It's an established fact that the Mexican drug cartels get most of their weapons from the US. It's easier to get guns in the US than in most other countries (apart from Third-World countries or countries/regions where the rule of law is weak or nonexistent), so to the extent that the US would make it harder to obtain weapons in the US it would make it harder for the Mexican cartels to get weapons. They would have to go further from home and that would increase the cost. Weapons controls are not a panacea, nor is Holder claiming it would stop the Mexican drug cartels from getting weapons altogether; but anything that makes it more difficult for them to operate is a good thing.

Please keep in mind - that they are not deer hunter rifles - these are army type automatic weapons that are made ONLY to kill or maim humans. but difference. It is also something the NRA likes to ignore. i have no problem with 'gun collectors' - my only issue is the ones that feel that they are 'collecting' AK-47s and Kaleshnakovs [sp?] in order to hunt down fake DEA and ATF agents. Pull the fig leaf off - these are not peace-bound gun collections, these are straw buyers buying dozns of guns to seel to Mexican drug cartels. I grew up with hunters and know the difference.

BIG difference.

Fear the government? It becomes more clearer everyday why I should keep my guns given that the "head-stompers" and the "mercenary security police wanna-bees" surely have some of their own!

Since I would guess that the drug lords are not buying the weapons legally in the first place, how is a law going to stop them?

It may be harder, and more expensive, but it's not going to stop them.

I don't recall the bad guys having any problems getting automatic weapons during the previous ban.

If the point of laws is to absolutely stop anything, then it is futile to have laws because they can never be so totally effective. Prohibition never works. But in reality laws are not about stopping anything. They are, sometimes, about setting guidelines or limits or restrictions, and about establishing penalties when they are not followed. None of which requires that laws be absolutely effective in stopping undesirable activities or outcomes. Just because the law cannot make it impossible to keep weapons out of the hands of drug cartels is no reason not to make every reasonable effort to make it as hard as possible for them to get weapons. Some people just need to realize that life is not an either/or proposition. The real deal is in the fuzzy in-betweens.

kinda like their attitude when there is a Democratic president. HAS to be a fluke, voter fraud or some other illegitimate result. Not like GW Bush which clearly WAS an illegitimate result, where SCOTUS made the final decisions, not actual vote counting. Now the GOP knows it can pull out a fradulant election, it refuses to give it up as a means to an end.

I think both parties like to play into the "he stole the election" buzz. Democrats have a tendency to complain when there is a close race that Republicans have stolen the election (and obviously vise versa). Both spend millions of dollars to employ lawyers to contest any and all close elections. The sadness for me is that usually that money is tax payer funded (although not 100%) and usually it wastes time (thus slowing down all government).

I also think, in this particular case RE: Angle, this was another political tactic designed to scare people who're upset with our current congress even more. People already believe our current congress is the most corrupt and out of touch and whatever other talking point has been mindlessly parroted out there; by stoking fears about the Democrats it's highly likely this tactic will turn off more Independent, undecided, and Democratic voters from turning out (while simultaneously outraging more Republican voters to turn out). Hence why Republicans would claim "bullpuckey" before election results are in.

It should also be noted, for the sake of your point versus my initial counterpoint, that Republicans typically do want to suppress the vote. Part of what makes this election cycle so different is that Republicans (Sarah Palin, for instance) are going out and talking about "get out the vote," which usually never happens. This is because in general the public favors Democrats more so than Republicans (although the amount of registered Independents has and is changing that dynamic). This is also because by suppressing the vote you invariably end up suppressing the less wealthy and minorities. Statistically the less wealth you make the more Democratic you're likely to be and if you are a minority you are also more likely to vote Democrat than you are Republican. Notice how the "bullpuckey" claims run along the lines of targeting people who say don't live in one location for an entire year? Or who have inconsistent gaps in their registration? Or who have issues responding timely to mail? That is not coincidental. Republicans, in particular, push to have votes by people with such anomalies ignored. This is because poor people and in particular blacks and Hispanics are most likely to have inconsistent living circumstances, gaps in registration, or have issues responding to mail. It's also targeted towards senior citizens as (and I don't mean this to be rude or to pander to a stereotype) it often is hard for seniors to remember what days they need to register or return mail. I've dealt with that issue with my grandma enough times to tell you it's a sad but true reality. By exploiting "you have 10 days to return this letter to verify you're registered" mail, the Republicans help skew countable ballots in such a way that it favors their party and disfavors Democrats during an election. Ironically by imploring such tactics it also makes voting hard on soldiers, as they also tend to fall into such inconsistent gaps. Republicans, essentially, hedge their bets that there are enough rich, white, middleaged, and suburb and rural home owners to offset soldiers, racial minorities, and the elderly to win an election.

I can't really recall any losing Democratic candidate who claimed voter fraud was the cause of his/her defeat. And other than the special case of the 2000 presidential election, I can't think of another election that Democrats generally have blamed on anything other than just losing. Obviously, I'm not omniscient, so if you've got specific examples, please share them.

And by specific I mean such as: Republicans generally believe that Al Franken stole his election, and McCain 'predicted' in the course of the second presidential debate in 2008 that any Democratic victory that year would be due to voter fraud. So that's two from the other side off the top of my head.

@Meddling: I was trying to be bi-partisan here. You are correct though; I personally can not think of an instance where Democrats played the same card as Republicans are now; even during the segregation shinwaht'zu. So I dunno honey. I was just trying my best to be fair- factually though...you are not false. Not by a long shot.

Rachel, you need to get TIM PROFITT on the show ...... not only is it incredible that HE wants an apology from Lauren Valle, the victim, he blames the police for the entire incident! Then Rand Paul in his press statement, warns BOTH sides to stop the violence! Pot meet kettle!

I just want to chime in with support for the way Rachel handled the Miller supporters. Her questions were respectful and specific, and may have started some of them thinking about what they were doing.

Solomon Asch did a famous study on how people are willing to make judgments that are even contradicted by the evidence of their own senses, when they are immersed in a peer group that supports that off-target judgment. He also found that they can be jarred out of subservience to the peer group by a single, persistent questioner.

The only thing sicker than the act itself was Rand Paul's reluctance to condemn the action outright. The incident serves as a reminder of what the anger the Tea Party and Fox News are fomenting can lead to -- if we don't stand up and remain vigilant in the face of this ignorant, reality-free movement, we're likely to see a lot more incidents like this, and worse. After all, we have Senate candidates touting "Second Amendment remedies" if the elections don't go their way. The American way, huh? Don't like something, just start shooting!

I agree. I think Rand Paul showed Kentucky women just what he thinks is ok. As in patriarchal attitudes toward women.

You can bet that her call for voter intimidation tactics like Tea Partiers acting as "poll watchers" will only be for districts other than her own. After all, there's no way conservatives would ever rig elections and use voter suppression, right? Forget about Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, or New Hampshire. Those were all fabrications of the liberal media, right? Of course it was possible that jewish voters overwhelmingly voted for Buchanan in a heavily democratic county in Florida in 2000 instead of Gore. Of course it is possible that more people voted for Bush in an Ohio district than there were registered voters in that district in 2004.

Repubs see widespread voter fraud when there is none, but are seemingly ok if they can intimidate voters from voting in the first place. Witness instances where flyers were sent to voters in predominantly dem districts that gave them the wrong date for the election. That's fair, right?

The sad thing is, if dems ever tried to do the same thing to repubs, they'd probably be wildly successful, as demonstrated by the near total lack of knowledge by most Tea Partier about even the most elementary things that they profess to be expert upon, such as the First Amendment. Tell them that the election has been postponed until Nov. 9, and you'd probably eliminate half of their voters. Fortunately, dems don't believe in that sort of thing. When we win, it's because voters actually took the time to understand the issues, and that's the way it should be.

Friend told me she encountered a bagger who told her she should watch and listen for all the voting fraud coming from ACORN - that it needed to be reported!!

She said she had to find a restroom quickly as she was laughing so hard, tears rolled and -- you know what else was going to happen!!!

i rent a room from a bright red Republican - and a couple weeks ago we were watching the evening news and all of a sudden she turned to me and said - one thing about you living here, all of a sudden I realize how much I took what other people said as gospel - now I don't. I read more, I ask questions about where they came up with that idea, I change the channel more and I find Rachel Maddow has a point.

Made my year.

let's all tape 2 pennies to an index card and mail them to DeMint, since it is 1-3% fed funding to NPR.

You are very observant. If you look, you will see that not only at the federal level, but at the state and possibly local level too. The strategy is to run up deficits using borrowed money while cutting taxes, so that the true damage is only seen a few years later when the bills come due and the repub offender is out of office. A dem comes in, and they immediately are forced to make unpopular decisions such as raising taxes and cutting services to right the ailing fiscal ship. Then. in the next election cycle, the repub can accuse the dem of being a tax and spend liberal, promise to cut taxes, and the whole vicious cycle begins anew. Repubs win no matter which way things go. If the dem is able to fix the economic damage done by the preceding repubs, it allows the repubs to go right back and start wrecking things as they did before. If the economy was wrecked so badly that it hasn't been fixed when they get back in power, they are able to claim that they have to make big cuts in social spending to get things under control. Since that has been something repubs have aimed at since the start of the New Deal, they also see that as a victory.

If you listen to repub "ideas" to get the economy moving, you'll see that pattern. They talk about eliminating or privatizing social security, medicare and medicaid, and eliminating welfare. On the other hand, they want to boost defense spending, because you know we need a big military to keep fighting that good old war on terror, as well as dealing with Iran and China, not to mention those sneaky old russkies! And let's not forget the elimination of the estate tax and the corporate tax, and tax cuts targeted at the very wealthiest Americans. Add to that the call for eliminating regulations on business and eliminating the minimum wage, and you have a nation where the rich get richer, and the rest of us become little better than indentured servants with no rights and no money.

I bet the Koch brothers sit back each night and laugh their asses off as they think about how they have manipulated people to vote against their own interests, voting to sell themselves into virtual slavery, and being almost fanatically eager to do so. The people who support the Tea Party are the very ones that will suffer the most if those policies they support get enacted.

In a way, there isn't anything actually wrong as such with the people who are drawn toward the far right (currently going under the 'tea party' label). It's just that they have a way of thinking that is different from most other people and which leaves them vulnerable to manipulation based on fear and resentment.

I suggest that you visit http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ where you can download some works on the subject of right-wing authoritarianism (the fancy-pants term for what you're talking about) by Dr Robert Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. And for actual money there's Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics by Marc J Hetherington and Jonathan D Weiler, which covers the same subject.

You certainly have a point. I haven't ever explicitly thought of it in those terms, but maybe there is a positive correlation--sometimes--between how little you know and how wound up you can get; because the more you actually know, the more complicated and nuanced things get. But informed people can go on the march, too. Maybe it's different on the left and on the right. Maybe lefties need to know more to become activist, while righties are more activist the less they know. It would be nice to know if there is any research on this.

I believe that this celebration of ignorance has its roots at least partially in the requirement present in most religious dogma that critical thought be suspended. Therefore, suspending critical thought is seen as an indication of "more faith", and thus something laudable. How much "faith" must one have to actively ignore provable facts...?

Yes! I have been thinking the same thing for some time now. After watching what's happening in this country, I have come to the conclusion that the real problem is the religious right. Without them and their celebration of blind faith, maybe enough of the population would wake up and demand our country back from the corporations and big money interests that are really running things...then again, maybe that's just wishful thinking. After all, the idiots have always been with us.

I'm afraid you've misdiagnosed a symptom for the cause. Don't forget that the religious right as a political force has only been around since the late '70s. The political right has always existed but it can take any form it likes. Currently in America the primary expression is through fundamentalist Christianity. In the 1920s it was the Ku Klux Klan, which was not primarily religious. Nor were the Nazis, quotes from Hitler about his providential role notwithstanding (the Third Reich's actual policies toward the churches is more illuminating). And, of course, in today's America there is an non-religious manifestation of the right in the form of the neocons. And the libertarians. The right-wing is very much like a hydra. The religious right is only one head.