The Electron Pencil

Changes

A little house wren whispers in my ear that the debate is ongoing over at Indiana University Press regarding whether or not the outfit should cease publishing actual books.

Should the Press decide to quit the paper and ink racket, it would confine itself exclusively to electronic publishing. The bird asks, “Whaddya think?”

“As long as there still are people who grew up with hard copy books, there’ll be a demand for them,” I sez. “As soon as those generations die off, that’ll be the end of the printing press.”

The bird nods and says no more.

People tell me it’ll be a sad day when there are no more actual books. Of course, people probably said 30 years ago, “It’ll be a sad day when my VCR isn’t half the size of a city bus.”

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Target Practice

NPR reported this AM that Prez Barack H.O. has been making his security forces jittery of late by opting to walk hither and yon in the nation’s capital.

Out In The Open

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After five and a half years of voluntary incarceration in the White House, Obama, like many another C-in-C before him has grown weary of living in the gilded cage. The report quotes Harry Truman, f’rinstance, as referring to the White House as “the great white jail.”

It was a cute story, characterizing BHO as a bear strolling around in search of food. The first reaction that hit me, though, was less than cute: There are at very least a few hundred Open Carry fanatics and, worse, clandestine gun-toters who right now are walking around in a state of tumescence over the golden opportunities Obama’s idylls are presenting them.

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Love Guns

Speaking of this holy land’s erotic fixation on shootin’ irons, my academic historian hero/man-crush Rick Perlstein writes in Salon that the gun industry’s recent triumphs over decency and common sense are more than just a clear and present danger to innocents who wish only to go to a movie, sit in a classroom, or have lunch in a mall food court. The victory of the Wayne LaPierre gang over humanity actually erodes the primacy of law and may actually be an irreparable breakdown of, well, these civilized United States.

To wit: The Cliven Bundy ranch showdown in which the feds backed down in the faced of armed lunatics means that Open Carry and other gun eroticists actually beat the law as well as the entire structure of the nation. He writes, “When legitimately constituted state authority stands down in the face of armed threats, the very foundation of the republic is in danger.”

Perlstein finds an unlikely villain in the gun madness that has overtaken Murrica — the Democrats. My own party (and his, he acknowledges) once stood in stark opposition to unfettered access to guns. The Dems represented what I like to think of as a majority opinion that guns should be controlled. And, just prior to the Age of Reagan, it was conventional wisdom that people who dug automatic weapons, called for unlimited access to ammunition, and fantasized strutting around town armed to the teeth were sick in the head.

Once upon a time, Democratic presidential candidates robustly argued for gun control — that, as the party platform put it in 1980 (the year the NRA made its first ever presidential endorsement, of Ronald Reagan), “handguns simplify and intensify violent crime”; Democrats support “enactment of federal legislation to strengthen the presently inadequate regulations over the manufacture, assembly, distribution, and possession of handguns.” Note no mention of machine guns, because back then the notion that there should be no barrier to their ownership would have seemed self-evidently ridiculous to most reasonable observers.

The Dems, though, lost a key election or two and decided to drop the whole gun control idea in hopes of wooing Southern white men. A courtship, BTW, that was never consummated.

He Never Would Be Dem Material

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Sometimes, sometimes…, no, most of the time, I feel not happy at all to identify myself as a Dem. Then again, what choice do I have?

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Chilling Effect

Sure, George Will made an ass of himself when he bleated that women dig identifying themselves as rape victims. He wrote earlier this month in the Washington Post op-ed page that colleges and universities, essentially, are teaching young women that it’s cool to have been raped and Commie/abortionist Washington is encouraging this brand of thought. Will opined our institutions of higher educ. are making “victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges.”

That, my friends, is the reasoning of a jerk.

Jerk

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The news came last week that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch will no longer carry Will’s screeches from the WashPo syndicate. “The column,” the paper’s eds. wrote, “was offensive and inaccurate.” So, for all intents and purposes, the Po-Dis fired him.

I suppose that’s their right but it makes me uncomfortable when I hear of an opinion columnist losing her/his job for writing something controversial. Even if it is idiotic.

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