Governor Kristi Noem is away from the office again, this time pandering to the gun nuts in Indianapolis:
To make it look like she’s actually governing, Noem’s office says she will sign an executive order further protecting gun rights during her NRA talk today. Perhaps that stunt will help Noem compete for headline space with the other big Republicans speaking at the NRA leadership forum this afternoon:
Noem is desperately trying to get attention.
Yes, bullying can lead to massacres but when the US ended the draft in 1973 the number of mass shootings began to rise. Compulsory military service or police training might indeed be one way to slow gun violence. Enlistment could look like the Swiss model where soon after high school eighteen year olds would join for two years then re-up or enroll in the college or vocational training of ones choosing. Raise the civilian age of possession, operation and ownership of all firearms to 21, levy 100% excise taxes on the sales of semi-automatic weapons then tag the revenue for Medicaid expansion so parents have the resources to address the devastating effects of Fox News on American youth.
Oh, that was a lineup of NRA speakers? I thought a baby took a wet burp on my phone screen. Wayne LaPierre is an elephant murderer. The rest are not very nice people either. You know what they say, jokes don’t make people laugh.. people make people laugh.
Noam Chomsky explains to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! why the Republican party is the most dangerous organization in world history.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O34JM4Xdf3g
A FB “friend” of mine posted a picture of a young woman in Israel standing at a bodega in a casual dress with an assault weapon strapped over her arm and made a comment about “no school shootings in Israel or Switzerland. I responded with links to the gun laws (and other relevant information) in Israel and Switzerland. In both countries, there is MANDATORY military service for all citizens – IF they can pass the medical and PSYCHOLOGICAL tests required. They are then issued their weapons by the state. Those who fail the tests are required to do some other sort of public service and ARE NOT issued weapons and CANNOT own/possess weapons unless they DO pass those tests AND complete mandatory state training. Switzerland also limits the amount of ammunition any one can hold for any weapon to 50 rounds – TOTAL, and their mandatory service extends from 18-32 years of age. Israel REQUIRES – BY LAW that every active military member carry their issued weapon AT ALL TIMES – off duty included. In both countries gun owners MUST – pass the medical and psychological tests EVERY YEAR and complete the state safety and use training course.
So, I asked my FB friend if he was in favor of making these the requirements in the US – as I AM. His (predictable) response was a rant about liberals wanting to take guns away and a statement that his post was NOT about anything other to “open carry” as a way to reduce school shootings.
I wrote this poem after the TN school shooting and dedicate it to the NRA
Sleeping under tombstones
Refusing to be called back on home
I can’t leave it unsaid
Regardless of being dead
I told you i will live flamboyantly in your head
What vacant a place it turns out for my bed
Permeating your magnetosphere wasn’t hard
The truth is you payed it no regard
The only thing it cost was integrity and law
The things now only possessed by nature in the raw
Honor long abandoned by man
Replaced by a mealy-boned, soft-belly reptilian
Wonder got lost
Progress paid the cost
The energy resource became rotted from neglect
Perfectly blighted and bankrupt of respect
Don’t forget
to remind me not to regret
failing to wake up before that call from fate
By then its too late
Id sure love to hate to live here in your grave
To remind you you lived an NRA slave
Nobody is dead Who lived with regret
Nobody keeps living who wills to forget
Only to sleep for awhile
It takes that immaculate energy store to defile
Such a body electric given the living
The freedom of choice we received from a misgiving.
Perhaps it wasn’t a mistake, but was always in order
Twill be rolled over like dough, turned like an old motor
Something I’ll contemplate
Beneath your headstone as i wait.
Expect to not be surprised
When the dawn comes oh about sunrise
It is then you may finally hear all the cries
The pain surely leaving your corpse with unseeing crossed eyes
Too late
You chose our fate
You sold the ammunition
You earned your place in Hell’s kitchen
I was only in third grade when you let me leave earth
I forgive you for all that its worth
DU
Well Cory, best case scenario. Ibelieve her reasoning is that if everyone in the country is carrying we will all be safe, nothing bad can happen, right? Their training six year olds to shoot nearby me. Why not lower the age of free carry to say 10. No school shooter then. I learned at age five so I’m in with flynn. Just think how much money the industry is making. Soon, when everyone has a gun they will have to make yearly changes to their weapons to make people trade in their old guns to keep up with the joneses. Just imagine the new styles of the AR15. Imaginative thinking for America and sell the last year’s trade ins to the world. Everyone would be sooo polite in the future, if your not you will be shot.
“I don’t know of any other grandma that’s going to be standing there giving a speech to the NRA. I don’t know of any other mom standing there talking about these things,” Noem said. “I’m a different kind of messenger for the NRA, but I am the NRA.”
First she’s a grandma, then a mom, then a different messenger for the IRA, then the IRA incarnate! A serial imposter in the tradition of Frédéric Bourdin, chameleon Kristi, that is.
https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/13/kristi-noem-says-i-am-the-nra-ahead-of-speech-at-nra-national-convention-gun-rights-second-amendment/70111759007/
Token Black guy gets the rear seat on the venue bus. How very magat like. I thought Noem’s lifestyle was lying and gifting which she doesn’t need a gun for.
I know, I know, the NRA mantra is “guns don’t people, people kill people.” And that mantra is in fact a true statement for the most part. If we don’t want “people” to kill people, however, why do we let “people” have guns in the 1st place? Shouldn’t the default position be that no one, no exceptions, can possess a gun until substantial evidence shows that anyone who wanta one or more guns will not use these guns to kill people?
Republican is not just another word for earth hater; it’s another word for Nazi. The American Left poses no violent threat to the United States while the hate-filled white wing of the Republican Party always will.
I was in the right
Yes, absolutely in the right
I certainly was in the right
Yeah, I was definitely in the right, that geezer was cruisin’ for a bruisin’
Yeah!
Why does anyone do anything?
I don’t know, I was really drunk at the time.
Hard to believe MTG could not find the time to attend ans spread her version of guns n’ hate.
The NRA positions are so absurd they drive voters from the polls. Let them celebrate mass shootings of school children, teachers, and police. Their sun is setting.
All Mammal, dear woman. Thank you for sharing your poem. Loved it and you. :)
MTG was spouting about poor unfortunate National Guard airman who posted classified info on the ‘net. You can bet she will blame Biden for the leak.
Yes it was a good poem.
I have always thought “It’s a Constitutional Right” a piss-poor justification for the carnage gun ownership has wrought upon the US. Any other right is shaved down to meet the larger interests of society, but the mighty Second Amendment is untouchable.
There will come a time when even US society will reject this thinking, and these enablers for the merchants of death will not have aged well. The NRA is nothing more than another example of the perversion of governance for profit.
Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Jeffrey Weise, Charles Carl Roberts IV, Seung-Hui Cho, Adam Lanza, One Goh, Christopher Harper-Mercer, Nikolas Cruz, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, and Salvador Ramos also made memories hunting. I would be fine if they, as well as our Governor, had been forced to make memories another way — without guns.
I read Noem’s speech…it is total absurdity. She claims she has given her two year old granddaughter a “rifle and a shotgun”. That school shootings are the product of “deranged music”…I suppose she is exempting Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. She tells a very odd story of her father leaving her in the wilds of the Big Horn Mountains at ten years of age and telling her to “hunt her way back to camp”. It is all, much too much. We need help from a Higher Power to get to the end of her term. Nothing on Earth can save South Dakota.
Mrs. Noem makes George Santos seem credible.
It looks like Herr Trump just promised Mike Pompeo the Veep slot. Sorry Kristi.
Nothing will ever change. Maybe if every dead victim from all these senseless mass shootings was shown on social media and television all across the country, THEN, just maybe then, common sense gun control measures would happen. Think Emmett Till which finally got the Civil Rights Movement started.
This pretty much says it all about how f’d up the system is in this country to try to get Congress to do anything to stop the massacres.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5BSlO3vPJms
Gen Z is the lockdown generation, having grown up with school shooter drills and school shooting after school shooting. Can’t you see how f’d up that is! This doesn’t happen in other countries!
Mrs. Noem is stuck as governor until ‘26 and Mike Rounds wants to trade her for his old job as South Dakota’s chief lawgiver.
NRA SPEAKERS TRYING TO OUT-GUN EACH OTHER WHILE CAMPAIGNING FOR NATIONAL OFFICE…KRISTI BOASTS HER 2-YEAR OLD GRAND DAUGHTER ALREADY OWNS A SHOTGUN AND RIFFLE. PROBABLY A SAWED-OFF SHOTGUN KIDDIE SIZE AND ONE OF THE ‘PATRIOTIC’ DOWN-SIZED AR15 STYLE ASSAULT RIFLES. GO FIGGURE…..
P. Aitch- yeah, Baby, ah naw, Baby! Love you too and if you ever make it back to your vaterland, holler at me.
You too, Mr. A.
I think requiring a gun/hunters safety course and a psych eval are reasonable requirements for gun possession and usage. Like needing to pass a drivers test to drive.
Noem says the media claims NRA is all old white guys. Cameras the pan the audience a few times and that is shown is old whiten guys.
https://youtu.be/5LWveMPNwvA
Noem shoves her cloven hooves in her mouth tightly.
Nowhere in her speech does she mention that her two-year old granddaughter is more likely to die from gunfire than any other cause?
https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/spring-2023-harvard-youth-poll-gun-safety-findings
Gen Z overwhelmingly support stricter gun laws….can ya blame therm? This generation has been traumatized by gun violence and suffer from high rates of mental health diagnoses such as PTSD, anxiety and depression because of it, and other circumstances such as the pandemic.
GOP is so out of tough with reality. Noem is not going to win over Gen Z as Miss NRA. I don’t know if they are banking on Gen Z not voting or have given up on getting their vote or what. Gen Z is the generation that have witnessed the most school massacres by far, have had abortion rights taken away from them in most red states, rampant racism with police officers caught on camera, sky high costs of a college education, cost of living out of control. This generation needs Democrats to deliver. Dems currently have the Gen Z vote easily given to them but Dems will NEED to DELIVER and it won’t be with DC establishment Democrats because we know Corporate Dems are just as bad as Pubs. True Progressives need a strategy or there needs to be a third Party.
McCurtain Co Chokelahoma sheriff and several county commissioners were cught on tape discussing the hiring of hit men to kill local reporters. They were also heard to lament they couldn’t just lynch Blacks like in the olde days. You know this makes the lads and lass magats, don’t you?
https://www.rawstory.com/mccurtain-county-ok/
Kids as young as 6 fondling guns at NRA love fest. https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-show-young-kids-handling-guns-nra-annual-conference-2023-4
TAKEN VERBATIM FROM KRISTI NOEM’S SPEACH TO THE NRA AT THEIR CONVENTION IN INDIANAPOLIS.
“My dad taught us life lessons and common sense during our hunting trips. As soon as we were old enough to ride a horse, he would take us hunting and pack us by horseback 20 miles in the Big Horns to hunt elk.”
“I didn’t always know it then, but those hunting trips gave me the confidence to be a problem solver. For instance, I remember being around 10 years old and miles from camp in the high country when dad turned to me and said, “Hunt your way back to camp” as he disappeared over the ridge.”
“Now, to a ten-year-old girl, this was terrifying. As strange noises and darkness fell, I had to rely on my instincts and horse to find my way back to our tent. Years later, mom shared with me that dad followed me at a distance to make sure I was safe.”
“Now, before you go and get all soft and tender-hearted on me, I want you to know he was also the one making the bear noise which just about scared me to death. But it made me stronger. It made me realize I could conquer challenges. It made me who I am today, the first female Governor of the state of South Dakota.”
Let’s examine this story.
Kristi Noem was born on November 30, 1971 and she is currently 51 years old. (chronologically not emotionally IMO) By her own description, she was “around” 10 years old when her dad allegedly took her elk hunting in the Big Horns of Wyoming. They allegedly packed in 20 miles on horseback. She says, in her embellishing style, that her dad told her to hunt her way back to camp; riding off over the ridge leaving her, and her horse, to hunt and find their way back to the tent. By her description, this event occurred in 1982 before she turned 11 or possibly 1983 before she turned 12. Wyoming elk seasons fall in the months of September and October.
In her own words, she admits to violating Wyoming law!!! The State of Wyoming, like the State of South Dakota at the time, had and still has a statute on the books that establishes a minimum age of 12 years to hunt big game in Wyoming. In addition, the child must have successfully completed a certified Hunter Safety Course that can’t be taken until the child is actually 12 years old; in order to qualify for a license. Additionally, Wyoming law establishes that any child under the age of 14 may not hunt big game unless a qualifying adult accompanies them at all times.
Follow this out; At 10 years old, she was not old enough to hunt elk in Wyoming, she was not old enough to be eligible for a license which both she and her non-resident companions would have had to apply for through the mail, and she wasn’t old enough to have completed the necessary Hunter Safety Course to qualify to buy a license. If she did hunt with a license, she obtained it fraudulently and those that assisted her in obtaining the license committed fraud against the State of Wyoming. Since she was left to hunt by herself as a 10 year old, both she and her dad violated Wyoming law by virtue of the 14 year age requirement to hunt alone. In some jurisdictions, that circumstance is called “contributing to the delinquency of a minor”
In conclusion; Kristi Noem is either a juvenile wildlife law offender or she’s a first rate liar. In either case, her parental instruction was negligent and irresponsible.
Thanks for the post JW, as with many of Noem’s stories this one about a Wyoming hunting trip smells like a fabrication. Kristi fighting to save the farm from the IRS and the Federal Estate Tax is another example of one of her stories that don’t line up with the truth.
But they sure are good stories.