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Best line of the post-debate discussion

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From a Batten student: “Romney just said ‘Guns don’t kill people, unwed mothers kill people’.”

Comments

  1. I’m going to say “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” when anyone even hints that something I am saying is not 100% true.

    • I’m going to say “proceed, Governor” when someone is spouting obvious bullshit.

      • This was the moment that they will be talking about in years to come:

        And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our U.N. ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president. That’s not what I do as commander in chief.

        • and the fact that the president and Cathy Crowley were both wrong…later admitted by Ms. Crowley….should be noted. He lied and he continues to lie.

          • So David, other than a few minor slipups (see notes a, b, c, d and e), your response may have some merit…or maybe not.

            (a) Fact? Only on Fox would this b.s. be called a “fact”
            (b) Cathy Crowley? Who’s that?
            (c) Wrong? Only on Fox would those carefully chosen words be called “wrong”
            (d) Later admitted? Even on Fox, that wasn’t claimed. Rather, Fox claimed that Crowley flip-flopped, not that she had admitted anything.
            (e) Lied? No, even Fox didn’t claim that.

            So David, if you’re going to get your version of “truth” from Fox, and then try to foist it off on those of us who pay attention, you need to be a little more careful to pay attention to the details yourself.

  3. Hurrayyy! President Obama is the hero of democracy tonight! Defender against cruel plutocracy. Romney clearly rattled and a quite desperate to grab the floor to go over his time limits.

    Andrea Mitchell hammers Romney hard for misstatements! Oil production on fed. lands up 10.6% with Obama, for example. Andrea even has a graph showing the truth!

  4. Obama: we need to make it harder for people to get guns because criminals follow those laws.

    I thought it interesting that Obama seemed to advocate a warm and fuzzy community-style response to violent crime (a la Chicago Ceasefire). Yeah, because Chicago has been so successful at attacking violent crime. And Chicago Ceasefire has been so successful too, right? Wrong. How about looking at the other Ceasefire model, the one in his opponent’s home state, Boston Operation Ceasefire.

      • Yeah, I picked up on that, too: Criminals don’t obey laws, so let’s pass some more. I’m a 2nd amendment supporter, which is why my only concrete proposal is a gun ban.

        OTOH, he nailed Romney, who HAS in fact changed his position on gun control to get the NRA endorsement, and the idea that his own ban was supported by gun owners so it wasn’t really a ban is BS, even if it’s NRA endorsed BS to justify endorsing Romney.

        Gun owners didn’t have a friend in that room, only an enemy, and a cowed enemy. Well, I suppose the latter is less awful.

        • Gun owners only have an enemy in the deluded hive-mind monoculture that is the NRA. Obama is for gun ownership, just not unbridled and wanton gun ownership. He is pro-safety, not anti-gun. To say otherwise is simply a lie.

          The NRA has for years been trying to push this false idea that wanting to regulate military-grade weaponry for private individuals–but to allow them to keep rifles and handguns–is some how akin to banning all guns. It is not, and you know it. To say otherwise is a lie. An untruth. Hogwash. Malarkey.

          • “To say otherwise is simply a lie.”

            No, to say so is simply a lie. It’s merely a lie gun controllers have found politically necessary, after a series of disastrous elections proved to them that gun control was political poison.

            Look, your friend to gun owners put Sotomayor on the bench, who was glad to vote for the 2nd amendment to not be incorporated, in order that local governments could completely ban guns. Your friend to gun owners tried to have military spent brass shredded at extra expense, just so civilians couldn’t reload it to have slightly cheaper ammo. Your friend to gun owners had only one concrete proposal on the subject: BAN GUNS!

            “Military grade weaponry”? That’s the true lie, the ‘assault weapon’ ban had nothing to do with military weaponry, it was aimed at normal civilian arms which just shared some cosmetic features with military arms, like plastic stocks, or the location of the magazine, and so were easy to deceive the public into THINKING were machine guns.

            Don’t ask me, as your guy, Josh Sugarman:

            “”Assault weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons –anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun– can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

            Not an out of context quote, Sugarman of the Violence Policy Center was quite proud to have coined this term with the intent of misleading people into thinking the law banned military weapons. He thought the ban would alienate the public and the NRA, make it easy to portray the NRA as extremists. Instead it backfired, and the gun control lobby lost most of it’s legislative clout, it’s supporters must now lie about what they want, as does Obama, outside of a few outlier districts where gun control is actually popular.

            All because too many people could see that the law actually banned ordinary guns, NOT military weapons.

          • as a gun owner and occasional plinker i know the difference between a fully automatic weapon and a semi-automatic automatic weapon having had the opportunity to fire both. i also know enough to be able to say that the differences between a semi-automatic assault rifle and any kind of hunting rifle are more than cosmetic. it does not require a 50 round clip and a folding stock to be able to hunt game or target shoot. an assault rifle is not a necessity in any civilian application. at best it is a luxury item and should be regarded as no more necessary to our constitution as a bottle rocket or a tin of beluga caviar.

            i personally don’t see the need for a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons if we could have a licensing regime similar to what is required to purchase and possess fully automatic weapons or even what is required to purchase and possess professional grade pyrotechnic devices. however, that goes far beyond the permitted range of discourse in our country right now. i can only hope that someday we will be able to have a rational discussion on the burden of death our slavish devotion to firearms has brought us. what may or may not have been the intent of the framers during a time of local militias and muzzle-loaders is only marginally relevant to the current issues regarding guns in our time.

          • You’re talking about *me* failing a Turing test, when you weren’t the least responsive to my points? Could pull your responses out of a look up table, frankly.

            Go ahead: Come up with a good reason, other than simple hostility towards gun owners, for ordering the military to shred used brass and sell it for scrap, at extra cost, instead of selling it to civilian reloaders. I’ll be interested to hear what you say.

            Explain how it’s really pro-2nd amendment to appoint judges who’ll vote that it can’t be incorporated, when dealing with one of the most anti-gun local governments in the nation. Obama gets to appoint a replacement for any of the Heller majority, and that 2nd amendment he claims to defend will be razor bladed out of the Bill of Rights at the next available test case.

            It’s common for the left to assume 2nd amendment activists are deluded idiots. If we actually thought Obama wasn’t our enemy, that characterization would be accurate.

          • i didn’t comment on shredding military brass because that lasted about three months and the d.o.d. changed it’s policy at the end of that and so military brass has been sold to reloaders ever since then. that was three years ago and they’re still selling spent brass to reloaders in the states. the policy guidelines under which the defense logistics agency ruled that the spent brass represented sensitive munitions had been issued the bush administration. to put it another way, i didn’t comment on it because it was a policy that ended after three months in 2009 and was initially promulgated by the bush administration and so i didn’t find anything about that to be relevant to anything we’re talking about here.

            i don’t see appointing justices who would take a less absolutist approach to the second amendment as being as sinister as you see it. i think there should be room for more regulation of guns and gun ownership and that won’t happen as long as the heller majority exists but even without the heller majority it will still take years and appropriate cases for things to change. i’ve never thought nor claimed that 2nd amendment activists were deluded idiots unless they put forth notions that are delusional. i’m a gun owner brett. a hunter, a target shooter, and plinker. you’re excoriating the wrong person if you think i’m cowering in fear of guns. i just think that as extremely powerful and dangerous objects they should be subject to at least as much regulation as similarly powerful and dangerous objects we use in our lives. if guns were regulated to the extent that cars are regulated i would be quite satisfied.

          • Guns can’t be regulated in the way cars are, because car ownership isn’t a civil liberty, and gun ownership is. So long as that 2nd amendment is in the constitution, I’m going to insist that it be treated as a civil liberty, a full blown, not rationalized away, enforced to the hilt, civil liberty. Just like freedom of speech, or not having the police walk into your house any time they feel like it.

            Obama says he supports the second amendment, then nominates justices who WON’T enforce it. That makes him a liar on the subject, and no getting around it. Chicago is an utter outlier jurisdiction on gun control, with legal gun ownership almost completely suppressed, and Obama nominated, and you’re fine with, that state of affairs continuing.

            It’s like claiming you favor the first amendment, but want local communities to be able to censor people’s magazine subscriptions. It’s like claiming that you favor the 4th and 5th amendments, but want local communities to be able to force people to keep their house keys on file with the police, so that the police can walk in and look around any time they want.

            It’s like you want to enjoy the right, while not enforcing it for anybody else. NOT an admirable stance, in my book.

          • if the amendment didn’t have the clause “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state . . .” i would find it easy to take your position. with that clause i see a distinction between the right to gun ownership and the rights relating to free speech, free press, the free exercise of religion, and the right to peaceably assemble.

            as for my own rights, i would be delighted to be subject to regulatory requirements like having a license to own a gun or being required to register my guns. your admiration isn’t necessary for the maintenance of my conscience nor is my admiration necessary for the maintenance of yours but imputing motives to me which you cannot possibly justify by any rational deduction seems unworthy of someone who claims to be a clear-eyed realist.

        • cowed ally would be more apt. everyone has been cowed by the nra. think about it, we’ve gone from a consensus on several reasonable measures to reduce the insane number of gun deaths each year to being unable to speak the truth when a lunatic stockpiles 1000s of rounds of ammunition and the weapons to mow down a dozen people. we can’t have a dialogue about the insanity of that kind of unlimited access to weapons, instead it gets treated like a flood or an earthquake, as if it were an act of god we’re helpless to deflect.