July 1, 2017: A
disgruntled doctor carries an assault
rifle into a Bronx hospital, kills one doctor and wounds six staff
members and patients.
Trump and the N.R.A. insist that we need more guns to protect
ourselves from all the people who have guns. (See: 6/24/17.)
*
WE ALSO LEARN that the average cost of a
semi-private room in a nursing home for one year is $82,128. According to the
Kaiser Foundation one of every three Americans over age 65 will end up
in a nursing home. Of those, 62% will be unable to pay without Medicaid
assistance.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, the latest GOP “healthcare” plan
would lead to a 35% cut to Medicaid by 2036.
If Trumpcare passes states will carry a
greater burden of costs and will have to decide. Do we cut services for the
elderly? Do we cut services for children? Do we cut services for the disabled?
11/20/17: The President decides to savethe
elephants after his administration decides to kill the elephants.
In an effort to cut down on pesky regulations, the federal
government announces that big game hunters will be allowed to bring back
trophies from exotic African hunts.
This will include various elephant parts. The National Rifle Association
supports the change, saying it would be a “signficant step forward in having
hunting receive the recognition it deserves as a tool of sound wildlife
management.”
(Yes, sound management: for example, the history of the
American bison, c. 1873, or the carrier pigeon, 1914.)
This policy change is so terrible – the logic so absurd –
even Laura Ingraham on Fox News can’t choke it down. When other Fox
commentators criticize the change, Trump realizes that if Fox can’t go along
with such stupidity, he might be wise to look at the new policy for the first
time.
This “horror story,” he suddenly exclaims,
must be stopped! Trump saves the elephants from Trump.
Don Jr. saving an elephant by shooting an elephant.
2/28/18: Two
weeks since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High. Two days more since
the president claimed, if he had been there, he would have rushed in unarmed to
try to stop the shooter (see: 2/26/18).
A grand conclave at the
White House is called to address the matter of gun violence in America. “It’s time to stop
this nonsense,” President Trump tells lawmakers and an audience watching on
television.
Most lawmakers, Trump explains to the American people, are “petrified”
of the N.R.A and the gun lobby. Not him. “They have
great power over you people,” he tells gathered senators. “They have less power
over me.”He wants everyone to know that he is the man to put an
end to the carnage.
Sen. Cornyn appears doubtful as he listens to Trump.
He would have braved gunfire two weeks ago, he has said. Now
he wants everyone to understand he’s ready to run through the friendly fire directed
at him from the Second Amendment folks. He tells Democrats and Republicans
both. He wants “one terrific bill.” He prefers something on the “strong side.” He
doesn’t want to nibble at a problem that has baffled his predecessors. “We want to pass something great, and
to me the something great has to be where we prevent it from happening again,” he
continues, referring to the slaughter in Parkland, Fla., on February 14. “It would be so beautiful to have one bill,” he intones.
(Pardon Mr. Blogger’s if he sounds skeptical.
He remembers when Trump said repealing and replacing Obamacare would be “so
easy.”)
The real question was what, exactly, the
president wanted included in his one “terrific” bill? And how hard would he
fight for gun control measures? Ah, there was the rub. He had hinted at federal
action to raise the age to buy an AR-15 style rifle to 21. Stronger background
checks? Hard to tell, but Trump seemed in favor. He did say he was against an
N.R.A.-backed push to expand concealed-carry protections. As for “red flag”
laws, he bemoaned the fact that it was so difficult to take guns away from
people who had been identified as dangerous to themselves or to others.
“Take the firearms first, and then go to
court,” Trump suggested, stopping Vice President Mike Pence in mid-sentence. His
second-in-command had been offering up a version of the due-process argument
that the N.R.A. and other gun-rights absolutist have used to block reform measures
for a quarter century. “You could do exactly what you’re saying,” he told lawmakers,
“but take the guns first, go through due process second.” He said again
that senators were afraid of the gun lobby.
Sen. Ben Sasse, among others, raised alarm,
noting that “due process” rights were kind of a big deal.
Besides, the N.R.A.’s political wing had spent
$42.3 million during the 2016 election cycle to boost Trump’s and Republicans’ chances
of winning.
Asked afterwards, his impression of the
meeting, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) was as skeptical as this
blogger. “I thought it was fascinating television,” he told reporters.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/10/2022): In the
wake of another mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, we know what
happened during the last three years of Trump’s time in office. Nothing,
really.
The carnage continued unabated.
Trump had no more success getting guns out of the hands of crazy Americans than
he did getting Kim Jong-un to give up his nuclear arsenal.
3/24/18: Hundreds of thousands of
mostly young Americans join the “March for Our Lives” in the nation’s capital.
They gather to demand action to stem the bloody tide of gun violence that
stains America. There are “sibling marches” in 800 towns and cities, including
390 congressional districts.
New York City marchers number 175,000. Paul McCartney is
there to remember John Lennon, gunned down by a deranged individual forty years
ago.
David Hogg, a survivor, speaks at D.C. rally.
The teens who did so much to organize the marches and fuel
them with passion lead the way. More than a
thousand kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the most
recent massacre occurred, attend D.C. events. Survivors of the slaughter speak
eloquently. Emma Gonzalez reads the names of the 17 who died at her school.
Then she stands in silence for six minutes and twenty seconds. That’s the same
length of time it took one unbalanced young man, armed with an AR-15, to kill or wound 34 of Gonzalez’s teachers and classmates.
____________________
“I have
learned to duck from bullets before I learned to read.”
Edna Chavez
____________________
Students from across the nation, who have witnessed the
scourge of gun violence play out, speak up. Edna Chavez, 17, from Manual Arts
High School in Los Angeles, tells the crowd about her brother, Ricardo, who was shot
and killed. “I have learned to duck from bullets before I learned to read,” she
explains. Then she leads the crowd in a chant: “Ricardo! Ricardo!”
Trevon Bosley, a high school student from Chicago who also
lost a brother, addresses the crowd. “I’m here to speak for those youth who
fear they may be shot [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] while going
to the gas station, the movies, the bus stop, to church or even to and from
school. I’m here to speak for those Chicago youth who feel their voices have
been silenced for far too long.”
Other marchers in D.C. and at other locations include parents
who lost six-year-old sons and daughters at Sandy Hook, and Lauren Milgram, 12,
herself a survivor of that horrific attack.
Finally, Martin Luther King Jr.’s granddaughter steps to the
mike. “My grandfather had a dream that his four little children would not be
judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,”
nine-year-old Yolanda Ree King explains. “I have a dream that enough is enough.
That this should be a gun-free world.”
“Period,” she adds.
*
THAT MUCH is a utopian dream, but you can hardly fail to be
impressed with the spirit of the young who wish to make America a better, safer
place to live. Well: unless you speak for the N.R.A.
The N.R.A. weighs in with this: “Today’s protests aren’t
spontaneous. Gun-hating billionaires and Hollywood elites are manipulating
and exploiting children as part of their plan to DESTROY the Second
Amendment and strip us of our right to defend ourselves and our loved ones.”
In a video clip released the day before, N.R.A.
representative Colion Noir criticizes the Parkland survivors and what he calls
“a march for their lies.” The Second Amendment is clearly the only amendment
Noir likes. “To all the kids from Parkland getting ready to use your First
Amendment to attack everyone else’s Second Amendment at your march on Saturday,
I wish a hero like Blaine had been at Marjory Douglas High School last month.”
Blaine, in this case, would be Blaine Gaskill, the school
resource officer who quickly shot and killed another school shooter at Great
Mills High School in Maryland earlier in the week.
Noir continues angrily, “Because your classmates would still
be alive and no one would know your names. And because the media would have
completely and utterly ignored your story the way they ignored his.”
You could easily pick holes in his response. You could start
by noting that these kids wish no one
knew their names – because their names are written in the blood of dead
teachers and friends in the news. You could note that none of the
leaders of the “March for Our Lives” had suggested disarming police. You could
Google “Gaskill” and find 200,000 stories that mentioned him by name. Then you
could mull the unspeakable tragedy of Jaelynn Willey 17, shot in the head and left
brain dead by an armed classmate before Officer Gaskill could respond.
You could ask if perhaps that didn’t prove the Parkland
survivors had a point.
POSTSCRIPT: I think you might convince almost all who marched Saturday
that it would be great to have armed school resource officers (and let’s be
blunt, that means “police”) in every American school. In many cases, you’d
probably need more than one per building to be safe.
There are an estimated 90,000 schools in the United States,
so the Big Orange Buffoon could argue that we would be creating at least 90,000
new jobs if he sent cops into every school.
Say: $50,000 per year and the tab comes to $4.5 billion
annually.
Of course, young Americans, and old, might still get
massacred at the mall, at church, in a theater or while attending a country
music concert.
The N.R.A. would very much prefer you don’t think about
that.
3/31/18: In a recent poll only 33% of Americans between the ages of
18 and 34 approve of the job the president is doing.
Make
America Great Again, c. 1960.
Luckily for Republicans, people in this age bracket turn out
to vote at far lower rates than old codgers with walkers.
More ominously, for the GOP, 47% of the younger demographic
say they’re paying greater attention to politics since Trump was elected. More
than 7 in 10 say Trump “doesn’t reflect my personal values [emphasis
added].” What! No pussy grabbing! No hating on Mexicans! No banning LGBT
soldiers from the military!
Come on young people! Make America Great Again, c. 1960, when
America was 90% white, interracial marriage was illegal, and you could ban
people of skin tones you didn’t like from eating in your restaurant.
Also, women knew their place, which, among other things,
meant no opportunities in sports.
But lots of chances to be secretaries!
Other poll findings paint a grim picture for President Trump.
Six in 10 young Americans think he’s “mentally unfit,” 62 percent believe he’s
“generally dishonest” and 63 percent consider him “a racist.” Almost 7 in 10
favor a pathway to legal status for DACA recipients and others brought to the
country illegally as children.
Finally, 6 in 10 young Americans want the government to take
steps to address climate change. This probably has something to do with the
fact that all the old people who don’t believe in climate change, like the
president himself, will die off relatively soon. The young know they may be
stuck living on a planet where the damage becomes acute.
With that depressing future in mind, 55 percent of those
polled favor legalization of recreational marijuana.
Cloned pets (explained below).
*
FORMER ROCK STAR and draft-dodger Ted Nugent – also a major
fan of President Trump – decides to wade into the discussion of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High School.
It really gets Ol’ Ted riled up to think that surviving
students are protesting against gun violence. On The Joe Pags Show,
Nugent lets rip:
The dumbing down of America is
manifested in the culture deprivation of our academia that have taught these
kids the lies, media that have prodded and encouraged and provided these kids
lies. I really feel sorry for them because it’s not only ignorant and
dangerously stupid, but it’s soulless.
[He went on to say] to attack the good,
law-abiding families of America when well-known, predictable murderers commit
these horrors is deep in the category of soulless. These poor children, I’m
afraid to say this and it hurts me to say this, but the evidence is
irrefutable, they have no soul. ... These children can’t be critical of any of
the propaganda that they’re fed and that’s just sad.
I would doubt it “hurt” Nugent to say the survivors of the
bloody slaughter were soulless. I can say it hurt me to listen.
Ted is also a board member of the N.R.A.
*
Get that fish a chin-lift!
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, for today: We have fresh proof that the
Top 1% don’t have enough money to spend and desperately need tax cuts.
The Asian arowana, popular with fish-collecting enthusiasts,
can sell for as much as $300,000. Known as the “long yu” (or
“dragon fish,” in Chinese), most go for a few hundred dollars. The most
“attractive” can go for tens of thousands, including that aforementioned
arowana, sold reputedly to a Chinese communist official for six figures. Kenny
Ng, a premier cosmetic surgeon – for fish – operating in Singapore, will give
your arowana an eyelift ($90) or a chin-lift ($60) if you think it might help.
Of course, in desperate times – say if you were trapped in
your house by zombies – the fish might save your life.
You could always eat it if you were starving.
This is probably more than you can say for Barbara Streisand
and her dogs, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett. Both are cloned from her deceased pet, Samantha, a Coton de Tulears
breed.
Cost per clone: $50,000.
Then again, I guess, if you were desperate, you could make
Miss Violet breakfast and save Miss Scarlett for lunch.
12/11/18: God damn those Mexicans! I was
sure they were going to pay for the Great Wall of Trump!
____________________
“I am
proud to shut down the government.”
President Trump
____________________
Now, Trump is mad because Democrats won’t give him $5 billion
to build his pet project and he’s too lame-assed to work out a compromise.
He’ll just pout.
In a televised confrontation with Democratic leaders, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, Trump grumbles, “If we don’t get what we want one way or the
other...I will shut down the government. I am proud to shut down the government
for border security... I will take the mantle of shutting it down.”
Considering who’s in charge of the federal government, it
might not be a bad idea to close shop for a year.
(You can watch the tape of the meeting between President Trump and Democratic leaders in the U.S. House and Senate, below. I think Nancy Pelosi mentions Article I around the four-minute mark - because she realizes the president has never read and never will read the U.S. Constitution. As for Vice President Pence, who sits at Trump’s left, he might as well be a dummy. He does not speak a syllable in over ten minutes, but practices looking concerned and serious.)
*
IN RUSSIAN-INVESTIGATION NEWS, Maria Butina, the hot young
Russian redhead who infiltrated the N.R.A. and spent the 2016 campaign hanging
with leading conservatives, has agreed to a plea deal and will cooperate with prosecutors. That
includes testifying in front of a grand jury.
Her crime: conspiring to act as a Russian agent without
registering with the Justice Department. That’s a felony.
Now we may find out how it happened she was called on during
a campaign rally in 2015 to ask Trump what he thought about sanctions on
Russia. He said he didn’t think we needed them, which would have been sweet
Tchaikovsky music to Putin’s ears.
8/9/19: President Trump and “Massacre
Mitch” are daintily considering legislation to require universal background
checks for gun purchasers. It all depends on if the N.R.A. will grant permission.
The N.R.A. normally argues that the solution to gun violence
is guns for everyone, from teachers to preachers to ticket takers at theaters.
But Wayne LaPierre, who heads up the organization, is almost too busy tending
to his own guns and ammo to put up a fight. The N.R.A.is riven. Members are
quitting. Those remaining are wondering why the organization was thinking about
buying Wayne and his wife Susan a 10,000-square foot
mansion in a gated golfing community.
With a lake view!
That deal fell through when reporters sniffed out Mr. and
Mrs. LaPierre’s trail. As part of the deal, it was revealed that the couple
hoped to keep the previous owner’s “golf cart if possible.” Mrs. LaPierre was
thinking about renovations. She noticed a lack of space in the men’s walk-in
closet off the master bedroom. Wayne needs space. That may have to do with the
fact leaked documents show he spent more than $274,000 at one
high-end Beverly Hills clothing store.
Mr. LaPierre has insisted he needs that house for security
reasons. He said he feared being “targeted” after the Parkland, Florida
massacre. That was just one of dozens of times he had insisted guns weren’t the
problem – and the only way to stop a bad
guy with a gun was a good guy with a gun. Or a good guy with a $6 million
mansion, in a gated community, where he could hide out.
Whether he and the missus got the house or not, he planned to
struggle along on a salary of $1,370,000 per year.
*
THIS LATEST ROUND of debate over guns and gun
legislation, bloodbaths and assault rifles, and countless deaths and injuries,
made this blogger go back and check the U.S. Constitution.
Ratified in 1789, without a Bill of Rights,
Article I listed the duties of Congress.
Including:
So, the Founding Fathers gave Congress the power to
regulate arming of the militia. The Second Amendment did not then exist.
That amendment, adopted as part of the great Bill of Rights
in 1791, reads as follows:
____________________
“A well-regulated
Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the
people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Both the original Constitution and the Second Amendment
assume the militia will be “well-regulated.” The Founding Fathers vested the
power to regulate the arming of that militia in Congress from the start.
In other words, if “Massacre Mitch” and President “I’m the
Real Victim” had a modicum of courage, they could start regulating guns with at
least as much fervor as the GOP shows in regulating uteruses.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (9/18/21): Two years later, we
know. The remainder of President Trump’s term passed without any action on the
question of guns.
Stormy Daniels - with whom Donald cheated on Melania.
____________________
Easier
to list the number of subjects Trump understands than the ones he doesn’t
understand.
____________________
A
British reporter wanted to know if Bartlett thought Trump lied so much because
he was dishonest. Or were his false statements a function of profound
ignorance?
…former
Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy Bruce Bartlett said it
would be easier to list the number of subjects Trump understands than the ones
he doesn’t understand. “Other than how to pander to right-wingers and get busty
women to have sex with him, I can’t think of anything,” [that he actually
understands].
Bartlett agreed with the assessment of Harvard economics
Professor Jeffrey Williamson, who insisted that Trump couldn’t tell the
difference between business debt (hey, let’s declare bankruptcy) and sovereign
debt (federal deficit; we’re ballooning the budget again). Both men told
reporters they feared,
that Trump’s apparent ignorance
was exacerbated by his advisers’ sycophancy. “The real problem isn’t Trump’s
ignorance and stupidity – it’s that he is surrounded by people like [Treasury
Secretary] Mnuchin who are just as ignorant and stupid, or too cowardly to tell
him when he’s wrong.”
*
BARTLETT AND WILLIAMSON are not alone in suspecting that the
President of the United States is an uninformed numbskull. Former National
Security Advisor John Bolton trashed his former boss behind closed doors this week.
He told a gathering of conservatives that Trump’s decision to invite the
Taliban to Camp David was “disrespectful” to the victims of the 9/11 attack. He
said negotiations with North Korea and Iran were “doomed to fail,” and said
Trump’s decision to call off a retaliatory strike on Iran after they shot down
a U.S. drone in June convinced Iran they could get away with the recent strike
on Saudi Arabia’s oil refining facilities.
Of course, we know Bolton. We know what Bolton is like. He
says Iran’s attack on the Saudi facilities is “an act of war.” If it were up to
him, the United States would bomb Iran back – if not to the Stone Age – at
least to 631 A. D., before Mohammed got the idea of spreading a religion.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, the National Rifle Association has made it clear it considers a White House proposal on
enhanced background checks a “non-starter.” Guns aren’t the problem an NRA
spokesman insists. You just think they are, because every time we have a mass
murder in this country the murderer uses a gun.
Well, the NRA is not buying that “guns are the issue” hooey.
The White House proposal ignores “what actually matters: fixing the broken mental
health system and the prosecution of violent criminals.” Senate Leader
McConnell agrees. Why, there’s nothing he can do! He’s waiting to see what President Trump says he thinks we
should do. “The administration is in the process of studying what they’re
prepared to support, if anything,” McConnell explains.
Try, “Nothing.”
*
THE PRESIDENT decides to knock off for the weekend and spends
Saturday at one of his private golf courses. This is Day #299, since taking
office, that he has spent completely or in part at one of the properties he
owns.
2/3/21: How insane are some Republicans? This week the Oregon chapter of
the GOP passed a resolution saying that the attack on Capitol Hill was a “false flag.” That is, an “operation designed to discredit
President Trump, his supporters, and all conservative Republicans,” and provide
the “sham motivation to impeach” the God-chosen President Trump.
January
6: A false flag?
You know the Trump version of the GOP is
bonkers when the MyPillow guy shows up on Newsmax, spouts off his usual
conspiracy theories, and forces the newscaster to walk off the set.
You know – because the newscaster realizes if he listens to Mike Lindell talk
nonsense, he too could be sued for defamation.
While we clean up the wreckage in
Trumpistan, I would encourage you to read a report by Jonathan Swan, a writer
for Axios. He describes the “craziest meeting of the Trump presidency.”
PROOF ONCE AGAIN, that the only way to stop a bad guy with a
gun is with a snow shovel or a syringe. Or a therapist.
On February 3, after a snowstorm blanketed Plains Township in
Pennsylvania, trouble erupted when two neighbors started shoveling snow off
their property. A neighbor accosted them and said they were shoveling their
snow onto his land. Angry words followed. Then gunfire. James Spaide,
47, killed James Goy, 50, and Lisa Goy, 48. Then he killed himself.
The Goy’s sound like fools, themselves, but as ABC reports, after profanities flew, and Mr. Goy threatened
Mr. Spaide with a fist, Spaide went inside, grabbed one of his guns, and “allegedly opened
fire on the couple, shooting both of them multiple times. Officials said Spaide
then went back into his house and retrieved another firearm, which he
reportedly used to shoot them again.”
Six
days later, another angry old white guy, George Ulrich, 67, took a gun to a
health clinic in Buffalo, Minnesota, and opened fire. One person was killed, four others wounded, three
seriously.
“We are very familiar with the suspect,” Police Chief Pat Budke
told reporters. “There is a history of him being unhappy with health care
– with the health care he received,” the chief said.
Gun sales in 2020 reached new highs, with 39.7 million
people completing background checks to purchase pistols, rifles, and
shotguns. That would surpass the old yearly record by almost ten million.
In the early 2000s, the F.B.I. processed under nine million
background checks per year. Then, in 2008, the NRA
began warning that Barack Obama and the Democrats were going to take away all
our guns. Permit requests surpassed 14 million in 2009 and kept climbing, to
27.5 million in 2016. The panic to buy guns before all the guns were gone
dissipated in 2017, when Donald J. took the helm. Then they rose again, to 28.4
million in 2019, and to a new record last year.
From January 1, 2000, to January 1, 2021, Americans filed
requests to buy 362,660,000 guns.
Or more than 1 gun for every 1 person in the land.
Meanwhile, murder rates in 2020 skyrocketed in America’s
cities. President Trump had taken credit when rates fell to a fifty-year
low in 2019. Now he blamed “Democratic mayors” for a huge rise in gun killings.
Christian Science Monitor notes that Democratic-run cities were in fact hit hard (Madison, Wisconsin, for example, saw a 400% increase, Boston 54%,
Memphis 45%). But so were Republican-led cities (Omaha 120%, Lubbock, Texas
100%, Jacksonville 20%).
FUN – WITH COPS: This blogger is not one who believes all
police are bad, or even most police. They have a dangerous job and a large
majority do their best to protect the rest of us from harm. (Also, they hand
out speeding tickets to fine drivers such as the blogger, who does have a lead
foot.) But Donald J. Trump’s penchant for claiming 99% are good, or even 99.9%,
is always stupid.
Some plumbers are bad. Some politicians are bad. Same with
cops. Case in point: NYPD Inspector James F. Kobel – just fired for racist
social media posts. It was revealed recently that he
liked to post under a nickname on the social media platform Rant. President
Obama? Kobel called him a “Muslim savage.” The bi-racial son of the mayor?
Kobel thought it was fun to label him “brillohead.” He likened another African
American to a “wildebeest,” and used an obscene slur to describe a female NYPD
chief. For variety, he sometimes spiced up his post with anti-Semitic language,
too.
Second case in point: three other NYPD officers fired and
later convicted for their role in a bribery scheme. The officers had been selling accident report information and steering
damaged vehicles to tow truck companies that paid.
