It's All About Timing

With a full staff back from vacation (though still under the weather), and everything on the table today from media ethics to the growing damage caused by the sequester, we thought the best use of our time and yours was to focus on timing - specifically, the timing on issues of gun safety legislation.

The NRA lobby, notorious for slow-walking gun safety legislation to its death, once again belatedly trotted out its own plan on Tuesday, a 225-page "school safety" report that may as well have been titled, "Let's Arm Everyone In School Except The Kids" or, even more simply, "Guns For Teachers." The only thing that might be worse than arming all the teachers and school staff everywhere is listening to the NRA in the first place.

It's obvious the NRA's latest document is nothing more than a carefully worded exercise in evading one of the five key components about gun safety we addressed initially last December - that while the media, mental health, economics, and politics are all factors in our national gun violence problem, it's the guns themselves that are the key part of the problem.

One of the other five components of America's continued gun violence problem is our corrupt political system - a system which wasn't always as corrupt as it is now.

Greg Sargent of the Washington Post exposed that reality clearly early Tuesday afternoon when he dug up an old New York Times interview with Senator John McCain from October 2000, along with a television ad of McCain denouncing the private gun seller loophole. Senator McCain, a longtime ally of the NRA, clearly laid out in the 2000 television ad the same problems with the loophole - often called the 'gun show loophole' - which most sensible gun rights supporters agree even today are problems.

The 2000 television ad was designed to help voters in Colorado and Oregon push to pass state laws for background checks on private gun sales, something the Colorado legislature and governor just put into law in their state last month. McCain's October 2000 interview with the New York Times made it obvious that the Senator wasn't just pushing for changes to the laws in Colorado and Oregon though. Indeed, in the Times' piece, McCain claimed that he would push to pass the gun-show bill in Congress in 2001, though history clearly shows McCain did no such thing.

In fact, these days, Senator McCain seems to be trying to time his media appearances so that he doesn't have to face the 2000 version of himself on gun safety.

Not surprisingly, McCain isn't the only one with bad timing.

Asa Hutchinson, the former GOP congressman from Arkansas who presented the NRA's school "plan" midday Tuesday agreed later in the day in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer that universal background checks would in fact be a sensible idea. Of course, the NRA, in a move as well timed as snowshoes in June, immediately followed up Hutchinson's CNN appearance by saying the former congressman didn't currently speak for them on background checks.

Maybe Hutchison was thinking about a different time. In 1999, the NRA's Wayne LaPierre testified in front of Congress that the NRA supported background checks as "reasonable…  for every sale at every gun show. No loopholes anywhere for anyone." The NRA even did a massive ad campaign in 1999 in favor of background checks.

The fact is, whatever ridiculous plan the NRA is pushing for today, any American with sense would need another hole in their head if they were to honestly believe that what the NRA - the gun manufacturers' lobby - has to say on guns is going to be anything other than a message to "Buy more guns."

In life, timing is everything.

The gun makers' time to control the message of gun safety has passed. It's long past time Americans enacted sensible gun safety reform.

Time To Put Your Shoulder Into It

The wait for spring to truly arrive has seemed especially long this year in many corners of the nation, so to many Americans, the crushingly slow move towards seasonably warm Spring weather feels like the whole nation is taking on a Sisyphean task, pushing a massive boulder uphill.

For those of us focused on moving our nation forward politically, this painfully slow feeling is one we've been used to for at least a dozen years now. That frustration is often quite obvious in the way President Obama continues to push for progress against the obstructionists in the GOP.

For some time now, though - especially since the successful 2012 election - we've been hearing more complaining and grousing coming from the liberal left towards President Obama and towards certain Democratic politicians. We're more than willing to admit - we've got our own issues with President Obama's Adminstration, and with certain other Democratic politicians, chief among them the ineffectual Harry Reid.

That said, we've got news for progressive-minded Americans, and indeed any sensible American, regardless of their political leanings who wants to sit on their backsides and blame all our nation's problems on either President Obama or Republicans in Congress: Get off your behind, step up, and get to pushing. It's time to put your shoulder into it - "it" being the things we need to do to move America into the future.

A perfect example of this is in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare."

As Ed Kilgore of Washington Monthly notes, this week marks the third anniversary of the final House vote that gave us the ACA. The ignorant idiots of the far right, like right-winger Ben Domenech, continue to trash the ACA, insisting that someday they'll repeal and replace Obamacare.

Anyone with half a brain has to laugh at that attitude, as Republicans in Congress have been promising "repeal and replace" for nearly three years now, and have NEVER presented so much as a whisper of a hint of a notion of a realistic replacement plan for the ACA. In a similar way, Republicans have been promising to strike down Roe vs. Wade for forty years, and while they have pushed through some draconian attacks on the rights of American women, they still haven't been successful completely curtailing the rights of women and individuals after forty years of failed attempts. That doesn't mean defeating the habitual right-wing liars will be easy, as Julie Burkhart and the Trust Women Foundation are finding out in Kansas right now.

The fact is, securing further progress in America is going to be hard.

Whether it's on the issue of gun safety, where most Americans - 91% - agree, or it's on the issue of immigration reform, on the availability of honest, ethical, and diverse media, or fighting for sensible, effective, progressive economic policies that work, there are no more battles against the small-minded that will be easy to win any more.

Extremist conservatives understand: their very existence is threatened by things like hard work, performed by good people of all sides working towards common goals on issues like the budget, immigration, gun safety, health care, the environment, and more. Listening to one another, and remembering that most Americans really do want the best for other Americans - even many of those they disagree with - isn't easy. Passing what appears to be sane sensible political solutions over the billions of dollars at the disposal of corporate politics is even more difficult.

The only way to lose, however, is to give up, to stop pushing to make things better for all, to stop pushing forward.

When President Obama campaigned, he never said, "Elect me, and I'll do it all for you." He said, "Yes WE Can."

If WE want anything done, WE - all of us - must put our proverbial shoulders into it, together.

Slipping On Reality

What do Minnesota, Wisconsin, Utah, and Arkansas all have in common? If you said "None of those teams are in the 2013 NCAA Men's Final Four," you wouldn't be wrong this year, though you also wouldn't be correct - at least within the boundaries of our topic for today.

If your answer was, "All four states have experienced massive oil spills within the last year - and three within the last two weeks," you'd be correct, unfortunately.

The latest disaster this weekend saw thousands of barrels of oil spewing from a ruptured Exxon Mobil pipeline into a residential neighborhood in central Arkansas. Twenty-two homes had to be evacuated, in a spill that literally saw oil running down residential streets and between houses.

Of course, since it was a holiday weekend, smack in the middle of Congress' latest two-week vacation, it was nearly impossible to find a politician of any kind with something serious to say about the latest oil disaster. That doesn't surprise us, since politicians of all kinds have been slipping and dancing around the issues of oil and environmental safety for far too many years now.

For all the work the Obama Administration has done on environmental issues - like requiring much better fuel standards for cars and trucks, or clamping down on emissions - the fact of the matter is, none of that will matter if President Obama and other politicians don't stop the Keystone pipeline route through Nebraska.

No matter what the decision is on the Keystone pipeline, the most important liquid flowing through Nebraska over the next hundred years wont be oil - something a task force in the Nebraska Legislature made very clear last week.

As reporter JoAnne Young noted, Nebraska state Sen. Tom Carlson, in a meeting of the Legislature's Natural Resources Committee last week, talked about what could happen if America ever runs out of affordable gas, coal, or oil. "We will survive," he said.

However, if Nebraskans ever lose access to our amazing surplus of clean, drinkable, useable water? "We will die," said Carlson.

For all the bluster already flooding the media from the oil companies about how many trucks they sent to Arkansas to suck up the tar sands oil from the neighborhood, or how well the cleanup is going from the oil spill in Minnesota, the facts remain the same. No matter how much cleanup is done in either location, the raw tar sands oil has now damaged both areas where the spills have occurred, in ways that neither area will fully recover from for many years to come.

No matter how many short-term temporary jobs the Keystone pipeline will generate, all it takes is one spill, once, in any area over the Ogallala Aquifer, and ALL the jobs in a county or a region could be lost, because the water may no longer be suitable for irrigating crops or slaking the thirst of Nebraska residents.

Just one spill could do exactly what state Sen. Carlson fears, and kill off a large area of Nebraska, Kansas, or anywhere else along the path of the pipeline, as water is turned from a lifeline into worthless poison.

If you don't think the price is too high for that kind of oil - oil Americans will never see, as it will be shipped to foreign ports and sold abroad - ask yourself these questions:

If you lived in the neighborhood of an oil spill, how safe would you feel drinking the water from your well? How safe would you feel letting your kids play outside? What price would you pay to never have to see crude oil flooding the streets of your neighborhood?

These are kinds of questions our politicians from both parties are slipping on right now.
From our perspective, the right answers don't really seem that slick. Then again, we're not financed by oil company lobbyists.