The media is also barely covering the story about the NRA’s dire financial straits as a result of top leaders were using its funds as their personal piggy bank. Given how weak the NRA is at the moment the media should be explaining why Republicans are still being obstructive about gun control measures like background checks that have a lot of public support, even from Republicans. Could it be that obstruction is just Republicans’ default mode? Back in the day when Republicans were supposedly still normal they decided, on the advice of Bill Kristol, to reject any health care bill proposed by Clinton “sight unseen”.
Kristol told them that by refusing to compromise on this popular reform and allow Clinton any win they could beat the Democrats in the midterms. They then ramped up a vicious, deeply dishonest propaganda machine with a lot of help from Big Pharma that trashed Clnton’s bill. (Clinton’s radical bill was based mainly on ides from the conservative Heritage Foundation.) The media played along, repeating the lies they were spreading. I still remember how the same journalists who had been reporting on families going bankrupt because of medical bills suddenly declaring that we had the best healthcare system in the world.
Every republican legislator should be asked constantly why they don’t support any sensible gun reform. Why they constantly ignore 80 percent of the voting public. And why the murder of innocents is compatible with their pro life Christian beliefs. They should be asked every time they show their faces and especially on every television program on which they’re invited to speak Hold their cowardly feet to the fire.
Boehner's book tour has been a reminder of what a shallow, me-first, "country club Republican" looks and sounds like. He wallows in the both sides crap, and the media indulges him. In an attempt to explain away his impotence he lamented the Tea Party's influence, and Gayle King rapidly assured him, "both parties have their problems." The bigger dope in that exchange was, of course, Gayle King. Boehner and Mitch McConnell decided the GOP would be the obstruction party, and then sat back and watched the clowns grab the spotlight. Now both of them blame the clowns...and the Dems.
Our Failed Political Press™ is playing the role of Captain Louis Renault and says, “Round-up the usual suspects,” which in this instance is BOTH SIDES.
I think we’ve all said it before, the Press is missing the biggest story of our lifetimes: one of our two political parties has gone completely around the bend and is full-on nuts. And now that party is actively enthusiastically supporting mass killings because gun manufacturers are giving them money. The Republicans are accessories to slaughters both before- and after-the-fact.
The inside-the-beltway press cannot cover the obstruction story because then they would be admitting that they got it all wrong since the beginning of time, and who’s going to give Chuck Todd a job when he’s never gotten even a syllable right?
Could it be Republicans don’t want even the most basic gun reforms because of their alliance with white nationalist groups and all of this baffling nonsense is a simple matter of racism and extreme ideology gone amok? I mean, they staged a literal attempted coup only a few months ago, a culmination of decades of baby steps in the making. Nothing else makes sense politically, financially or morally, and process of elimination logically concludes it:
1) The NRA is bankrupt and has no real influence or credibility left.
2) Overwhelming public support wants effective gun reforms.
3) The mass shooting in El Paso almost lost them Texas (TEXAS!), and the GOP’s continued impotence on gun reform and other issues has already flipped Arizona and Georgia.
4) Their platform continues to be a gift to Democrats at the polls.
The media may not be blaming Republicans for their obstruction, but the American people clearly are, and it is on trend to get even worse for the GOP. So, why are they doing it, if not to live out their fever dream of minority rule by appeasing the white nationalist groups who will always solidly, blindly follow them and fight for that agenda if it means a gun free-for-all and white supremacy? And when I say this, I do mean the leaders in the GOP (and a majority of their followers) are racist AF. I don’t believe for a second that they’re merely exploiting a dangerous demographic.
Perfect song choice today. What an excellent way to start a Monday morning.
The fact that legislation couldn't get done when 26 people, including 20 children were butchered at Sandy Hook tells you everything you need to know. One sequel after another of this horror movie known as mass shootings in America leaves the rest of the world scratching their head. As you point out, the media has been playing along with this game of not calling out the Republicans for far too long. 50 Democratic Senators have 40 million more constituents than the 50 Republican Senators. Because of this quirk on our political system, we can't get legislation passed to stop this madness when the vast majority of voters want gun laws changed. So the media is aiding in all of us playing along with the odds game. That game being that the likelihood that when I go to the grocery store this afternoon, odds are I will survive. Folks, the odds keep shrinking because Republicans refuse to do anything to offend the NRA. That the media plays along confuses me to no end. Aren't they afraid that it can happen to them?
Thanks Eric. Any list of gun massacres in this country is jarring, and yours is no exception.
Yesterday I helped my daughter study for the exam necessary in my state to teach History in secondary school. The exam covers centuries of world history, as well as US history. I admit the Spanish and English murder and brutalization of the first inhabitants of this country--reviewed in a few hours for exam purposes--left me sick to my stomach. Later I felt worse as we reviewed American exceptionalism like slavery, Jim Crow, and so many other "proud" US moments. And the last couple of decades is just starting to make it onto these exams.
There is a poison in our country, borne of genocide, slavery, murder and other violence that includes the slaughter of children by weapons of war. And it seems to infect a particular type of American, arguably now the minority, and their enablers.
Will Rogers famously suggested “The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.” Perhaps. Perhaps the American voter can't recall the 40-year failure of trickle down, and elect a political party robbing them blind. Or that one party leads us into national financial, health and other disasters that the other party then fixes. But it takes more than short term memory to ignore the slaughter of children.
I want to point out that men are killing us. Typically young white men. If all of these shootings were done by women, there would be immediate legislation. The status quo of do nothing is not working. It may take many years to get these assault rifles off the street but we need to start now. And regarding further legislation, if you are a responsible gun owner, you shouldn’t worry about it.
Give Talking Points Memo credit - here's how they wrote up the latest false outrage story from the GOP:
"GOPers Threaten ‘Action’ Against Maxine Waters In Transparent Display Of Bad Faith
By Cristina Cabrera April 19, 2021 12:52 p.m.
Hark! Fresh gaslighting and deflection on this week’s menu.
On Saturday, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) attended an anti-police brutality protest in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota against the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer last week amid the murder trial of ex-cop Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.
“We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational,” Waters told reporters. “We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Republicans, thirsty for an opportunity to both distract from their role in inciting a full-blown insurrection in January and to smear Black Lives Matter as a violent movement, pounced immediately.
On Sunday night, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) accused Waters of “inciting violence in Minneapolis” and demanded that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) punish the Democrat.
“If Speaker Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week,” the GOP leader tweeted.
Reps. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) and Madison Cawthorne (R-NC) backed McCarthy’s threat.
“Rep. Waters has incited violence for the past two years. Enough is enough,” tweeted Cawthorne, who has been accused of sexual harassment and intimidation by multiple women at his old college.
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), now left with plenty of time on her hands after being stripped of her committee assignments due to her violent rhetoric online and canceling her flatly racist “America First” caucus, has thrown herself into the outrage and vowed to introduce a resolution to have Waters (referred to by Greene as “this criminal”) expelled.
Waters dismissed the ruckus on Monday, telling the Grio that she’s “not worried that they’re going to continue to distort what I say.”
TPM has reached out to Pelosi’s office.
Needless to say, any push to censor or expel Waters over her comment will go nowhere in the Democrat-controlled House, but that isn’t the point.
This theater is part of the GOP’s sustained effort to flip the narrative on Democrats ever since President Donald Trump’s supporters ransacked the Capitol on January 6. Virtually all Republicans, including McCarthy, helped Trump fuel the rage that led to the attack with lies claiming that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Then almost none of them voted to impeach Trump for encouraging his supporters to storm the building.
Since then, GOP lawmakers have steadfastly refused to acknowledge their role in the attack and are using false equivalencies to paint the other side as the real enemies of peace and democracy. McCarthy and his conference whipped out the same playbook in the contested race in Iowa’s second district earlier this year, accusing the Democrats of trying to steal the election as Rita Hart, the Democratic candidate in the race who lost by six votes, contested the results.
Hart ultimately abandoned her challenge, citing Republicans’ “toxic campaign of political disinformation.”"
Today's newsletter is merely a reminder that the diseased hundredth-of-a-cent streetwalkers who comprise the DC political media brothel and its satellites are the enemies of journalism and, consequently, the enemies of the people.
By the way, a friend noted that I should be careful about calling it a brothel, which is why I qualify it with the previous description. Prostitutes work for a living.
The media is also barely covering the story about the NRA’s dire financial straits as a result of top leaders were using its funds as their personal piggy bank. Given how weak the NRA is at the moment the media should be explaining why Republicans are still being obstructive about gun control measures like background checks that have a lot of public support, even from Republicans. Could it be that obstruction is just Republicans’ default mode? Back in the day when Republicans were supposedly still normal they decided, on the advice of Bill Kristol, to reject any health care bill proposed by Clinton “sight unseen”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/radical-republican-opposition-is-not-new/361536/
Kristol told them that by refusing to compromise on this popular reform and allow Clinton any win they could beat the Democrats in the midterms. They then ramped up a vicious, deeply dishonest propaganda machine with a lot of help from Big Pharma that trashed Clnton’s bill. (Clinton’s radical bill was based mainly on ides from the conservative Heritage Foundation.) The media played along, repeating the lies they were spreading. I still remember how the same journalists who had been reporting on families going bankrupt because of medical bills suddenly declaring that we had the best healthcare system in the world.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/01/a-triumph-of-misinformation/306231/
Every republican legislator should be asked constantly why they don’t support any sensible gun reform. Why they constantly ignore 80 percent of the voting public. And why the murder of innocents is compatible with their pro life Christian beliefs. They should be asked every time they show their faces and especially on every television program on which they’re invited to speak Hold their cowardly feet to the fire.
Boehner's book tour has been a reminder of what a shallow, me-first, "country club Republican" looks and sounds like. He wallows in the both sides crap, and the media indulges him. In an attempt to explain away his impotence he lamented the Tea Party's influence, and Gayle King rapidly assured him, "both parties have their problems." The bigger dope in that exchange was, of course, Gayle King. Boehner and Mitch McConnell decided the GOP would be the obstruction party, and then sat back and watched the clowns grab the spotlight. Now both of them blame the clowns...and the Dems.
Our Failed Political Press™ is playing the role of Captain Louis Renault and says, “Round-up the usual suspects,” which in this instance is BOTH SIDES.
I think we’ve all said it before, the Press is missing the biggest story of our lifetimes: one of our two political parties has gone completely around the bend and is full-on nuts. And now that party is actively enthusiastically supporting mass killings because gun manufacturers are giving them money. The Republicans are accessories to slaughters both before- and after-the-fact.
The inside-the-beltway press cannot cover the obstruction story because then they would be admitting that they got it all wrong since the beginning of time, and who’s going to give Chuck Todd a job when he’s never gotten even a syllable right?
In case anyone forgot--this is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing...
The unwritten law of the media is that nothing is ever the fault of Republicans.
Could it be Republicans don’t want even the most basic gun reforms because of their alliance with white nationalist groups and all of this baffling nonsense is a simple matter of racism and extreme ideology gone amok? I mean, they staged a literal attempted coup only a few months ago, a culmination of decades of baby steps in the making. Nothing else makes sense politically, financially or morally, and process of elimination logically concludes it:
1) The NRA is bankrupt and has no real influence or credibility left.
2) Overwhelming public support wants effective gun reforms.
3) The mass shooting in El Paso almost lost them Texas (TEXAS!), and the GOP’s continued impotence on gun reform and other issues has already flipped Arizona and Georgia.
4) Their platform continues to be a gift to Democrats at the polls.
The media may not be blaming Republicans for their obstruction, but the American people clearly are, and it is on trend to get even worse for the GOP. So, why are they doing it, if not to live out their fever dream of minority rule by appeasing the white nationalist groups who will always solidly, blindly follow them and fight for that agenda if it means a gun free-for-all and white supremacy? And when I say this, I do mean the leaders in the GOP (and a majority of their followers) are racist AF. I don’t believe for a second that they’re merely exploiting a dangerous demographic.
Perfect song choice today. What an excellent way to start a Monday morning.
The fact that legislation couldn't get done when 26 people, including 20 children were butchered at Sandy Hook tells you everything you need to know. One sequel after another of this horror movie known as mass shootings in America leaves the rest of the world scratching their head. As you point out, the media has been playing along with this game of not calling out the Republicans for far too long. 50 Democratic Senators have 40 million more constituents than the 50 Republican Senators. Because of this quirk on our political system, we can't get legislation passed to stop this madness when the vast majority of voters want gun laws changed. So the media is aiding in all of us playing along with the odds game. That game being that the likelihood that when I go to the grocery store this afternoon, odds are I will survive. Folks, the odds keep shrinking because Republicans refuse to do anything to offend the NRA. That the media plays along confuses me to no end. Aren't they afraid that it can happen to them?
Thanks Eric. Any list of gun massacres in this country is jarring, and yours is no exception.
Yesterday I helped my daughter study for the exam necessary in my state to teach History in secondary school. The exam covers centuries of world history, as well as US history. I admit the Spanish and English murder and brutalization of the first inhabitants of this country--reviewed in a few hours for exam purposes--left me sick to my stomach. Later I felt worse as we reviewed American exceptionalism like slavery, Jim Crow, and so many other "proud" US moments. And the last couple of decades is just starting to make it onto these exams.
There is a poison in our country, borne of genocide, slavery, murder and other violence that includes the slaughter of children by weapons of war. And it seems to infect a particular type of American, arguably now the minority, and their enablers.
Will Rogers famously suggested “The short memories of the American voters is what keeps our politicians in office.” Perhaps. Perhaps the American voter can't recall the 40-year failure of trickle down, and elect a political party robbing them blind. Or that one party leads us into national financial, health and other disasters that the other party then fixes. But it takes more than short term memory to ignore the slaughter of children.
And some days we seem no closer to the antidote.
I want to point out that men are killing us. Typically young white men. If all of these shootings were done by women, there would be immediate legislation. The status quo of do nothing is not working. It may take many years to get these assault rifles off the street but we need to start now. And regarding further legislation, if you are a responsible gun owner, you shouldn’t worry about it.
Give Talking Points Memo credit - here's how they wrote up the latest false outrage story from the GOP:
"GOPers Threaten ‘Action’ Against Maxine Waters In Transparent Display Of Bad Faith
By Cristina Cabrera April 19, 2021 12:52 p.m.
Hark! Fresh gaslighting and deflection on this week’s menu.
On Saturday, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) attended an anti-police brutality protest in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota against the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer last week amid the murder trial of ex-cop Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.
“We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational,” Waters told reporters. “We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”
Republicans, thirsty for an opportunity to both distract from their role in inciting a full-blown insurrection in January and to smear Black Lives Matter as a violent movement, pounced immediately.
On Sunday night, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) accused Waters of “inciting violence in Minneapolis” and demanded that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) punish the Democrat.
“If Speaker Pelosi doesn’t act against this dangerous rhetoric, I will bring action this week,” the GOP leader tweeted.
Reps. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) and Madison Cawthorne (R-NC) backed McCarthy’s threat.
“Rep. Waters has incited violence for the past two years. Enough is enough,” tweeted Cawthorne, who has been accused of sexual harassment and intimidation by multiple women at his old college.
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), now left with plenty of time on her hands after being stripped of her committee assignments due to her violent rhetoric online and canceling her flatly racist “America First” caucus, has thrown herself into the outrage and vowed to introduce a resolution to have Waters (referred to by Greene as “this criminal”) expelled.
Waters dismissed the ruckus on Monday, telling the Grio that she’s “not worried that they’re going to continue to distort what I say.”
TPM has reached out to Pelosi’s office.
Needless to say, any push to censor or expel Waters over her comment will go nowhere in the Democrat-controlled House, but that isn’t the point.
This theater is part of the GOP’s sustained effort to flip the narrative on Democrats ever since President Donald Trump’s supporters ransacked the Capitol on January 6. Virtually all Republicans, including McCarthy, helped Trump fuel the rage that led to the attack with lies claiming that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Then almost none of them voted to impeach Trump for encouraging his supporters to storm the building.
Since then, GOP lawmakers have steadfastly refused to acknowledge their role in the attack and are using false equivalencies to paint the other side as the real enemies of peace and democracy. McCarthy and his conference whipped out the same playbook in the contested race in Iowa’s second district earlier this year, accusing the Democrats of trying to steal the election as Rita Hart, the Democratic candidate in the race who lost by six votes, contested the results.
Hart ultimately abandoned her challenge, citing Republicans’ “toxic campaign of political disinformation.”"
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/gopers-threaten-action-against-maxine-waters-in-transparent-display-of-bad-faith
Subscribing to TPM (and Press Run of course) is well worth it.
Today's newsletter is merely a reminder that the diseased hundredth-of-a-cent streetwalkers who comprise the DC political media brothel and its satellites are the enemies of journalism and, consequently, the enemies of the people.
By the way, a friend noted that I should be careful about calling it a brothel, which is why I qualify it with the previous description. Prostitutes work for a living.
So sorry about your son, Joe. Mad as hell sure fits the bill.
A growing element in the GOP mix on guns is the party's increasingly open embrace of racism. Guns are the answer to replacement. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/4/18/2026488/-About-those-constitutional-carry-gun-bills-popping-up-in-red-state-legislatures
TY