Some prominent people showed their respect to the families of the children and teachers killed by the Second Amendment in Uvalde this week by declining to appear at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston yesterday:
Some scheduled speakers and performers backed out of the event, including several Texas lawmakers and “American Pie” singer Don McLean, who said “it would be disrespectful” to go ahead with his act after the country’s latest mass shooting. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said Friday morning that he had decided not to speak at an event breakfast after “prayerful consideration and discussion with NRA officials.”
“While a strong supporter of the Second Amendment and an NRA member, I would not want my appearance today to bring any additional pain or grief to the families and all those suffering in Uvalde,” he wrote in a statement [Juan Lozano and Jill Colvin, “NRA Speakers Unshaken on Gun Rights After School Massacre in Texas,” AP via WDSU, 2022.05.27].
Texas Governor Greg Abbott backed out of appearing in person, instead sending a video. But Governor Kristi Noem, who was away from her desk again for another attention-seeking trip to Texas, stuck to her gun-nuts:
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, another potential presidential contender, said calls to further restrict gun access are “all about control and it is garbage. I’m not buying it for a second and you shouldn’t, either” [Lozano and Colvin, 2022.05.27].
Knowing she really can’t win a debate about protecting the lives of children, she turned back to Karl Mundt’s Red Scare tactics:
“Let me tell you the truth about the enemies of the Second Amendment. They are schooled in the ways of Marx and Lenin,” she said [Eric Bradner and Jeff Zeleny, “Trump, Other Republicans Reject Gun Reforms at NRA Convention That Showcases Nation’s Split,” CNN, 2022.05.28].
Attack the Second Amendment, or even suggest that letting 18 year olds walk into a store and buy war rifles with ammo clips made for swift mass slaughter isn’t the best idea, and Kristi Noem calls you a Commie. That’s the sensitive, intelligent policy discourse we’ve come to expect from Kristi Noem.
The interpretation of the 2d Amendment is a fraud on the American people.
Take a chief justice’s word for it, a republican: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eya_k4P-iEo
Only someone like NOem, versed and supportive of authoritarian governments like Putin’s Russia, would know any thing about Marx and Lenin. NOem is a fascist that sells herself like a common prostitute to the blood thirsty children killers called the NRA.
“All about control”! She’s got that right–although in a way she’s incapable for her to grasp. It’s all about much needed societal gun control rather than unbridled, unrestricted license to shoot up whomever one doesn’t like. And that isn’t garbage.
As far as her criticism of the French Revolution, it couldn’t be clearer: her primary fear is a rising class consciousness among the masses that would oust and her ilk her from office, not to mention the Republican trigger word “French” which denotes iconoclastic French intellectuals, many long dead (viz., Foucault), despised by Republicans.
I think Coach Steve Kerr said it well: “WHEN ARE WE GONNA DO SOMETHING? I’m tired, I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families…. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough. There’s 50 senators…who refuse to vote on HR 8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago…. [N]inety percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want…universal background checks…. We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote despite what we the American people want…because they want to hold onto their own power. It’s pathetic,” he said, walking out of the press conference. ” Good words John (and thanks for the link – very good also), Jerry and DaveN.
I found America’s Party Girl Kristi Noem’s ignorant comparison to the French Revolution was bizarre and laughable. Whoever wrote that speech for America’s Party Girl should be fired. Or was she on meth? https://www.keloland.com/keloland-com-original/noem-criticizes-french-revolution-during-nra-speech/
The Governor has a lot more common with the later French revolution, the Vichy French government that kissed Hitler’s ass when the Nazis marched into Paris. More than being a fascist, America’s Party Girl is treasonous and hateful of any democracy in the United States. She kowtows to the worst elements in America. Her appearance to preen and prance like a stripper in front of the gun slobs was a major embarrassment to our state.
I hate her. She has never read a gd idea written by Marx or Lenin. She does’t read. She tweets. Tweeting is to literacy as bologna is to Wagyu beef. We know where to start handing out pink slips- any SOB who won’t respond to the screams, cries, calls to 911, and gunfire coming from our schools. Anti-Kristi is a devil worshipper and the NRA skanks are all scared little sheeple.
magats are digging in to protect the 2nd amendment they can’t seem to read and comprehend intelligently. For breastworks around their bunker they stack (figuratively) the bodies of innocent kids slaughtered by weapons of mass destruction. There always seems to be a fresh supply of bags, just like there is a fresh supply of caca del toro to feed their delusional followers..
Few policymakers dispute the reasons educated people are fleeing my home state of South Dakota.
The state’s governor is a racist, reactionary cracker. Infrastructure is crumbling. Industrial agriculture is smothering wildlife habitat. Churches are girding for gun violence. Meth has replaced alcohol as the state’s drug of choice. Pierre’s culture of corruption and attacks on kids have ended open government. Native wildlife are being exterminated to make way for disease-ridden domestic livestock and exotic fowl. Jails far outnumber colleges. Bankers continue to enslave landowners and the state’s medical industry triopoly operates without scrutiny.
Guns have sticky nuts? Perfect
e.g. – … stuck to her gun-nuts
But, but, 96 tears, she wears torn jeans. It’s from all the hard work she does on her farm, ranch in her eyes. All mammal, she also loves Tom Jefferson, who’s greatest achievement in his own eyes was establishing the estate tax which she detests. So it goes, she’s a dummy but she’s trying for the big leagues and in Trumpland that’s playing it dumb and she’s not playing.
Sheila Kennedy with a great article about Federalism, today.
https://sheilakennedy.net/2022/05/ah-federalism/
Thanks, Mike. Enjoy Heather: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoMvvKuw2oQ
She’s all over the tyranny of the minority. Her quick survey of the past of the NRA evokes my childhood experience – hunter safety classes, gun safety. The NRA went ludicrous in the 1980s, when was detached from childhood stuff.
Governor Norm don’t try to demean us for backing common-sense gun control measures.. Seems your plan to “arm the grannies” backfired and turned deadly when that coward 18-year old kid in Texas used the two assault rifles that grandma bought him to slaughter 19 innocent 4th graders and two of their adult teachers. Instead of honoring their memory,, you go right next door to a NRA gun-fest while cavorting with your guy-pal the lecherous Corey Lewandowski and the genital-grabber Donald Trump and the Cancun party boy Ted Cruz,
She will do and say anything to get that coveted VP spot – or perhaps she’s still delusional enough to think she can get top billing.
Now Republicans want to arm woke, underpaid leftist teachers? What could go right?
I had predicted it would come out of the mouth of America’s Party Girl Kristi Noem. Instead it came from the piehole of professional NRA liar and crook Wayne LaPierre. From ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE today online:
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But to hear National Rifle Association honcho Wayne LaPierre tell it, the real victim here is the NRA. LaPierre took the stage of the National Rifle Association’s governance meeting Saturday to the strains of AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and delivered an angry address in which he painted the NRA as the target of “weaponized government.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/uvalde-nra-wayne-lapierre-victims-1360374/
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LaPierre served up a heap of pretty sickening, self-serving and completely ridiculous fluff about the NRA as the “underdog” suffering from the liberal cabal. Considering the money and record of ruthlessness to turn gun victims into political epithets and rent out soulless politicians like America’s Party Girl to say the most wicked things to defend these cowards, LaPierre demonstrates a facile capacity for the worst kinds of damaging lies.
By the way, no mention of America’s Party Girl in ROLLING STONE. Lots of other folks, but not Kristi. She truly leaves no wake when she preens and prances.
The Texas school shooter shot out windows from outside to kill students and teachers before entering the door left ajar by the panicked teacher. Then local law enforcement waited out some 77 minutes of terror. So much for “arming teachers” and “the good guy with a gun” being the best defense. Stop the availability of the weapons of war and end the bloodshed.
A good friend, quite progressive, commented that even if there were no more guns ever manufactured in the US that there are alrealy so many guns in public hands that anyone wanting to obtain a gun could still easily obtain one. This observation overlooks another more important reality.
The goal of immediately stopping all of this slaughter is laudable but not particularly realistic. A much more obtainable goal would be to make public policy changes that incrementally reduce the carnage. Every year that these shootings are reduced will save lives.
While it may true that so many guns currently in exist in the US that restricting the manufacture and sale of new guns cannot completely solve our national horror show; over time such restrictions would by definition begin to reduce rather than add to the number of weapons available to potential killers. And although guns might continue to be available on the black market, over time some greater effort and cost would become necessary to acquire a used gun than is currently required to obtain a new weapon from a public gun store.
The solution is not a zero sum game where we either win by immediately stopping all carnage or lose, rather saving our children’s lives is an ongoing goal that will take focused and extended efforts over the long term. By analogy, every chess grandmaster started out as a beginner and lost literally 100’s of games before gradually finding and obtainiing path to mastery.
i haven’t seen other then palliative excerpts of Noem’s NRA post-Uvalde where she asserts guns are the answer and those disagreeing are controlling “Commies”.
But her fascist
“solution” raises the bigger question. Putin. Financial Times columnist Chris Giles writes that “the quickest and cheapest way to reduce dependence on Russia is simply to use less gas. if ever there was a win-win outcome for the energy trouble of our time, this is it. Lowering the temperature of our buildings in winter, from 20C to 18C across Europe would reduce energy use by between 20 and 25 percent.” Giles calls for emergency appeals plus price incentives that would make it more expensive to connect to gas and electricity grids but would offer double discounts to current users for every unit of energy they conserve compared to last year.
Yale author Jim Sleeper favor’s “challenging and reconfiguring the very corporate-capitalist system within which such measures could be taken, by nationalizing or otherwise severely constraining American oil companies that now pursue their shareholders’ profits über alles. At the risk of flirting with “state capitalism” — as the New Deal and the World War II regimen certainly did — we have no choice but to defeat and/or contain what Putin and Xi, his likely overlord, intend for all of us.” Again, https://www.salon.com/2022/05/05/we-must-defeat-the-enemies-of-democracy–but-that-doesnt-just-mean-putin/
The solution to guns lies in the same vein, the arms industry reliance on the second amendment, our adversaries, the GOP and NRA at home must be defeated and/or contained.
Likewise Putin and ultimately Xi, our adversaries abroad!
Accountability. That’s all we, gun and non-gun owners want. Accountability.
At all levels.
Accountability does not end with killing the murderer. (That’s my exception to opposing a court-jury-rigged death penalty with years of appeals, and too often in wrongful convictions – expect more bad cases, now that in the words of the illegitimate Supreme Court “evidence doesn’t matter”.)
Accountability only begins, and does not end with killing the murderer.
Accountability MUST walk back through the cops on scene, the 911 operator (“why are you whispering”, then hang-up — Buffalo), parents or confidants of the murderer, local, state, and federal politicians.
Series of horrendous Supreme Court decisions are part of the accountability, or lack thereof. The court-created dogma of “qualified immunity” is a fascist, Putinesque nod to the court supporting a police state. Cops should be held to the same standard as applies to the citizens the cops protect and serve.
State police training, standards, and certification boards need to hold officers to the highest standards via scheduled periodic reviews and decertification of officers who fail to practice the profession’s standards. I.e., the Uvalde chief and senior officers should never practice law enforcement in ANY of the 18,000 policing jurisdictions in the US. “Decertification” will ensure that NO ONE ever hires them. Too often a sub-standard cop just works in the neighboring jurisdiction.
It’s long past the time to put ACCOUNTABILITY in the hard job of policing, and to stop molly-coddling the police.
https://newrepublic.com/article/166655/police-uvalde-shooting-qualified-immunity
@francis_scarr
Just another day in the life of Maria Butina:
https://mobile.twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1499289678868058112
clears up SD Governor Kristi’s stupid comment that “the truth about the enemies of the Second Amendment. They are schooled in the ways of Marx and Lenin….”
And just like Kristi and Dusty, Butina is an now an ‘elected’ legislator/politician supporting rightwing thugs Trump/Putin!
Putin seeks to perpetuate his autocratic violence in Syria assuring his Mediterranean naval fleet’s access through its sea port at Tartus and also on the Black Sea with Crimea. Now in greaterUkraine, this will allow access through the Strait of Bosporus, which Turkey can regulate. The US standing in the way is Putin’s problem, thus, in 2016 , “anyone but Hillary—“ his internet trolls screamed, and were effective. Thanks to infiltrating and nuetering the Republican party. Kristi and Dusty are/were helpful dupes.
https://news.usni.org/2022/02/28/turkey-closes-bosphorus-dardanelles-straits-to-warships
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/07/europe/russia-z-symbol-ukraine-war-cmd-intl/index.html
Since Moscow’s formal intervention in the Syrian conflict in September 2015, the Russian Federation and the Syrian Arab Republic have concluded a 49-year lease for the use and expansion of the naval base at Tartus, and a separate agreement on stationing the Russian “aviation group” at Humaymim airfield in Syriahttps://www.andrewerickson.com/2022/03/putins-naval-strategy-development-key-docs-translations-analysis-from-russia-maritime-studies-institute/.
https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/03/the-significance-of-the-turkish-straits-to-the-russian-navy/
So Putin suckering young Dusty into still sexy legislator/spy Maria Butina’s infiltration of the GOP via the already corrupt vehicle known as the NRA and our “cherished” second amendment right to stand your ground, w/a military specced assault rifle and high capacity rapid fire oversize magazines of 1000 rounds in the hands of an immature, disgruntled, unregulated 18 year old anywhere in America, or a middle aged wealthy nobody on the 30th floor comped suite in Las Vegas, is not only asinine, it is NOT common sense. Fox News “truth” maybe, but as the GOP continues the information wars w/glib, twisted talking points and no rational policy, it is in a death-spiral, clinging to political power. They fooled a naïve Dusty, but John Thune is the number two figure in the GOP! The Republican voters are fools. Every single one.
Raleigh, NC mass killer is juvenile male wasicu.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/raleigh-active-shooting-suspect-victims-nc-latest-b2202601.html