Random Politics & Religion #00

PLCAA completely prevents gun-manufactures from negligence liability. That includes selling weapons in certain areas. Selling a gun in Vermont isn't the same as selling a gun in Chicago or LA. They aren't getting used for the same purpose.

More importantly it creates unique protections for the gun industry. No other industry in the country has such unique protections. Why do gun manufactures deserve such privilege?

As the first Democratic presidential debate nears, both leading contenders are working to lessen the distance between themselves on two issues of great importance to the primary base. Last week, it was Hillary Clinton’s opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact, with the former secretary of state citing its insufficient safeguards for American workers. This week, it is Bernie Sanders’s reconsideration of his longstanding opposition to holding gun manufacturers liable for gun deaths in the wake of a rash of school shootings.

Sanders cited two shootings Friday at universities in Arizona and Texas as well as last week’s slayings at an Oregon community college when he told NBC’s Chuck Todd during a “Meet the Press” interview on Sunday that he’d take another look at his past position. In 2005, Sanders supported legislation protecting gun manufacturers from civil liability lawsuits.

“That was a complicated vote and I’m willing to see changes in that provision,” Sanders said. “Here’s the reason I voted the way I voted: If you are a gun shop owner in Vermont and you sell somebody a gun and that person flips out and then kills somebody, I don’t think it’s really fair to hold that person responsible, the gun shop owner.”

“On the other hand, where there is a problem, is there is evidence that manufacturers, gun manufacturers, do know that they’re selling a whole lot of guns in an area that really should not be buying that many guns, that many of those guns are going to other areas, probably for criminal purposes?” he asked. “So, can we take another look at that liability issue? Yes.”

Sanders, whose sparsely populated home state of Vermont has a good deal of gun owners, has a more conservative record on gun control than his main rival on Tuesday’s debate stage despite having run to Clinton’s left on nearly every other issue.

In the past, Sanders has opposed a five-day waiting period on gun purchases, supported guns in national parks and checked baggage on Amtrak trains but as CNN notes, his vote to protect gun manufactures from liability is the most curious given that “he has voted to make it easier to sue airlines for crashes over water, machine tool makers for injuries that happen after 18 years of use and restaurants over mislabeled food that contributed to weight gain.”


“Instead of people yelling at each other, we have got to come together on common-sense approaches which, in fact, the vast majority of the American people support,” Sanders explained to Todd, adding that there is “widespread support to ban semi-automatic assault weapons, guns which have no other purpose but to kill people.”

Sanders voted against the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act in 1993, a bill that established the current national background check system, before eventually backing the 2013 Manchin-Toomey bill closing the gun show loophole. He has also voted for a semi-automatic gun ban and a ban on high-capacity magazines.

Sanders, who now holds a D- rating from the NRA, has called himself “strong” on gun control issues in past interviews.

For her part, Clinton appears ready to set a contrast between her record on gun control and Sander’s in Las Vegas this week. Days after nine people were killed by a lone gunman in Oregon, Clinton touted new proposals for gun reform on the stump in Iowa, including a repeal of the Sanders backed congressionally mandated immunity from civil liability for the gun industry.

“This epidemic of gun violence knows no boundaries,” Clinton said as her campaign expressed a willingness to enact new gun control measures through executive action.

It's been what, 10 years? He's not allowed to change his mind?

I think its not that he's changing his opinion, but rather the timing. It comes across as a bit staged and artificial.

Nothing wrong with changing your mind as the world changes, but if it's right before a debate it means you did it just for success, not on principle like you should have.

A mass shooting like the Oregon one can cause you to rethink your stance on an issue you haven't thought about in a while

Or they've been busy with other things and haven't paid as much attention to it as they should have


Are we forgetting that politicians are humans? lol

Or they've been busy with other things and haven't paid as much attention to it as they should have


Are we forgetting that politicians are humans? lol

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 crashed as a result of a Russian-made Buk missile, the Dutch Safety Board says.

The missile hit the front left of the plane causing other parts to break off, it said in a final report into the July 2014 disaster, which killed 298 people.

The West and Ukraine say Russian-backed rebels brought down the Boeing 777, but Russia blames Ukrainian forces.

The report does not say who fired the missile, but says airspace over eastern Ukraine should have been closed.

The plane - flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur - crashed at the height of the conflict between government troops and pro-Russian separatists.

Most of the victims were Dutch - 196, including some with dual nationality. The other passengers and crew were nationals from 10 countries.


A separate Dutch-led criminal investigation is under way. The report says the three crew members in the cockpit were killed by the missile explosion instantly. However, it adds, it was unclear at which point the others died, and the possibility of some remaining conscious for some time during the one-and-a-half minutes it took for the plane to go down could not be ruled out.


Presenting its findings at the Gilze-Rijen military base in the Netherlands, the safety board showed plane parts that had been brought back from the rebel-held Donetsk region and reconstructed. Board president Djibbe Joustra said the impact pattern could not have been caused by a meteor, an air-to-air missile or an internal explosion.

Instead, he said, a warhead carried by a surface-to-air missile had detonated above the left-hand side of the cockpit, causing structural damage.

Mr Joustra said the missile was a Buk - which experts say both Russian and Ukrainian armies possess.

He added that paint had been found on metal fragments within the plane that matched with missile fragments on the ground.
Mr Joustra also said there had been sufficient reason to close off Ukrainian airspace but Ukraine did not do that - and on the day of the crash, 160 flights flew over the area in question.

He's been criticized publicly by liberal outlets about his support of PLCAA and how it effected the families of Sandy Hook Elementary. Why is Oregon any different?

In what’s either an excellent bit of techbiz history or the strangest possible promotional tie-in to the new Steve Jobs movie, Stephen Levy at Medium brings us a fascinating backgrounder on yet another bit of Carly Fiorina brag, during the second GOP debate, that she couldn’t have been too terrible at Hewlett-Packard, since she got an encouraging phone call from Steve Jobs Himself:

Heck, that’s how the tech business goes. Sometimes you’re just too darn visionary for a mere corporate board, and they shitcan you because they aren’t visionaries like you.

Color Levy skeptical. Sure, Jobs called her to commiserate and say, “Yeah, I’ve been fired by dunderheads too, but that’s what happens to those of us who Think Different, right?” Except Carly Fiorina ain’t no Steve Jobs:

But that’s not really the point, says Levy. The real point is that Steve Jobs could easily afford a kind word for Fiorina, since she’d very helpfully made him a lot of money in one of her many management debacles at HP: the sorry and forgettable “partnership” between HP and Apple that resulted in an abominable, largely forgotten technology footnote, the HP iPod. Levy knows a thing or two about that misbegotten artifact of the early Aughts, since he literally wrote the book on the iPod. Or at least, a book on it.

When the iPod was still so new and revolutionary that everyone was still gaga over it:

No, kids, this piece is not going to be kind to Fiorina.

Under Fiorina’s direction, HP fudged almost everything it could in its iPod “partnership” with Apple, although the relationship sounds a bit more like the “partnership” of the USSR and its Cold War satellite states. Jobs pretty much dictated the terms under which HP would make and sell its version of the iPod, and he made sure that Apple had the better deal in every aspect of how it was rolled out. His biggest advantage was getting Fiorina to pre-install Apple’s iTunes music service on all its new computers:

Levy ventures that because HP was barely making a profit on each PC it sold, the deal almost certainly created more value for Apple than it did for HP. And then there was the HP iPod itself, which never really competed with the Apple version because shortly after HP got its version on the market, Apple came out with the next generation of its iPod, with more storage and better bells and whistles. This left the HP version perpetually behind:

At its best, the HP version never made up more than 5 percent of iPods sold. It didn’t even do well in Iran! Jobs dictated even the tiniest detail of the HP version’s design: Although Fiorina proudly showed off a pretty blue HP iPod prototype, the Apple device came only in white, and darned if the actual production models from HP weren’t white, too.

Fiorina even screwed HP beyond the end of her tenure, since her agreement with Apple committed HP to not producing a competing music player until 2006 — well past her firing in February 2005. Even after her successor ended the iPod deal in July 2005, HP/Compaq computers came bundled with iTunes until January 2006, when HP made a deal to include the Rhapsody music service:

So Fiorina made a deal to sell an HP iPod that would always be obsolete compared to Apple’s and to install software that made Apple rich. Great negotiating, Donald Trump would be proud! Anything else?

Oh yes. Levy points out that when HP bought Compaq, it acquired Compaq’s many patents on digital music player technology that Fiorina could have leveraged to HP’s advantage in negotiating with Jobs, since “she could have credibly claimed that the iPod infringed on HP’s intellectual property” — if she’d had any idea that her company owned the patents. Nope. Levy sums up:
ep, that’s the brilliant business experience that Fiorina wants to bring to the Oval Office. As Levy says, it’s not an especially “encouraging precedent for a person who wants to deal with Vladimir Putin.”

Now we simply need to wait and see whether Donald Trump can find an old HP iPod on eBay before the next GOP debate. Might be fun for him to pull that from a jacket pocket and say, “Perhaps this will refresh your memory!”

I'm sure Hilary would have been a much better choice for CEO at HP.

I wasn't able to watch the debate, but it appears that the major news websites are unanimous in their belief that both Clinton and Sanders came off looking better after the debate, with the others seen as losing it. Sanders had many more Google hits, though, which plays big for him as the underdog.

A mass shooting like the Oregon one can cause you to rethink your stance on an issue you haven't thought about in a while

Seeing as Carly lost over 56% of the stock value, lade off 30,000 American workers and outsourced their jobs, and according to the article above didn't get a red cent for installing iTunes on all HP products, any one of us here could be a better choice.

Sanders had many more Google hits, though, which plays big for him as the underdog.

I wasn't able to watch the debate, but it appears that the major news websites are unanimous in their belief that both Clinton and Sanders came off looking better after the debate, with the others seen as losing it. Sanders had many more Google hits, though, which plays big for him as the underdog.