Month: February 2018

Last week a former student brought an assault rifle to his school in Parkland Florida and murdered seventeen people.

In 2012, a gunman, using an assault rifle, killed twenty children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

In 1999, two students murdered twelve students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado armed with an assault rifle and a sawed off shotgun.

Last year a gunman opened fire at a concert in Las Vegas from a hotel room high above the concert venue. He used an assault rifle that had been converted to fully automatic, by using a “bump stock.”

He killed fifty-eight people and injured eight hundred fifty-one more.

In 2016, a gunman massacred forty-nine people and injured fifty-eight more at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida using an assault rifle and a semi-automatic pistol.

I could go on and on chronicling these episodes and totaling up the dead and injured.

In the wake of these massacres, Congress has taken no action to place any restrictions on these deadly weapons.

Indeed, it was unable to muster the courage to outlaw “bump stocks,” the device that allows a shooter to convert a semi-automatic rifle to fully automatic, as the shooter in Las Vegas did.

In the days following this latest carnage in Parkland, Florida, the best the politicians have been able to offer is their” thoughts and prayers.”

Trump’s weasel, Paul Ryan, thinks the best remedy to prevent a reoccurrence is “mental health treatment.”

The students who survived the attack at Parkland have vowed to confront the lack of action both by the Congress and the Florida State government.

I hope they are successful but I’m not optimistic.

The National Rifle Association, which is silent for the moment, owns both, lock, stock and barrel.

The NRA has spent over twenty-seven million dollars in support of U.S. Senators who opposed background checks for firearm purchasers.

Nine Senators, alone, received over twenty-two million of those funds.

Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, received $ 1,262 189.00.

Roy Blunt, Republican from Missouri, received $ 1, 433,952.00.

Pat Roberts, Republican from Kansas, received $ 1, 584, and 453.00.

Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, received $ 1, 968,714.00.

David Perdue, Republican from Georgia, received $ 1,997,512.00.

Bill Cassidy, Republican from Louisiana, received $ 2,687,074.00.

Joni Earnst, Republican from Iowa, received $ 3, 124,773.00.

Cory Gardner, Republican from Colorado, received $ 3, 939,199.00.

Tom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, $ 4, 418.033.00.

The NRA also spent over fourteen million dollars more to defeat candidates who favor background checks.

Then there is the thirty million dollars it spent to elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

By the end of the week, Trump’s proposed solution wasn’t to re-enact the assault rifle ban but rather to arm teachers.

Never mind the fact that teachers have declared that they don’t want to be armed.

Never mind the fact that trained police officers only hit their targets eighteen percent of the time.

It also didn’t take long for the leader of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, to come out from under his rock and join the conversation.

Wayne travels with his own security is apparently not the mythical “good guy with a gun” that would stop “bad guy with a gun.”

LaPierre accused the media of profiting from the school shootings. In his warped mind, they may have even staged them too.

His solution was, of course, more guns.

Guns for teachers, guns for armed guards, no matter what the situation, more guns is the solution.

My guess, is that if he were anywhere near a school shooting he’d be hiding in the nearest hidey hole too.

Neither Trump nor LaPierre offered any proposal about how armed guards in schools would be funded.

It would be interesting to see how they and their supporters would feel about funding it with a tax levied on assault rifle owners and assault rifle manufacturers.

` After all, why should the rest of us have to bear this cost, when the simple solution is to ban the weapon?

Florida’s Governor, Rick Scott and the State legislature are clearly under the thumb of the NRA.

Scott has signed more pro-gun legislation into law in one term than any other Governor in Florida history.

In Florida, you must be twenty-one to purchase a handgun, for which no permit is necessary, but you can purchase an assault rifle at age eighteen, like the Parkland high school shooter did.

See if you can understand the logic of that legislative scheme.

At this writing, the Florida state legislature has shelved legislation that would allow gun owners to carry their firearms into school buildings.

Don’t be surprised if that passes later this year.

Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas last year, Pew Research reported that 68% of Americans favor a ban on assault rifles and 64% favor a ban of magazines which hold more than ten rounds.

The students that survived the Parkland high school shooting last week have made it very clear where politicians can stick their “thoughts and prayers.”

I’m with them on that one.

Former Georgia Congressman, Jack Kingston, a Trump shill who appears on CNN has sunk to a new low by accusing the surviving students of the massacre of being pawns of George Soros.

The talk about more mental illness programs rings a bit hollow since Trump repealed an Obama era regulation that would have authorized background checks for people receiving mental health benefits seeking to purchase a firearm.

If these politicians are such Second Amendment purists, then why don’t they repeal the laws that prevent people from bringing firearms into the halls of congress and the state legislatures?

The primary reason I am not optimistic about any prospect of an assault ban being enacted is this.

This past June, a gunman opened fire on a group of republican congressmen practicing for a charity softball game in Alexandria, Virginia.

Republican House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise, was seriously injured.

In the wake of that attack the Republican Congress still would not enact any gun measures.

Maybe that suggests that Paul Ryan is right.

It is about mental illness.

It’s about insanity.

In this case, the insanity is the failure to do anything over and over again and expecting a different result.

During my first year of law school, one of the required courses was Constitutional Law.

We spent a lot of the semester learning the protections and guarantees of Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Religion.

We spent no time studying the Second Amendment since, at that time, the right of the government to impose reasonable restriction on firearms had been well settled for over half a century.

Of course, that was long before the rise of Antonin Scalia and the death of common sense on the United States Supreme Court.

One of the more controversial First Amendment cases that arose at that time was one involving the American Nazi Party’s seeking a permit to march through Skokie, Illinois.

When the City of Skokie denied the permit, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the City on behalf of the Nazis and Skokie was ordered to issue the permit and allow the march based on the Nazis right to freedom of Speech.

` The Nazis didn’t pick Skokie as the sight of their march because it was scenic or a media magnet.

They picked Skokie because it had the highest concentration of holocaust survivors as residents anywhere in the United States.

The Nazis intent wasn’t to parade, it was to provoke and traumatize.

We have seen this repeatedly since then.

The Westover Baptist Church whose membership is composed of the Phelps Family insist on demonstrating at the funerals of military veterans killed in combat proclaiming these dead heroes were punished by God for America’s sins.

They also attempted to protest at the funerals of the victims massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

There is nothing “Christian” about inflicting pain on people during their worst moment in life.

As these pests persisted in there cruelty, the Hells Angels motorcycle gang volunteered to act as a security buffer to keep them away from the mourners.

Most recently, we saw this in Charlottesville, Virginia this past summer, when a collection of Nazis, white supremacists and other reprobates, that we euphemistically call “the alt-right,” marched through the streets of the University of Virginia Campus, carrying torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” “Blood and soil” and other racist and Nazi chants.

In the ensuing clash with counter demonstrators, one of the Nazis drove his car into a crowd, killing an innocent young woman.

Unlike Trump, I don’t believe that there were “many good people” among that group or that their motives in marching through Charlottesville carrying torches and chanting those slogans were pure.

We are about to find out much more about that.

This past October a civil conspiracy lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Charlottesville, on behalf of nine people who were hurt in the violence, against the organizers of the demonstration seeking to hold them responsible for the injuries they sustained.

The name of the case is Sines v. Kessler.

The lawsuit contends that the violence that erupted was no accident.

Pre-trial discovery has revealed numerous postings on various social media web sites in which participants in the march proclaimed their readiness to “crack skulls” and bring firearms that ”could shoot clean through a crowd at least four deep.”

Others proclaimed their intent to bring “wrenches, pipes and wooden sticks.”

Among the defendants named in the lawsuit is Richard Spencer, who rose to fame by leading a room full of supporters in the chant “Heil Trump,” at a gathering in Washington, D.C. close to Trump’s inauguration.

Fittingly, Spencer can’t find a lawyer who will represent him in this lawsuit, so he is representing himself.

I suspect he will inject new vitality into Clarence Darrow’s observation that “A man who represents himself has a fool for a client.”

In normal times, one would expect the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department would have investigated and sued the defendants that organized the March and violence.

Regrettably, there is nothing normal about having Jeff Sessions in charge of the Justice Department.

My older brother Jim is fond of saying that “the right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins.”

The wisdom in that observation is self-evident.

As I thought about the Nazi march in Skokie and Phelps family harassing the bereaved at military funerals, it dawned on me that while there might be a constitutional right to free speech, there is no constitutional right to police protection.

So, if you insist on marching through Skokie or harassing people at funerals, you might discover that there are consequences that you haven’t thought about.

At this writing the white supremacists that are being sued in Charlottesville, are whining that the purpose of the lawsuit, is to “silence them and destroy them financially.”

I’ll settle for that.

When John Kelly was appointed White House Chief of Staff this past July, most people in Washington breathed a sigh of relief.

Kelly, who was serving as Secretary of Homeland Security had impressively served this country in the United States Marine Corp. for most of his adult life.

He rose through the ranks to General having served in a variety of positions both at home and abroad and along the way saw combat during the Iraq war.

Kelly knows the sacrifices of war on the most personal level. In 2010, his oldest son, a First –Lieutenant in the Marine Corp was killed in Iraq when he stepped on a land mine.

Kelly became the highest ranking officer to lose a child in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His other son, John Jr. Is a Major in the Marine Corp.

When Kelly arrived at the White House his earliest personnel changes were impressive.

He showed Anthony “the Mooch” Scaramucci the newly appointed Director of Communications and a bully, the door.

He ended the chaotic access that everyone had to Trump by requiring everyone to get his consent before seeing him.

He ultimately cashiered Steve Bannon, Trump’s Chief Strategist and personal Rasputin.

When Trump found moral equivalence between protesters and alt-right white supremacists in Charlottesville, Kelly was seen standing by staring awkwardly at the floor. The impression he left was that he shared the embarrassment of the others surrounding Trump.

So, it came as a surprise to me the way in which he dealt with the dispute that erupted over Trump’s callous treatment of the widow of a soldier killed in Niger.

When Trump disputed the account of his conversation given by Congresswoman, Fredrica Wilson, who was in the car with the widow, the White House, sent Kelly into the press room to vouch for Trump’s version of the telephone call.

Trump’s defense also encompassed a claim that President Obama had not made calls to the families of fallen soldiers and cited Kelly as an example.

Thus, when Kelly was forced to defend Trump, he also had to address the loss of his own son.

As it turned out, Trump’s claim about Obama’s failure to call the families of casualties and also express his sorrow to Kelly about his loss turned out to be a lie.

I fully expected that Kelly would refuse to be used in this manner again.

That turned out to be wrong.

Kelly attacked Congresswoman Wilson as a grandstander, who falsely claimed that she had obtained the funding for the construction of the FBI building in Tampa, Florida at its dedication.

When an audiotape of her remarks revealed that his accusation was untrue, Kelly refused to apologize.

Kelly, it has turned out, seems to hold many of the same alt-right views that Trump’s domestic adviser, Stephen Miller and Miller’s mentor, Steve Bannon hold.

On the subject of the Civil War, he praised Robert E. Lee and attributed the cause of the war to “a failure to compromise” apparently on the issue of slavery.

Recently, when Senators Richard Durbin and Lindsey Graham brought an immigration proposal to the White House that would resolve the DACA issue and protect the “Dreamers,” Kelly, along with Miller scuttled the deal, which Trump had signaled he would accept.

In the aftermath, Kelly has made it clear that DACA would not be extended beyond Trump’s March 5, deadline and has said the fault lies with “Dreamers” who didn’t “get off their ass” and register under it.

Mark my words.

McConnell may hold a vote on the issue and if anything passes, Ryan and his House members will not pass it and if anything does pass, Trump will veto it.

We are going to see deportations.

This past week, it was disclosed that Kelly’s deputy, Robert Porter, was a domestic abuser.

Porter beat and abused both of his ex-wives and the photographic proof of that is undeniable.

Kelly, Huckabee-Sanders and others in the White House came to Porter’s defense and urged him not to resign.

Their defense of Porter was reminiscent of Trump’s defense of Roy Moore, the pedophile that they endorsed and campaigned for in Alabama last fall.

“He denies it,” they proclaimed.

Since Porter had not been able to obtain a security clearance following an FBI investigation, it is inconceivable that Kelly didn’t know about Porter’s history.

Nevertheless, he described Porter as “a man of integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidante and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.”

John Kelly spent most of his life in honorable service to this country. His sacrifices are undeniable.

The tragedy is that his legacy will be his role as another of Trump’s apologists and enablers.

Trump inevitably tarnishes everyone who serves him.

In February, 1950, Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, brandishing what he claimed was a list, gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia in which he declared that there were over two-hundred communists working in the United states State Department.

McCarthy would repeat this canard over the next few years changing the number of subversives to whatever captured his imagination.

He held numerous U.S. Senate hearings while he was chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations during which he summoned targets of his suspicions to be grilled before the public about their suspected disloyalty.

He was a complete and total narcissist who was drawn to the publicity and media attention like a moth to a flame.

In 1953 he began an inquiry into suspected communists in the United States Army and singled out Irving Peress. Peress, a New York dentist, had been drafted into the Army in 1952 and promoted to Major the following year under the Doctor Draft law, which McCarthy had voted for. When questioned about his membership in the left-wing American labor Party, Peress invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination and McCarthy demanded he be court-martialed.

Instead of court-martialing the dentist, his commanding officer, General Ralph Zwicker, granted him an honorable discharge. McCarthy told Zwicker that he was “not fit to wear his uniform.”

The following year, the Army charged that McCarthy had sought to pressure it into giving favorable treatment to one of his former aides.

Thus began the Army-McCarthy hearings in which the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations began public and televised hearings which transfixed the nation. An estimated twenty-million viewers followed the proceedings over the next thirty-six days.

On the thirtieth day the Army’s lawyer, Joseph Welch, from Boston, demanded McCarthy produce the list of 130 “subversives or communists” that McCarthy had claimed were employed in defense plants. In reply McCarthy suggested that Welch investigate a young lawyer in his Boston law firm, Fred Fisher, who was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing bar association.

Incensed, Welch replied, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness….Let us not assassinate this lad, further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”

When Welch finished, the gallery in the hearing room erupted with applause. It was the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s tyranny.

This past week, we saw the departure of the Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe.

McCabe was a twenty-two year veteran of the nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency with an unblemished reputation until he drew the attention of Donald Trump.

Trump, who is as narcissistic as McCarthy, has been casting about for reasons to discredit the Mueller probe into his campaign’s collusion with the Russians during the 2016 Presidential campaign.

McCabe, who was appointed Deputy Director by James Comey, became Acting Director following Trump’s firing of Comey.

In his desperation to find a reason to question the impartiality and integrity of the FBI’s investigation into both the Russian meddling and the Clinton e-mail investigation, Trump seized on the fact that McCabe’s wife had been an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for a state legislative office in Virginia during 2015.

Jill McCabe accepted substantial contributions from the Virginia Democratic Party and Governor Terry McAuliffe’s super PAC called Common Good Virginia. (Full disclosure, Terry McAuliffe is my cousin.)

Trump now contends that because McAuliffe is a close friend and supporter of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, the investigations headed by McCabe are politically tainted and that the leadership of the FBI is corrupt.

A close examination of the facts underlying this claim reveal, that like most Trump claims, it has no merit.

At the outset, it should be noted that by the time McCabe became the Associate Director of the FBI in 2016, his wife’s campaign in 2015 had ended in defeat.

While the news outlets have been characterized the contributions coming from a close friend and supporter of the Clintons they have glossed over the fact that the contributions did not come from either Bill or Hillary Clintons PACs but from a PAC that McAuliffe established to try and elect a majority of Democrats to the Virginia Legislature. Hence, the name Common Good Virginia PAC.

Also under-reported is the fact that McCabe had the facts of his wife’s candidacy and the contributions vetted by the FBI, which saw no impropriety in the situation.

None of this matters to Trump or his supporters in the media on Fox News, Breitbart, Limbaugh and others who have ginned up his base with claims of corruption on the part of McCabe.

The end result of all this is that a good public servant had his career ended when Trump’s newly appointed Director, Christopher Wray asked McCabe to step down to end what he termed a “distraction.”

That Wray bowed to this pressure does not bode well for the independence of the FBI’s future investigation of Russian meddling or other matters that might arise from Trump and his various activities.

Not long ago, when events were not breaking Trump’s way, he lamented the absence of his long departed mentor, Roy Cohn.

Cohn was McCarthy’s chief counsel and right hand man.

He was instrumental in ruining all of the lives that he and McCarthy destroyed during their investigations.

Unlike McCarthy, it is not necessary to ask Trump the question “Have you no decency?”

We know the answer to that question.

It is evident from all that he says and does.