Today's edition of quick hits:
* Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) unveiled a newly revamped Assault Weapons Ban this morning. It will exempt 2,200 firearm models, and existing weapons will only be affected (subject to background checks) if they're being sold.
* On a related note, there probably won't be much bipartisanship on gun policy, but there will be a little: "The first bipartisan legislation to place tighter restrictions on guns will be introduced in the Senate next week, part of a joint effort by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.)."
* Speaking of gun policy, Sen. Joe Manchin's (D-W.Va.) support for universal background checks is a pretty big -- and unexpected -- deal. Greg Sargent has the scoop.
* More on this on tonight's show: "Saying that more needs to be done to reform Wall Street, President Barack Obama named tough former federal prosecutor Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, bringing a proven white-collar crime watchdog into an agency that has been criticized for being soft on the financial industry."
* No good will come of this: "A blunt and explicit threat from North Korea on Thursday that its missile and nuclear programs would 'target' the United States poses a stark challenge to the Obama administration even as it hoped it could focus its major diplomatic effort on restraining Iran's less-advanced nuclear program."
* The president is on board with women in combat: Obama "'fully supports' the decision by the departing Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, at a briefing Thursday morning. But Mr. Carney seemed to suggest that it was not a decision that the White House reviewed extensively or that Mr. Obama had to formally approve."
* Norm Ornstein gets to the heart of the problem on weak Senate reforms: "They are going to make it easier to move things, but they are not extracting a price for bad behavior right now."
* And did you ever wonder what happened to the chair Clint Eastwood argued with during the Republican National Convention? Oddly enough, it ended up in Reince Priebus' office (thanks to my colleague Kent Jones for the tip).
Anything to add? Consider this an open thread.
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Oddly enough, [Eastwood's chair] ended up in Reince Priebus' office
I'm sure he talks to it all the time.
Awww, doesn't Clint have a chair to talk to? Poor Clint! ;-)
What's really odd is that whenever Priebus sits in the chair, it's still empty.
I'd MUCH rather have universal background checks than an assault weapons ban. What's the use of an AWB if the crazies can still go to a gun show and pick up a bunch of legal guns at a gun show?
Ask the parents of the 20 first graders with bullet ridden bodies in Newtown about those big scary assault weapons tough guy. How many of those kids wet their pants facing that big scary assault weapon? Oh and by the way they had no political affiliation.
Whitey's here to prove to any of us who didn't know it that white male morons from Alabama are just as dumb as they sound when they open their mouths and start talking without spitting out the roadkill they're chawin' on. Just your classic dumbass Confederate traitor.
Agreed. Why all the insults and crudeness Whitey when you could be studying for your GED.
How about bazookas or small dirty bombs to hunt with. Just because we put up stop signs didn't mean we were coming for your cars.
It is not too much to ask to demand background checks or to ban high capacity magazines or 'cop killer' ammo. If it would save even one life, one innocent life it is not too much to ask. Your guns are not being taken away and the little one would have to give up to keep assault weapons out of the hands of the mentally disturbed IS NOT TOO MUCH TO ASK. Hell, you don't need your own drone to hunt so stop your whinning and be part of a solution to ring in gun violence.
All progressives and pro choice people should abandon Facebook since Mark Zuckergberg will be hosting a fund raiser for Chris Christie next month.
Thank goddess I never joined. First time I saw that little putz, I told myself "whatever he's selling, I'm not buying."
We've never been tempted to join Facebook, and Snakerburg is one of the main reasons why.
I left Facebook over a year ago because of privacy issues (and the fact that I realized I didn't like most of the idiots I used to keep in touch with)
Mark Zuckerberg has already proven himself to be a POS. It's no surprise that he's supporting republicans as well. I wonder if he'll somehow use his personal database of millions of people to try to sway the political climate in his direction. If past behavior is any indication, the answer is yes.
I was on Facebook for an afternoon.
Spoken like a true elitist. She herself carried a hand gun for self defence. Now that she is rich and has the people paying for her protection, she wants to take away everyone elses ability to protect them self.
True liberal democrat: the minions need to shut up and go to work so they can pay taxes (homage) to them the elite, that know better. they will keep us safe.
The image of Feinstein with a Bushmaster slung over her shoulder... priceless.
First sentence: one ad hominem and one attempt to mislead.
Second sentence: one irelevant statement and a lie.
Third sentence: complete projection.
Apparently the "chem" in your sig stands for LSD...
I think Chem just got schooled by Doug! (Snaps!)
Nonsense chemend
No one is talking about taking away your guns. These are military grade weapons PRESENTLY BEING SOLD...not the ones already sold. No one said anything about keeping you from carrying your handgun around for defense...which makes your comments pretty lame. Stop spreading rumor.
I find it interesting that lawmakers from states that already heavily restrict gun rights want to impose that on the other states, I'm sure they would love to let Texas and Kansas lawmakers set California's Abortion access or marriage laws.
Sen Feinstein is actually taking a step down with the Bushmaster, per various sites she normally carries a 357 magnum. Suposedly per some of these sites at one point she was the only person in San Francisco with a carry permit...(a quick search will show)
And how does a "hand gun" compare to an asault weapon? And FYI, nobody is talking about taking any of your beloved guns.
bjobotts,
Chemmy must have gotten the brown. ;-) (probably too obscure a reference these days)
The fact is only the connected and the "important" are allowed to carry legally in Ca,Ny,MA,Il,Wi,DC....If types of weapons and magazines are to be restricted then reasonable access should be granted in exchange and the 7 bullet thing in ny is the equivalent of requiring cars to have 5 wheels. ( as MOST common handguns use a 10 round mag)
If you are wondering why so many poeple want to stop something like this watch this:
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/innocents-betrayed/
bills like this only lead to further attempts at more liberties being taken away.
It, too bad we can,t require elected officials to watch this video. But then again some that" may possibly" buy into an agenda like this may already know what it contains. Mayhaps these programs served as inspiration for their own "possible" agendas. Herr Hitler was reputed to be a Charismatic Speaker. Joseph Stalin reportedly was just a politically astute thug. We in this country have our own charismatic speakers and our share of politically astute thugs. "The more things change the more they stay the same." See you in the Labor Camps. If we,re lucky we might be able to land a job herding SHEEPLE.
That necklace is an assault weapon! (/snark)
That thing could put out an eye!
Why would she introduce this on the same day she blocked any chance of real filibuster reform. She's not serious about this, but she'll act like she is on the Sunday shows when she complains about how obstruction kept it from passing. It's too bad so many Californians are fooled by this woman. I won't be again.
Seriously. Good luck passing this bill when the GOP goes into their standard filibuster routine. Harry Reid certainly doesn't want this to pass. They'll sigh and explain how they just didn't have the 60 votes needed to pass. How convenient.
I'm thinking the same thing. Dianne Feinstein, who is my senator, is the queen of appearing to do something while doing nothing. If she really wanted to pass second amendment reform she would have supported filibuster reform with teeth. Same with my other senator, Barbara Boxer. People say, "Oh, Boxer is good on the environment". But what bills has she supported that passed? People say, "It's those Republicans. They filibuster everything. She can't get any bills passed." Well, she could if she had supported filibuster reform with teeth. But she didn't. I'm beginning to wonder what the point is of supporting Democratic politicians who don't do anything but stay in office forever, collect their salaries (chump change to both Barbara and Dianne), their fabulous healthcare funded by us and their nifty pensions.
Banning assault weapons will not stop what happened in Newtown, there are already hundreds of thousands of assault style rifles in the hands of the American people, a ban will not keep these weapons out of the hands of crazy people or criminals. There should instead be a national campaign for responsible gun ownership, if any gun you own is not in the hand of a responsible gun owner it should be locked up in a safe.
They will not lock up the crazy people so they must lock them out of places like schools. They know that an assault weapons ban will not stop gun violence, it's a feel good policy to sooth the pain of reality that we live in violent times.
There is only one way to stop gun violence and let no one be fooled, that is to take away all the guns. That's not going to happen. So lets beef up public security, oh wait a minute congress don't want to pay for cops. Lets do something about mental health, wait a minute congress doesn't want to pay for that either.
Face it your best chance to survive gun violence is to live in a fortress or own a gun.
California has some of the strictest gun control laws in the US but I have had no problems legally acquiring a variety of guns and I will never commit a mass shooting, so why should they ban my guns?
You know just the other day I was thinking, "If I walked around with a grenade launcher no one would mess with me."
And then today I walked around without a grenade launcher and no one messed with me.
Still can't quite...
Herky-jerky, ego-driven Wayne La Derriere in his undeciferable and disjointed rebuttal to President Obama’s Inaugural speech, bobbed and weaved continually, like a child in need of a bathroom, rambling incoherently, repeating these phrases, saying.... what was he saying???
"Words have meanings, Mr. President, and those meanings are absolute,"
“...to mistake absolutism for principle."
"And when absolutes are abandoned for principles...”
"Without those absolutes, Democracy decays...”
Is Principle good? Is Absolute good? Which is which?
Definitions might help...
“Absolute”...:
• not qualified or diminished in any way; total:
• used for general emphasis when expressing an opinion:
• having unrestricted power:
• viewed or existing independently and not in relation to other things; not relative or comparative:
• independent of the rest of the sentence:
• that which exists without being dependent on anything else:
“Principle”...:
• a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or for a chain of reasoning
• a rule or belief governing one's personal behavior:
• a fundamental source or basis of something:
• a fundamental quality or attribute determining the nature of something;
• a general idea or plan, although the details are not yet established or clear:
• because of or in order to demonstrate one's adherence to a particular belief:
Sorry... Didn’t help at all... What DID he say???
He is sort of a male Sarah Palin, and spouts similar word-salads.
rachel why are you not talking about the billion dollars/year made in the selling of military-style weapons in america???
this is not about the second amendment, it is about money!
why do you, chris, ed, and lawrence allow yourselves to be pawns of the military-marketeers by deluding americans into thinking the gun battle is about the second amendment???
is not msnbc to be a voice of truth? please be that.
thank you.
Criminals do not care about a rule on a piece of paper or a hard drive.Never have. The sooner you realize this the sooner you can quit all these convulsions and jumping around when a bad guy ignores your playground mentality rules.
I want the same stuff the bad guys have, the police can't be everywhere.I've seen some departments scoff at and joke when people raise concerns about trouble in the neighborhood.Comforting.So finding law enforcement, willing, able, and close enough in that critical moment may not happen.Waiting on government to solve problems ain't fer me.
I don't know why the NRA doesn't understand that many of us don't want to walk around in a society swimming with guns. We have heavily armed people who could be living on the other side of the apartment wall, who might be either mentally unstable, or a threat to whatever political leader they don't like. I spent two years in Germany, where weapons are strictly controlled in society. There is a sense of freedom and safety which we just don't have in the US.
In addition to universal background checks, we need to rebuild the mental care capability in our communities, which was nearly totally destroyed during the last half of the 20th century. Too much of mental illness "treatment" is the nearest penitentiary.
We need a ban of military style weapons. If we can't get that, at a MINIMUM, we need to register every sale of these weapons, as well as the purchase of large capacity magazines for these weapons. I want to know who is buying these weapons in my community...and especially who is buying multiples of these weapons. Are they planning some crime spree? Are they planning some sort of political statement? We, as peaceful citizens, need our local law enforcement to know who these people are. I hope the discussion on military style weapons doesn't give us only: Ban all or do nothing. My preference is ban all; if that isn't possible, register them. Nothing less.
I would love to live in a society where we had strict control, and in which there is not only a background check, but a requirement that people know how to use them, and that they would have to justify the reason for all purposes. Where weapons that aren't used for sport shooting or hunting should have strict regulations, and that any who want to use weapons like the AR-15, must use them by checking them out of an armory and returning them.
I would LOVE to have many of our weapons were removed from our society, but, unfortunately, with nearly 300 million weapons, that won't happen. [anyone who claims that such is in the works, please explain how. We have 3,794,00 square miles of territory. There is no reasonable way that guns could be seized, even if we wanted to...even using ALL of our Law Enforcement and military personnel, I'd be amazed if we got more than a few tens of thousands, before every other weapon "disappeared"]
Why does supposedly one of the most "Christian" of the countries in the world feel the need to have so many weapons? How can we love our neighbors as ourselves with an assault rifle slug over one arm.
Pr Chris
We need to keep pressing to disarm this nation. How can we be free when we have to fear that the next person may be armed--and may have an agenda which isn't peaceful?
Pr Chris
When you site the way things are in Germany you need to consider the fact that in the 1940's we went into Germany with the 7th Army and took all their guns away from them and then we stuck around for years making sure they didn't re supply themselves. Strict gun control was not their decision it was ours.
Mark,
Germany had strict gun controls in place before the Nazi's gained power. The Nazi's promoted gun ownership by citizens once they had stripped citizenship from the undesirables, and the more open gun laws were associated with the Nazi dictatorship.
Distaste for anything from that era is a big part of why strict gun controls are in place today.
Rachel, I am disappointed that you and your colleagues are not telling viewers the truth about the gun issue. It is about money - not the 2nd amendment. It is about the billion dollars/year raked-in by military-weapons marketeers -- not the 2nd amendment. Why don't you expose the congressional supporters and others on Capitol Hill who financially benefit from the sale of these weapons. No-one on any "news" channel is revealing this truth or holding these people accountable. I truly hope you and others on MSNBC will begin to tell Americans the truth and help move Sen. Feinstein's efforts forward and help save our country.
In Louisville, KY a Baptist minister was arrested following a bit of civil disobedience at the county clerk's office. The subject of his protest was same-sex marriage...but not quite in the way you might expect.
So what's you point! Do you approve or disapprove????
Wow, arrested… so the male baptist minister wants his marriage to another man be recognized and gets arrested for not leaving. Either way, the person issuing the license would be arrested.
What a shame, they are married in 2006 in a church, but the state would arrest someone -for this???
The point (I think) is a church married these 2 men 6.5 years ago, but the clerk would be arrested to give them a license.
I approve of people willing to get arrested for a deeply held principle of peaceful civil disobedience. Takes a strong person to do that, shine a light on this from a "different" perspective. I applaud them for saying MY church did not have a problem with this marriage, so there is no standard for all religions having the "anti" same sex marriage position.
O Crap, the edit
Either way, the person issuing the license would be arrested.The point is that if we followed our programming, we'd expect a Baptist minister to be protesting against the idea of marriage equality. That this one is gay and engaging in civil disobedience in favor of marriage equality flies in the face of everything we led to expect. It's not only an example of protest in a good cause, it also cuts the legs out from under one of the right's major arguments: that to be religious is to be anti-equality. Anything that makes the enemy's weapons blow up in their own hands is a good thing.
What the liberals conveniently never mention is that the Feinstein gun bans have already been in place and were a dismal failure that prevented nothing...many studies including the FBI have concluded the Feinstein ban of 1994 to 2004 was a total failure. Even if the new Feinstein bans were in place they would have not prevented any of the mass shooting that we have seen. Many of the uninformed do not realize that what Feinstein proposes to ban is the way these semi automatic rifles look and not how they function she wants to ban the cosmetics. For example I could have 2 semi automatic rifles and one of them would be banned because it has a certain kind of a grip or a certain kind of a stock !! they both have the same mechanics and function but one would be banned because of how it looks and under the Feinstein ban this would be considered an "assault rifle"...how stupid. Feinstein bans are only for liberal ideology, and nothing else ..these bans will do nothing in saving lives. Qualified armed security is a proven method of deterrence and prevention,and the politicians who really want to protect the innocent should focus on securing our schools with qualified security guards in the same way that the privileged elite schools are secured. And our sagging mental health care system has to be upgraded.
The chair. In his office. Tells us more about RP than he might want us to know.
An important point about the current strong support for Social Security/Medicare: People strongly supported welfare aid until we went through a years-long anti-welfare propaganda campaign. Who today doesn't believe that AFDC specifically was "breaking the budget," etc? In reality, it used some 6% of the federal budget at its highest, back during the recession of the 1970s. What about the alarming "culture of dependency" that threatened the US? Um...no. Before "reform," some 80% of AFDC recipients quit welfare for work as soon as their children began school. Welfare kept so many families together through difficult times, and saved so many lives! It also served the middle class well. Every dollar of welfare was, by necessity, immediately rolled into local economies via necessary consumer purchases. The existence of this option compelled employers to provide decent wages and safe working conditions as the only way to get workers (now they can simply place a call for super-cheap temp workfare labor). If we work at it long enough, I'm sure we could convince the public that Social Security/Medicare are bad, too.
On guns: A lot of us lost someone to guns. For me, it was by big brother (who I idolized, as little sisters tend to do) who died back in 1971. What has stayed with me all these years was the way the second it takes to pull a trigger -- such an easy thing to do, requiring no thought or effort -- ends one life and deeply scars so many. Those scars are permanent. You never really "get over it," you just learn to adjust.
It just occurred to me that one of the reasons IMO that there was no filibuster reform is because the Democrats want to do entitlement reform that includes the chained CPI and raising the Medicare retirement age which the Rethugs will probably go along with so the Dems can say this is the only thing we could pass. The Dems can once again use the excuse of Republican obstructionism which really serves the Dems quite well.