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Showing posts with label PARKLAND. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PARKLAND. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
Remembering Parkland as tragedy strikes again
Monday, February 21, 2022
47,857 Deaths from Gun Violence
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Friday, January 29, 2021
RSN: FOCUS: Bess Levin | Is Marjorie Taylor Greene the Worst Person in Congress? An Investigation
We can’t provide service to a readership of this size without a budget. From this group we get the highest demand and the least assistance. We have to move you. We have done it with readers for nearly 2 decades but, not this group. Very unfortunate all ways round. Marc Ash If you would prefer to send a check: |
28 January 21
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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Is Marjorie Taylor Greene the Worst Person in Congress? An Investigation
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "The United States House of Representatives has always counted its share of horrible people, but the era of Donald Trump obviously upped the 'truly awful with a side of crazier than a sh#thouse mouse' quotient."
There’s stiff competition, but the lawmaker who harassed a school shooting survivor is clearly the one to beat.
Whereas past and present members like New York’s Michael “I’ll throw you off this fucking balcony” Grimm and Wisconsin’s Glenn Grothman, who once put out a press release declaring that “almost no Black people today care about Kwanzaa—just white left-wingers who try to shove this down Black people’s throats in an effort to divide Americans,” used to handily top the charts, today’s competition requires elected officials to wake up a lot earlier in the morning to be crowned the House’s biggest asshole. That competition grew even more fierce on Wednesday, when a video surfaced of newly elected representative Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing a teenage survivor of a school shooting, in which she called him a “coward,” among other insults.
The video, posted by Fred Guttenberg, the father of a slain Parkland student, shows Greene following Parkland survivor David Hogg while he is apparently in D.C. to discuss gun control with lawmakers. In it, Greene suggests that Hogg is using dead children—like the 14 who were killed at his high school—to elicit sympathy. “Why are you using kids as a barrier? Do you not know how to defend your stance?” Greene yells at Hogg, who ignores her. “Look, I’m an American citizen. I’m a gun owner. I have a concealed carry permit. I carry a gun for protection for myself. And you are using your lobby and the money behind it and the kids to try to take away my Second Amendment rights. You don’t have anything to say for yourself? You can’t defend your stance? ... How did you get kids? Why do you use kids? Why kids?” Naturally, she then launches into a monologue about how if there’d been more guns at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, fewer people would have died. “You know, if school zones were protected with security guards with guns, there would be no mass shootings at schools. Do you know that? The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun,” she says. “But yet you’re attacking our Second Amendment. And you have nothing to say. No words.”
When it becomes clear Hogg isn’t going to dignify her questions with responses, Greene turns toward the camera to conspiratorially wonder how Hogg was able to get meetings with lawmakers when she wasn’t, a truly incredible self-own. “Guess what?” she says. “I’m a gun owner. I’m an American citizen. And I have nothing. But this guy with his George Soros funding and his major liberal funding has got everything.” Then she calls Hogg a “coward” because he won’t respond to the crazy lady who thinks school shootings are inside jobs by Democrats so they can take away her guns. “He’s a coward,” she says. “He can’t say one word because he can’t defend his stance. Because there is no defense for taking away guns. There is no defense for gun confiscation. Zero.”
That wasn’t the only video—originally posted on Greene’s own YouTube page—to resurface on Wednesday. In another, Greene suggests that the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was planned by anti-gun activists who specifically targeted the people at the country music festival because “performing a mass shooting into a crowd that is very likely to be conservative, very likely to vote Republican, very likely to be Trump supporters, very likely to be pro-Second Amendment, and very likely to own guns” helps the anti-gun liberals pass anti-gun legislation by making people scared of mass shootings.
The videos followed a Tuesday report by CNN’s KFile that Greene had liked comments supporting the executions of prominent Democrats and federal agents before she was elected. The congresswoman responded with a statement on Twitter claiming that it must have been someone else using her account who seemingly endorsed executing, among others, Nancy Pelosi, despite the fact that she also gave a speech saying Pelosi was “guilty of treason” and treason was “a crime punishable by death.”
Asked if the White House had any comment about Greene on Wednesday, press secretary Jen Psaki refused to dignify the congresswoman’s insane behavior with a response.
And yet!
Greene’s colleagues are loathe to come down on her too hard, apparently reserving such judgement for…well, actually, it’s not clear what she would have to do at this point to be universally condemned by the GOP, per CNN:
Most House Republicans were silent on Wednesday after CNN’s KFile reported that Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress.
Greene has a track record of incendiary rhetoric, including past comments using Islamophobic and anti-Semitic tropes. She also has ties to the baseless and thoroughly debunked QAnon conspiracy theory. The CNN KFile report once again puts Republican leaders in a position of deciding how to respond—and so far most are declining to weigh in.
A rare Republican to speak out was Representative Adam Kinzinger, who tweeted, “She is not a Republican. There are many who claim the title of Republican and have nothing in common with our core values. They are RINOS. She is a RINO.” That might be giving Republicans a little too much credit but hey, it’s something!
Trump supporters think impeachment proves Democrats were always out to get him
Rather than that he committed a (second) impeachable offense. Per The New York Times:
For much of the American public and for the historical record, the second impeachment of former president Donald J. Trump represented a blistering censure from a coequal branch of government whose members’ lives had been imperiled days earlier by a mob of his supporters attacking the Capitol. But many of his defenders saw the second impeachment, a first for an American president, as something else: the culmination of years of unfair treatment by a Washington establishment that was always hostile to Mr. Trump and is now trying to end his political career once and for all.
Now, supporters of Mr. Trump whose blood boiled at the first impeachment are galvanized anew by the second, rising to his defense with the familiar refrains they have soaked up for years from conservative talking heads, from social media or from the president himself. Cries of a witch hunt and commands to “stop the steal.” Calling opponents “radical left Democrats” and the media “fake news.” Repeating the campaign slogan of “Keep America Great” as hundreds of thousands died of the coronavirus and the economy tanked.
“If he had done something bad in his presidency that was absolutely horrible, I could see it,” Trump supporter Ashley Klein told The New York Times. “But he was treated very unfairly for a guy who would have made way more money not being president.”
Meanwhile, at Trump’s D.C. hotel…
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Father of teenager killed in school shooting designs billboard with bracing message: “Vote for Me.”
Father of teenager killed in school shooting designs billboard with bracing message: “Vote for Me.”
A few years ago, Joaquin Oliver asked his father what he wanted to be when he grew up.
It was a joke, of course. Manuel Oliver was already grown, living in Parkland, Fla., watching Joaquin make his way through high school. But he played along, telling his son he wanted to retire, ride his motorcycle, maybe spend time with grandchildren one day.
Then he asked his son the same question, Manuel Oliver recalled Monday.
“I wanna be great,” Joaquin told him. “I wanna be known everywhere. I wanna be like [Nelson] Mandela, or John Lennon.”
Two years ago, Joaquin Oliver was among 17 people killed in a school shooting in Parkland. He would have turned 20 last week, and this fall could have cast his first vote in a presidential election.
His image is now being featured on a new billboard, designed by his father, that urges people to vote in bracing words.
“I was murdered. I can’t vote. Vote for me!” reads the billboard, posted on a parking garage in the Back Bay that is visible from Boylston Street.
The message is delivered in the first person to carry Joaquin’s voice, his father said.
“I know him so well,” Manuel Oliver said of his son. “We not only had a relationship like son and father, but also like best friends. I know exactly what he would be doing at this point and what would be concerning him.”
The picture of Joaquin, who was affectionately known as “Guac,” is printed in high-contrast black and white next to his name and date of death, Feb. 14, 2018. The message “Vote for me!” has a dual meaning, Manuel Oliver said. It urges people to vote on behalf of Joaquin and the thousands of Americans killed by guns every year, and to vote for people like Joaquin to represent his memory in the halls of power.
Manuel Oliver, an artist and designer who still lives in Parkland, turned to activism around gun laws after his son’s death. He and his wife, Patricia Oliver, founded a youth leadership group called Change the Ref — short for referee. They met John Rosenthal, cofounder of Massachusetts-based Stop Handgun Violence, at the “50 Miles More” march from Worcester to Springfield about six months after their son’s death.
This is their second collaboration with Stop Handgun Violence, the organization known for eye-catching billboards advocating for gun safety. The new billboard is also set to be posted this week in New York’s Times Square, Miami, Atlanta, and Las Vegas.
While public attention has been focused on the coronavirus pandemic and protests about police brutality and systemic mistreatment of Black people, laws that regulate firearm sales and access should still be on voters’ minds as they choose their candidates this fall, Rosenthal said.
“It’s so critical that we honor our democracy that we are rapidly losing to special interests and vote,” Rosenthal said. “Americans should ask candidates at every level what they’ll do about gun violence and what specific actions they’ll support, starting with criminal background checks on all gun sales and renewing the ban on military-style weapons.”
Joaquin Oliver also appeared on the group’s last 90-by-20-foot billboard at the same location, also designed by his father. It carried the words, “If I had attended high school in Massachusetts instead of Parkland, Florida, I would likely be alive today.”
“Only a mom or dad could put those words in their son’s mouth,” Rosenthal said.
Rosenthal and Stop Handgun Violence were long known for posting massive billboards by the Massachusetts Turnpike near Fenway Park. The billboards, which advocated for various laws the organization backed or featured a tally of the number of children lost to gun violence, hung from the Lansdowne Street parking garage Rosenthal owned.
Rosenthal sold the garage to the Red Sox’s parent organization in 2013 and removed the turnpike billboard two years later.
The organization has since replaced that billboard with smaller, usually donated calls for action along highways and city streets.
Thursday, February 6, 2020
Bhaskar Sunkara | The DNC Can't Steal the Election From Bernie Sanders Despite the Iowa Chaos
06 February 20
When we get into trouble on donations the small donors are always the first to respond. The see the problem more clearly, they feel the urgency more personally.
Haven’t seen a 3 digit donation in 3 days.
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05 February 20
Bhaskar Sunkara, Guardian UK
Sunkara writes: "Yes, the Iowa caucuses were a disaster, but Sanders supporters need to remember that if they organize and turn out to vote they can indeed win."
READ MORE
Sunkara writes: "Yes, the Iowa caucuses were a disaster, but Sanders supporters need to remember that if they organize and turn out to vote they can indeed win."
READ MORE
Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to the media after boarding a plane at the Des Moines international airport en route from Iowa to New Hampshire. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Trump's Speech Was a Nationalist, Anti-Immigrant, Socialism-Hating Game Show
Sam Brodey, Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 2020 State of the Union didn't bother sneering at impeachment. Trump took a different sort of victory lap-one heavy on spectacle."
READ MORE
Sam Brodey, Spencer Ackerman and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The 2020 State of the Union didn't bother sneering at impeachment. Trump took a different sort of victory lap-one heavy on spectacle."
READ MORE
Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to tear up President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech after it ended. (photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty)
Donald Trump Will Be Acquitted. American Politics Will Be Convicted.
Ezra Klein, Vox
Klein writes: "Trump was never really on trial in the Senate. Not in the sense of a true trial, where the objective is to understand the truth."
Ezra Klein, Vox
Klein writes: "Trump was never really on trial in the Senate. Not in the sense of a true trial, where the objective is to understand the truth."
EXCERPT:
Trump was never really on trial in the Senate. Not in the sense of a true trial, where the objective is to understand the truth. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made that clear from the outset. “Everything I do during this, I’m coordinating with White House counsel,” he said. “There’ll be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”
Rather, it was America’s political system that faced the true trial. And the truth was revealed.
The Constitution’s framers did their job, in their time. They designed a system of government that worked to call the country, with all our flaws and all our potential for greatness, into being. But they did not design a system of government that is working in our time. That is our job.
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Feb. 14, 2018, Parkland shooting. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Parkland Father Removed From State of the Union Speech After Shouting at Trump
David Smiley and Alex Daugherty, The Miami Herald
Excerpt: "The father of a high school freshman killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was removed from the audience at President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night after shouting out during the president's speech."
David Smiley and Alex Daugherty, The Miami Herald
Excerpt: "The father of a high school freshman killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was removed from the audience at President Donald Trump's State of the Union address Tuesday night after shouting out during the president's speech."
Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting, was escorted calmly out of the balcony gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives chamber toward the end of Trump’s speech.
“Tonight was a rough night,” he wrote. “I disrupted the State Of The Union and was detained because I let my emotions get the best of me. I simply want to be able to deal with the reality of gun violence and not have to listen to the lies about the 2A [second amendment] as happened tonight.
As Trump finished a line saying, “So long as I am president, I will always protect your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Republicans began to cheer and Guttenberg began to yell. As the cheers quieted, Guttenberg could be briefly heard in the chamber.
He is urging lawmakers to support “Jaime’s law,” a proposal to require background checks on the purchase of bullets. He has been supportive of Democratic candidates, and recently filmed a lengthy testimonial for former Vice President Joe Biden.
US troops stop and frisk Iraqi civilians. (photo: AFP)
US Taxpayers Each Spent More Than $8,000 on Iraq War, for Total of Trillion
Kenneth R. Rosen, Newsweek
Rosen writes: "The War in Iraq cost nearly $2 trillion, roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt."
READ MORE
Kenneth R. Rosen, Newsweek
Rosen writes: "The War in Iraq cost nearly $2 trillion, roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt."
READ MORE
Juan Carlos Perla embraces his wife, Ruth Aracely Montoya, in the entrance to their home in Tijuana, Mexico, on June 19, 2019. The Perla family of El Salvador has slipped into a daily rhythm in Mexico while they wait for the U.S. to decide whether they will win asylum. A modest home replaced the tent they lived in at a migrant shelter. (photo: Gregory Bull/AP)
Report: At Least 138 Sent From US to El Salvador Were Killed
Ben Fox, Associated Press
Fox writes: "At least 138 people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. in recent years were subsequently killed, Human Rights Watch says in a new report that comes as the Trump administration makes it harder for Central Americans to seek refuge here."
Ben Fox, Associated Press
Fox writes: "At least 138 people deported to El Salvador from the U.S. in recent years were subsequently killed, Human Rights Watch says in a new report that comes as the Trump administration makes it harder for Central Americans to seek refuge here."
EXCERPT:
“This report is a shameful reminder of the Trump Administration’s xenophobic policy of denying meaningful protection to vulnerable families fleeing a certain death in their home countries,” said Sen. Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, in a statement.
Leal Parker and other critics of the administration’s immigration policy say this report — and previous efforts that have documented violence against Salvadorans waiting in Mexican border towns for their claims to be processed — show the risks of the Trump administration policy.
“We are deeply concerned by the Trump administration’s effort to literally eviscerate the right to seek asylum in the United States,” she said.
Human Rights Watch urged the administration to repeal the policy that requires asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico along with the agreements that allow Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Hondurans to be settled in other countries of Central America while seeking refuge. They also want the attorney general to reverse restrictions that made it harder for them to claim U.S. asylum because of threats posed by gangs or gender-based violence.
President Trump and Emanuel Macron plant a tree in front of the White House in 2017. (photo: AP)
Trump's Vow to Help Plant a Trillion Trees Is Worse Than Stupid
Dharna Noor, Earther
Noor writes: "Ever since visiting Davos for the World Economic Forum last month, Trump has been obsessed with trees. He continued going on about them at the State of the Union on Tuesday night."
Dharna Noor, Earther
Noor writes: "Ever since visiting Davos for the World Economic Forum last month, Trump has been obsessed with trees. He continued going on about them at the State of the Union on Tuesday night."
“To protect the environment, days ago, I announced that the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and the private sector to plant new trees in America and all around the world,” he said said at his State of the Union on Tuesday night.
Since Trump first mentioned the initiative, Republican legislators have started drafting a bill to fund it and the founder of Salesforce launched a slick platform to manage the project all as part trying to position themselves as searching for climate solutions. That’s nice and all, but President Trump and Congressional Republicans’ other actions to-date show they don’t give a shit about trees or the climate crisis, really.
The administration has gone hard after conservation rules protecting forests. Last summer, Trump proposed opening the Tongass, America’s largest national forest and one of the world’s most important carbon sinks, to logging, mining, and development. If the administration succeeds in rolling back protections, some 9.5 millions of acres of Alaskan forest land could be lost.
Before that, Trump floated a policy proposal which would open 90 percent of Utah’s national forests—that’s 4 million acres of trees—to deforestation. The administration quietly issued an executive order ahead of last year’s government shutdown to expand the logging on public lands, arguing that increased timber harvesting would help reduce wildfire risk.
All this doesn’t even get into Trump’s mangled understanding of forest management and the impact of climate change. And let’s not even start on how his regulatory rollbacks are making climate change worse, which in turn is weakening forests around the world and increasing the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
Since the One Trillion Trees initiative aims to plant, restore, or conserve a trillion trees, you’d think he’d start with just taking back some of his proposed rollbacks and putting policies in place to reduce carbon emissions. But I’m sure he won’t.
The Trump administration hasn’t been a friend to trees abroad, either. As the Brazilian Amazon burned last year due to widespread deforestation, Trump defended Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro. His administration made it possible for the logging, mining, and industrial agriculture industries to chop down far more trees and burn the forest. So Trump’s record on trees is pretty damn dismal.
But say he’s trying to turn all that around. Maybe Trump has seen the light on environmental policy! The world is losing some 10 billion trees a year to human activities, and everyone likes trees, so it seems this project sounds kind of great.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of even more bad news, but this project is still not the real deal. As Greta Thunberg said at Davos, “planting trees is good, of course, but it’s nowhere near enough of what is needed, and it cannot replace real mitigation, and rewilding nature.”
And as the New York Times pointed out, using trees to absorb all the carbon the U.S. emitted in 2019 alone would require planting 371 million acres of forest, or an area roughly four times the size of California. It would almost certainly require turning over land for agriculture to land for carbon sequestration. For context, the entire Tongass National Forest is just 16.7 million acres.
Even if Trump found a place to plant a bunch of new trees outside the U.S., the results could be awful. One World Bank and United Nations carbon offsetting program was complicit in land grabs in Kenya and Brazil, where governments forced thousands indigenous people from their ancestral homes.
To be clear, trees are dope and important. They help regulate the climate by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, protect soil from erosion during heavy rains, and provide nutrients, shelter and shade to countless species. Plus, they are beautiful and majestic and wonderful. And yes, there are just ways to plant trees and not screw people over.
But reforestation is no replacement for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Trees take decades to grow tall enough to sequester any real amount of carbon, and can get killed by floods, droughts, or disease before they even grow enough to do so. Greenhouse gas emissions won’t just sit around and wait for trees to grow before they wreak havoc on the atmosphere. That’s why we have to make corporations stop emitting them in the first place. And Trump has no plans to do that, as he once again showed during the State of the Union. When he wasn’t talking about this trees program, the president bragged about his U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement—which will facilitate massive natural gas expansion and pollution—and his “bold regulatory reduction campaign”—which has helped the oil and gas industry expand.
“The United States has become the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world, by far,” he said. “With the tremendous progress we have made over the past three years, America is now energy independent, and energy jobs, like so many elements of our country, are at a record high.”
(Side note: that last part is actually very not true).
All those fossil fuels are driving catastrophic climate change (which he didn’t mention in his State of the Union address), perpetuate environmental injustice (which he also didn’t mention), and threatening access to clean air (do I even have to say it) and clean water (you already know). In the face of all that, touting the trillion trees program is a joke.
It’s no surprise that Trump is embracing the trillion trees initiative, because it doesn’t actually require the industries responsible for fueling the climate crisis, like the oil, gas, and logging industries, to change their business models. That’s exactly what makes it a false solution.
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