Author: Epic Progress

The following was written in early February of 2009 in response to the horrific post-campaign propaganda that was still going around about President Obama and the whitewashing of the entirety of the Bush terms in office at the time.  It was as though conservatives had just started to pretend that the previous decade was an illusion, or didn’t count – and that the current President who had spent only a few weeks in office was to blame for the rotten state of affairs in the world.  In response to conservative screeds in the form of a “Sunday School Lesson”...

  You guys always blame Bush!  When is it going to be Obama’s responsibility?  Well, when is it the firefighter’s responsibility for the towering inferno he shows up to save from the pyromaniac’s actions?  It’s a lot more difficult to heal or recover than it is to destroy, and Republicans seem to have very selective memories that only seem to go back as far as January of 2009.  To rectify that, I’ve taken the liberty of assembling a list of some of the things President Shrub did while in office, that yes, progressives are still trying to fix. Pre-Inauguration,...

A few facts about guns that you might want to take with you when you debate your gun nutter friends:

In the United States last year, 31,593 people died from gun violence
Every six minutes, someone in the U.S. is killed by a gun.
The U.S. does not require a background check when a gun is sold.
U.S. homicide rates per capita are 6.9 times higher than the rates in 22 other populous high-income countries combined, despite similar non-lethal crime and violence rates.
A gun in the home is 22x more likely to be used in an attempted suicide, 11x more likely to be used in a criminal assault, 7x more likely to be used in a homicide and 4x more likely to be involved in an unintentional shooting than to be used in self-defense. (Source Kellerman, 1998)
The NRA spends $300 million to lobby for gun manufacturers. Brady spends $3 million.