interesting things
Gun rights group in Colorado offering free ammo to volunteers working to unseat pro-gun control state legislators.
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via Talking Points Memo http://da.feedsportal.com/c/34753/f/640418/s/2c92da9e/l/0Ltalkingpointsmemo0N0Carchives0C20A130C0A50Chrrrrmmmmm0Bphp/ia1.htm
On March 10th, Middlefield, Ohio police made what appeared to be a routine traffic stop of a man who had run a stop sign. But then James Gilkerson emerged from his stopped car firing 37 rounds from an AK-47 rifle. Amazingly the two officers in the cruiser sustained only relatively minor injuries and fired off 54 rounds of their owning, eventually killing Gilkerson.
You can see the shocking and somewhat disturbing dash-cam video released by local police just this weekend here.
Perhaps not surprisingly, in Gilkerson’s car police found eight 40-round magazines for the AK-47 and a bunch of militia and terrorist related literature.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer released photographs of the different books and pamphlets. And here’s where it gets even more interesting and, yes, more disturbing. TPM Reader JL notes that the 7th slide in the slideshow shows what appears to be a course manual for the Fighting Rifle course taught by a Tennessee outfit called Tactical Response.
Now, ring a bell?
Well, remember back not long after the Newtown massacre, a crazy gun guy down in Tennessee who was the CEO of a ‘tactical’ firearms training operation said he was “gonna start killing people” if President Obama issued an executive order on guns. Well, that was James Yeager, CEO of, yep, Tactical Response. If you don’t remember, here’s the initial video.
A short time later, Yeager clarified that he wouldn’t murder anybody “unless it’s necessary.” But that apparently wasn’t enough for the State of Tennessee which suspended Yeager’s carry permit because his comments suggested a “material likelihood of risk of harm to the public,” which sounds like a reasonable enough position.
Not to worry though, Yeager got his permit back last month.
Here’s the page on the Tactical Response website about the particular course Gilkerson appears to have taken. (Obviously, we only have this manual in his position at the time of his death. Conceivably he could have gotten it through some other means.) The course is next taught on May 18th and 19th. Sign up now. Here’s the couse description from the site.
You know how to shoot your rifle or subgun now let us teach you how to FIGHT with it! This course is far more advanced than any other rifle course you can attend (with the exception of our advanced course) and covers trajectory, battlesight zero, gear set-up, sling configurations, transitions to pistol, use of cover and concealment, practical ready and firing positions, close- and medium-range snap shooting, weapons handling, urban applications, team drills, firing while moving, multiple targets, plus the tactics required to employ this potent tool in combat. Every student leaves this class with empty mags, a red hot rifle, and a smile from ear to ear! This is one of our most popular courses.
This class is great for nearly any magazine fed rifle or subgun and any traditional military style rifle. We will show you how to run your MP5, AR, AK, RPK, FAL, M1A, G3, VZ-58 or whatever weapon you have!
Needless to say, one can’t lay any direct responsibility on Tactical Response for what Gilkerson did. But when you make it a habit of giving urban combat training on automatic weapons to civilians in a climate of gonzo threats to start civil wars or start blowing away government officials, it’s hard to say something like this is entirely unexpected.
We’ll call tomorrow and see whether Tactical Response has records of Gilkerson attending the course or any comment on these unfortunate developments.
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via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/05/when_stories_collide_1.php
O’Connor says maybe Bush v Gore was a mistake.
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via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/04/now_you_tell_us_2.php
On Saturday evening, Montgomery County, Maryland police got an urgent and fake message claiming that someone had been shot at Wolf Blitzer’s home. (In fact, he was fine and actually not even in town.) A perimeter was set up around the home, the whole deal.
What makes this jump out to me is that something seemingly almost identical happened at roughly the same time at the Michigan home of Rep. Mike Rogers (R). (Our Pema Levy confirmed the story around noon today.)
No evidence that the two incidents are connected. But uncanny and more than a bit unsettling.
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via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/04/bizarre_and_unsettling.php
Interesting, telling juxtaposition. Gabby Giffords and Mitch McConnell react to the successful Republican filibuster of the background check compromise.
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via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/04/juxtaposition.php
You’ve probably seen this now iconic photo of three Boston police officers and a man knocked down by the blast just after the bombs went off. As noted earlier, the man in question, 78-year-old Bill Iffrig of Lake Stevens, Washington, was a bit bruised but otherwise unharmed.
After the jump, a video interview this evening with Iffrig, just released by ESPN …
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via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/04/that_older_man_knocked_down_in_the_photo.php
Too early for 2016? Not for Hillary fans.
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via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/04/all_hail_hill.php
In the DC suburbs, a grounded teenager who snuck out of his house to go drinking with friends came home later in the night to the wrong house, two doors down, and snuck back in, where he was shot and killed by the homeowner.
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via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/03/just_sad_1.php
In addition to be abrasive and serially disliked, it seems Sen. Cruz’s penchant for imitating Joe McCarthy may have be ever greater and of longer standing than we knew. In this case, the habit of lying for political advantage seems even more clear.
Jane Mayer just posted this piece at The New Yorker website in which she notes that only two and half years ago Cruz gave a Fourth of July speech in which he accused at least twelve members of the Harvard Law School faculty of being not only “Marxists” but communists “who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Here’s the passage …
Boxer’s analogy may have been more apt than she realized. Two and a half years ago, Cruz gave a stem-winder of a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally in Austin, Texas, in which he accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there. Cruz attended Harvard Law School from 1992 until 1995. His spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request to discuss the speech.
Cruz made the accusation while speaking to a rapt ballroom audience during a luncheon at a conference called “Defending the American Dream,” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit political organization founded and funded in part by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)
He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Mayer goes on to discuss the issue with Charles Fried, a widely respected professor at HLS who was Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General during his second term, who not surprisingly doubts there are twelve members of the Harvard Law faculty who believed in the violent overthrow of the United States by the Communist Party now or when Cruz was a student from 1992 to 1995.
Now many universities, many law schools are going to have a few left-wingers and/or radicals on the faculty. That’s part fo that free speech and academic freedom thing. But Cruz made a much more specific claim — that they were communists who supported the overthrow of the US government. That’s a claim of sedition, certainly a lie but one he knew would be a good political line.
It’s just another data point. The guy has a hard time not knowing lying about people to gain political advantage.
via Talking Points Memo http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/02/the_lies_the_lies_the_lies.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Talking-Points-Memo+%28Talking+Points+Memo%3A+by+Joshua+Micah+Marshall%29
For a promotional video that was eventually never shown, the Tea Party group FreedomWorks got two female interns to impersonate then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a Giant Panda having sex.