Motley Moose – Archive

Thank you, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), for standing up to the NRA and paving the way for Dr. Vivek Murthy to be our next Surgeon General!!!

What?!!?? That was not your intent when you forced the Senate to remain in session on Saturday? Regardless, Dr. Vivek Murthy will finally get a vote:

[Dr.] Murthy is an impressive medical professional with sterling credentials. He’s an attending physician, an instructor, and a public-health advocate, so when Obama nominated him for the post, no one questioned his qualifications. But Murthy, like so many in his field, also sees a connection between gun violence and public health, which meant Republicans and the NRA decided to destroy his nomination.

Dr. Murthy was nominated by the president on Nov. 14, 2013

Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy, Nominee for Surgeon General, Department of Health and Human Services

Dr. Vivek Hallegere Murthy is the Co-Founder and President of Doctors for America, a position he has held since 2009.  Dr. Murthy is also a Hospitalist Attending Physician and Instructor in Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, a position he has held since 2006.  In 2011, Dr. Murthy was appointed to serve as a Member of the Advisory Group on Prevention, Health Promotion, and Integrative and Public Health.  Dr. Murthy has been the Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of TrialNetworks, formerly known as Epernicus, since 2007.  Dr. Murthy co-founded VISIONS Worldwide in 1995, a non-profit organization focused on HIV/AIDS education in India and the United States, where he served as President from 1995 to 2000 and Chairman of the Board from 2000 to 2003.  Dr. Murthy received a B.A. from Harvard University, an M.B.A. from Yale School of Management, and an M.D. from Yale School of Medicine.

Dr. Murthy’s nomination was approved by Senate committee but put on hold in February by red state Democrats frightened by the NRA. Yes, the same NRA that spent millions to support those red state Democrats’ opponents in November 2014 (how’d that work for you, soon-to-be-former Senator Mark Pryor?).

But Saturday afternoon, thanks to the “intervention” of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Dr. Murthy cleared the first procedural hurdles to his  confirmation by a vote of 52-40. On Monday, Senators will vote on cloture, and because of the 50+1 rule, confirmation.

Many conservatives have invoked Holocaust comparisons – and claimed that if European Jews only had guns in the 1930’s and 1940’s there would have never been a Holocaust – when it comes to any effort to implement new gun control laws.  This time, the focus of their anger is Jersey City mayor Steven Fulop, himself a grandchild of Holocaust survivors.

Mayor Fulop’s offense is that he supports a measure which would require gun vendors that seek contracts with Jersey City to fill out a gun safety questionnaire.  For this, his grandparents ordeal in the Shoah was invoked by Scott Bach, a member of the National Rifle Association’s board.

Mayor Fulop’s response to the claim that if only his grandparents, and other Jews, had guns when the Nazis came for them:

If my grandparents had guns in their house when the Nazis came, my grandparents would be dead and I wouldn’t be here. (emphasis my own) So that’s probably the reality of the situation. But I don’t think that you can equate religious persecution to a manipulation of the intent of the Second Amendment.

These conservatives seem to forget exactly what would happen if you had one or two people go up against fully equipped soldiers.  Maybe one or two or even three soldiers would get killed, but, in the end, it would be the ordinary people that were killed.  No, it wasn’t a lack of guns that caused the Holocaust, but the complicity of millions of people in Germany and occupied Europe who actively assisted in the Shoah and those, throughout the world, that turned a blind eye to what was happening and the countries that closed their doors to Jewish refugees fleeing for their very lives.

The guests on this weeks Moyers and Company are Francine and David Wheeler, and the topic is The Sandy Hook Promise. At the end of this segment Francine Wheeler and Dar Williams sing “Family”…I’m still blinking tears.

http://youtu.be/sOlSZeI457A

This morning in the New York Times, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords wrote an op-ed about the cowardly action of the U.S. Senate in defeating the amendment promoted in this video:

Gabrielle Giffords: “A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip”

SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms – a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

… if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s.

Let’s join her and let’s make them fear the wrath of the voters. There is really no excuse for voting against the wishes of 90% of Americans.  

 

“Doctors have no business inquiring of patients

whether they are choosing to exercise their

constitutional rights,” NRA spokeswoman

Jacqueline Otto said in a statement Friday.

“When a child is brought to a doctor, it is to seek

their expertise in pediatrics, not firearms ownership.”

.

So this is brief provocation rather than a proper essay, and I truly hope to inspire some contrary points rather than nods of assent. Without going into the emotional question about assault weapons after Newtown, or indeed concealed hand guns etc, I’m just querying a suggestion – often put – that rifles are essential to US life because so many rely on hunting.

Tendentious one sided image of a Moose Hunter to get y’all riled up

So here’s a comment I put on Orange which I hope you will (pardon the pun) shoot down, or at least discuss in animated (but always civil) terms.

Ya all know them roolz.  

Cross-Posted from Daily Kos…

Gun violence has not stopped, neither has the conversation on how to reduce it. Today Joe Biden continues the discussion at WhiteHouse.gov.

As Vice President Biden continues his work in an attempt to move the gun issue forward and the NRA continues its work to arm teachers, the country as a whole is advancing the topic in small and large ways. Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe once again this morning provided, at least to the largely liberal MSNBC audience, an example of a very conservative former politician who understands the realities of the issue in America today.

Meanwhile, Moose Bill McGee (bam) was on the Ed Show on MSNBC representing the position of parents who would rather not have armed teachers in their children’s classrooms. Bill does a very Moosely job of respecting the other opinions but nonetheless providing well articulated reasons why armed teachers in classrooms is not a viable solution to gun violence. Bill’s interview begins right at the 6-minute mark in the video below.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This issue is not going away, no matter what the NRA has to say about it. 85% of Americans today want to have universal background checks for gun purchases, 75% want restrictions on the size of magazines. Regardless of the mechanisms agreed to attempt to address the issue it seems apparent that the usual roadblocks to discourse are coming down.

This is the first time I’ve copied over an entire article of mine, and I’m probably infringing my own copyright, but I think this is an important discussion and I can only join in here.

In the wake of the terrible events of last Friday in Newtown, which left 27 dead-20 of them young schoolchildren-social media such as Twitter and Facebook played a key role in communicating the shocking news and expressing an international sense of outrage and grief. But they also spread misinformation and misapprehensions just as quickly. The gunman was initially misidentified, and his murdered mother was erroneously connected to Sandy Hook Elementray School. But while these errors of fact were soon corrected, a deeper misunderstanding took hold over the following few days as a shattered nation tried to understand an inexplicable tragedy.

Writing is seen on a home in Newtown, Connecticut on Dec. 17, 2012. The two funerals on Monday ushered in what will be a week of memorial services and burials for the 20 children and six adults massacred when gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last Friday. (Eric Thayer/Reuters, via Landov)

An uncorroborated rumor about the gunman, Adam Lanza, suggested that he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome-a now out-of-use term for a higher-functioning form of autism. By Saturday, a blog post by Lisa Long-“I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother: A Mom’s Perspective On The Mental Illness Conversation In America”-had gone viral, been retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, and republished on Gawker, Britain’s Daily Mail, and on the Huffington Post. Long, the mother of a 13-year-old with behavioral problems, argued, “It’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.”