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FOCUS: More Kids Are Dead |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Thursday, 15 February 2018 11:28 |
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Pierce writes: "There was another unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms in an American high school on Wednesday. Eighteen students were killed."
Students are evacuated by police out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland after a shooter opened fire on the campus. (photo: Mike Stocker/Sun Sentinel)
More Kids Are Dead
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
15 February 18
Those four words are the cost of our uniquely American "freedom."
(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
 here was another unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms in an American high school on Wednesday. Eighteen students were killed. The shooter is in custody. This time the scene was Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. From CNN:
Nicole Baltzer, 18, said she was in trigonometry class about 10 minutes before the end of the school day when the fire alarm went off. As students evacuated, she heard six gunshots and everyone started running back inside the school, Baltzer told CNN's Sara Ganim. "I heard so many gunshots, at least like six. They were very close," Baltzer said. A police officer told her to close her eyes as she walked past a classroom with broken glass, telling her "there's nothing good to see in there," she said.
In a school.
"We have been liberated. God bless, America," Aidan tweeted after being evacuated from the building. "Love each other. You may never know when it may be the last day you meet someone."
In a fcking school.
By now we know that the shooter was a troubled young man named Nikolas Cruz, who was expelled from the same school he shot up on Wednesday. From The Boston Globe via AP:
Cruz, 19, had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for ‘‘disciplinary reasons,’’ Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said, but he insisted he didn’t know the specifics. Math teacher Jim Gard told the Miami Herald that before Wednesday’s fatal shooting of 17 people, Cruz may have been identified as a potential threat - Gard believes the school had sent out an email warning teachers that Cruz shouldn’t be allowed on campus with a backpack. “There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus,’’ Gard told the paper. Unhappy there, Nikolas Cruz asked to move in with a friend’s family in northwest Broward. The family agreed, and Cruz moved in around Thanksgiving. According to the family’s lawyer, who did not identify them, they knew that Cruz owned the AR-15 but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet. He did have the key, however. Jim Lewis said the family is devastated and didn’t see this coming. They are cooperating with authorities, he said.
Good god. This guy was so freaking dangerous he was on the FBI’s goddamn radar. (The countdown has begun to the moment when the president* uses this fact to take another shot at the FBI for his own problems.) There is almost no way the Army or the Marines—or anybody’s army or marines, except, possibly, ISIL—would have handed an AR-15 to anybody with Cruz’s background. But he was able to own it as long as he locked it up at night in a cabinet to which he had the damn key. And it was sitting there, in the cabinet, to which he had the key, while he was posting threats on social media, bragging about killing animals, and shooting stuff with a pellet gun. His AR-15 was right there, locked in the cabinet, to which Nikolas had a key, until it wasn’t anymore.
Until he opened up and killed 17 people in the school from which he’d been expelled for being dangerously violent, Nikolas Cruz had broken no laws. That’s because this was Florida, and in Florida: a) you don’t need a permit to buy a gun or to register the weapon once you do; b) you don’t need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun, just a handgun, and it’s hard to believe the NRA let that one slip by; c) you can buy as many guns as you want; d) there are no regulations on military-style weapons or the amount of ammunition you can buy for them, and e) if you want to sell guns, you don’t need a license. The state does require a three-day waiting period, which clearly was effective in this case.
And, in case you were feeling relieved that you don’t live in an armed asylum like Florida, don’t get comfortable. Right now, in the Congress, there is pending something called the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. This would allow people from armed asylums like Florida to carry concealed weapons without penalty, and without notifying local authorities. In December, two months after a well-armed lunatic named Stephen Paddock shot 58 people to death in Las Vegas, this dog’s breakfast of a bill passed the House of Representatives, in which you cannot carry a gun, concealed or otherwise. It may not pass the Senate. It’s probably unconstitutional as hell. But it got 231 votes in the House. There are 231 members of Congress who thought this was a good idea, even in the wake of mass murder in Nevada.
Of course, I had to look up Stephen Paddock’s name because I’d forgotten it—just as, I suspect, I will have forgotten Nikolas Cruz’s name the next time someone exercises his Second Amendment freedoms in a school, because that’s just the way things are in this country. The entire argument from the National Rifle Association and the members of its terrorist cult can be boiled down to a contention that massacres like the one in Las Vegas and the one in Florida are simply the price one pays for constitutional liberties. This, of course, implies that the Founders, some of whom owned slaves, were also psychopaths.
Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, took to the floor of the Senate almost immediately to excoriate the Congress for being accessories before and after the fact. As CNN reported, Murphy, of course, represents the state in which the Sandy Hook massacre was supposed to be a game changer on this issue. It was, and the game changed for the worse. On Wednesday, Murphy told the Senate.:
"This epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting, it only happens here not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible for a level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else."
In December, after Steven Paddock shot up the concert in Las Vegas, Murphy said this:
“This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren't public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It's time for Congress to get off its ass and do something.”
A month before that, when Devin Kelley—Remember his name? I didn’t—killed 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Murphy said:
“As my colleagues go to sleep tonight, they need to think about whether the political support of the gun industry is worth the blood that flows endlessly onto the floors of American churches, elementary schools, movie theaters, and city streets. Ask yourself – how can you claim that you respect human life while choosing fealty to weapons-makers over support for measures favored by the vast majority of your constituents.
This was the 18th such unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms in an American school this year. It was the eighth one in which people were killed. It is over five years since Adam Lanza—I remembered his name—slaughtered toddlers in Newtown, which was going to change everything. And it did, too. It demonstrated that, to our government, mass slaughter is just part of the price we pay for being free. It is now the second week of February and nobody is going to do a thing.
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In America |
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Thursday, 15 February 2018 09:38 |
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Cory writes: "In America we send our children off to school to be slaughtered."
Students are evacuated by police out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland after a shooter opened fire on the campus. (photo: Mike Stocker/Sun Sentinel)
In America
By John Cory, Reader Supported News
15 February 18
 n America we send our children off to school to be slaughtered.
In America we send our thoughts and prayers as anesthesia for our sins.
In America we learn geography by ballistic pain: Sandy Hook – Columbine – Virginia Tech – Pulse Nightclub – Isla Vista – Las Vegas – Red Lake – Umpqua – Oikos – Casas Adobe – Marjory Stoneman Douglas – and tomorrow’s grief yet to be plotted on the GPS of death.
In America our right to bear arms often devastates our right to bear children.
In America life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness dies at the end of a gun barrel.
In America our love of guns overpowers our love for one another.
In America evil has become normalized.
In America the word gun rhymes with numb.
In America our hearts are full of pain. Again.
In America today, our Valentine was a bullet.
In America we have the right to remain silent.
And so it goes.
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Stormy Daniels Payment May Be Illegal, Even if It Came From Trump's Lawyer |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=21537"><span class="small">Margaret Hartmann, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Thursday, 15 February 2018 09:29 |
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Hartmann writes: "It may not be immediately apparent how money used to pay off a candidate's mistress that doesn't pass through the campaign could violate campaign finance laws, but a fairly recent political scandal addressed that very question."
Michael Cohen, President Trump's longtime personal lawyer, has said he paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 out of his own pocket to cover up an affair between her and President Trump. (photo: Getty)
Stormy Daniels Payment May Be Illegal, Even if It Came From Trump's Lawyer
By Margaret Hartmann, New York Magazine
15 February 18
 ichael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, was widely mocked on Tuesday night when he released a statement that seemed to suggest he’d paid Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels, the adult film star who once claimed she had an affair with Trump — $130,000 out of his own pocket, weeks before the 2016 presidential election.
“Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford, and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly,” Cohen said. “The payment to Ms. Clifford was lawful, and was not a campaign contribution or a campaign expenditure by anyone.”
In the full statement, Cohen says he’s responding to a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission that “alleges that I somehow violated campaign finance laws.” While he insists that the allegations are “factually unsupported and without legal merit,” nothing in Cohen’s statement disproves them — unless one actually believes that he gave Clifford a massive sum of money for reasons that have nothing to do with his boss.
In complaints to the FEC and Justice Department filed last month, Common Cause, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said there’s reason to believe the payment to Clifford was an “unreported in-kind contribution” to the Trump campaign, as well as an “unreported expenditure by the [campaign] — because the funds were paid for the purpose of influencing the 2016 presidential election.”
It may not be immediately apparent how money used to pay off a candidate’s mistress that doesn’t pass through the campaign could violate campaign finance laws, but a fairly recent political scandal addressed that very question. In 2011 former senator John Edwards was indicted on charges that he violated the law by having wealthy donors cover the expenses of his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, in an attempt to cover up their affair during the 2008 presidential campaign.
As Thomas Frampton recently explained in a post on the Harvard Law Review blog, the Edwards case turned on whether secret payments count as a campaign “contribution” under the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA). He wrote:
FECA’s definition of “contribution” in 52 U.S.C. § 30101(8)(A) includes “any gift, subscription, loan, advance, or deposit of money or anything of value made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office.” Importantly, there is no requirement that a “contribution” be labeled as such or that the money actually pass through a campaign’s coffers: a third-party’s payment of a candidate’s campaign or personal expense qualifies as a “contribution,” except where “the payment would have been made irrespective of the candidacy.”
That last bit was the key to Edwards’s defense. His attorneys argued there was insufficient proof that Edwards’s wealthy pals wanted to help him conceal his affair from voters, rather than from his cancer-stricken wife. They noted Hunter accepted much of the money after Edwards dropped out of the race, and said there was no proof that she was about to share her story with the press. Edwards was ultimately found not guilty on one felony charge, and the jury was deadlocked on five other felony charges.
Finding a campaign-related motive wouldn’t be a problem for prosecutors looking into the Stormy Daniels affair. Rumors about Trump’s affair with Clifford had circulated for years, and she discussed them at length with InTouch in 2011. Documents obtained by the Journal show that on October 17, 2016, Cohen established a shell company and used pseudonyms to transfer the $130,000 to Clifford (though he blew his own cover by listing his real name as an “authorized person” for the company). Clifford was reportedly in talks with both Good Morning America and Slate at the time. “And then, about a week before the election, Daniels stopped responding to calls and text messages,” said Slate’s Jacob Weisberg. If the payment was about keeping the affair from Melania, why did it happen just before the election, rather than in 2011, when Clifford was dishing about spanking and Shark Week–inspired phobias?
If the point of the payment was to keep Clifford’s tawdry tale from hitting the press in the days after the Access Hollywood tape, then it may have violated campaign finance laws regardless of where the money came from. Cohen using his “own personal funds” for the payment could be viewed as his donating $130,000 to the Trump campaign, far more than the maximum allowed donation of $2,700. Some noted that Cohen never denies that Trump was personally involved in paying Clifford or reimbursing him. There’s no limit on candidates’ contributions to their own campaigns, but if the money came from Trump the individual, rather than his campaign or business, he still would have been legally required to disclose it.
But what if Trump knew nothing about the payoff, and it was instead the work of a loyal employee committed to shielding his reputation even before he entered politics? The last line in Cohen’s statement hints that might be the point of his seemingly absurd explanation. “Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean that it can’t cause you harm or damage,” Cohen says. “I will always protect Mr. Trump.”
The larger question is why Cohen felt the need release the bizarre statement in the first place. There may be a stronger case against Trump than there was against Edwards, but experts doubt federal investigators will pursue it. Even Common Cause vice-president for policy and litigation Paul Ryan (no relation to the House Speaker) acknowledges that’s unlikely in this political environment.
“The FEC has been for years mired in dysfunction and now has a Republican majority of commissioners,” he told USA Today, “and the DOJ is within the Executive branch of government headed by the president.”
In this administration, potentially violating campaign finance laws by paying off a porn star isn’t even the biggest scandal of the week.
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I've Reviewed Some Cruel Budgets. I've Never Seen Anything Crueler Than This. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36361"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Wednesday, 14 February 2018 14:29 |
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Reich writes: "I wasn't going to write about Trump's budget, because it's dead on arrival in Congress. But its unbridled cruelty is so alarming that I can't resist saying something."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
ALSO SEE: The White House Believes Poor People
Don't Deserve to Choose What They Eat.
I've Reviewed Some Cruel Budgets. I've Never Seen Anything Crueler Than This.
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
14 February 18
wasn’t going to write about Trump’s budget, because it’s dead on arrival in Congress. But its unbridled cruelty is so alarming that I can't resist saying something.
Bear in mind, this budget increases overall federal spending and it comes on top of a huge cut in taxes for corporations and the wealthy. In other words, its purpose is not at all to reduce the federal budget deficit or federal debt.
Here goes:
1. Trump calls for huge increase in defense spending – 13 percent more next year alone. And as you know, our military budget is already bigger than the next five largest nation's military budgets put together, and is larded with waste as it is.
2. Trump wants to slash safety nets Americans depend on:
(a) He proposes cutting Medicare by $554 billion and Medicaid by around $250 billion over the next decade.
(b) He wants to slashes Medicaid. (The Trump administration has already approval Kentucky and Indiana’s requests to impose work requirements on adult Medicaid recipients – even though there’s not a shred of evidence that access to health care has kept people from working. It’s just the opposite. Lack of access to health care has kept people from working.)
(c) He'd cut disability insurance.
(d) He'd cut housing assistance.
(e) He'd slash food stamps by nearly 30 percent over the decade -- and he's proposing to give food stamp recipients pre-selected boxes of food!
3. And you can forget about helping people get ahead.
(a) Trump aims to cut a large swathe of the Education Department’s budget designed to help needy children — including after-school activities to keep kids off the street and a grant program for college students with “exceptional financial need.”
(b) Yet he’d increase spending by more than $1 billion on private school vouchers.
(c) He’d also slash funding for National Dislocated Worker Grants, which support people who lose jobs because of factory closures or natural disasters, as well as cutting adult employee and training, which helps high-school dropouts and veterans.
Bottom line: I've reviewed some pretty cruel budgets (Reagan's first budget, George W. Bush's first budget, for example). But I've never seen anything crueler than this, less justified by the facts, and seemingly more intended to hurt vulnerable people. Trump has taken social Darwinism to a new level of absurdity.
What do you think?
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adness and despair - those were my first reactions.
