Recent Comments

1. about 14 hours ago on Clay Jones

   I think that the rate of fire is greater than 180. Unless you mean that it takes a minute to burn through 6 thirty round magazines.

2. about 14 hours ago on Clay Jones

   Probably, in the narrowest sense of the legal definition of “machine gun” (an arm designed to fire multiple rounds with a single trigger pull and hold operation), the SCOTUS judgment holds water. Yet, a semi-automatic arm which is field modified (instead of being a designed and manufactured machine gun) to function precisely as a machine gun, is therefore a machine gun for all practical purposes.

3. about 14 hours ago on Bill Bramhall

   SCOTUS (well the 6 right-wingers) have already legalized machine guns — as long as they are modified semi-automatic arms.

4. about 14 hours ago on Arlo and Janis

   My Dad was a Navy vet, I think that he had enlisted before WW2. He always played his cards pretty close to his vest. He didn’t talk about his own life and I didn’t seem to be able to formulate questions that would elicit illumination from him. Although I had regular visits with him after my parents broke up when I was 9, we drifted apart during my adolescence and adulthood. When I was in my 30’s a dispute cropped up between us related to a trivial incident involving, of all things, a case of lube oil. Out of this, however, came a resolution and we developed a much more mature relationship. It was not possible to salvage the missing links, of course, but we became closer in a sort of mixture of filial/parental friendship. One Tuesday evening in early July, when I was in my 40’s, I pulled up at home from work and he was parked in front of the house. We went to a local beanery and had supper together. Back at home we shot the breeze for a while until he saddled up and drove home, wanting to arrive before dark. At about 9 Thursday morning his next door neighbor called me at work and told me that Dad had died of a massive coronary Wednesday evening. One never knows ….

   Most of my scant knowledge of Dad’s life I got second hand, and from photos in a album belong to his sister which I found at his house, after he died.

5. 1 day ago on Clay Bennett

   I take your point as regards machine guns, or more generally arms INTENDED to fire multiple rounds with one trigger pull, in other words when the arm is fully automatic. Bofors AA guns are also machine guns by that definition. Another way to put the issue is to ask: Does any modification (or failure such as a broken sear) which requires the shooter to execute a single trigger pull to fire multiple rounds make an arm fully automatic? That seems to be the case as regards switches and bumpstocks, the arm, now fully automatic, clearly seems to fit the definition of a machine gun. Further, if that result, a fully automatic arm, is what the shooter INTENDED to be so, is the arm not only effectively but also legally a machine gun? As in many — if not all arguments — defining terms and their relations is an early, if not the first step. Yet I fail to see how such a modification of an arm that makes it anything but a machine gun as defined by statute. If it quacks like a duck, and its not a toy or a decoy, it’s a duck. Sadly, your good point about new legislation to embrace these modifications hasn’t the legs even to waddle like a duck, if it’s any kind of a duck, it’s a dead duck — dead in the egg.

6. 1 day ago on Clay Bennett

   Patty-cakes??

7. 1 day ago on Michael Ramirez

   When I first read your riposte, I thought I should apologize to you for implying that you were taking an obtuse position on the NY conviction. That thought MAY have been premature. It’s clear from NY law that Trump committed felonies by covering up his peccadilloes and falsifying business records. That was why he was convicted, unanimously as required in criminal cases. That’s no BS — it’s the truth. You say that the jury was biased; perhaps you should elaborate, with proof. You claim that Trump is a business man, but his business practices landed him in bankruptcy several times and many of those with the temerity (or greed or ignorance or naivete) to trust him suffered. Some have profited (or, like Trump, profiteered), too. He has possibly broken laws previously, and I think that his company may have paid some penalty when judgment went against him. “[H]ard nosed practices” as applied to Trump is merely a euphemism for unethical practices which consist in stonewalling legal action (as is the case in the other 3 trials today) or making in financially impossible for those he misused, cheated, stiffed, or otherwise abused to sustain legal action for redress. While this may not be relevant to the NY conviction, per se, it is relevant to his other trials — and to his presidential aspirations, especially for those who are his base. It’s a shame that it won’t matter to them. It’s also relevant to the extent that anyone else who abused his accusers, their families, and the judge would have been punished far more than Trump. If there is a two tiered judicial process, he is its poster child for impunity. I am quite aware that “rapid fire” arms were extant in the 18th century, but they weren’t of the ilk generally regarded as “arms” in the 2nd amendment. Hence, that take is on the issue is quite meritless. You speak of a “plethora of additional writings to back up the straight forward understanding of the 2nd Amendment”. Yet you didn’t opine on that “understanding.”

8. 1 day ago on Nick Anderson

   Restriction of the right to vote is a good example. The right wingers do this by, among other means, passing laws that make it more difficult to obtain absentee ballots, closing polls in certain areas, disenfranchising Native Americans, and ex-convicts, the new attempt to throw out mail-in ballots which arrive at the counting centers after election day (despite the fact that the ballots have valid and timely postmark). There are also moves to curtail some forms of the right to free speech and assembly with threats of arrest. We also see that some of the right-wingers want to amalgamate evangelical “Christianity” into the US government, a clear violation of the establishment clause.

9. 1 day ago on Nick Anderson

   Greed is a common theme everywhere. That is self-evident to anyone with the sense that God gave geese. I merely restricted the scope of my initial comment to Musk’s recent windfall. If you actually paid attention to the second comment you will see that I drew a parallel between greed — the concentration of wealth — in general and how it permeates both communist as well as capitalist forms of government, as well as individuals, such as Musk. The only difference is that a purely, or functioning, capitalistic system has the ability to create, as it were, wealth, whereas a purely communistic system merely redistributes existing wealth by appropriation (read: theft). In the end, the object is the same in either case: to concentrate wealth in the smallest possible number of hands.

10. 1 day ago on Steve Kelley

    But how is it valid to pin the past 4 years of inflation on Biden? There are other factors more germane to the situation, such as those I listed in my previous comment. The Vietnam war made a significant contribution to the conditions in the 70’s along with the oil embargoes, for example, just as the trillions the administrations (an Congress) frittered away on the Donnybrooks in Iraq and Afghanistan. I noticed that you didn’t mention those events. Likewise, the GOP malfeasance before and after WW1 and public get-rich-quick of the 20’s led to the ‘29 Crash and the nearly 2 decades of Depression following. Despite some gains by FDR’s New Deal, it took WW2 to invigorate the US economy — but that was a war with goals, unlike the wars from ’50s (Korea) through the present day — and the Depression economy was in the basement, unlike today’s rather more robust economy which, by that fact, tends to result in inflation.