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After the Marysville-Pilchuck High School shooting, Goldy quite rightly said that now is the time to talk about this, including in ways that are politicized. It’s happening and if we can’t talk about reasonable solutions for dealing with these things as they happen, they’re going to keep happening.

But the other question is when the fuck would be the time we talk about them?

I’ve mentioned on this blog before that I had a roommate who was murdered.* It was the better part of a decade ago, and shit still sets me off about it sometimes. I mean I literally cried about it this weekend (and writing this post), and certainly part of the reason I’ve been thinking about it more now is it is the gun debates in the air. But they’re still worth talking about, because they’re the only way we figure out policy.

Shit sets me off sometimes. It was pretty close to where I was working, and for at least a year I would drive past where it happened at lunch or after work even though it was a little out of the way. One time I stopped my car and got out and had actually ate just looking at the building, but usually I just drove past. A couple years ago, I had jury duty and they asked the jury pool about crimes that had been committed to people who we knew. I told the story, as I’d done before without incident, and I don’t know if it was the judge saying “I’m so sorry” because sometimes strangers saying that is more of a problem than people I know, or because I woke up early and it was just a stressful day but I just couldn’t concentrate the rest of the day. I have a cousin who I love very much but who is a big ol’ NRA person and sometimes I argue with him about these things, and it’s super draining.

And so I’ve been reluctant to get involved in this particular debate beyond some snarky posts because, as important as it is, it also sometimes seems like just a big ol’ chance to feel like shit. I have some family who are pretty actively volunteering on the campaign, and for a while I thought I should too, but I just can’t. And I don’t know if there will be a right time for the family and friends at SPU. And I don’t know that there will be a right time for people whose families have just been victims of street crime or suicide with guns. I don’t know that there is or that there will be a right time for me in the future, but I’m still glad we’re having the debate because it’s the only way we can prevent the next one.

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In the immediate wake of last week’s tragic shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, the chatter on gun rights websites like NorthwestFirearms.com immediately focused on the obvious culprit: a Michael Bloomberg funded “false flag” conspiracy. Because cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing:

And that was one of the more thoughtful posts; at least he prefaced his paranoid fantasy with the word “if.” You should watch the video that attempts to connect the shooting to Bloomberg, pondering “what are the odds” of it happening just two weeks before the election? (Or rather, you shouldn’t watch it.)

The conspiracy theorizing isn’t all that surprising. Some gun nuts are nutty. But it is a little frightening how people with guns are so quick to believe that gun control advocates would happily murder children to advance our political agenda. At least when we demonize the opposition as an imminent threat to our life and liberty, we lack the deadly weapons with which to act on our paranoia.

– What’s broken about Mars Hill is the misogyny and homophobia more than the way one guy wrote about it, or even the money stuff.

– I’d like to take a step back and urge you to question why you or anyone would take to the internet to insult a celebrity to begin with.

– Downballot races like County Crank deserve more attention.

– There’s all sorts of Halloween stuff. I don’t think I’m going out this year, but if I do it’ll be as sexy Carl Ballard.

– All the best to Kevin Drum

– Did You Know about cities are some of my favorite Tom The Dancing Bug.

Last week’s contest was won by Seventy2002. It was Wichita.

This week’s contest is related to something in the news from October, good luck!

John 15:6
If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

Discuss.

The gun lobby lap dogs of Congress.

Young Turks: Obamacare’s worst nightmare hilariously coming true for Republicans.

Chris Hayes: Mr. President, “Don’t touch my girlfriend!”:

Thom: Fukushima radiation on the West Coast.

A Nation Is (Still)Born

• Michael Brooks: South should secede soon & form the nation of “Reagan”.
• Young Turks: The nation of Reagan

There’s help: creepy British child syndrome.

Mental Floss: 29 dumb facts about deserts.

Young Turks: Young hot women should date, not vote, says FAUX News.

Sam Seder: George Carlin finally gets his “way”.

John Oliver: Translators.

White House: West Wing Week.

Political Ebola:

• Obama: What you need to know about ebola.
• Mark Fiore: Ebola Buddy.
• An Ebola update from Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH
• Young Turks: Ebola fear mongering goes viral in the U.S..
• WaPo :How the CDC trains workers to combat Ebola
• David Pakman: Right wing nutbags push meme that liberals believe Americans should die from ebola
• Matt Binder: Ebola overreaction reaches new high in US.
• Michael Brooks: Ted Cruz is unbelievably dishonest.
• Young Turks: Good ebola news as Nurse is now ebola-free.
• David Pakman: Ebola panic gets Maine teacher suspended for simply visiting Nigeria Liberia Texas
• Ann Telnaes: Republican fearmongering.
• Calming ebola fears.
• Young Turks: Obama’s and Bush’s Czar.
• David Pakman: Louie Gohmert has bad case of Teabola!

Chris Hayes and Howard Dean: Vermont’s funniest gubernatorial debate moments.

Debate crowd laughs at carpetbagger Scott Brown (via Crooks and Liars).

ONN exclusive: A one-on-one interview with GOD.

Alex Wagner: Four Blackwater guards who murdered 17 civilians are convicted.

David Pakman: Louie Gohmert discusses gay massages to argue against gays in the military.

Young Turks: His-Panic.

The Republican War on Low Wage Workers:

• Sam Seder: Chris Christie reveals his disdain for low wage employees.
• Ann Telnaes: Chris Christie is tired of all the minimum wage talk.
• David Pakman: FAUX “Business” trashes people who want a living wage
• Richard Fowler: Scott Walker things minimum wage serves no purpose
• Young Turks: Raising the minimum wage could save billions annually
• Sam Seder: Chris Christie is really tired of hearing about the minimum wage.

Mark Halperin critiques Joni Ernst’s “closing” ad (with hogs) (via Crooks and Liars).

Thom: America’s lost generation.

Ed and Pap: Republicans blocking the vote at all costs.

Maddow: Alabama top Republican indicted on corruption.

Harry Shearer’s: “Nixon’s The One”.

Young Turks: Bill-O-the-Clown explains votes for Democrats.

The Asshats of Alaska:

• Sam Seder: Police releases audio of booze-fueled Palin family brawl
• Young Turks: Sarah Palin’s PAC is a scam
• Unapologetic, Rep. Don Young blames government dependence for youth suicide (via Crooks and Liars).
• Sam Seder: Did Congressman Don Young (R-AK) once killed a guy?!?

Maddow: Late ‘churn’ in voting rules sows confusion.

Sam Seder: How bad is GOP Governor Paul LePage.

Alex Wagner: Ted CRUZ goes totally wacko over marriage equality.

Mental Floss: Misconceptions about food.

James Rustad: #StopTheGOP theme song:

Ed, Pap, and Joy: A voter’s guide to telling when Rick Scott is lying.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Dare to connect today’s tragic shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School to the availability of, you know, guns, and gun rights advocates will excoriate you for politicizing a tragedy. But of course, the immediate wake of yet another tragic shooting is always exactly the right time to debate the wisdom of our gun culture, and the public policies that sustain it.

After all, if someone were to somehow die in a background check gone horribly wrong, you can be sure the NRA crowd would be screaming about it. So there is no shame in pointing out the role of the gun in this tragic shooting.

Our goal should be to make future gun tragedies less likely. If that requires a painful conversation, so be it.

In case you were wondering how to vote on the initiatives, vote the opposite of this:

VOTE YES ON INITIATIVE I-591– The WSRP joins the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs (WACOPS), the Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association (WSLEFIA), and 7 county sheriffs to support I-591. I-591 protects our national guidelines which prohibit the state from confiscating firearms from law abiding citizens without due process. Initiative I-591 would also prevent government interference in temporary gun loans to friends or relatives, and blocks the state from creating a universal gun registry that would set the stage for future confiscation.

Look, if you’re going to loan a murder weapon to someone, the state shouldn’t be involved. It’s especially true if you’re deluded enough to believe that the state is somehow in the process of setting “the stage for future confiscation.” Honestly, saying out loud that you think the state might “set the stage for future confiscation” is proof beyond proof that you don’t deserve a gun, and the state should take it away. They won’t, of course, but they should at that point.

VOTE NO ON INITIATIVE I-594 – The WSRP joins the Washington Council of Police and Sheriffs (WACOPS), Washington State Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association (WSLEFIA), and 17 county sheriffs in opposing I-594. While supporters of I-594 claim it is about “background checks,” actually it is an 18-page document of complex regulations and restrictions that pose a severe danger to our Second Amendment rights, and criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners. None of the modern mass shootings would have been prevented by the regulations in this initiative. I-594 would expand the state government database of lawful hand gun owners, and in sweeping language it would severely restrict private loans and transfers of guns between friends or relatives.

Um, isn’t “criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners” an oxymoron? I mean if what they’re doing becomes criminal, and they keep doing it, then they’re no longer law-abiding. Unless you think any regulation on guns “criminalizes the actions of law-abiding gun owners” and if that’s the case, then maybe you aren’t in a position to talk intelligently about potential gun regulations. Also, it wouldn’t restrict the transfer of guns between anyone, it would mean that you’ll have to fill out some paperwork some times.

VOTE NO ON INITIATIVE I-1351 – The WSRP supports our school teachers. However, this initiative in the guise of “reducing class size,” actually requires four billion dollars of extra spending in the next biennium with two-thirds going to administration and overhead. This budget busting initiative provides no funding mechanism for this additional spending, so it would lead to tax increases and pressure to impose a state income tax.

We support school teachers, but not at the cost of doing anything to support school teachers. We support the idea of school teachers in the abstract. We support the political good will that comes with saying you support school teachers. We support looking like we care about education.

Also, but not for nothing this paragraph pretty casually admits that you can’t have lower class sizes without an income tax. The state GOP basically can’t come up with non-income tax related ways we might pay for this initiative. I thought there was all that waste fraud and abuse just lying around to save us. Turns out, no.

– A suspension of sweeps of Tent City 3 is great news indeed. Now maybe the city can work on more permanent solutions to homelessness.

– With no further ado, I give you the ten best reasons to ban me from the Bay Area Science Festival after I retweeted a tweet that linked to a blog post revealing a horrible thing someone else did:

– A more walkable Olympia would be nice.

– Artist stitches catcalls into beautiful needlework

– Cathy McMorris Rodgers’ Q&A about innovative policies won’t answer questions about innovative polices.

– Since I mentioned unnecessarily quoting the founders last week, I don’t even understand why you’d go out of your way to misquote them.

This falls more under the category of bizarre amusement than actual controversy, but in the Republican–on–Republican battle in Washington’s 4th Congressional District, something weird happened. And I don’t simply mean the existence of Clint Didier as a possible future Congressman from Washington state. No…this weirdly amusing thing comes from a “PAC backed by former Republican U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton” that produced this ad against Didier:

Didier: “Get your ham radio. Get it in a metal box and get it buried in the ground!”

Narrator: “The more you listen, the weirder Clint Didier sounds.”

Yep. Can’t argue with that.

So…I’m a ham radio operator. And a pretty active one, at that. Some of my ham acquaintances on a list server I belong to were outraged by their perception that the ad implied that ham radio was weird.

But what is weird is Clint Didier. I don’t know the full context of the quote, but putting a ham radio in a metal box and burring it in the ground doesn’t make for a very good radio or for bountiful farming.

It sounds to me like Clint is some kind of wackjob prepper with a dose of paranoia, and he probably doesn’t know squat about ham radio, emergency communications, or disaster readiness.

Sure enough…a search of the FCC database reveals that Clint Didier is not a licensed amateur radio operator.

At least not under his REAL name….

– It turns out SPD officer’s nonsense lawsuit was nonsense.

– Guns are a health issue because when people get shot it does all sorts of bad things to their health, like kills them or paralyzes them or, at best, seriously wounds them. Anyway, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy would not be out there confiscating everyone’s guns. Too bad. He tweeted something.

– Here’s hoping the red bus lane on Battery actually works.

– GIF-splanation is my favorite new word.

– Everything Old Is Nuts Again

– Well, I’m officially looking forward to No Cities to Love.

I almost wrote this post a couple weeks ago, after it had been pointed out that once-dominant righty blog (un)Sound Politics hadn’t seen a new post since mid-September, and only a handful of posts over the months prior. Now it appears to be totally offline:

Guess that makes me the last man standing.

Ironically, I owe a fair amount of my own blogging success to u(SP) frontman Stefan Sharkansky, who stupidly got into a pissing match with me immediately following the 2004 election and during the bitter, months-long contest over the gubernatorial results. It was u(SP) that dominated the local political blogosphere early on, but by casting me as the enemy Stefan helped elevate HA into the role of the state’s premier liberal blog. And as Stefan gradually revealed himself to be a little bit crazy and a lot bit wrong, it was HA that ultimately rose to a position of influence as u(SP)’s relevance steadily withered away.

Stefan stopped blogging long ago, but not before destroying u(SP)’s last shred of credibility. I’ll miss his online voter registration database. That was useful. But u(SP) hasn’t been much more than a nasty afterthought for years. So good riddance.

The ballots have dropped and the mid-term elections are nigh. There are races to discuss, candidates to evaluate, and endorsements to ponder. So please join us tonight for an evening of political ponderance over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.

We meet tonight and every Tuesday evening at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up before that for dinner.

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? Check out one of the other DL meetings this week. Tonight the Tri-Cities and Shelton chapters meet. On Wednesday, the Bellingham and Burien chapters meet. And on Thursday, the Woodinville chapter meets.

With 201 chapters of Living Liberally, including seventeen in Washington state, three in Oregon and three in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

IBM is paying Abu Dhabi owned GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to entice it to acquire IBM’s chip manufacturing division. Yes, that’s right—paying $1.5 billion. So how does IBM make money on deals like this? Volume!

IBM has agreed to pay $1.5bn as part of a deal to shed its lossmaking chip manufacturing arm and avoid the billions of dollars in capital spending it was facing to upgrade its manufacturing technology.

To be clear, it’s not like IBM can’t afford the billions of dollars in capital spending necessary to make its chip manufacturing competitive. The company made $18 billion in profits last year. And it would have reported a $4.7 billion profit this quarter (up from $4 billion in the year ago quarter) had it not been for the $4.7 billion pre-tax charge it took to write off its chip foundry business.

So what is IBM doing with all its money? IBM shareholders will receive roughly $4.5 billion in dividends this year. Meanwhile, the company continues to prop up its share price with stock buybacks—$3.7 billion worth this year, and over $50 billion since 2010.

Yet investing in, you know, making stuff, that’s something that IBM executives can’t be bothered to do.

Next time a righty tells you that we need to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy so that they can accumulate the capital necessary to invest in creating jobs, send them a link to this.

Kshama Sawant’s District 3 seat was supposed to be easy pickings in November, 2015. I wouldn’t exactly call it conventional wisdom, but a lot of Democratic establishment types sure seemed to have convinced themselves that the socialist city council member was a wacky, one-hit wonder who voters would quickly tire of. The chamber was preparing to spend big to take her down, and serious candidates like the ACLU’s Alison Holcomb were being recruited. This was going to be easy.

Well, not so fast. As PubliCola reported last week, a new poll by respected firm EMC shows Sawant with some of the highest approval ratings on the council. Citywide, Sawant enjoys a 50 percent “favorable” rating, second only to Nick Licata’s 51 percent. And within her district, Sawant’s favorable stands at a remarkable 61 percent, well above Licata’s 46 percent second place showing.

Critics will point out that at 30 percent citywide and 21 percent within District 3, Sawant also has the highest unfavorable rating. But at 80/82 percent city/district, she also has the highest name ID as well. Voters know Sawant. And despite all the Democratic eye-rolling, they’ve overwhelmingly made up their mind in her favor.

Personally, I was never all that concerned. District 3 was Sawant’s best district in her 2013 at-large victory, and while she might not match the chamber’s war chest, she’d certainly be able to raise the $250,000-plus necessary to get her message out. From everything I’ve heard, Democratic efforts to peel labor support away from Sawant have so far proven fruitless. And of course, everybody continues to underestimate the impressive (and increasingly sophisticated) ground game that Socialist Alternative is putting together. Really.

A lot can change in a year. But there’s an argument to make that at this point in time, Sawant looks like the least vulnerable incumbent of them all.