If you shoot somebody when you’re hunting, it’s your fault. Period. When you’re holding a gun, the margin of error is pretty slim (though it’s wider with birdshot than with a deer rifle). This means it’s fundamentally your responsibility where your pellets end up. Josh Marshall backs us up on this with feedback from his hunter-readers. The description from (landowner) Armstrong as paraphrased by Marshall sounds right:

The birds ‘flush’. Cheney picks out a bird and starts following it. In the process he basically wheels around doing a 180. So he’s spun around and is now firing backwards relative to the direction he had been facing. And Whittington was just, for whatever reason, where Cheney didn’t expect him to be.

Which is irrelevant or a lie. Cheney was in a group trying to flush birds, and that means you can’t assume someone isn’t behind you. “Doing a 180” means you need to be very, very, very careful, since that means you have or will end up facing your fellow hunters.

The comments provided by Mary Matalin are clearly just more Republican lies:

The vice president was concerned. He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.

We don’t doubt that Cheney feels bad. He should. The reason he should, though, is that he did do something “he wasn’t supposed to do;” he didn’t keep his field of fire clear. He behaved carelessly. And as a result, somebody’s in the hospital. He’s very lucky — as is Whittington, who could easily been killed; we suspect his injuries are more serious than they’re letting on, though, since he’s in ICU. Hunting accidents are no means unheard of (though in a lifetime of hunting, we’ve never seen it happen), but when one does happen, an honorable man admits his fault — as he does with any accident. So our takeaway with the Cheney shooting is that, well, he’s not admitting fault. Make of this what you will.

Update: CNN has a bit more data. Apparently Whittington was about 30 yards away, and Cheney was shooting a 28-gauge. If true, these bits of data taken together suggest there wasn’t much danger of Whittington’s injuries being fatal (though, as we said, only one pellet needs to get lucky).

A 28 is <b>very</b> small. Most hunters just carry the all-purpose 12-gauge, which (when paired with the right load) can take anything from whitetail deer down to small game like quail or rabbit. Smaller shotguns (16, 20, 28, and .410) use progressively smaller amounts of powder paired with fewer pellets per load. Some people use 20s for birds or other small game -- they are lighter guns, and the recoil is easier to take -- but only very rich people carry 28s. There are no "utility" 28s like the $200 shotguns most of Red America buys at Wal-Mart. These are exclusively hand-made or hand-finished guns, probably over-and-unders, with price tags to match (more than $1,500 certainly; more than $10,000 isn't unheard of). Traditional American shotgun companies don't even make them; you have to go to Beretta or other high-end manufacturers.




That Whittington is apparently doing well (and never even lost consciousness, according to the story above) is the result of the small loads involved, his distance from Cheney (30 yards is a long way for a shotgun; it's hard to take any game at that range), the small gauge of the gun, and good luck.

Barack Obama has a plan to fix Detroit. (Link fixed.)

Slacktivist covers this in two posts:

• First, he notes the cover story in Christianity Today, which makes clear that torture is never, ever acceptable, and that reminds us that things like extraordinary rendition are no better; and
• Second, the endorsement by 86 mainstream evangelical leaders of a call to action on global warming. This isn’t just left-of-center people; it’s genuine red-state evangelicals, too.

“VA Nurse investigated for sedition for letter to editor“

Media Matters points out (as has Olbermann) their little trick in re: Rev. Joseph Lowery’s remarks during Coretta Scott King’s funeral. Lowery made mention of the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, which got a significant amount of applause (23 seconds, according to MM). Fox edited out the applause in replaying the clip, and then made comments about the audience’s lack of response. You don’t get much closer to just plain making shit up than that.

Media Matters lays it out.

Atrios and Josh explore the nutbird landscape inhabited by young GOP functionaries like George Deutsch. Deutsch himself contents that the scientists he was trying to censor have ties “all the way up to the top of the Democratic party” and were obsessed with embarrassing the president. The even scarier bit is in the second piece linked by Atrios:

The coalition government relied heavily on a revolving door of diplomats and other personnel who would leave just as they had begun to develop local knowledge and ties, and on a large cadre of eager young neophytes whose brashness often gave offense in a very age- and status-conscious society. One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion.

The DOJ has opined twice in the last four years that the domestic spying program was probably illegal.

Why is this okay? Why do we permit American companies to be complicit in oppression and evil abroad? We think, perhaps, that American companies ought to have to honor the values of America no matter where they operate. If this makes it hard to expand into dictatorial countries, well, we’re pretty sure that’s a feature, not a bug.

Insight is reporting that Plame-outing turd Karl Rove has threatened GOP senators with blacklisting from all White House aid if they vote against Bush in Judiciary Committee proceedings in re: the illegal wiretapping program.

This is what “scared” looks like.

The FISA law Bush has been violating for years was passed in 1978 in response to Nixon’s abuse of power, so it wasn’t operative for Roosevelt or Lincoln or whomever else they’re trotting out.

There’s a great rundown on FISA here — as well as on the arguments brought by the DOJ — if you’re interested.

Watch the Beltway dynamics closely, and you’ll see he’s thrown in with McCain over Obama. Just just the aisle and be done with it, Joe.

Yeah, he resigned. It seems he’s been lying about graduating from A&M.

Read this to find out. Here’s a tidbit I didn’t know: many if not most are there on scant real evidence, as they were turned over to US forces by rival Afghanis with little or no documentation. Don’t like your neighbor? Tell the Yanks he works for Osama!

No, really. More here. Short version: he’s trying to bully Obama, and Obama is schooling him. Whatever he once was, he’s become just another tool of the Administration; clearly, he’s either forgotten who they are, or he no longer cares because he wants that office for himself.

By now, everyone who’s paying attention is aware of the NASA story wherein a 24-year-old political hack tried to get references to Intelligent Design inserted into discussions of the Big Bang, and further attempted to change all references to said Bang to “Big Bang Theory,” etc.

We’ll just point out that it came as no surprise to us to learn that said jackass is an Aggie.