Alex Yablon at The Trace writes—The NRA Warns Hunters to Prepare for War. An aggressive new ad campaign tries to pit sportsmen against "perverted" animal lovers:
The National Rifle Association has a new message for its oldest constituency: it’s time to go to war.
The gun group is rolling out a new ad campaign geared toward hunters, a segment of firearm owners whose concerns have been eclipsed as the NRA transformed into a political powerhouse and threw its weight behind fights over self-defense and access to weapons. To sway its audience, the NRA is deploying its favorite tactic. It is trying to scare them.
“To save hunting, you must understand the terms of the battle,” a landing page for the campaign reads. “Because the animal rights extremists fighting to destroy hunting have an even more destructive goal: the systematic diminishment of humanity itself.”
The ad campaign consists of 10 videos paired with essays, featuring appearances and bylines by notable hunters and outdoorsmen like David Draper, a well-known writer for Field & Stream magazine. Put together, the package paints a picture of a world where hunting is under threat by animal rights activists.
These activists want to “suppress your most natural connection to the earth,” the narrator in one video states, and “ignore that death is life’s unwavering partner.” At the end of each video, the voiceover implores listeners to “trust the hunter in your blood.” [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Colin Powell is so sad he can't erase 'blot' on his reputation:
Former Bush era Secretary of State Colin Powell has a new book out May 22. As with so many political celebs, it's a book written "with" a professional person who does the actual writing. But it includes quotations from the guy who was once seen as potential presidential or vice presidential material. Based on uncorrected proofs released in advance, what we get once again is Powell lamenting the stain he can't get rid of because of the dead-wrong 85-minute speech he gave to the United Nations Feb. 5, 2003. There he declared convincingly that the United States had irrefutable evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Within five months, that claim had been convincingly refuted.
“Yes, a blot, a failure will always be attached to me and my UN presentation,” the former U.S. secretary of state writes in a new book of leadership parables that draws frequently on his Iraq war experience. “I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me.”
Powell, 75, laments that no intelligence officials had the “courage” to warn that he was given false information that Iraq had such weapons during preparations for his February 2003 speech before the U.S. invasion the following month.
We've been hearing this crap from the guy for seven years now. It's tedious. It's sickening. It's self-serving. It's bullshit. It's the same old, same old.
Except, not quite. Because Powell keeps changing his story about his interactions in the White House. In 2005, he told Barbara Walters that he was "right there with" the president on the use of force in Iraq. In 2007, he told a group of heavyweights at a conference in Aspen, Colo., that he had spent two-and-a-half hours trying to talk Bush out of using force.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin & Armando (sort of, mostly) kept the focus where it belonged as House Republicans passed Trumpcare 3.1. What’s next? How will the Senate handle it? Will they even want to? Also: the Comey effect; George Will discovers Trump is demented.
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