Republicans Are Responsible for On-Going Gun Violence

Yesterday , America's 146th mass shooting of 2023 took place in Loiusville, Kentucky.   Five are dead, eight wounded, and many more traumatized.  Once again, an AR-15 appears to have been used by the shooter.   These shootings continue to take place because of Republicans' slavish self-prostitution to the gun industry and gun fanatics/extremists within the GOP base.  No other advanced industrial nation experiences such ongoing carnage.  Trump whines about "American carnage" supposedly due to Democrat policies, but the underlying cause comes from his own party (to the extent he has one other than himself).  Astralia, New Zealand and dozens of other nations have shown how the carnage and needless deaths can be stopped or at least greatly limited.   The only obstacle is today's Republican Party's gun worship and addiction to gun industry money. The lives of school children, college students and those going about their daily business at work or in the grocery store simply do not matter to Republicans. Their bloviating about "thoughts and prayers" do nothing to solve the problem and, frankly are an insult to both the dead and wounded and their families.  When will the significant majority of Americans who want gun control say "enough!" and vote the bastards out of office.  A column in the Washington Post responsibility at the feet og the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

The only path out of America’s cycle of gun violence is for the Republican Party to change course and join Democrats in backing far-reaching gun control. Otherwise, Americans will continue to be victims of gun violence, see friends or relatives shot, or be haunted by those possibilities.

I joined the third group this week. On Monday, a man fired shots at a downtown building in Louisville, killing at least four people and injuring numerous others. I had been at the building, which housed a bank branch as well as office space, for a news conference in December, as Mayor-elect Craig Greenberg announced top aides in his administration.

The ongoing national wave of these shootings has made me increasingly leery of attending large events or visiting schools or other venues where mass carnage is all-to-easy to imagine. Five years ago, a high school friend of mine was shot (but thankfully survived) in a mass shooting in nearby Cincinnati. Monday’s shooting makes me even more nervous — I had been in this physical space before.

Because these shootings just keep happening, so many Americans now know someone affected. Twenty-one percent say that either they or a family member or friend has had personal experience with gun violence, according to a 2022 poll conducted by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That statistic now includes Gov. Andy Beshear (D) of Kentucky, who said two friends died in Monday’s shooting.

Each year, more than 20,000 Americans are killed in non-suicide incidents (mostly homicides) involving guns in the United States. Several hundred times a year, four or more people are shot and either killed or injured in a single event, which is how the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting.

But, of course, this is not inevitable. Countries such as Australia and Canada have dramatically lower gun-related death rates than the United States. California and Massachusetts have substantially lower rates than many other states, including Kentucky.

It’s no mystery why. Australia, Canada and other nations have stringent gun regulations. States with higher rates of gun violence are largely Republican-dominated, with looser regulations, while those with lower rates are often blue states with greater gun control.

The solutions aren’t simple, but we can fix this problem. By some estimates, there are nearly 400 million guns in circulation in the United States, meaning we have more guns than people. A good incremental step would be for Kentucky to embrace gun laws similar to California’s. But ultimately, we need the United States to have gun laws more like Australia’s.

If the United States severely restricted AR-15’s and other such weapons, there would be fewer mass killings in which one person shoots dozens. But to truly reduce the number of homicides, we have to restrict handguns, too.

So we need Americans to voluntarily give up their guns en masse — or be required to do so. That would require numerous, aggressive pieces of gun-control legislation, judges upholding those laws in court — and potentially a constitutional amendment stating that the Second Amendment does not provide an individual right to gun ownership.

I don’t think that’s impossible. Australia did something similar in the 1990s after a mass shooting there.

But we all know the problem. Such massive policy changes would require Republican politicians, powerful right-wing institutions such as Fox News and many hard-line conservative voters to stop acting as though radical gun freedoms are essential to a free society. In our current political environment, Fox and other conservative entities regularly suggest that conservatives are under mortal threat and that owning a gun is both good and necessary. Republican politicians also whip up pro-gun sentiment.

Just last month here in Kentucky, for example, the GOP-dominated legislature adopted a provision declaring the state a “Second Amendment sanctuary” barring local law enforcement officials from enforcing some federal gun laws.

For the United States to make progress on guns, the Republican Party has to change direction. That would require powerful parts of the Republican coalition, such as former president Donald Trump and Fox News, to start telling Republican voters that conservatism doesn’t require opposition to gun regulations.

I know how far-fetched that sounds. But ultimately, that’s the only solution. The Democratic Party can’t impose gun control on its own, particularly in GOP-dominated states such as Kentucky. Nor can it push aggressive legislation if Republicans are loudly suggesting Democrats want to put conservative voters in bondage.

We have become a nation of mass-shooting victims and people like me are traumatized by hearing about so many mass shootings. This is a terrible problem, but it is one we can solve. Slavery was abolished. Jim Crow was outlawed. Mass shootings and gun violence can be dramatically reduced, if not eradicated.

But we need some Lincolns and Kings to emerge in the Republican Party to push it in the right direction. I am not optimistic, but I am not fatalistic, either.

Loosening gun laws further as is happening in GOP controled red states will only increase the death toll despite the lies pushed by the gun industry and their polical whores. 

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 Tom Daley

A Georgia Indictment Looms Over Trump

One of the mysteries to me since 2015 has been how people who at least pretend to be decent and moral have continued to wrap themselves up in the cult of Donald Trump, a man who is a serial adulterer, has run his businesses like a crime boss, and pretty much ignores all standards of decency.  Are they really that racist or worried about lower taxes that nothing else matters?   These questions do not apply to evangelicals and Christofascists since I long ago learned that these people are the most inclined to lie and cheat to reach a desired end and displays of false piety and religiosity are all for show and a smoke screen for their relentless quest for power, something Trump promised to them back in June 2016. But for others in the Trump base, their alliegence to someone so foul in so many ways is still baffling at times.  Thus, one has to wonder what kind of criminal charges, if any, might make at lease some of this crowd ceace drinking the Kool-Aid.  The media has had an orgasm over Trump's indictment in New York, but as a piece in the New York Times lays out, an indictment in Georgia may expose Trump to far more danger and further undercut his lies that the 2020 election was "stolen" even though he was the one trying to steal the election.  Here are article highlights:

The indictment of Donald J. Trump in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star was a global spectacle, with the former president glumly returning to his old stomping grounds in Manhattan as TV networks closely tracked his procession of black SUVs on their way to the courthouse.

But strip away the high drama, and the actual charging document in the case was far less grand — 34 felony counts of a fairly narrow and common bookkeeping charge that Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, described as the “bread and butter” of his office’s white-collar criminal prosecutions.

In Georgia, however, there is another criminal investigation of Mr. Trump nearing completion, this one also led by a local prosecutor, Fani T. Willis of Fulton County. While nothing is certain, there are numerous signs that she may go big, with a more kaleidoscopic indictment charging not only Mr. Trump, but perhaps a dozen or more of his allies.

Her investigation has targeted a wide range of conduct centered around efforts to subvert the democratic process and overturn Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss. Nearly 20 people are already known to have been told that they are targets who could face charges, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, and David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party.

For Ms. Willis, the choice to pursue a narrowly focused indictment or more a sprawling one — a classic prosecutor’s dilemma — carries with it potential risks and benefits on both sides. And American history offers few examples in which the stakes are so high.

A narrow case can be easier for jurors to understand. But it is also possible to go “too narrow,” Ms. McQuade said, denying a jury the ability to see the entire scope of a defendant’s criminal behavior.

If, on the other hand, a wide-ranging scheme is charged, “you allow them to see the full scope of criminal conduct,” she said. But going big could cause jurors to become lost amid a profusion of evidence, with a long trial increasing the possibility of a mistrial.

In Georgia, the investigation is focused on myriad efforts to overturn Mr. Trump’s narrow loss in Georgia after his 2020 election defeat, including his January 2021 phone call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he pressed Mr. Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, to recalculate the results and “find” him enough votes to win.

Mr. Trump is also under investigation by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, for his role in the events leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and his decisions to retain sensitive government documents at his home in Florida.

The wide scope of the investigation has been evident for months, and Ms. Willis has said that seeking an indictment under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute is an option that she is considering. Like the similar federal law, the Georgia RICO statute allows prosecutors to bundle what may seem to be unrelated crimes committed by a host of different people if those crimes are perceived to be in support of a common objective.

Ms. Willis has extensive experience with racketeering cases . . . . Her office is currently pursuing racketeering charges against two gangs connected to the hip-hop world, including one led by the Atlanta rapper Jeffery Williams, who performs as Young Thug.

After starting the Trump investigation in February 2021, Ms. Willis’s office sought the aid of a special grand jury to gather and consider evidence. In Georgia, such juries do not have indictment powers but can issue subpoenas in long-running investigations. The body was empaneled last spring and completed its work in January after hearing closed-door testimony from 75 witnesses, though its recommendations have remained largely under seal.

Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of that special grand jury, strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among more than a dozen people who had been recommended for indictment. “You’re not going to be shocked,” she said, when asked whether Mr. Trump was named in the report. “It’s not rocket science.”

Documents also show that prosecutors are following numerous narrative threads in Georgia involving either Mr. Trump or his allies. These include Mr. Trump’s phone calls to Georgia officials, including the one to Mr. Raffensperger; specious statements about election fraud made by Mr. Giuliani and others at state legislative hearings; the convening of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College at the Georgia State Capitol . . . . and a plot by allies of Mr. Trump involving the copying of sensitive election software in rural Coffee County, Ga.

If Ms. Willis brings a sprawling RICO case, it could present its own problems, said Michael J. Moore, a former U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia. Asking a jury to consider multiple acts that do not tie directly back to Mr. Trump might make it more difficult “to point the finger at him with the strength that you might have been able to in a simpler case,” he said.

Mr. Moore also wondered how far a trial involving Mr. Trump would stretch into the coming presidential election season. He noted that the jury selection process in the multi-defendant racketeering case involving Young Thug had been going on for roughly four months, and that the judge in the case had estimated the trial could take up to nine months. “We're just going to have to face the reality that we’re going to have to deal with that,” he said.

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Republicans: Caught Off Guard by Majority's Backlash

With Republicans still reeling from the backlash against the overturning of Roe v. Wade and GOP threats to democracy itself, the ruling by far right extremist Texas federal judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk, a man who has a mind set one would expect abong the ayatollahs in Iran, banning abortion medications nationwide, will only throw gas on the fire.  Add to this the Tennessee Republicans unprecedented - and racist - explusion of two black Democrat representatives who "sinned" by challenge GOP policies putting the wants of gun fanatics over the lives of school children and everyday Americans, and the flames of a anti-Republican backlash will likely increase.  Meanwhile, GOP threats to Medicare and Social Security may well alienate older voters on whom the GOP has long relied.  Surprisingly - or maybe not given the Fox News fueled bubble in which the political right dwells - Republicans are shocked to find that the citizenry is not inclined to quietly sit back as Republicans strip away their rights and empower religious zealots to engage in censorship and openly racist and homophobic screeds.  Apparently, these out of the mainstream political whores to extreme GOP primary voters simply expected the rest of us to do nothing to fight back.  The results of the Wisconsin supreme court election (and the GOP's poor 2022 mid-term result) show the foolishness this assumption.  A piece at Salon looks at what will hopefully be the GOP's huge miscalculation.   Here are highlights:

For as long as I can remember, Democrats have been on the defensive about enacting their agenda because it was assumed that it would engender a backlash among "the silent majority," as former president Richard Nixon called it, or what modern Republicans call "Real America." Reacting to the counter-culture of the 1960s and the massive social changes it engendered, the left wing of the Democratic Party was always admonished by the centrist and conservative wings not to go too far or too fast. The media even blithely asserted that "America is a conservative country" as if it were an act of God. This article of faith hobbled progress for a very long time and empowered the Reagan Revolution through the Tea Party and Donald Trump's MAGA movement.

Nobody ever seemed to consider that enabling the right wing to become more and more extreme over the course of many years might engender a backlash of its own. It appears as if that time may have finally come — and it's clear the Republican establishment doesn't know what to do about it. The question is whether the Democratic establishment does either.

We started out with former president and current GOP presidential frontrunner being indicted in New York over the payments of hush money to conceal information that might have damaged his chances in the 2016 election. It's a huge story but it's not unanticipated nor is it the last prosecution Donald Trump is likely to face in the coming months. The most interesting aspect of it remains the fact that the Republican establishment is circling the wagons around him once again while Republican voters seem determined to push him to the nomination. This is despite the fact that he will be under indictment on felony charges in at least one case and probably more, proving once again that no amount of norm-busting, corruption or criminal behavior is a deal breaker with his cult. Trump has trained them to believe that it's all an elaborate conspiracy against him.

But this week also showed that something else is afoot. Yes, Trump is a galvanizing force in Democratic politics going all the way back to the massive, global Women's March in 2017. His grotesque behavior motivated millions of people, especially women, to organize and it paid off in every election since then. Donald Trump has been dragging the GOP down for years but they just can't quit him. However, the party's rapid descent into extremism is bigger than Trump and the backlash is continuing to show itself in ways that are shattering the status quo.

The swing state of Wisconsin has been a battleground for years with a polarized electorate that has had power swinging back and forth between the two parties with razor-thin margins. It was assumed that the high-stakes election this week for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would be similarly tight. The future of the outrageous gerrymander that makes Republicans massively over-represented in the state legislature was at issue but, most importantly, abortion rights were front and center. Abortion has been illegal in the state since last June when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and an archaic law banning abortion that had been on the books since 1849 was no longer moot. The hard right legislature and the conservative state Supreme Court wasn't going to fix that.

The election turned on those two intersecting issues. Abortion rights and democracy were on the ballot with the first being denied as a result of the Republicans manipulating the map to un-democratically seize more power than the people voted for. The anti-abortion candidate (a Trumper, by the way) lost by 10 points, a miracle in that polarized electorate. With good organization by the state Democratic Party — which saw a huge uptick in 18-29-year-old voters, a big gender gap and even, surprisingly, inroads among white, non-college-educated voters — abortion rights and democracy advocacy carried the day.

Meanwhile in Chicago, just as in Los Angeles earlier, the progressive mayoral candidate won despite widespread expectations that the centrist "law and order" candidate would prevail as a result of right-wing fear-mongering about crime. . . . . The stale "law and order" handwringing didn't work in 2022 and it didn't work this week — and it's yet another sign that the extremism of right-wing rhetoric and policies is turning off voters. Backlash.

And then there was the grotesque display we witnessed in Nashville, Tennessee on Thursday when the Republicans expelled two Black lawmakers, Justin Pierson and Justin Jones, for staging a protest for gun safety legislation on the floor of the House.

After six people, including three little children, were shot down in a Nashville school, citizens protested the state's insanely loose gun laws that allowed the shooter to legally obtain firearms despite a history of mental illness. The anti-democratic Republicans (yes, Tennessee is ridiculously gerrymandered as well) essentially scoffed at their concerns, attacked their colleagues' First Amendment rights and then showed the entire country in living color that they are unreconstructed racists on top of it by instituting the political death penalty against two Black legislators for a minor rules violation.

In this instance, we are seeing the burning issue of gun violence converge with the issue of democracy and systemic racism and while it hasn't yet been fully demonstrated, the fact that the two ousted legislators are also quite young, as are most of the protesters, makes me think we are on the verge of seeing another backlash developing.

This dispatch from a local Tennessee journalist suggests that some Republicans sense that too: The GOP is an authoritarian, extremist political party that is out of the mainstream of American life. . . . .Backlashes go both ways and this one is coming from the left. It's about time. 

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

Matthew Kacsmaryk: The Worst Federal Judge in America

Not only did Donald Trump, a/k/a De Trumpenfuhrer, appoint three religious extremists to the Supreme Court who seek to make all Americans live subject to their religious beliefs (the real reason Roe v. Wade was oveturned), but he also packed lower federal courts with similar extremists - many deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association - who are now hell bent to inflict Christofascists beliefs on all citizens.  With Roe overturned, Republican judges and Republican controled state legislatures, as noted in prior posts, care nothing for the views or rights of the majority of Americans, but instead - much like the mullahs in Tehran - are using their power to strip away rights and enforce a version of "Chrstian" sharia law on all.  (Note, I use Christian in quotations because there is NOTHING Chrstian about these people).  A case in point is Matthew Kacsmaryk (pictured above left), a long time anti-abortion fanatic appointed to the federal bench in Texas by Donald Trump.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Kacsmaryk who should never have been appoited to a judgship at any level much less a lifetime federal appointment.  It goes without saying that Kacsmaryk opposes LGBT rights and even contraception.   Here are highlights:

Congratulations are in order for Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. The competition is fierce and will remain so, but for now he holds the title: worst federal judge in America.

Not simply for the poor quality of his judicial reasoning, although more, much more, on this in a bit. What really distinguishes Kacsmaryk is the loaded content of his rhetoric — not the language of a sober-minded, impartial jurist but of a zealot, committed more to promoting a cause than applying the law.

Kacsmaryk is the Texas-based judge handpicked by antiabortion advocates — he is the sole jurist who sits in the Amarillo division of the Northern District of Texas — to hear their challenge to the legality of antiabortion medication.

And so he did, ruling exactly as expected. In an opinion released Friday, Kacsmaryk invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and, for good measure, found that antiabortion medications cannot be sent by mail or other delivery service under the terms of an 1873 anti-vice law.

Even in states where abortion remains legal. Even though study after study has shown the drug to be safe and effective — far safer, for instance, than over-the-counter Tylenol. Even though — or perhaps precisely because — more than half of abortions in the United States today are performed with abortion medication.

My fury here is not because I fear that Kacsmaryk’s ruling will stand. I don’t think it will, not even with this Supreme Court. Indeed, another federal district judge, just hours after Kacsmaryk’s Good Friday ruling — issued a competing order, instructing the FDA to maintain the existing rules making mifepristone available. Even Kacsmaryk put his ruling on hold for a week; the Justice Department has already filed a notice of appeal; and the dispute is hurtling its way to the Supreme Court.

No, my beef is with ideologues in robes. That Kacsmaryk fits the description is no surprise. Before being nominated to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2017, Kacsmaryk served as deputy general counsel at the conservative First Liberty Institute. He argued against same-sex marriage, civil rights protections for gay and transgender individuals, the contraceptive mandate and, of course, Roe v. Wade.

Given the nationwide attention to the case, you might have thought that Kacsmaryk would have taken pains to appear as judicious as possible. But no: A dozen sentences into the opinion, his personal views about abortion become unmistakable. Mifepristone, Kacsmaryk writes, “is a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone, halts nutrition, and ultimately starves the unborn human until death.”

Not appropriate — not even close. Unborn human and unborn child are loaded terms — and Kacsmaryk goes on to use those phrases multiple times, as in “the unborn humans extinguished by mifepriston” and “expelling the aborted human.” This does not demonstrate the judge’s scientific bona fides; it reveals his bias.

Even the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — “other jurists” who are Kacsmaryk’s actual superiors — understood this. . . . .But Kacsmaryk is more advocate than judge. His second footnote launches into supposed ties between abortion rights advocates and the eugenics movement.

He veers out of his way to raise, sympathetically, the tangential question of “fetal personhood” — the argument that the Constitution protects fetal life from the moment of conception and therefore precludes states from allowing abortion. This man really can’t help himself. He is a true believer, miscast in a judicial role.

Kacsmaryk’s legal reasoning is as irresponsible as his rhetoric. He breezes past every barrier to getting to the merits of the case. The physicians’ group concocted to bring the lawsuit has standing “because they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place ‘enormous pressure and stress’ on doctors during emergencies and complications.” (There is no such evidence.)

He cites, as supposedly objective sources, studies conducted by antiabortion activists . . . I could keep going, but you get the point: This is a judge who knows what conclusion he wants to reach and is going to do what he must to get there — facts, fairness and law be damned.

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