NRA Please.

Would someone please start discussing gun control rationally? Why do all the spokes people look like televangelists and sound like crazy uneducated hicks?
Try this: People keep up Japan as a nation of no guns and no gun violence. Why has no one pointed out that they have one of the highest suicide rates in the world? Suicides need to be removed from discussions of gun death statistics, guns go away, for example in Australia, but suicides haven't changed, so including suicides in gun death statistics causes inaccuracies in thought. Good rhetoric, distorted facts. As Martin Bashir and Reverend Al Sharpton are fond of quoting: "You're allowed to have your own opinions but not your own facts."
Similarly, saying gun deaths and injuries due to accidents need to be removed from the numbers discussion. You have a table saw in your house, you're more likely to be cut off your own fingers than if you don't. So of course accidents happen with people who own guns than with people who don't.
Gun control will not stop criminals who bought guns illegally from getting guns. It will drive up the costs. It will open a new black market, like drugs, like alcohol, and the likely hood of guns used in violent confrontations over guns will increase but it won't stop violence.
And who cares how much ammunition you can buy? So the Aurora shooter bought 6000 rounds of ammunition over the Internet? Did he shoot 6000 rounds? If we're going by possibilities, the labs he had access to before dropping out of school could have been used to produce mustard gas any number of other chemical weapons. What would the death toll have been then? Just while we're pointing out things that didn't happen but could have done?
So...we need better spokesmen. We need better arguments over rational statistics. We need a realistic view of the world and its changing structure. I don't remember any school shootings when I was in school. So perhaps we should also look at the rise in school shootings for an explanation. Guns have always been available. It's the violence that's changed.
Why?
Until we answer that, the rest is silly posturing over sadness and guilt. Social media outrage in a world brought into focus through the same constant socializing and anonymity that degrades the empathy and reason of any mob.

Annoyed again, naturally

In the last 4 years, the actual deficit, the actual amount over tax revenue the government is spending per year, has gone down. The debt has increased, but that is not the same as the deficit. So actual government spending, even with the stimulus (whether you believe it was effective or not) was reduced.
At this stage, tax reform, as a practice in reduction of institutionalized corruption (people getting tax breaks because someone gave money to, or voted for, a politician or party) needs to be instituted.
And usury laws. That's the biggest drain on savings. Unchecked, unregulated credit charges, and the legal remedies there to, that can be changed in the fine print of the billing paperwork.
Think of it as corporate taxation with corporate representation.
Think of Black Friday and the consumer culture it promotes as corporate America's denationalization and secularization of America.
Credit cards and home loans are basically the company store of the 21st century. Throw in reverse mortgages, are causing the elderly to lose their one tangible asset, and the housing bubble as the corporate world getting bitten on its bottom for trying to provide company housing by foreclosure and purchase by rental companies leading to a future of serfdom where in they, the land holders, who own the loans the rental companies use to finance their rental properties-- landlords for the landlords ...
Okay. That's a little far, but you'll notice that the companies that provided the credit authorizations for the subprime loans are not only still in business, but still providing credit ratings, and still authorizing loans for their banking partners, while the home owners who got loans they couldn't afford, only because they were approved by those banking institutions, are still being foreclosed on and vilified as deadbeats by the common man.
That's good advertising. Madoff needed to hire that PR team instead of lawyers. Then, like the banks and fellow travelers, he would have been given a pass by the States Attorneys Generals and congress would have given him matching funds.

The magic of America

Days after Sandy, not weeks or months which is understandable, but days after Sandy we had people out shouting about how power should be back because "this is America, not (insert name of seemingly randomly selected nation here)." As if living in this particular geographical location makes us immune to the laws of physics.
Add to this that the majority of images are on Fox News, one of the main decriers of FEMAs existence, and, well, all you can do is laugh.

Sandy Jersey Shore

How long will it take before some preacher decides the storm was the result of the hedonistic voyeurisms of the reality TV show. Or "reality" TV in general.

TV and religion. Still.

Okay, so I have decided it would be a good idea to spend an extraordinary amount money on "No Evil Oil" From Danny Davis ( the TV preacher who's tag line is "go with god and god will go with you"). I figure I am getting to that age where magic oil that not only protects me from witchcraft and helps with that pesky prostrate (better to start early than wait for it to be a problem) but also saves one from the evils of poverty is a good investment.
Plus, you know, oil...and there's always time for lubricant.

The dumbest thing Michael Dukakis thing ever did was hesitate.

The first political add I remember was the Willie Horton attack add against Michael Dukakis. Then, during the debate, when asked if he would (paraphrased) want to kill someone who attached his family, the answer should have been an unqualified yes. Spoken loud.
Not because it's right. Because its the nature of the beast. One of the basest, but likely a survival mechanism for genetic information. Think the Price equation.
But he should have asked "but, should I be making that decision? Should I be allowed to make that decision in a society of laws?".
Don't get me wrong. I am very pro death penalty. Not because it's right, but because it's cheaper and nicer than sixty years of imprisonment in an American SuperMax facility. Even more so than in some over crowded third world hell hole or Russian gulag.
But that doesn't make it right.

The basis of religion is sacrifice, the object is to be a better person.

People have forgotten that, whatever your god may be, it's about black and white. Rules. Modern religion has forgotten this.
Modern religion, as practiced in America, has become about feeling good. People go to church to feel the love of god. The acceptance of who they are, warts and all. They, as Catholics will attest (at least if Chris Mathews' is to be believed), violate the Church's tenants when they don't agree, but go on playing the good church goer.
Catholics use birth control, Jews reform and eat pork, Muslims participate in the Olympics during Ramadan. All think that their religion's adaption to the modern world's ideas is natural and acceptable. They hunt through their religious texts on their own to find the ideas that support their view of truth, and neglect the things that do not.
It's human nature. We find reasons not to sacrifice, or, we sacrifice for the benefit of others. How many people donate to their church to the limit of their tax benefits, and no further.
Even the government knows that, sans a few reprobate throw backs, people do not donate without the direct benefit to themselves. It understands that taking away tax credits for donations would kill church run hospitals and programs for the poor.
Sacrifice. A movie star who drops one hundred thousand dollars on church project gets coo-does and feels warm in his or her pants, but if their last film netted them 35 million ... it's not really a sacrifice. I give the same percentage dropping my pocket change in a Salvation Army bucket at Christmas. That isn't to say it's not welcome and appreciated, but it is not a sacrifice.
It boils down to this: if you think the your religion's rules and tenants should adapt to what you believe, and you do what you want when it doesn't, then you are not (insert your religion's name for its followers here). You might be a Unitarian. You might even be a person of faith. But you are making it up as you go along.
If you religion teaches truth, it in effect teaches 1+1=2. That you, or billions of you decide that this is not so, that 1+1=3, or 4, or 7, because you believe that truth is inconvenient to your world view, then you do not believe in your religion's god.
Modern religion is about confirming your goodness, and, generally, that god loves you as you are. But most religion is about being better than you are, with rules god supposedly gave for living a better life. A good life. What does it say that modern society expects one plus one to equal three.