Thursday Mashup (4/29/10)

(Note: I’ve been able to post more than I thought this week, but there definitely won’t be posting tomorrow. Also, here is the Philadelphia Inquirer summary on last week’s congressional votes – really nothing for me to say about them...a little late on Iran sanctions, but better than never I guess)

I got an unintentional kick out of this screed by Repug strategist John Feehery today (here)…

The new law in Arizona should be seen less through the prism of politics or constitutional law and more through the lens of national psychology. It really is a cri de coeur, or a cry from the heart.

The law may seem punitive or intrusive from the ACLU’s perspective. But as I have said before, desperate times require desperate measures.

You only need to glance over the border and see the situation that is unfolding in Mexico to understand that the people of Arizona are panicking that the drug war, like a swarm of killer bees, is coming to a location near them.

It is absolutely ridiculous to me that we continue to discuss the immigration issue, particularly in Arizona, as being wholly centered around drugs without any mention whatsoever of guns that travel south of our border to Mexico. And it is even more ridiculous that Democratic Party politicians are completely and utterly cowed on this issue, with the exception of Frank Lautenberg of NJ and Carolyn Maloney McCarthy of NY on the federal level and Dwight Evans of PA on the state level (I would love to add other candidates to that list if I knew who they were).

This post from Louis Klarevas last month tells us the following…

Mexico has some of the toughest gun laws on the books. There are only about 6,000 guns registered in Mexico. Yet, as President Calderon told CNN this weekend, "We seized 66,000 weapons in three years, half of them assault weapons. We made a sample one year and a half ago, above 80 percent of those weapons came from the United States." Authorities claim that between 250-300 guns enter Mexico from the U.S. every day, most obtained in the four Southwest border-states.

The problem is compounded by the fact that there are more licensed gun dealers in the four border-states than there are registered guns in Mexico. If you add in the Brady Center's allegation that 40% of all gun sales are made without conducting proper background checks, you can see how this is a recipe for disaster.

The failure of the U.S. to address its national appetite for illegal drugs and its reluctance to better regulate gun sales has recently led to a degree of blowback, with Mexico's violence spilling over into the border-states. Cartel-related murders, assaults, home invasions, and kidnappings are now overwhelming local authorities.

And by the way, I just know that somebody out there is going to say, “there he goes again, claiming that 80 percent of 66,000 guns come to Mexico from the U.S., and here’s about fifty pages of massaged and manufactured gun data from John Lott or somebody or other saying that isn’t so.”

I know that President Calderon was talking about a sample that showed that 80 percent of the weapons came from this country. I do not know how many guns were in that sample.

And by the way, no matter how many guns, drugs, people or dollars cross our borders, that in no way justifies the farcical, “illegal to be brown” Arizona immigration law.

And "killer bees," Feehery? You mean, like these? (sorry about the ad...)

Update 4/30/10: What a sick joke (here).

I’m still trying to process everything that happened on the Cape Wind decision yesterday (again, as noted here, excoriating myself a bit for not commenting on it more earlier), and as I did, I came across this CNN story today, which basically made me gag.

To listen to our corporate media “betters,” Jim Gordon, the owner of the company that manufactures the wind turbines and thus stands to gain the most out of this awful outcome, overcame the Cape Cod “elite,” and his hair has “gone from black to gray” as a result of the legal wrangling (awww…).

(And CNN wonders why its TV ratings are utterly collapsing, as noted here; also, speaking of MSNBC, I’ll have a note involving K.O. in a minute.)

Gee, I wonder if “The Most Trusted Name In News” is ever going to bother to tell us that Gordon tried to pay off the local Wampanoag Indian tribe to halt their opposition (here...the tribe fought it because they believed the turbines would be constructed on sacred burial grounds)?

And I wonder if they’re going to tell us that the project was called “…a boondoggle that defies economic logic” by the Beacon Hill Institute, which also said the following (here)…

In 2008, the Beacon Hill Institute tallied up the social costs and benefits of the project. The social costs consist of the resources that would be used up installing, maintaining and operating the turbines plus a small charge for the negative aesthetic effects of the project, as revealed by a survey of tourists and homeowners. The benefits consist of the savings in fossil fuel consumption, the avoided capital costs of installing gas-fired plants, the health benefits of the reduced volume of noxious pollutants and the benefits of increased energy independence and reduced carbon dioxide emissions. We found that the costs would come to $2.2 billion and the benefits to $1.2 billion.

(And yes, I know the Beacon Hill Institute is ideologically conservative.)

And I wonder if CNN or anyone else in our corporate media is going to tell us what we learn here about how ratepayers are likely going to regret the project (here)?

Oh, and I suppose all of those quoted in this story were “blue bloods” also…

"The developers have a financial interest in saying that these are going to be unobtrusive on any number of fronts," says Issac Rosen, who heads an alliance that's fighting the wind farm project.

As much as opponents object to the size of the project, what really bothers them is the way Cape Wind has taken advantage of existing laws.

"Developers are doing much what 19th century speculators did in the West," says Rosen. "They are finding tracts of land, tracts of water, recognizing that there are no regulations governing usage or development, sticking a shovel in it and saying, 'I'm going to take this and I'm going to make money off of it.'"

…

Shareen Davis's family have lived and fished near Chatham on the cape for 13 generations. She says the wind towers will destroy her local fishing grounds and endanger birds and sea animals.

"I know that [the windmills] are going to impact all of the different aspects of the environment, of the aesthetics, of the infrastructure, of the business of the cape," she says. "It will be something that will critically change our area. Why should I have to be collateral damage to something like that."

And the fact that Greenpeace, among others, have apparently signed off on this is enough to make yours truly utterly sick.

Finally, it seems that “Z on TV” himself, David Zurawik, is mad at Keith Olbermann yet again; here, he went off on K.O. last week over a reprisal suffered by MSNBC host Donny Deutsch for criticizing Olbermann in a taped segment about how the lefty blogosphere is every bit as nutty as the right (yep, loaded generalities, fake equivalency yet again – you guessed it).

Gee, it seems to me that MSNBC has a pretty clear policy on this stuff and Deutsch totally ignored it; namely, that you don’t criticize fellow hosts on the same network.

Also, Zurawik tells us that Olbermann is attacking Brian Stelter of the New York Times on Twitter; gee, “Z,” maybe it would have been nice for you to let us know that Olbermann was upset because Stelter ran with a “story” that Olbermann got Deutsch bounced without checking with Olbermann first, as noted here (if Stelter had done that, his reporting would have been accurate, but since he didn't...).

That all being said, I should add that I have neither the time nor the desire to try and referee a corporate media hissy fit like this, and I hope you feel the same way. Besides, I already posed some questions to Zurawik over similar behavior, questions that are a lot more than hypothetical which I presume will never be answered (the second bullet here has to do with another Stelter misstep, and the third deals with Zurawik).

And one more thing, ”Z,” as long as you feel so pleased with yourself for helping to “publicly shame” the “conman” John Edwards here, I should tell you that he and Elizabeth, now estranged of course, have two young children, Emma Clare, born in 1998, and Jack, born in 2000, in addition to their other offspring. Really, the classy thing to do, no matter how you may feel about any of the adults, is just to say nothing and try to spare the feelings of the kids, even just a little given what they’ve endured to date and likely will endure for the rest of their lives over this, OK?