All Purpose News and Politics Thread Part IV: The Center Cannot Hold

[aja_christopher]

We all know where the real problem lies -- as usual.

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"America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic Is the Result of Republican Minority Rule"

A clear majority of Americans and Democrats support stricter gun control—the GOP has been blocking it for decades, and the results have been murderous.

"No other developed country has anywhere near this level of both gun violence and mass shootings. A 2016 study, “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities,” found that between 2000 and 2014, the United States had 133 mass shootings, while Finland had just two (killing 18 people in total) and Switzerland had one mass shooting (killing 14 in total). In 2019, America has had more mass shootings than days. In The Atlantic, David Frum, like so many other commentators, called it “a uniquely American determination to ignore the obvious,” pointing out that nations like Italy are home to white supremacists and even fascistic leaders, but not mass shootings.

“More guns, more killing. Fewer guns, less killing,” he wrote in conclusion. “Everybody else has figured that out. Americans—and only Americans—refuse to do so.”

That’s not quite right, however. For all the talk of America’s obsession with guns and propensity for violence, only 30 percent of Americans actually own them, according to Pew Research. A solid majority—57 percent of Americans—support stricter gun laws, with 80 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents versus 28 percent of Republicans. Blue states, like California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, and New York, have passed stricter gun-control laws—and even though it’s relatively easy to purchase firearms and bring them across state lines, those states have lower rates of gun violence than those with lax standards, according to the Giffords Law Center. On the federal level, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed two bipartisan gun-control bills earlier this year: H.R. 8 (a bill prohibiting person-to-person firearms transfer unless a background check can be performed) and H.R. 1112 (a bill extending the time firearms dealers have to wait for a response on background checks to 10 days).

That legislation has been held up in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has not brought them to the floor for a vote. It is not merely a problem of obstructionism at the federal level either. Nine of the ten states with the highest gun-death rates—Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia—have both Republican-controlled state legislatures and weak gun laws. So it is not, as Frum asserts, that “Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.” It is largely a Republican determination to do so.

In the wake of the latest mass shootings, Republicans rallied around anything-but-gun-control talking points. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California blamed video games in a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News. "The idea that these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals," McCarthy said. "I've always felt that it's a problem for future generations and others.” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick also pointed at video games, as well as a lack of prayer in schools and saluting the flag, in an appearance on Fox & Friends.

Republican Texas senator John Cornyn—who supported the 1996 Dickey amendment on a spending bill which banned federal funding for the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence—tweeted that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” gesturing toward a “broken background check system, improving access to mental health treatment, by hardening soft targets like our schools, by enhanced training for law enforcement and mental health professionals.” Texas governor Greg Abbott—who once tweeted that he was “embarrassed” that Texas was second to California in gun purchases, urging Texans to “pick up the pace”—also deflected to mental illness: “the need for the state and for society to do a better job of dealing with challenging mental health based issues." As did President Donald Trump, who claimed to reporters that this was “a mental illness problem.”

None of these theories are backed by evidence or even some kind of good-faith reasoning. Every other industrialized country has mental illness, video games, and “soft target” schools, as well as minimal school prayers and flag saluting, without our mass-shooting epidemic. In Japan, where video gaming is widely popular and gun laws are strict, there have been no mass shootings in the past year—never mind hundreds of them in eight months. Researchers have found no link between mass shootings and violent video games. Ditto mental illness. In a study for the National Institutes of Health, professors of psychiatry Paul Applebaum, of Columbia, and Jeffrey Swanson, of Duke, found that only “3 percent—5 percent of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns.” And another psychiatrist at Columbia, Michael Stone, found that about 65 percent of mass murderers exhibited no mental disorder, and a 2016 analysis by the Department of Justice found a similar rate, about 20 percent, of psychotic disorders among mass killers.

“In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times. “That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis—all these semiautomatic weapons, when they became so easily accessible...”

https://www.gq.com/story/americas-ma...epublican-rule

[BeastieRunner]

2.9% drop and overnights are looking worse. Trumps about to pull an HW and blow his only good talking point ... the economy.

[BeastieRunner]

In better news ... Detailed Maps of the Donors Powering the 2020 Democratic Campaigns.

This is a phenomenal set of maps.

In one, they have to remove Bernie Sanders since he is so popular nationally.

[Kirby101]

2.9% drop and overnights are looking worse. Trumps about to pull an HW and blow his only good talking point ... the economy.

Trump is going to wreck the economy (GOP Presidents always do) the question is if it will happen before November of 2020.

[Tami]

In better news ... Detailed Maps of the Donors Powering the 2020 Democratic Campaigns.

This is a phenomenal set of maps.

In one, they have to remove Bernie Sanders since he is so popular nationally.

I saw this earlier, and I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about popularity. Bernie is getting a big boost since he is the only one who still has a donor list from 2016. Yet, many people who make these donations also donate to multiple candidates. Especially this early in the race. If they redo this list at the end of the year, You will start to see a shift as more people make up their minds about the candidates.

[worstblogever]

This is how stochastic terrorism works. A politician just has to name some people as targets and their extremist followers will take it from there.

Hey, Trump already got Cesar Sayoc to try and kill CNN and Democrats, then followed that up by getting a guy to go to El Paso and murder Hispanics.

I don't want this to go on long enough that someone tries to murder a member of the Squad... but if he keeps it up, I do fear for Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib. It's clearly something he'd like to happen.

[BeastieRunner]

I saw this earlier, and I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about popularity. Bernie is getting a big boost since he is the only one who still has a donor list from 2016. Yet, many people who make these donations also donate to multiple candidates. Especially this early in the race. If they redo this list at the end of the year, You will start to see a shift as more people make up their minds about the candidates.

The metrics don't lie. Sweeping them under the rug means you'll just trip over them later.

That being said ...

Hillary had a ratio similar to Bernie in 2007 until the Great Debate and Obama reared up.

[Robotman]

Twitter Thread Link

This part which talks about the members of this group is very scary

“...and two men whose families funded the largest voting machine vendor in the U.S.”

[Jack Dracula]

This part which talks about the members of this group is very scary

“...and two men whose families funded the largest voting machine vendor in the U.S.”

Agreed. I fail to understand why no one in the Democratic leadership seems to be following up or blowing the whistle on any of this information. Surely it can't be unknown to people who've been in the game for multiple decades. Just like any community, word has to get around.

[Jack Dracula]

The DJI is currently down about 850 points.

Could this be the big one?

Trump announced a new round of tariffs against China. The "winning" never stops.

[GindyPosts]

The only time I can say a Democrat whiffed worse than Trump was Joe Biden mistakenly saying the shootings occurred in Houston and Michigan, but then again, I'll take Biden's senile ass over Trump's corrupt ass any day of the week.

[Robotman]

The Council for National Policy (to which Kellyanne, Bannon, the DeVos family, the Mercers, Pence, Ken Blackwell, and two men whose families funded the largest voting machine vendor in the U.S.) has set a deadline of 2020 for restoring “religion and economic freedom and Judeo-Christian values” under the Constitution.

It’s funny (in a sad way) that we see all those right wing lunatics raging about “The Deep State”, a secret liberal cabal trying to undermine democracy. When in fact it’s republicans who have the powerful secretive organization dedicated to undermining democracy and leading the country to ruin.

[aja_christopher]

Trump announced a new round of tariffs against China. The "winning" never stops.

"Chinese companies halt purchases of US agricultural products"

"The latest salvo in the trade war sent global markets plunging Monday. In addition to the halt in American agriculture purchases, China devalued the yuan Monday morning, sparking fear that the United States could retaliate.

The US Chamber of Commerce warned last week that new tariffs "will only inflict greater pain on American businesses, farmers, workers and consumers, and undermine an otherwise strong US economy."

China's halt of US agricultural purchases will hurt America's farmers in dire need of relief. The trade war has forced Washington to come to the rescue of farmers with billions of dollars in aid. Delinquencies on agriculture loans have tripled since mid-2015 to eight-year highs, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank."

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/05/e...ure/index.html

[PwrdOn]

Trump announced a new round of tariffs against China. The "winning" never stops.

Honestly, we don't deserve to win the trade war. It's always been more than a bit ass backwards that Americans are the ones constantly bitching about outsourcing. If it had been Chinese companies who set up shop in the US and started employing Americans at slave wages in hellish factories with suicide netting, all for the purpose of providing cheap junk for Chinese consumers, would we ever take them seriously if they Chinese government claimed that this was somehow evidence of Americans robbing them blind? The list of peoples persecuted by the Chinese government is a long one, but any wealthy white American claiming to be victimized by them is seriously delusional.

[Tami]

It’s funny (in a sad way) that we see all those right wing lunatics raging about “The Deep State”, a secret liberal cabal trying to undermine democracy. When in fact it’s republicans who have the powerful secretive organization dedicated to undermining democracy and leading the country to ruin.

What is the most evil fictional secret organization you can think of?