Fables of the reconstruction

No Platinum Coin - Now, Let's Get to the Substance

I am not sorry about this development:

The U.S. Treasury Department said on Saturday it will not produce platinum coins as a way of generating $1 trillion in revenue and avoiding a battle in Congress over raising the U.S. debt ceiling.

I've never looked into the relevant statutes and cases, so I have no idea about the legality of minting the coin. I assume it's a "political question" that a federal court is likely to avoid deciding.

I didn't embrace the idea for two reasons: First, while posing little economic risk by itself, I was afraid Republicans would engage in unpredictably irrational behavior in response to the coin that would wreak catastrophic damage. The logical response to the minting of the coin is lifting the debt ceiling to repurchase it. But the national GOP is controlled largely by a group of nutters who do not care what the consequences of their actions are. 

Second, if minting the coin had worked, I think it would have just punted on the very important issue that the national GOP is controlled largely by a group of nutters who do not care what the consequences of their actions are. A showdown over the debt ceiling focuses the public's attention on that. Every time the issue comes to a head, the GOP gets more unpopular. I think the President has noticed that.

I think some people rightly fear that negotiating with the GOP over the debt ceiling risks giving things away that we shouldn't. But I look at it like this: If I am negotiating with a hostage-taker, I am willing to send in some pizza and soda, so long as no one I care about gets shot in the end. If Obama gives them some symbolic victory, like the fiscally meaningless estate tax deal that just went down a couple of weeks ago, I'm fine with it. 

Shotgun Divorces

My opinion is that the only thing that could bring down the rate of gun violence - either in mass murders or the regular kind -  is to reduce the number of guns in the country from the current 300 million to ... something drastically lower.  How would you do that? Ban the sale of new guns and confiscate existing ones. There really is no other way; guns are just inherently dangerous items, like cars, and after you do what you can to reduce unlawful and unsafe use, there is an irreducible lump of risk. Leaving aside the pesky Second Amendment roadblock that the current Supreme Court has created for us, let's think about the political and cultural issues involved in such an effort. 

First, you have to line up enough political support to get Congress to pass the necessary legislation. The NRA aside, about 45% of Americans own at least one gun. The vast majority of them probably feel like they are not the problem, and don't want to give up their weapons. On the other hand, you have a fairly small group of people who would be full-tilt in favor of outlawing guns, with everyone else maybe vaguely supporting it. The gun owners and manufacturers would be highly mobilized and motivated, while the pro-ban forces would have to be self-funded and constantly reminding wavering allies why it was so important to do this. 

Let's say you overcome that obstacle and get the votes necessary to pass a gun ban and confiscation law.  What's the mechanism for identifying and confiscating the guns going to be? As many people don't know, the ATF doesn't have a database of gun owners. Individual gun shops are required to maintain records, but this law will put them out of business, so I doubt all of them will be able to "find" the records you would need to track down the original buyers of guns they have sold. You're going to need to hire a lot more cops and investigators. 

What are the penalties for violating the law going to be? You have to think about how many people are going to become criminals solely by operation of your new law. If 120 million people own guns right now, how many would resist turning in their weapons?  You'd probably have some measure of voluntary compliance. But largely I imagine you'd have to go find the guns and take them by force. What percentage of those incidents will end well? Probably, almost all of them, but the ones which don't ... you get the picture. 

I did leave the Second Amendment to one side, but what about the Fifth Amendment? Confiscating guns is a Taking which requires compensation. How would you determine how much each individual gun seized is worth? What would be the procedure for paying the former owner? How much money are we talking about?

The picture I am trying to paint here is a parallel to the various kinds of prohibition America has tried in the past. Obviously, there are significant differences between guns on one hand and alcohol and drugs on the other - including the fact that it's harder to make your own guns than it is to distill spirits or make drugs. But the same problems come into play. Creating a black market for guns will have unforeseeable consequences. The value of an individual gun will skyrocket. Smuggling will be rampant. And while it is hard to make a gun, it is not impossible.  

Remembrance

Five years ago yesterday, Andy Olmsted was killed by a sniper in Iraq.  It was a tragedy for the people who knew him, and for those of us who followed his blog posts.

Since then, over 20,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the U.S. invasion of their country. 

All excellent reasons not to go to war when you don't have to.

When Tragedy Strikes, People Say Stupid Things: The "Let's Confiscate Guns" Edition

In 2007 (seems to be the last comprehensive effort to make an estimate), there were 270,000,000 guns in the United States of America possessed by civilians. Except for the relatively small number of fully automatic weapons (i.e., machine guns), these guns are unregistered. We might be able to find out who the guns were sold to originally, but as we go further back in time that becomes harder, and in any event as guns are sold or stolen the task of further tracing ownership becomes obviously impossible.  Imagine if we suddenly decided to confiscate television sets when almost everyone who owned one didn't want to give them up. That would be the kind of effort that would be required.

I can't help but get lawyerly and add: Even if the Supreme Court decided the Second Amendment didn't protect an individual right to own a gun, confiscating guns would be a taking under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.  How much do you think those 270 million guns are worth? That's how much the United States government would have to pay out to gun owners whose weapons were confiscated.

 

 

I Always Have My Powerful, Black, Ersatz Penis With Me, Just in Case

Duncan's experience is absolutely in accord with mine: People who carry concealed - and let you know it - are just looking for an excuse to use it. If they've been at it for any length of time, they've got at least one story about how they brandished it and made some punk run away in fear, a story they tell with great relish right after they show you their piece.  The psychology of it is a total mystery.

I have experience with firearms and, given my temperment, I'm terrified by the idea of having a gun on me while driving, or at a bar after having a few drinks. So I have excellent reasons not to carry and no really good cause in the other direction.

People who say they have to carry concealed because of where they work or live have a very high standard of proof to meet, from my perspective. "I live in the city" certainly doesn't cut it. "I live in a really bad neighborhood" starts to get them there, but I would first also need to hear about how good they are at spotting trouble before it gets to them. If they don't have any stories about doing that, or worse, say they shouldn't have to avoid some situations, then they fail to have the proper mindset. Also, I have lived in the city for decades, and I know my definition of "really bad" is much different as a result. 

Next, I don't care if they have the "Stand Your Ground" law in their state, if they don't readily acknowledge that their first duty is to retreat in any dangerous situation, then they fail. You are not a superhero. This is not a movie. If someone pulls out a gun and you can get away (with the people you need to protect), then get away.  All else equal, if you don't pull a gun, there is a much lower chance of a gunfight. And fewer gunfights mean fewer dead and wounded people.

There is much more, but the above will eliminate most candidates.

Obama's Tech Team

Profiled here. Interesting read. Impossible to tell how much of it is true or accurate, of course. They're fucking geniuses, especially in retrospect. Of course.

A couple of points:

1. They are all dudes. You could weave a fucking rug with all the facial hair. Why are they all dudes? What happens to women coders who try to get in the door? Maybe they get laughed at or subtly discouraged. Maybe it's a toxic atmosphere.
2. The article claims the tech guys didn't start out as politically engaged but ended up that way in mid-'12. They had built this great machine to do something, and that was to win an election, and then they became afraid of losing. "[L]osing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded." No mention of a single issue they cared about, so I'm taking that with a huge grain of salt. These guys make bank. Politics does not touch their lives except for things like net neutrality. Suddenly they're politically energized? No, probably, they're suddenly aware they won't be profiled in The Atlantic if they lose.

Whatever. I don't give a shit whether the people working for us actually share our goals so long as their incentives are lined up with ours. 

(Via Cole.)

The Democratic Volunteer and Field Organizer Army

Four years ago, I was heavily involved in the Obama campaign in Philadelphia as a volunteer. I registered a lot of people to vote. And I was a slacker compared to many of the people who volunteered with me. I was just one set of hands among thousands in Philly. Even more impressive were the field organizers who were often in their first (woefully-underpaid) campaign job and who were inspiring, smart, and seemingly indefatigable. 

This year, every single person I volunteered with last time did it again. And the junior field organizers from last time were now senior people. How many tens or hundreds of thousands of people across the country are now veteran Democratic operatives? These people all have experience in both winning ('08 and '12) and losing ('10) cycles. They know how it works. Some of them will go on to run for office themselves. All of them will probably be involved in political activism for life and will bring up their families in the same tradition. 

If I were a Republican, that would scare me a lot more than demographics. 

Demographics are Not Destiny

People talking about demographics have the wrong end of the stick. White conservatives don't vote for white conservative candidates because they're white, they vote for them because white supremacy is at the core of American conservatism. So long as Republicans continue to embrace distrust and fear of non-white people and of women, they will continue to lose those constituencies. It's possible conservatives can change (although I don't see how), so this problem is fixable. And I hope they do fix it, because we'd all be better off if the Confederacy finally accepted defeat.

The Rocket Science of Elections

So what have we learned from all this?

1. Money alone will not buy an election, especially when you tell your opponents you're trying to buy the election.

2. Having a based motivated soley by antipathy for the other guy will not win an election. 

3. Having a great ground game, enough money to be competitive, and a base motivated by support for your guy (and antipathy for the other guy) will win an election.

Don't Take the Riverlink Ferry From Philly to Camden for a Concert

A kind of non sequitur to post about on here after such a long hiatus, but if you're going from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden, New Jersey, for a concert, don't take the Riverlink ferry that runs from Penns Landing. What a nightmare after the concert lets out. There is only one ferry boat, and it loads and moves very slowly, so you will be guaranteed to be standing in line for hours waiting. Just take PATCO, assuming you're not so suburban that you find walking 1 mile from Camden City Hall to the venue frightening.  Otherwise, drive if you have $25 for parking plus money for the toll. 

Comforting Sound

Plutocracy

70 Years Ago

Two fateful mistakes:

Launching the attack galvanized a nation that had been deeply divided on entering the war and transformed it into 133 million people who, as Barbara Tuchman put it, were so angry they were willing to swim to Japan and strangle anyone they found there.

Second, the military blunder of launching the first and second waves of planes against battleships, rather than the oil tanks and machine shops, when it turned out the aircraft carriers were not in port. Killing the infrastructure at Pearl would have accomplished the same objective as sinking the carriers: It would have knocked America out of the Pacific for a year and made the West Coast vulnerable to attack, allowing Japan to consolidate its gains. Sinking battleships was a strategic nothing, but the Japanese commanders were simplemindedly convinced that destroying the maximum number of ships would achieve the optimal result.

The Unflattering Truth

Avedon Carol provides an illustration of why liberals are so bad at politics:

It's lost in the mists of time for me, but does anyone remember who came up with (and who promoted) the idea that liberal ideology is hard to defend and explain because it's all so "nuanced"?

She calls this "the flattering lie" - I'm not sure why it's supposed to be flattering - and says liberal ideology is easy to understand.

One implication of this argument is that anyone who claims not to understand liberal ideology is arguing in bad faith. Commenters reinforce this:

It's not hard to understand, unless you're dead set against understanding. I call it being aggressively stupid. Other people have a more polite term.

Another is that liberals suck:

It's not a question of liberalism being complex, it's a question of so many liberals not really believing in equality, justice, etc. , that the actual substance of liberalism is worth the effort of fighting for and risking any real personal sacrifice for. That's how liberalism has died.

Talk about "the flattering lie". If there is one, it's that things would be going great if everyone else were as principled and morally good as you.

The problem with Carol's argument is that she's talking about rhetoric, not politics. Rhetoric is essential but not sufficient for effective politics. Rhetoric is about getting people to think what you want them to think. Politics is about getting people to do what you want them to do. We've seen time and again that people who agree with many liberal ideas and policies in general still vote for conservative politicians. That's because conservatives can make their politics simple, while liberals can't.

Consider the following:

• Free-market capitalism is the source of all wealth. Anything that interferes with the free market reduces wealth and therefore all regulation of business:

1. should be carefully crafted to avoid undue interference with the market.
2. should be designed to avoid market failures by promoting dissemination of information, reducing barriers to entry, and countering anti-competitive practices.
3. is evil and should be repealed.

Contrast that with:

• The concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority of people creates a bias in the political system which caters to the interests of those people and undermines the principles of liberty and equality on which the country was founded. Therefore, as a nation we should:

1. promote institutions that counter the creation or persistence of such bias including campaign finance laws, whistleblower statutes, strong independent oversight, and aggressive investigative reporting.
2. create laws and policies to mitigate the concentration of wealth by placing the greatest share of the cost of government on the wealthy using progressive taxation.
3. kill the rich, take their money, and distribute it to the poor.

I think the point is self-evident: Almost no liberals answering the second question would choose the third answer or vote for politicians who took that position. A majority of conservatives answering the first question would do both. Conservative politics are simple and liberal politics are not.

Liberals value fairness, conservatives value power. A message of power is always easier to sell than fairness. As someone wrote:

World's run by fear, you see. Can't sell pipe dreams, can't rule with charity, no good at all. Not in the real world. Promise to build a chap a house, he won't believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he'll do what you tell him. Fact of life.

Conservatives have built a narrative of virtuous strength versus degenerative weakness that is cohesive and, again, simple, and marketed it relentlessly. Liberals could not concoct and peddle such a simplistic story. Again, we value fairness while the other side does not. We refuse to sell what we wouldn't buy; conservative leaders do it every day. A liberal will never be able to appeal to a voter's baser instincts and remain a liberal; a conservative will never be able to appeal to a voter's better instincts and remain a conservative. But it's easier to appeal to the baser instincts, and that's not flattery or a lie.

Message: They're Nuts

releasing Obama's long-form birth certificate won't quiet the crazies. I would guess the Administration thinks so, too, and thinks the GOP presidential candidates will have to continue to cater to them. The media will consider the settled matter really, really settled, and make fun of Trump, et. al. if they continue to insinuate the contrary.

Worst Aspects of the Blogosphere: Two Examples

Item one:

The law firm that Congressional Republicans hired to defend DOMA dropped the representation, and Jonathan Adler at Volokh Conspiracy engages in a little propter hoc, saying that the public outcry among gay groups caused the firm "to discard its integrity when placed under fire." He calls this "the New McCarthyism" and says it's "shameful ... particularly given the nation’s sorry history of efforts to prevent effective legal representation of marginalized groups and unpopular causes." He then has to backpedal when it's pointed out that members of the majority party in the House of Representatives are not exactly an oppressed group, and further when it comes out that the lawyer involved didn't follow proper firm procedure in taking on a new, controversial client.  Nevertheless, he still thinks it's McCarthyism.

Item two:

Digby finds a story that the United States is enacting rules regarding how to get a passport that would be almost impossible to comply with, and posts, "Keeping Them Out ---Or Keeping Us In?" and compares it to the Berlin Wall:

This is Big Brother stuff --- they are setting up a series of roadblocks to use "just in case" they want to deny someone a passport. The question is, who and why? Basically, this will potentially deny US citizens the ability to travel outside the country. It may not be a wall, but it functions pretty effectively as one if they want it to.

In comments, a couple people point out that the proposed form is to be used in cases where someone is applying for a passport for the first time and either (a) claims to be a natural-born citizen born outside the countryor (b) claims to be born in the U.S. but wasn't born in a hospital or whose birth wasn't recorded for more than a year. That is, in a rare situation where someone's right to claim citizenship isn't obvious from the record, amounting to about 75,000 cases every year (out of 14 million passports issued annually). Unlike Adler, Digby doesn't even bother to engage the contrary information and the vast majority of commenters run with the paranoia ball.

Most days there is no point in engaging things posted online, which is why I've largely stopped trying.

Update: This from Conor Friedersdorf is fucking idiotic:

The fact that bureaucrats at the U.S. State Department now feel empowered to demand information this personal, cumbersome and detailed as a condition of permitting an American to leave the country is as alarming an example as I've seen of how these people conceive of the relationship between a government and its citizens. There is only one appropriate response to many of the questions they pose: "It is none of your damned business."

As a condition of receiving a document which will be unquestioningly accepted as proof of your identity, yes, you have to demonstrate that you're eligible. 

Unfortunately, also, too, Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice picks up the scare thread from digby without adding anything. But to their great credit, many commenters at the site push back hard on the conspiracy theory.

DOMA: Fantacism For its Own Sake

The law firm that House Republican hired to defend DOMA decided to drop the representation. The lawyer at the firm who agreed to take the case, Paul Clement, quit, saying:

Defending unpopular positions is what lawyers do. The adversary system of justice depends on it, especially in cases where the passions run high.

Which I agree with, wholeheartedly.

He also says:

Efforts to delegitimize any representation for one side of a legal controversy are a profound threat to the rule of law.

Here's the fun part.

Clement will join the firm Bancroft PLLC, a small D.C.-based litigation boutique founded by former assistant U.S. attorney general Viet Dinh.

Who is Viet Dinh? Recall:

[Viet] Dinh, [principal author of the USA PATRIOT Act,] now a Georgetown law professor, urged the CPAC faithful to carve out a Bush exception to their ideological principle of limited government. "The conservative movement has a healthy skepticism of governmental power, but at times, unfortunately, that healthy skepticism needs to yield," Dinh explained, invoking Osama bin Laden.

Dinh brought the crowd to a raucous ovation when he judged: "The threat to Americans' liberty today comes from al Qaeda and its associates and the people who would destroy America and her people, not the brave men and women who work to defend this country!"

(Emphasis supplied.)

So Paul Clement quits over the principle that everyone, including bigots, have the right to due process, and goes to work with Viet Dinh, who doesn't seem to think much of limits on government power when it comes to "national security". And, I'll ask again, just who is Dinh referring to when he mentioned "the people who would destroy America", apart from al Qaeda? Any Americans on that list?

 

 

Actually, Republicans Did Vote to End Medicare

PolitiFact had no basis for saying otherwise. (I've lobbed an email in to them; I'm sure that will make them come around.) I figured the reason for this isn't just a mere fetish for false equivalence. Looking over their "Pants on Fire" ratings, the prior receipients were:

1. Reince Priebus
2. Michelle Bachmann
3. WorldNetDaily
4. Rick Santorum
5. Glenn Beck
6. Chain e-mail
7. Donald Trump
8. Chain e-mail
9. Chain e-mail
10. Tim Pawlenty
11. Bloggers
12. Michelle Bachmann
13. Mike Prendergast
14. CrossroadsGPS
15. American Action Network
16. Dan Coats
17. John Raese
18. Christine O'Donnell
19. Christine O'Donnell

Before we get to a Democrat, Nancy Pelosi. (The chain e-mails, bloggers, and anyone else you don't recognize on the list above are all conservatives.) Clearly, there must be an internal rule at PFact that you can't go more than 20 Republicans before dragging a Democrat in for balance.

 

Happy Zombie Jesus Day!

If an undead, long-haired, doe-eyed hippie comes shamblin' toward you, push someone else in his way and run like hell.

Republican War on the Poor

Assholes:

Under a new budget proposal from State Sen. Bruce Casswell, children in the state’s foster care system would be allowed to purchase clothing only in used clothing stores.  ...

His explanation?

“I never had anything new,” Caswell says. “I got all the hand-me-downs. And my dad, he did a lot of shopping at the Salvation Army, and his comment was — and quite frankly it’s true — once you’re out of the store and you walk down the street, nobody knows where you bought your clothes.”

Under his plan, foster children would receive gift cards that could only be used at places like the Salvation Army, Goodwill and other second hand clothing stores.

Hey, thrift stores have some nice stuff, but I don't think it's that much cheaper than Wal-Mart. This amounts to another step in the never-ending effort by rightwingers to humiliate the poor, with the bonus that it diverts dollars to religious organizations.  Grasping Christian fundamentalism continues to spread its tenacles.

See the Change

Pet peeve:

Huge surges among Hispanic populations in the Deep South could mean a political sea change over the next two decades, as immigrants become naturalized and they and their American-born children register to vote. ...

This is the correct usage of the phrase, meaning a slow and complete transformation. It just bugs me when people use it to mean a sudden change.

Philly's Stadium Zone

Duncan laments the fact that the Phillies' ballpark was built where it was:

As with many places, my stupid urban hellhole powers that be located the baseball stadium in-the-city-but-not-in-the-city, that is in a mostly isolated stadium complex not near anything else. It is served by the subway, so there's that, but it doesn't inspire people to come before or stay after and spend money in neighboring establishments because, well, there are no neighboring establishments.

Part of the problem is that nobody wanted it in their neighborhood. Locations considered for the baseball stadium included one just north of Chinatown which that community fought successfully. They saw the ballpark as a threat, not an opportunity, mainly because it would change the character of the neighborhood.

People like making more money, but they don't want anything to change to get it.

150th Anniversary of Attack on Ft. Sumter

At 4:30 a.m., April 12, 1861, a rebel cannon fired the first shot of the Civil War at Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. This act plunged the nation into a war in which over 3 million American men fought each other, and 625,000 people died.

Four months prior, a secession convention in South Carolina had issued a document titled "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union" which read in part:

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

The intellectual and moral heirs of the Confederacy now control the party of Lincoln and still claim the mantle of the Constitution while seeking the destruction of the union and the enslavement of workers.

 

Marketing [Insert Here] at Work

The perils of email marketing:

Crazy Curt in Libya

Oh great, Curt Weldon is in Libya, meeting with Gaddafi. No comment from the White House. Odd and a little worrying.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Election: 224 Vote Lead Out of 1.5 Million Votes Cast

This is the situation right now in Wisconsin:

Only 3 precincts left to count. Then, I assume, there is a mandatory recount.

Update 3:30 EDT: All precincts are in. AP says Kloppenburg has a 204 vote lead and 1,479,976 votes were counted. That's .01%.

Tastykake May Fold

Tastykake has delayed the filing of its annual report with the SEC because its accountants and lawyers are focusing all of their energy on trying to sell the company. Tasty Baking has been restructing its debt agreements since early January, partly as a result of problems they're having with their new production facility at the Philadelphia Navy Yard but also because of the downstream effects of the bankruptcy of the company that owns SuperFresh, A&P and Pathmark. As part of the restructing deal, Tasty Baking agreed to try to find a buyer by June who could pay the bills.

Tastykake promises to file the annual report within 15 days, and says it will include a warning from its auditors that the company may not be able to continue as a going concern.

Kicking Whole Household Off Food Stamps If One Family Member Strikes Is Not New, Not Workable

Brendan Skwire says that the Republicans' recent initiative to kick all family members of striking workers off food stamps is actually a policy adopted originally ... in 1981.  Why haven't we heard about it? Because, he says, it's largely symbolic:

[W]hile the language is offensive, it’s largely unworkable if the idea is to kick people already receiving [food stamps] off the program. When you apply, there’s a requirement to report if you’re on strike. If you’re already receiving SNAP, it’s a lot harder to determine that, simply due to the fact that the welfare offices where the majority of SNAP cases are handled are overworked, understaffed, inefficient, and in general swamped. ... [N]o one has the time (or for that matter the resources) to go through every applicant’s files to see which ones belong to unions and which unions are on strike at any given time. The only way this “policy” (and I’m using the term charitably) could work is if a striker went into the county assistance office and said “hey guys, those food stamps i’m getting? Cancel them, I’m on strike”.

There you have it: A great example of the real beauty of the internet, where people who actually know things tell other people who don't.

Real Firearms Are Not Like Video Games

Guns are dangerous to the user if you don't know what you're doing:

see more funny videos at FailBlog

Getting smacked in the face by a cruiser-style shotgun is a comparatively gentle reminder that you need to be taught properly how to handle and shoot a gun before you get anywhere near live ammunition.

Set Clocks Forward One Hour

Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. Sunday.  I wanted to set this post to appear at 2:05 a.m. just for the hell of it.  It's a time that doesn't exist! Turns out Typepad won't let me.