Tina Fey…..
Archives for December 19, 2015
More Debate Open Thread
From the Guardian liveblog:
Next question [immediately after the break]: the economy. Clinton strolls on stage halfway the moderator’s question.
Sanders answers first:
We have a rigged economy. Are we better off today than we were when Bush left office? Absolutely. But as you’ve indicated, people all over America … are working longer hours for lower wages.
He says the billionaire class is going to start paying their fair share. Women should not be making 79 cents on the dollar compared. Real unemployment 10%, youth unemployment off the charts. We rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, we create 13 million jobs. I’m gonna have a tax on Wall Street speculation to make certain that public universities are tuition free.
O’Malley goes next. He says Marylanders understand that regulating capitalism well means better including everybody. We increased education funding by 37%, only state without an increase to college tuition. And we’re moving our economy to a clean electric future with solar industry jobs. These things aren’t amorphous goals.
He’s really running through his memorized bit. He says he’s got a 15 point plan to get people working in better jobs. Then he wraps it up.
Clinton answers third, with a little kumbaya for her rivals.
If people feel the game is rigged, that has consequences. I think it’s great sitting up here with the senator and the governor talking about these issues, because you’re not going to hear this from any of the Republicans.
The central tenet of her plan is to get wages up, including a fair-pay act for women and new payment schemes that make employees greater stakeholders in their companies. She gives a shout to Hillary Clinton dot com.
The moderator cuts her off a bit and asks about her longstanding ties to Wall Street. Should corporate America love Clinton, he asks?
“Absolutely. Everybody should!”
She gets applause for that, and says that she wants to create more small business jobs.” If people in the private sector know what I fought for,” and they want to be part of building our economy so it works for everyone, “more power to them,” she says.
ETA, 11pm: I need to step away from the keyboard for a couple hours. Talk amongst yourselves…
Debate Open Thread
We’re live. I thought it started at 9.
ETA: Guardian liveblog here.
Shooting Simulations: What Do They Tell Us
Earlier, Anne Laurie posted about the recently staged, weapons free, mass shooting simulation/demonstration at the University of Texas. In that post one of the articles she links to and quotes from refers to a simulation done to determine if an armed responder would have been able to make a difference in preventing casualties or stop the Charlie Hebdo attack. That simulation, using simunition, was done by the folks at The Truth About Guns (Full Disclosure: I wrote a guest post for The Truth About Guns on German firearms laws and ownership and the Holocaust this past Fall). It is not the first one of these simulations that they have done. They also did one shortly after the mass shooting/murder at Sandy Hook Elementary. While you can read the full report that they prepared here, they concluded their onsite write up with:
Conclusion
This experiment was a preliminary test, providing a proving ground for the methodology and scenarios selected for testing before being implemented in a large scale test at a later date.
Based on the limited data collected from this experiment it appears that an armed teacher would save lives in an active shooter scenario. The caveat: the teacher’s effectiveness depends on their level of training. Maximum effectiveness of an armed teacher of any skill level is achieved with advanced warning of the approaching shooter and implementation of a classroom “lockdown.”
The bolding is by the exercise coordinator and post author. Notice what was and what was not emphasized.
The counterpoint to this is an ABC News report that came to the exact opposite conclusion. You can watch the first part of that report below:
So what do these types of simulations tell us? Basically they tell us that humans react very poorly under stress; that the types of attacks that they are simulating, and that in the real world one would be responding to, are volatile, uncertain, and complex; and that even well trained individuals have trouble responding in the manner they think they would/should because of the first two. Moreover, as both the Truth About Guns folks concluded, and the training officers in the ABC News report indicate, the types of skills needed to respond in an even adequate manner to a mass shooting or an active shooter or an armed intruder are quickly perishable. Additionally, a fairly high level of skill is needed and, because of perishability, training must be regular and often.
Does any of this really tell us anything useful about responding to an armed attack, an active shooter, and/or someone trying to commit a mass murder, whether with a gun or some other weapon? It does. It tells us that if one has a sufficient amount of training and maintains proficiency through regular practice they might be able to positively affect the outcome. The bigger issue is, given that the 2nd Amendment is an enumerated right and its current jurisprudential interpretation, that none of this really matters for policy making. Even using the reasonable regulation concept that the Heller decision left in place, I’m not sure how one would come up with a policy or set of policies that would pass Constitutional muster. Finally, I’m not really sure what kind of data would actually be useful for policy making even if we could get past the partisan divide on this issue.
Shooting Simulations: What Do They Tell UsPost + Comments (77)
Pre-Debate Open Thread
I'm old enough to remember when Clinton supporters were so angry that they'd never support Obama in 2008. People get over shit.
— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) December 19, 2015
Coming to you tonight, from St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, courtesy ABC, which will be livestreaming beginning at 8pm ET. Debate proper starts at 8:30pm. (I’m assuming the Guardian will live-blog as well, but my weak search skills can’t find a link yet.)
The always perceptive Ed Kilgore, now at NYMag, has “5 Things to Think About Before Watching Tomorrow Night’s Democratic Candidate Debate”. I suspect yesterday’s kerfuffle has given more weight to his second point:
… Nobody knows what ABC has planned for the debaters.
All ABC has vouchsafed to the rest of us about the debate is the names of the two moderators (David Muir and Martha Raddatz). We also know who is not going to be moderating: ABC’s own controversial George Stephanopoulos. The original co-sponsor, local TV station WMUR, is also excluded because it’s not behaving well in a labor dispute with its workers. But the format is a bit of a mystery, and so is the attitude of the moderators. Anyone who has watched the GOP debates knows this factor can be crucial. “Speaking of national security, Secretary Clinton, let’s talk about your responsibility for the deaths of Americans at Benghazi … ”One wild card is whether the moderators — or, for that matter, any of the candidates — will get into the strange dustup that broke out [Friday] when the DNC “suspended” the Sanders campaign’s access to party voter files (an indispensable tool) to punish it for an earlier breach of HRC’s confidential voter-info database, which Team Bernie admits but calls an unimportant accident (the staffer responsible was promptly fired). Sanders… could make a rude gesture in the direction of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz if she shows up in Manchester tomorrow night, but it’s hard to see exactly how it figures in a debate…
Speaking of which, several commentors linked to David Atkins’ excellent explanation in the Washington Monthly of “What Bernie Sanders Staffers Actually Did and Why It Matters”:
… The brouhaha over this little fiasco has been intense, and made worse by the fact that only a few thousand people in the United States understand anything about the voter tools involved. Few journalists—to say nothing of armchair activists—have enough campaign and field management experience to truly understand what happened. That ignorance has led to wild accusations and silly reporting from all sides, whether from conspiratorially-minded Sanders supporters or schadenfreude-filled Republicans…
…[I]t made sense for Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to suspend the Sanders campaign’s access to the data until it could determine the extent of the damage, and the degree to which the Clinton campaign’s private data had been compromised. As it turns out the ethical breach by Sanders operatives was massive, but the actual data discovery was limited. So it made sense and was fairly obvious that the DNC would quickly end up giving the campaign back its NGPVAN access—particularly since failing to do so would be a death sentence for the campaign and a gigantic black eye to the party.
This doesn’t mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn’t, in David Axelrod’s words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign. She clearly has been, judging from the intentionally obfuscated debate schedule and from her demeanor and reaction to this recent controversy. The Democratic Party would have been wiser to bring the campaigns together privately and resolve the matter internally. Instead, Wasserman-Schultz chose to take it public to attempt to embarrass the Sanders campaign, and merely managed to embarrass herself and the Party’s data security vulnerabilities in the process.
Still, the Sanders camp’s reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton’s data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn’t honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord. NGPVAN isn’t set up to benefit Clinton at Sanders’ expense—and if the violation by the campaigns had been reversed, Sanders supporters would have been claiming a conspiracy from sunrise to sundown. What’s very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.
It’s also another reminder that armchair activists speculating about news stories would do well to actually get involved in campaign field activities. If you want to be involved in politics, there’s no substitute for actually doing the work to gain a real understanding of how and why campaigns and politicians behave as they do. There would be a lot fewer overwrought conspiracy theories, at the very least.
I hope even the most committed partisans among us will agree with that last paragraph, at least.
Somber Read: “Why the Mock Mass Shooting [at UT-Austin] Matters”
It’s always fun — and, I would argue, important — to mock ammosexuals as the blowhards and bigots they are. But their buffoonery still has real-world consequences. Christopher Hooks, in Texas Monthly:
… The actual experience of mass murder, of course, is raw horror. It’s too intense for many people to contemplate for long, so we often don’t. When the campus carry bill was first heard in front of the Senate Committee on State Affairs earlier this year, a huge number of people came to testify, but one in particular stood out: Claire James, the first person shot by Charles Whitman, the man who posted up in UT’s clock tower with a rifle he used to kill sixteen people and injure dozens more.
James, née Claire Wilson, was eighteen and eight months pregnant at the time. She walking on the mall with her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, also eighteen. From the Tower’s observation deck, Whitman put a bullet through her stomach, fracturing the skull of her unborn son. Eckman was killed next. Forty-six people were killed or injured that day, some of whom were walking down Guadalupe Street, where Saturday’s protesters marched. James lay bleeding on the ground in the August heat for a full hour while emergency responders struggled to assess the situation. (In 2006, she and other shooting survivors talked to Texas Monthly about their experiences in intense detail.)…
The story of the UT Tower shooting, the first mass shooting on an American university campus, confounds a lot of the narratives in today’s debate over gun violence. To the idea, often repeated on Saturday, that only a “good guy with a gun” can stop a “bad guy with a gun,” there’s the rejoinder that Whitman, an Eagle Scout and Marine who’d won the service’s Good Conduct Medal, was a good guy with a gun. Until he wasn’t. On paper, he looked like the kind of guy lawmakers have said they hope will pack heat next year: A military veteran with exhaustive firearms training.
Somber Read: “Why the Mock Mass Shooting [at UT-Austin] Matters”Post + Comments (27)
DemenTED (Open Thread)
Gotta admit, this is a pretty effective approach, considering the intended audience:
His appalling politics aside, the biggest knock on Cruz is that he’s such an unlikable sumbitch, even to fellow wingnuts. Sounds like someone on his communications staff gets that and has a strategy to counter it.
Leaving the vile subject of the clown car aside, what do y’all think will happen at tonight’s Democratic debate? I’m annoyed by the timing of it since I have plans and will only be able to watch sporadically if at all.
Will Sanders complain about DNC favoritism? Will Clinton attack the Sanders campaign for data peeking? Or will they shake and move on? I honestly don’t know, but I’m hoping for the latter.