Author: Michael A. Ventrella

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Donald Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Well. Yesterday (March 13, 2018) was certainly interesting.

It started when Rex Tillerson, the unqualified Secretary of State, made a comment about how Russia was doing evil things as usual. Now, you may recall that Tillerson called Trump a “fucking moron” months ago, but this was just too much, and Trump fired him over the factually true Russian statement.

Which makes Trump a fucking moron.

Tillerson’s assistant Steve Goldstein said something else true — that Trump had not spoken to Tillerson and had fired him without notice (and on Twitter, nonetheless). youre-fired

So it wasn’t too long before we learned that Goldstein was likewise fired. Can’t have people telling the truth in the Trump White House now, can we?

“Lots of Presidents have done this,” said Trump supporters. Yes, everyone remembers when Harry Truman famously tweeted “MacArthur no longer has a place in my administration. Sad.”

Then we discover that two more Trump higher-ups resigned, including the spokesman for ICE out in California, who said he “no longer could no longer spread falsehoods” for the Trump administration.

Then to make matters worse, at the end of the night the Democratic candidate in a special election in western Pennsylvania appears to have beaten the Republican. This is in a very red district that voted for Trump by 20% and where Trump went and campaigned in just days earlier.

Let’s hope Trump continues to have many more days like this, shall we?

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The Revolving Door

Note: this cartoon is from almost a year ago

Scaramucci-5

Peter Kuper

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Apologies

This is the longest I have ever gone without updating this blog. In my defense, I have been very busy with my law practice, finishing up details on my latest book, working on my next, and very depressed about politics in general.  Plus the huge storm that hit the east coast left me without power for five days.

I’ll try to get back into it tomorrow.

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Republican “logic”

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Nick Anderson

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Gun laws and gun deaths

While this fact has been known to anyone doing the slightest bit of research, a recent chart done up by one group shows the relationship between stricter gun laws and gun deaths. And lo and behold, once again we learn that gun control works.

What they did is take the state with the least amount of gun deaths per capita (Massachusetts) and assign it a zero on the scale and the state with the most (Arizona) and assign it 100, and then compared the strictness of the gun laws in each state.

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No matter what the gun lovers say, gun laws work. We see this in states that have strong gun laws and in countries that do.

You’d think this would be common sense, right?

(Here’s a link with more detail about how this chart was made.) Please stop messaging me about “my chart.” I didn’t make it.

The real cause

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Steve Sack

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GOP denies real causes of gun violence

What is it about America that causes us to have so many mass shootings? What makes us different? Why don’t other countries have this problem?

“Clearly, it’s a mental health issue,” claim the Republicans, while slashing the budget for mental health and taking away the mental health background check requirements for gun purchases.

“Other countries have mental health issues,” we reply, “yet they don’t have this problem.”

“Look! A squirrel!” they reply while stuffing wads of money into their pockets from the NRA.gun chart

The fact is that while we have 4.4% of the world’s population, we own 42% of the world’s guns. And those guns aren’t evenly spread out among Americans. Only about 23% of all Americans own guns, but 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns.  And I’d be willing to bet that 99% of all the mass shootings come from that 3%.

So we Americans are allowing ourselves to be the deadliest advanced country in the world for the sake of 3% of the population that probably has mental problems we are not addressing. (For the record, the only countries with more gun violence per capita are poorer, less-developed places: Uruguay, Panama, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica, Guatamala, Swaziland, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Honduras.)

But the Republican solution to gun violence here in America?  “Let’s do nothing! Maybe that will work.”

squirrel

 

Be That Guy

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Was it good for you, too?

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Nick Anderson

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Summarizing the Nunes memo

I’m trying to summarize this memo that has the GOP all a-twitter. Let’s see if I got it straight.

Our intelligence agents knew Carter Page was in deep with the Russians, had given speeches in Russia about how great Russia was, and was suspected to be a Russian agent. gettyimages-645342704crop

They knew he was also working with the Trump campaign and was probably involved with deals between the campaign and Russia. They had already been following him and had a legitimate warrant to do so.

Their job is to gather information from whatever sources they can. They got a hold of a document that had information first gathered by Republicans trying to stop Trump and then Democrats trying to stop Trump. They used that information to obtain a second legitimate warrant. And then a third.

I think that’s it.

The GOP claims that the investigators looking into this and suspecting Trump of being a part of this were “biased” and therefore the investigation into this conspiracy should be suspended because it’s all made up (despite the fact that we already have people who have pled guilty).

Nowhere do I see any claim that the information in the document was incorrect or that the warrant wasn’t justified.

As for bias, allow me to say that I work with police officers every day, and when they have a suspect, yes, they tend to be “biased” against them.  That’s kind of their job.

So. Can someone please tell me what all the fuss is about? What am I missing?