For the second time in just over a week, we’re forced to say the following: Kim Kardashian is right. Shortly after the tragic Orlando shooting that claimed the lives of 49 people last week, Kardashian didn’t simply offer hollow thoughts or prayers. She Tweeted an actual solid point, referencing the “Terror Gap” in the United States, a loophole that allows suspected terrorists on the FBI Watch List to purchase automatic weapons. “We have repeatedly called on Congress to close this loophole that makes it easy for dangerous people to get guns & kill,” Kardashian wrote last week . “Nothing has changed!!!! People continue to senselessly die. When will these gun laws be changed?!?!?!?!!!!?????” Fast forward to Monday night and the Senate rejecting a quartet of legal measures, each of which would have made it more difficult for certain people to purchase guns in America. Most of this proposed legislation centered on the extension of background checks… and no bill received the 60 votes it needed to pass. This is how Kardashian responded to the failure of politicians to change anything about gun control in her country: “So terrorists on fbi’s wanted lists can legally still buy guns. Oh & mentally ill people can buy guns without a background check too.. “The fact that anyone can so easily access guns is so scary & after all of the devastating loss the Senate should have not failed us!!!” View Slideshow: Kim Kardashian: Her 24 Most Hideous Fashion Moments Kardashian also re-Tweeted a multitude of related messages, such as the list of which Senators voted for or against one of the measures. There is also a list going around of how much money these Senators have received over the years from the National Rifle Association. It may sound silly, but Kardashian could have actual influence on issues such as these. She has over 74.5 million Instagram followers. She can get, like, half of them to purchase some kind of lipstick she likes. Imagine what she could push them to do if she were to focus on topics that truly impacted the nation…
Ted Nugent Posts Fake And Racist “2 Ni**er” Meme On Facebook The watchdog site MediaMatters has put professional racist Ted Nugent’s Facebook page on blast after one of his latest posts was as racist as it was sarcastic and offensive… National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent posted a racially derogatory image on his Facebook page that he said was an advertisement for a moving company called “2 ni** ers and a stolen truck.” In a March 31 post, Nugent shared the image with his comment: “Before all the braindead dishonest lying scum politically correct racist hatepunks get all goofball toxic on us here, I am simply promoting a brilliant entrepreneur in Detroit that created a clever bussiness. His words, not mine. Ya gotta luv this guy!! When in doubt whip it out!” As much as hatin’ azz Ted would like to believe that some enterprising black entrepreneur starting a self-hating small business… There is no actual moving company; the image is actually a fake that has been shared on racist websites and condemned by civil rights leaders. Nugent, who wrote a column last year for conspiracy website WND praising the use of the word “ni**er,” even as a racial insult, frequently makes racially charged and otherwise inflammatory comments. Earlier in 2016, he caused widespread controversy for sharing anti-Semitic material on his Facebook page. This is all just par for the course for Ted. He and those like him want to take back America one racial epithet at a time. And if Donald Trump is elected president, he might just have a shot…SMH. Image via Facebook/WENN
Ted Nugent Says Swearing Toddler Will End Up Dead Like His Dad via Media Matters National Rifle Association board member and conservative columnist Ted Nugent claimed that African-Americans must “admit to the self-inflicted destructo-derby they are waging” in order to honestly celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Nugent, who recently became Outdoor Channel’s spokesman, made this claim in his regular column for birther website WND. In a column titled, “What Would Dr. King Say About Black Culture?” Nugent sought to tie a viral video of a 2-year-old Omaha, Nebraska toddler being cursed at by adults to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, which is on January 20. Nugent cited this single example of bad parenting as “the tip of the black gangster iceberg” and suggested that “[s]hould the boy ever be reunited with his family of gangsters, he will either end up in prison like his grandparents or dead like his dad.” Returning to his frequently made claim that Democrats act as slave masters to African-Americans, Nugent again indicted African-American culture with the claim that, “[t]o honestly celebrate the legacy of Dr. King, black America would have to admit to the self-inflicted destructo-derby they are waging and begin to tell their liberal Democratic slave drivers to take a hike.” Obviously this douchebag’s comments are way left field as usual, but should parents of young children see red flags if they’re behaving this way at this age? Or is it too early to be overly concerned?
The National Rifle Association (NRA) did what they do best today in their press conference addressing the Newtown school shootings. They issued a call for…
The National Rifle Association (NRA) has finally broken its silence over the Newtown school shootings. The NRA, which is also a powerful lobbying group, has…
“Good morning, shooters,” came the tweet from @NRA_Rifleman . “Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” Funny you should ask. The tweet was soon deleted by whoever maintains the National Rifle Association-affiliated Twitter account, likely (but un officially) the reaction to an outpouring of protest over the insensitivity of such a query mere hours after James Holmes allegedly opened fire in an Aurora, Colorado, multiplex , killing 12 and wounding 50. Moreover, it was a stupid question because we know everybody’s weekend plans, curled up with the cultural imperative to “process” the event: To blame, to pray, to reflect, to understand . Was it linked to The Dark Knight Rises , whose feverish midnight showing served as the flashpoint of the massacre? Was it an outgrowth of generations of mediated violence — a gory cocktail of TV shows, video games and shoot-’em-up blockbusters? Was it just a 24-year-old nutjob wanting to hurt, maim and kill for no other reason than to simply do it? Whatever. It’s all those things and more and none of them all at once, because it doesn’t really matter. Not if we’re being honest with ourselves. The victims don’t matter. The shooter doesn’t matter. The motive doesn’t matter. All that matters is us, sitting here wringing our hands over the same nightmare we’ve seen and “processed” again and again and that has finally hit us where we always knew it would: At the movies. A confined space comprising hundreds of strangers in the dark, all vulnerable, oblivious to their surroundings. A literal sitting target in a nation where the National Rifle Association cheerfully greets 16,000 Twitter followers on the same morning that an actual, real-life American Rifleman murdered a dozen compatriots, injured 50 others and got us all talking once more about the omnipresence of gun violence — until no one can settle on accountability and we get bored and stop talking about it. Then it happens anew. Again, though, you know that story, and you know that we do nothing. So welcome to the new reality: You will never feel safe in a movie theater again. You will suppress fears and go anyway , because “I can’t let the [insert menacing perpetrator of violence here] win. You will go in groups that help you feel saf er . You will pass through metal detectors and spot armed police and/or part-time security sentinels roaming the multiplex lobbies and corridors. You will arrive early to get a seat close-by an exit, but then second-guess your position because Holmes is said to have entered through an emergency exit, and what if a gunman or other rampaging homicidal maniac enters behind you and you don’t see him? And eventually you will go back to whatever strategy you had before Aurora, because it’s easier to be complacent than paranoid. What choice do you have? Consider Jessica Redfield, who was shot and killed this morning at the movies. Redfield kept a blog where she described in eerie, devastating detail having narrowly missed last month’s shooting at Toronto’s Eaton Center: More people joined the crowd at the scene and asked what happened. “There was a shooting in the food court,” kept being whispered through the crowd like a game of telephone. I was standing near a security guard when I heard him say over his walkie talkie, “One fatality.” At this point I was convinced I was going to throw up. I’m not an EMT or a police officer. I’m not trained to handle crime and murder. Gun crimes are fairly common where I grew up in Texas, but I never imagined I’d experience a violent crime first hand. I’m on vacation and wanted to eat and go shopping. Everyone else at the mall probably wanted the same thing. I doubt anyone left for the mall imagined they witness a shooting. I was shown how fragile life was on Saturday. I saw the terror on bystanders’ faces. I saw the victims of a senseless crime. I saw lives change. I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath. For one man, it was in the middle of a busy food court on a Saturday evening. It would be her final post, and it once again raises the most crucial yet unresolved questions that face us every time this scenario erupts, whether at Eaton Center or Winnenden or Columbine or Utøya Island or Virginia Tech: What will it take for us to stop never imagining we’ll experience a violent crime first hand and accept the ever-increasing likelihood of that prospect? And if we accept it, what, if anything, will prompt us to change it? Not violent knife crime or violent bomb crime, either, but violent gun crime — the kind that took Redfield’s life and which even she acknowledged as an afterthought from her upbringing in Texas, where one representative’s answer to this morning’s massacre was not to address the crisis of gun violence but rather to actually lament , “[W]as there nobody that was carrying a gun that could have stopped this guy more quickly?” I’m not going to go spelunking through the murky logic of the pro-gun crowd or the phony, fleeting outrage of millions who sit by spinelessly, deigning to confront the gun scourge only after it has taken another 12 or 20 or 80 souls they never knew. I’m not going to dwell on the barbarism of a society that extols the Second Amendment as gospel but would just as soon argue against an uninsured gunshot victim’s constitutional right to health-care coverage. (And anyway, every one of those survivors receiving care in Aurora today surely has a full-time job with excellent benefits, right? Right? ) Furthermore, if decades’ worth of school shootings and hundreds of dead kids can’t force appreciable change, then why would one multiplex tragedy in Colorado result in anything different? Here’s why: Because you’ll never feel safe in a movie theater again. Call it a silver lining if you want (or can), or just call it cold, calculated industry politics, but Aurora transcends our familiar gun-culture stalemates in that very specific way: A billion-dollar industry long accustomed to treating its customers like shit without consequence has been jolted into recognizing a threat that it can’t just sweep under the rug. Elected leaders and civic bureaucrats and unions can get away with sabotaging education all they want , up to and including neglecting and ignoring the budding sociopaths who roam the halls and streets with guns. Missing the point is part of their DNA. Hollywood, meanwhile, can see the massacre’s ghosts aloft in a shadow lengthening hourly over its domain, and even if every person in America took in a movie tonight in solidarity, the reality of that act as a reaction against fear as opposed to the pursuit of entertainment — of cinema’s enduring spiritual thrill — compromises everything this billion-dollar industry is built on. Like those in the NRA, the captains of this billion-dollar industry also have a lobby in Washington. And when you see envoys for the Cinemark theater chain, the National Association of Theater Owners and the Motion Picture Association of America enacting their own solidarity , and when you see stock values drop and security costs surge (the latter of which, as noted, won’t actually help you feel any safer in a movie theater, but hey), you can expect that lobby to apply the same volume of muscle we’ve seen exerted by gun owners, retailers, manufacturers and the rest of the firearms lobby for years. Only then, when the forces collide, might we have some actual development in how we truly deal with gun violence. And even that is assuming both can be honest about the psychic ravages and legacies of violence , from which they have profited enough to be so powerful in the first place. Unless, that is, any of us feel like actually doing something worthwhile with all our fashionable defiance — actively diminishing and someday, generations from now, eradicating the kind of gun violence that actually followed Jessica Redfield from Texas to Toronto to Aurora and to which she was so inured that she never imagined it could happen to her. “I was reminded that we don’t know when or where our time on Earth will end,” she wrote. “When or where we will breathe our last breath.” It really shouldn’t be in a movie theater, but I guess we’d better add it to the list of possibilities. Wouldn’t want to disrupt those weekend plans, you know? Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter . [Photo: Shutterstock ]
Ted Nugent: I Will Be Dead Or In Jail If Obama Is Re-elected Rocker and noted gun enthusiast Ted Nugent is stirring up attention over comments he made about President Obama and his administration at a National Rifle Association conference in St. Louis over the weekend. As the website Right Wing Watch reports, Nugent called Obama a criminal and denounced his “vile, evil, America-hating administration” which is “wiping its ass with the Constitution.” He went on to say, “If Barack Obama becomes the President in November again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” Nugent, who has already endorsed Mitt Romney for president, urged each person to get a “couple of thousand” people to cast their ballot for the presumptive Republican challenger. “If you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Mitt Romney, we’re done,” Nugent said. “We’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year. Our president, attorney general, our vice president, Hillary Clinton — they’re criminals, they’re criminals.” Do you agree with this guy or is he just flat out crazy? Source More On Bossip! Mariah Carey And Nick Cannon Bring “Dem Babies” Roc & Roe On Playdate With Alicia Keys And Swizzy’s Son Egypt Hoy En Mi Gente News: Happy Birthday Selena Quintanilla Perez! (April 16, 1971 – March 31, 1995) Bald And The…Beautiful? Did These Celebrities Look Better Or Worse Without Their Hair? PDA With The Parentals: Jay-Z And BeyBey Coupled Up For Knicks Game And Dinner Date
For those who think Larry King is the sweet saint of the sensible center, we can always draw up from our Notable Quotables archives some of King’s conservative-bashing venom from the Clinton impeachment period for a rebuttal. Take a look at these: “Shouldn’t someone tell President Clinton that one of his archenemies, Rush Limbaugh, actually said the following last week, speaking in defense of Bill Gates and Microsoft? `It’s OK to lie, everybody lies in business, especially in a civil case.’ Apparently to Rush, lying is OK about business but not about sex.” — CNN’s Larry King in his October 26, 1998 USA Today column, failing to recognize Limbaugh’s parody of how liberals excuse Clinton’s lies but want Gates pursued. “If he had to testify, do you think Thomas Jefferson would have been impeached? No chance, there was no talk radio.” — CNN’s Larry King in his USA Today column, November 16, 1998. “What-if department…What if President Clinton announced a cure for cancer developed by the National Institutes of Health? What would critics say? Would Bob Barr want him impeached for failing to tell us the study was going on? Would Rush Limbaugh decry the President taking credit while admitting getting rid of cancer wasn’t a bad thing? Would Pat Buchanan insist that no nation other than America be given it? Would The Wall Street Journal worry about its effect on pharmaceutical stock prices? And so it goes….” — CNN’s Larry King in his USA Today column, February 15, 1999. ” The term wacko right-winger is redundant. For example, they’re the only people who don’t like being called compassionate. Someone remarked that many now defend the tobacco industry because its products kill people early, saving us dollars in having to care for aged people.” — “Larry King’s People” item in USA Today, March 8, 1999. “I can’t figure out how religious leaders can support the National Rifle Association. One would think that guns and God don’t mix.” — CNN host Larry King in his USA Today column, May 17, 1999.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Constitution's “right to keep and bear arms” applies nationwide as a restraint on the ability of the federal, state and local governments to substantially limit its reach. By a 5-4 vote split along familiar ideological lines, the nation's highest court extended its landmark 2008 ruling that individual Americans have a constitutional right to own guns to all the cities and states for the first time. In doing so, the justices signaled that less severe restrictions could survive legal challenges. The ruling involved a 28-year-old handgun ban in the Chicago area. The ruling was a victory for four Chicago-area residents, two gun rights groups and the politically powerful National Rifle Association. It was a defeat for Chicago, which defended its ban as a reasonable exercise of local power to protect public safety. The law and a similar handgun ban in suburban Oak Park, Ill., were the nation's most restrictive gun control measures. Monday's decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. It left little doubt, however, that they would fall eventually. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, said the Second Amendment right “applies equally to the federal government and the states.” The Second Amendment and gun ownership rights are finally protected. Now people will be able to have their own equal protection from criminals, who have been the only people who owned guns in some areas. added by: 2helenahandbasket
How we buy jeans may depend on our gender, according to research that examines shopping behavior through an evolutionary lens. Our ancestors didn't shop for holiday gifts, but the way we buy may owe credit to thousands of years of evolution. In a new study, researchers propose that our mall-visiting behaviors harken back to the days when men hunted and women foraged
