Cheap shots: It's gone, boom!

Image via Arizona Star.

The former neurosurgeon ate at the Silver Saddle Steakhouse on the south side's East Benson Highway, a day after speaking to thousands of people at the Phoenix Convention Center.

He drew national attention as well, after commenting later in the day that he supports the use of military drone strikes to help secure the border....

In January, comedian/actor/director/screenwriter Adam Sandler stopped in to the Silver Saddle to have dinner with his sister.

That Silver Saddle wouldn't by any chance be an advertiser or anything, would it, Star?

Anyhow, what does Dr. Ben Carson mean by "drones" in his stump speech, as at his Phoenix rally last Tuesday?

“What I have said consistently is that we need [to] seal our borders,” he said. “We can use a whole series of things to do that, not just fences and walls, but electronic surveillance and drones.”

I mean, given that US Customs and Border Patrol has been using surveillance drones since 2005, to virtually no effect, although they have managed to crash 23 unmanned planes, one 100 yards from somebody's house in Nogales? What use other than surveillance did he have in mind? He wasn't planning to kill anybody, was he? He wasn't planning to use armed military drones, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus law (funny trick for a small-government Constitutional conservative, I must say), was he?

Hornendämmerung

Via AZCentral.

Sometimes you just look away for a second and they're gone! One of the blog's favorite conservative characters, Arizona attorney general Tom Horne, who just lost his primary yesterday, according to Ed Kilgore, and will presumably be passing at last through that semifinal revolving door to a consulting career:

Scarizona

Image via Freedom's Phoenix.

Got involved in another stupid debate, this time at a dreadful site called Weasel Zipper where they were celebrating the news that the Virginia murder rate has gone down in spite of relaxed gun laws. I pointed out that murders committed in Virginia alone don't account for all the harm done by Virginia-sold weapons, citing statistics from Wall Street Journal on the contribution of out-of-state guns to New York crime.

Well, says my interlocutor,

Of course a good deal of the problem in New York is the difficulty that normal people have in obtaining firearms, keeping them, and using them without running afoul of various laws intended to prevent their legitimate use. Here in Arizona you can walk in to WalMart and get one, you don't need a "permit," and you don't need a concealed carry permit. If someone breaks into your house and you splatter their across the wall, your biggest problem will be getting the bloodstains out. Gun violence in which a citizen is murdered or wounded by a perp is, understandably, all but unheard of. Even perp on perp, gun violence is low.

Ah, yes, another clown who thinks the Bronx is still burning down. Not quite, pal. Even in spite of our horrid Big-Government gun control, things are pretty good in the Big Apple. As I noted,

Did you know gun death rate in NYC at 4.3 per 100,000 is one of the lowest in US? http://www.nypost.com/p/news/l...whereas Arizona is almost 16 per 100,000, one of the worst. http://www.azcentral.com/commu...

Game, set, and match, I think. 

Supremely affordable

Update

Night vision golf. From Incredible Things.

Everybody has to submit a take on the Supreme Court this week and what they're going to do with the Affordable Care Act. One reason for optimism might take a back road, as follows:

We don't know that the Court does everything the Republican Party wants; what we know is that it does everything Big Business wants, by and large, which is not the same thing (Republicans only really care about the bond market and other such bloodsuckers). There are a lot of businesses that have figured out how to do reasonably well or much better with the new law, such as doctors, biotech firms, drug companies, medical schools and teaching hospitals, and many more. It is not in their interest to see the ACA repealed, and John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy may well have heard about this. They play golf, don't they?

Update Monday evening:
With the Court's ruling on Arizona's immigration law out, I just want to brag a little on how it goes along with the above argument. Business, properly speaking, has nothing against illegal immigration, you know: it's a source of cheap labor and growing markets.

Republicans are against illegal immigration because they are tied to this crowd of nativist yahoos that vote for them—if only millionaires voted Republican, they wouldn't be able to win an election even in Scarsdale, so they have to give on these issues that they don't actually care about at all, like abortion and guns, and they have to at least pretend they care about the dusky hordes invading the homeland to speak their foreign languages right in our faces.

But the Supreme Court doesn't need anybody's votes; they are free to represent the millionaires in a more simple and direct way. So they voided all the anti-business provisions of the Arizona law, leaving nearly intact, however, the provision allowing the police to harass anybody that looks like he might not have a birth certificate, because what's life if a cop can't even harass anybody?

And then when business and Republican interests are in accord, as in the case of the Montana corporate campaign contributions law, the Court's task is easy.

So will the same logic work with the ACA? We'll see.

Update 6/28
I hate to say I told you so. Told you so!

Young Horne with the Man

Horne warming up for the Rachmaninov second piano concerto, from America's Own Espresso Pundit, who notes that "Rach II was Ayn Rand's favorite piece.  So it's a cult favorite among Conservatives..."

Did Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne really attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, as a fresh graduate of Mamaroneck High School, on August 28, 1963? He certainly enjoys saying he did:

I grew up in the civil rights era. In the summer of 1963, having just graduated from high school, I participated in the march on Washington, in which Martin Luther King gave his famous speech, that his son should be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin. I have held onto this ideal in the face of subsequent fads: political correctness, identity politics, racial preferences, and "ethnic studies." (Letter to the editor, Arizona Republic, 2/3/2007)

Or then,

Mississippi gosh darn

Per Think Progress, the Tucson Unified School District must close down its Mexican-American Studies Program in keeping with the new state prohibition on ethnic studies in public schools:

 Insisting that the Mexican-American program taught Latino students “that they are oppressed by white people,” [state Attorney General Tom] Horne equated the program to the Jim Crow era. “It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it,” he said.

Hey, that explains the whole civil rights movement! It was all the fault of the teachers in those segregated schools--they told the black kids they were being oppressed! I mean, how else would they have been able to find out?

Oh, wait...