5.29.22: Helplessly Hoping in the Face of Hopelessness

Write about a mass shooting, take a week off, and write about another mass shooting... 

19 Children - Second. Third. Fourth. Graders. 

2 Teachers

17 Others injured... 

Hopelessness immediately comes to mind because we know that America will do nothing on guns to abate the exceptional carnage we've wrought upon ourselves. It's the hopelessness that our leaders will run out the clock while pontificating on the need for more mental health treatment, the absence of God, violent video games, the hardening of schools, and arming more citizens; while other leaders pack healthcare spending and untenable economic proposals into a background check bill so that it will never pass. 

Why would a person want to become a teacher? To learn the use of firearms? Why would that person just become a policeman? 

How about this heinous hypothetical. A surgeon and a medical team are in an operating room then a deranged person comes into the operating room and shoots them with a gun.  If only the surgeon and the medical team had been armed, right? We need to 'harden' operating rooms in all hospitals around the country by posting armed security outside the doors.

We'll do this after we accomplish this in all the schools in the country. Seriously?

It's nauseating to watch conservative politicians and commentators say everything, anything, with the exception of 'regulation' and 'firearm' in the same sentence, except to say no to it. For some, the 2nd Amendment has become a twisted 11th commandment for lost souls - dogma beyond reproach. However, always conveniently never are those two words in the Amendment that we constantly fixate on - well-regulated. That we are definitely not.

In the meantime, how many of these tragedies do Americans have to endure? 

We've put the right to own a firearm over the collective safety of the society. It's who we are, it's what we do, it's what we refuse to change, it's what we have to live with. Hard stop.

On this Memorial Day, we apologize to you because we're thinking about the extremely well-trained, brave men and women to fight for our democracy and we give them the best weapons of war to shorten the fight. The same kind of war of weapons we give our citizens to destroy that democracy. 

Have a good meal and hug your family today.

Panel: Ashley Parker, The Washington Post; Ali Vitali, NBC News; Cornell Belcher, Democratic Strategist; Pat McCrory, fmr. Governor North Carolina (R)

5.15.22: The Loss of Rights and Lives Will Continue Unabated

It's too frustrating and painful to regurgitate the same things we've written for years with regard to mass shootings, guns and right-wing extremism in this country. Chuck Todd said each time one of these mass shootings occurs, we get the same wash, rinse, repeat sort of rhetoric in Washington and nothing happens. We would contend that we're not even getting the empty rhetoric anymore. It's the silence on the right that Republican strategist Al Cardenas referring to that now exists. 

And why? Because the Republican base is rapidly growing in extremism? Not necessarily, but it's loudest voices have been breathing the words of intolerance and grievance steadily for years. Reverend Al Sharpton made an interesting point in as much as the 18 year-old shooter in Buffalo, NY yesterday was an impressionable 15 year-old at the time of Charlottesville, with the president at the time saying there are good people on both sides. It's a bit speculative but certainly logically.

However, there were two comments by Rev. Sharpton and The Washington Post's Matt Bai respectively that were incomplete in their reasoning. Rev. Sharpton said that President Biden should call a summit of minority leaders in our country to confront this kind of extremism and Mr. Bai explained that our political leaders have to stand up and look in the mirror. However, in an aforementioned summit, white politicians primarily from the Republican side of aisle need to be forced to listen to these cultural leaders as well. And for Mr. Bai, how about the press looking in the mirror - he should point that at himself. 

This individual had a manifesto teeming with hate speech, white nationalism, anti-semitism and screeds about white replacement theory. The panel, of journalists, said this was a heinous theory, but it is pushed into the mainstream by the biggest name in their profession, Tucker Carlson and hence by his benefactor Rupert Murdoch who is only concerned with the profit margin.

Now, we're not saying that they can't have their biased opinions, but what they're pushing on air to millions of people is beyond irresponsible. What we are saying now is that legitimizing of a heinous theory like that got 10 people killed yesterday, 9 of whom were African-American.

Governor Kathy Hochal of New York, who is from Buffalo, explained that New York has very strick gun laws, but because laws vary state to state, you can never fully enforce your state's laws. She called for national gun legislation, and therein lies the rub.

If we're being honest with ourselves, and Americans writ large are not, Democrats vote for gun legislation and overreach and Republicans have no interest in gun legislation whatsoever so there is no compromise to arrive at a place where 60 senators will vote in favor. 

As "Meet The Press" is alway wont to do, it's all discussed through the prism of elections and most assuredly 'guns' will not be on the proverbial ballot. However, given how the Supreme Court is trending, now that we all know, womens' reproductive health most certainly will be. 

Even if the Democrats manage to maintain control of the House of Representatives, it won't move the needle enough in the Senate unless the filibuster is amended. Republicans will put in that and the Republican majorities in individual state houses are going anywhere.

We're not sure what kind of wake-up call it will take for this country to change it's tone and become less polarized, but may be a day that none of us want to experience. Until then, the loss of rights and lives will continue unabated.

Panel: Ashley Parker, The Washington Post; Susan Page, USA Today; Matt Bai, The Washington Post, Reverend Al Sharpton

5.8.22: Let's Talk The Court and Codification

 As we have said so many times in this column, if the big luxury cruiseliner that is the United States turns too hard and too fast to the left or too hard and too fast to the right, the boat will tip over and you'll sink us all. 

The fate of Roe v. Wade, if the leaked draft opinion with by Justice Samuel Alito holds course, the landmark decision will be overturned. Will this one Supreme Court decision tip us all over? No, but it has certainly assisted in sharpening the degree in the hard right turn Republicans steer us toward.

There are so many points to be considered in discussing this decision it's difficult to know where even to begin, so we'll try this starting point. Since Politico's Josh Edelstein broke this earthquake, Democrats have focused on the substance and Republicans have focused on the leak of the draft. This is a bit of a big sweep but by and large that is how the dividing line has fallen. Both do tremendous damage but do not carry equal weight. When you take away a right that over have the population has had for the past 50 years, knowing now or later isn't changing that fact. 

There is no doubt that the leak of the draft has done tremendous damage to the integrity of the court and their ability to deliberate forthrightly about Constitutional issues. For as much as people may not look favorably upon the Supreme Court, we have to have the belief in it to maintain the rule of law. However, the court is partisan because of disgracefully partisan manipulation in the form of a cynical power grab on the part of Senator Mitch McConnell, a skilled politician but the worst national leader for Americans in its modern history. So what did we expect? 

This exercise of raw ideological power is going to take us all to a dark place if it continues, and once again the Supreme Court is opening the door to the curtailing of other rights. Justice Alito did make it clear in the draft that abortion is a unique case, as did the Governor of Mississsippi Tate Reeves, and that striking down the right to privacy only should apply in the case of abortion. You're being naive if you believe that some interest group or Republican controlled state houses won't try to push it as far as they can, and you're being stupid if you think a Republican politician is going to own that at this point. 

Going back to the leak for a moment, what's interesting to us is that Republicans have expressed outrage about it, which is justified, but they're coming at it as if the leak came from the left. We don't know who leaked the draft yet so we don't really know that person's motivations for doing so. Mr. Todd brought up the fact that it seemed The Wall Street Journal had some inside knowledge of the deliberations and some justices were on the fence. As conservative law professor Jennifer Mascott said, this leak won't change the court's decision, they 'won't be bullied,' a refrain that we're hearing repeatedly. But maybe the leak served to solidify, or codify, some of the justices on the fence. Point being, we just don't know. 

And as much as we would like to believe that the state of Mississippi is going to improve its prenatal care services, its foster care and adoption system, and its job training system as Governor Reeves said because they are all in need of it, in his state one in three children live in poverty and it has the highest infant mortality rate in the country. None of what he said about what needs fixing in his state will get fixed. 

All this ideology and talking about standing up for 'children' who can't speak for themselves; no one is thinking of the real world consequences and what this will do to womens' health in America. The only person who has the right to speak and stand up for a fetus is the mother, not the freaking governor of Mississippi, who is basically imposing his religious beliefs onto state law. 

And one last thing, codification, as term getting thrown around a ton. Democrats in the House and Senate are talking about trying to 'codify' a woman's right to choose into law. Codify: to refine and standardize. Let's us tell you something about codification, making it happen for a woman's right to choose isn't going to happen in this Congress or any other Congress any time soon and in fact there is more of a chance that it could codify and calcify the other way. 

What has been codified is our inability for consensus; what has been codified is the view that anyone who doesn't share your point of view is the enemy; what has been codified is that Republicans need to 'own the libs' even for the most nonsensical reason; what has been codified is Democrats thinking all conversatives are extreme right wingers.

The fact that 1 million Americans have now died becasue of Covid-19 has been codified into the back of our brains.

Laws and Judicial precedence? Not so much.

Panel: Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Boston Globe; Ali Vatali, NBC News; Josh Edelstein, Politico; ZSara Fagen, Republican Strategist 

5.1.22: It's All About the Issues, Not the Solutions

How much should the U.S. aid Ukraine in its fight for sovereignty against Russia? Fifty billion dollars, the new total sum of the U.S.'s committment to Ukraine won't be enough, but Putin has to lose this war. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is correct when he said that the international world order is at stake in this fight. When President Zelenskyy states that his country is fighting for democracy so that the West doesn't have to has tons of truth packed into it.

And the war is expanding to the western part of Ukraine as Russia tries to build a land bridge from the east all the way to Moldova, having already started the bombing of the historic city of Odesa. So if it takes $100 billion, the United States needs to go there. Also, Senator Menendez was correct in providing nuance to Mr. Todd's question as to whether this is a proxy war, in saying that it isn't necessarily because this effort is to support a country in a fight for its freedom, but on the more macro level, the international world order is at risk.

Spend the money on this righteous cause. And how do we know it is one because Republicans are in support of the United States' aid to Ukraine. The support mostly comes from their collective silence. It's not an issue in which the opposing side (Putin's) is politically tenable. As with immigration, we agree for the most part with the New Jersey Senator in as much as Republicans are looking for the issue and not the solution. 

As for Putin saying he will officially declare war on Ukraine on May 9, the rhetoric is meaningless as the two countries are already at fully scale war against one another. Only that Putin has convinced himself that by declaring war, you can deploy more extreme measures of destruction on the civilian population. 

Speaking of empty rhetoric, there is way too much on both sides of the aisle, however it is true that no matter what happens are the southern border Republicans will make it an issue. Case in point, during the Obama years, illegal immigration was around historic lows and the president deported a lot more people than was publicized. However, as it is now, the border was a 'mess' then. 

Say what you will about the job that Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is doing, but if you actually listen to what he is saying, Title 42 which rejects asylum seekers based on covid health concerns, allows for immigrants to repeatedly come back to try to cross, and he is following the laws as they are set. And Congress refuses to act in reforming immigration because any compromise on the part of the Republicans is a deal breaker with their fringe.

Former Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) accurately described the Republicans' singular drive for power over actually creating solutions for the American people. Exhibit A is minority Kevin McCarthey who blatantly lied about his disgust with the former president after the 2020 election. His colleagues are more upset that McCarthy is a bad liar than that he lied in the first place. 

To say that the American people are cynical is an understatement.

The country's days are numbered as a democracy if Republicans can't alter their course because the voters will put them in control of Congress in November. The solutions are secondary to the issues, the means to a poltical power the primary goal. 

Panel: Helene Cooper, The New York Times; Claire McCaskill, fmr. senator (D-MO); Stephen Hayes, The Dispatch; Garrett Haake, NBC News