsehood from the Right is especially instructive, seeing as how the coinage came from a Democratic senator. The point for the original expression was observing the inevitable problem (beyond the moral one, that is) with forcing people to buy something on pain of monetary penalty and then saying “but we’ll subsidize it!” when the complaints come in: setting the subsidies.
If the amount is too low, then this bit of “reform” makes the issue of affordability even worse. This happens both immediately in that the cost of insurance you’re required to get will far overshoot the subsidy, and in the long run in that the price would go up over time so the insurance industry can try to eat as much tax money as possible as the subsidy is forced to increase.
On the other hand, say the subsidy is pretty generous. Well, if you’re going to provide so much for buying health insurance, why even bother with the middle man? You might as well just purchase the care. That is, if your goal is actually helping people get health care, which I doubt was ever truly the case.
Now, take the employer mandate. The idea is that if a business larger than a certain size doesn’t provide its employees with insurance they’ll be penalized in a similar manner. Similar issue: if the penalty isn’t large enough, then it becomes cheaper to drop coverage than it is to maintain it. Combine this with the aforementioned individual mandate and you end up with a lot of people for whom the public government-option could be all they can afford anyway.
To the “moderates” out there: see why the liberals are so gung-ho about public government-option? Note how they’re already angry about this…
To the liberals: see why I say you might as well have just skipped this and went single-payer from the jump? The health insurance “market” as it stands is a joke, and we have political intervention to thank for that anyway, if you’re not going to roll back the previous distortion then what’s the point in maintaining it?
To Obama & anyone else conveniently spewing the “healthy idiots with money who think they’re invincible are the reason for the mandate” crap: what percentage of the uninsured population do you REALLY think fits that description? I smelled straw when Reason brought it up as an inane badge of honor of sorts, and I smell it now from you guys using it as a punching bag.
Found this amusing:
An NBA star and former area high school player was pulled over and arrested in Prince George’s County on Thursday night after a police officer found he was carrying three loaded guns, authorities said.
Delonte West, a guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers, was driving a three-wheeled motorcycle north on Interstate 95 near Route 214 in the Largo area when he cut off a Prince George’s County police officer, authorities said. The officer pulled him over, and West told the officer that he was carrying a handgun in his waistband.
That prompted the officer to call for backup, and investigators found that West was actually carrying three guns: a Beretta 9mm in his waistband, a Ruger .357 strapped to his leg and a shotgun in a guitar case slung over his back, said Maj. Andy Ellis, a spokesman for the Prince George’s County Police Department. (emphasis mine)
I’m sure he was just on his way to a meeting of the local chapter of the Antonio Banderas fan club…
Shorter Glenn Greenwald: “Government checking concentrated power? Signs point to ‘who are you fucking kidding?’…”
