calimary
calimary's Journal"Yes, freedom does require responsibility and it is time you become responsible for freedom."
AHHHH! GREAT quote, my friend!
However, it appears from your writing that you would have that go only one way. What about the responsibility that owning firearms should bring with it? Your arguments suggest that gun owners have no responsibility. They just have their "rights." From the behavior I've witnessed, that certainly seems true. The right to own and use any goddamn kind of goddamn gun anybody feels like owning - trumps anyone else's right not to be mowed down by them.
I am NOT afraid to protect MY freedom to live safely from YOUR so-called "freedom" to have the means to blow me away with war-weapons that have NO place in civilian hands.
We have actually done that many times (visiting the local VA hospital and the combat veterans
especially those who still suffer from PTSD).
I am in no way demeaning your service or sacrifice, or those of your brothers in arms. The ridiculous mis-read of the "right" to bear arms needs VERY BADLY to be revisited and rewritten. YES. And I think perhaps YOU should go visit the grieving moms and dads and siblings of those 20 children whose deaths you so cavalierly shrug off, and explain to them why this nutcase who killed their babies had the "freedom" to mow them down just as pretty as he pleased, because his "right" to have those mow-down machines is so damned sacrosanct and untouchable. Because heaven forbid, we're not allowed to try to keep extreme death-machines out of his cold dead hands, either, can we? YEAH. DAMN RIGHT I want to see that changed.
As I write this, I've got CNN on, and they're reporting about YET ANOTHER gun-crazy who took out a couple of volunteer firefighters TRYING TO FIGHT A HOUSE FIRE, as well as his sister, in upstate New York. And he finally relieved us of his own miserable self, too. The guy had another one of those bushmaster dream machines that you seem so adamant about any nutcase having. Without any background checks. Hell, his MOTHER owned the guns. She was a law-abiding citizen. Look how well that worked out for her.
And truly, I have to ask - have even you not had enough of this by now? You don't think this is an utter abomination? A complete abominable misread and misinterpretation and utter reckless abuse of the "right" to bear arms? I'm seriously not so sure that this would have translated from the original, or that the Founders of this country had in mind the "right" to mow down innocent people, NON-combatants, when the Second Amendment was crafted, and intended for the ability to resist an invading army from another country. Were those 20 children and their teachers some invading army from another country??????? And even if so, to follow the strictest interpretation of the Second Amendment, we'd all have to be using muskets - for all those self-titled "originalists" out there who think all things surrounding the Constitution should be interpreted and acted upon - with an 18th-Century mindset. Last time I looked, it was the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY.
I recognize the sacrifice the rest of us are being forced to make, against our will and at great threat of bodily harm or death, for the freedom others feel they simply MUST have, to possess personal weapons of mass destruction. AS I'VE SAID in an earlier post - nobody's trying to take your handguns away. It's the assault rifles - instruments designed SOLELY AND SPECIFICALLY for mowing down large quantities of people, not just one enemy at a time. YES I'm against that.
And you and your fellows fought and sacrified, and indeed some of them died - for MY right to express my outrage about these needless crimes and senseless deaths, and to try to do something to stop them.
I had the GREAT honor of working with him when I was at the AP in L.A.
It just dropped my jaw when I realized that the short, quiet, self-effacing, jocular, gray-haired Asian guy over at the photo end of the newsroom was THAT guy. THE Guy. I was actually working with a piece of history on two legs. I couldn't believe it! I'd interviewed rock stars and even movie legends before. Even threw a question at then-President reagan and actually got the I-never-say-squat-to-the-press Johnny Carson to answer a question (very briefly, but he actually did speak to me!) but lemme tellya - being in the presence of this particular man made me shaky in the knees. Made me want to stand up straight and clean up my language and tuck my shirttail in.
He was so nice, so approachable, so friendly. He still responds occasionally on Facebook. He's my hero! It just always blew my mind that he'd covered these earth-shaking events, capturing these shatteringly momentous split-seconds in history, having the impact he did with his work, and yet - there he'd be, lo these many years later, in some loony group of entertainment reporters and camera crews, shouting for - well, nowadays it'd be Justin Bieber and/or Kim Kardashian. In L.A., that's basically most of what you covered, because Los Angeles = Hollywood and as such is a company town. Unless we had mudslides or brush fires or Manson/Night Stalker murders or something. SOMETIMES political idiocy, but showbiz is still pretty much the main course.
I also had the privilege of working with a second Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer at the L.A. bureau. Reed Saxon. He took the photo of then-candidate Bill Clinton in a suit and sunglasses (a la Blues Brothers), playing a saxophone during an appearance on "The Arsenio Hall Show." And you could see Arsenio a couple of feet away from him, grinning a huge grin. That photo went into a compilation of 1992 campaign photos that won the AP another Pulitzer.
That was a total trip - working for the ol' "A&P"! What a ride!
Shortly after I started there, the L.A. Times did a front-page feature story about the Associated Press. It was really cool, and the whole newsroom was all aflutter about it. It made me feel really proud and kind of dumb-founded to be part of it. And I loved the first anecdote in the long, detailed report. It recounted Mahatma Gandhi - on a train ride through some lonely, isolated area in India. It was the wee hours of the morning and I think I recall in the story that it was also raining. Gandhi disembarked at this little out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere train depot, expecting to sorta disappear, unnoticed, into the countryside. But sure enough, there in the empty train station was an A.P. reporter, waiting in the rain to interview him. Gandhi recalled being really impressed by that. And he commented that - when he finally passed from this life, he fully expected that the first thing he'd see on the other side would not be angels or Whatever his idea of God was, but rather - an Associated Press correspondent, waiting to interview him. STILL makes me smile to think about that.
NOBODY at the AP had any pizazz. That's not what it was about. What struck me immediately when I first got there was that I was surrounded by a whole bunch of "mild-mannered Clark Kents." Even Lois Lane was too flashy for the women who worked there. Nobody ever turned into Superman. Nobody bragged. Nobody was that impressed. They were just day-to-day journalists, toiling in the back of the vineyard to generate the stories that made all the fancy TV people with the hair and makeup look smart on the local evening news. There was a fellow there named Bob Thomas who was basically the dean of the local (Hollywood) industry press. His reporting was regarded as every bit as essential reading as was Army Archerd's column in the trades every morning. And yet, Bob Thomas was THE guy who alerted the world to the shooting of Bobby Kennedy in the madness at the Ambassador Hotel that night in June after he'd just won the 1968 California primary. HE was there on the scene and it was HE who called it in. It was REALLY cool! And it was like being in the Army. You got "three square a day" (you didn't live large on an AP salary but you were always paid enough to eat regularly and they couldn't fire you on whims or bad ratings).
The AP gave out Mark Twain trophies as its top awards for regional news coverage, and each trophy featured a bust of him, and a quote engraved on the front: "The only source of illumination in the universe is the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here." Proud to say I have three of those for various crazy things I did.
Good times. (For the most part, that is.)
So? Why can't we be on them like flypaper? Why can't we be dogging their every step?
Why can't we be out there getting in their way and complicating their lives and making it harder and harder and more and more expensive for them to stay ahead of us?
OF COURSE they'll look for other ways around whatever they think they have a right to get around. WHY CAN'T WE RESPOND IN KIND? Does that mean we have to give up, shut up, go sit down over there in the corner and just let them have their way? Does that mean we should just shrug and say - "oh well, it's no use, so I might as well give up and go back to watching my reality show or my football game?"
As long as they WON'T give up, WE CAN'T GIVE UP.
Hey, Gloria Allred is ALRIGHT! If we hadn't had irritants like her, we'd be so much farther
back in the line than we even are now.
I wrote here, awhile back, about my own encounter with Gloria Allred. She stood behind me at a rough point in my own career when I was still fairly new in broadcasting. She never pushed or advocated. She took me to lunch and essentially let me cry on her shoulder. She sympathized and empathized and she listened to me. She offered to help if every I needed it but never ambulance-chased. She had total class and a heart as big as the planet Jupiter, and amazing discretion. She kept my secrets and my fears when the station manager insinuated I could be blackballed for making trouble. She was there when/if I needed her. She was there when/if a LOT of women in the L.A. market (and elsewhere too) needed her. JUST KNOWING THAT was enough.
Gloria Allred is worth her weight in gold-pressed latinum to me. She's a tower of strength and a flaming sword of righteousness, and I will never waver from feeling that way. She's a joke to some. A nuisance, and worse, to some more - mainly because they deserve it. And she's a saint to me.
Welcome to DU, polynomial!
Good to have you with us! Your last paragraph was a great one! Unfortunately true, too. I'm a retired journalist. I used to be so proud of that profession and now I'm just ashamed and disgusted. They DID give bush/cheney a complete pass. They DID turn a blind eye. Remember the millions around the world who protested against the Iraq War? Remember how much coverage that did NOT get? There were quite literally protests ON EVERY CONTINENT ON EARTH, INCLUDING ANTARCTICA. EVERY ONE. I think the news media is complicit in all of that. And the bushies are ALL war criminals. Totally and undeniably. But did you hear ANY of that when contradicta was out parading around, endorsing republi-CONS here and there along the campaign trail? She and her "husband" should be awaiting a war crimes tribunal in adjoining jail cells in The Hague. But never was heard a discouraging word whenever she came out of the shadows.
It's just way too long and too weary-ing to get into again. But if you've been lurking for awhile, perhaps you've seen some of the ranting around here. I've certainly spewed a whole lot of hot air about this, myself! We're a little island here - a refuge from that madness around us. And sometimes great activism (and occasionally, a result or two) arises from the seeds planted here.
But I actually kinda like what Sam Donaldson said. He said what a lot of us feel. I think that point should be driven home to the teabaggers - WHO ARE IN THE MINORITY!!!! And they should be reminded of that. They DON'T run the country! They DON'T have the right or privilege to boss and intimidate everybody else. As such, they do NOT have the right to dictate what is and what goes. Because they get so much attention, as the squeaky wheel always does, they've come to believe that they DO matter more and that they are first-among-equals, and that their wants and wishes and demands are more important than anyone else's. And THAT is what has to change.
Welcome to DU, duffyduff!
Good to have you here! I'm just glad he said it. That kind of thing NEEDS to be said more and more and more and more, and in many more ways and from many many many many more mouths than just Sam Donaldson's.
That's the reality that needs to start soaking in. That's the reality that needs to be catapulted. That's the framing that needs to be done, to steer the general mindset AWAY from the false presumption that the teabaggers are everywhere and dominate the agenda and basically run the country. They need to be marginalized and diminished and no longer taken seriously.
Hey, if they want to secede, let 'em! There's a perfect country out there just waiting for folks like them: beautiful balmy utterly free Somalia! NO government. NO rules and regs and annoying laws. All the guns you can eat! All the anarchy you can eat! All the warlords and pirates you can eat! And the poor, homeless, starving - are just laughed at and then ignored - they don't matter and nobody feels compelled to help them and that's the way it should be, 'eh, teabaggers? Those people should just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps because it's every man for himself (notice how that even leaves the women out? EVEN MORE PERFECT!!!) and that whole country has lifted the "you're on your own" mantra into the sacrament level.
I'm being a little sarcastic here as you may have discerned. But I believe that's how teabaggers should be treated. If you act like a jerk, you're gonna be treated like a jerk. And no political group acts like bigger jerks than the teabaggers do.
Welcome to DU, bobclark86!
Glad you're here! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Actually, boner might do well to throw 'em for a loop and say "fuck the teabaggers" too. He'd have a lot of company!
Wouldn't it be amazing if he just threw up his hands and decided to go another way? How 'bout siding with the Dems - who are gaining on that majority. Just a few from our side would be enough to give him a majority. He should get with Nancy Pelosi, find out what the Dems would go for, and do THAT. Whatever gets a majority.
True, while we did not win back the House, we DID gain seats, and thus gained ground, compared to the GOP, which lost out on both counts. Their majority isn't as big as it was. They lost THREE major-league leading "lights" of the teabagger contingent: todd akin, who vainly presumed he could rise to the Senate, and the Bobbsey Twins from Hell, joe walsh of IL and allen west of FL who both were defeated outright. AND THE REST OF 'EM NEED TO BE REMINDED OF THAT, EVERY DAY, ALL YEAR FOR AT LEAST THE NEXT TWO YEARS, AROUND THE CLOCK. WE WON. AND THEY LOST. Obviously they haven't gotten the message about that, judging from their behavior, SO THEY NEED TO BE REMINDED ABOUT THAT, forgetful willfully-ignorant little dears that they are.
Giving the Dems what they want would be much more in line with what the country at large spoke out for, in the last election. NO tax cuts for the rich. They need to shoulder their share of the burden, for a change. Especially since they can afford to much more easily than the rest of us - and STILL have tons left over to buy another vacation home or private jet.
Butthurt potatoes? Or fuckweasel?
ROFL!!!
This same page had ANOTHER couple of greats!
http://www.buzzfeed.com/catesish/the-30-best-dogs-of-2012
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/perfectly-timed-cat-photos
DAYUM, I've shared these all over Facebook!
AGREED. I don't want to hear about your freedom-freedom being taken away
just because you're denied access to your very own personal weapon of mass destruction.
Tough shit. Nobody's advocating taking your handguns away. You're not being dis-armed.
And I reserve the right to MY freedom not to be mowed down by some unhinged asshole or wackadoodle John Wayne wannabe with a hand-held overcompensation machine.
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Current location: Oregon
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