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So TFG may have a corner on the secret and classified documents hoarding market, but both Biden (as a VP) and TFG’s Mike Pence have now discovered inadvertantly retained classified documents in their posessions.

But contrary to TFG’s control of them because he thinks having these docs is “cool”, the two former VP’s seem to be caught in an embarrassed surprise.

Cue the National Archives, who quite expectedly this week issued an APB to all former presidents and vice presidents to check their closets and under their beds for any stray nuclear codes they might have packed along with their memorabilia of office.

The Nixon Library has responded that any and all classified documents that they might have had in the past have all been inadvertantly erased by Rose Mary Woods.

I write about gun violence on occasion knowing full well that it’s an exercise in futility.  Why?  Easy; our elected representatives, our law enforcement organizations, and now the courts have been overtaken by weirdos and ideologues who have morphed the powers of local, state, and federal government from “law and order” to an alternate reality believing that overturning over 200 years of legal precedent and history and putting guns into the hands of everyone is somehow sane public policy.  We’re 24 days into the new year and have already had 40 mass shootings in the US, killing 74 and wounding 170.  In that same period of time, over 2,800 people have died from guns and over 2,100 have been wounded.  Gun violence has overtaken car accidents and drug overdoses as the leading cause of death in children in America.

There has been an unrelenting effort by the gun lobby to rewrite the Second Amendment from its original intent into a gun-humper’s dream.  The amendment that provided for a citizen army to protect the newly formed government in the late 1700s has been turned onto its head with junk law and fake “studies” to turn the amendment into a Guns for Everyone ideology.  In unwinding 200 years of case law, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito have relied on bullshit and junk law to justify their politically motivated rulings which included gutting Washington, DC and New York gun safety laws.  They’ve relied on a doctrine of  “originalism” which, translated from Bullshit to English, is an excuse to turn everything on its head forcing 21st century technology into an 18th century framework of law.  The Heller case was the death blow to sanity by declaring that an amendment that provided for a citizen army lead by state and local authorities was actually enumerated a person right for any idiot to carry a firearm anywhere he/she damn well pleased.  Using this insanity, even more insane state politicians use the same junk law codified by the SCOTUS to unwind centuries of gun safety laws all over the country.  As Michael Waldman, Director of the Justice Brennan Center at NYU Law, said after the Court struck down the NY gun safety law,

“The ruling Thursday says that all these judges got it wrong. Instead, the majority said, courts must assess gun rules especially focusing solely on ‘history and tradition.’ Don’t look at public safety; search for analogies to past laws from a very different time.”

Waldman has written extensively about the history of the effort to rewrite the Second Amendment.  The gun lobby did it in plain sight, pumping out bullshit and fake studies while at the same time paying Republicans to kill federal funding into gun violence for almost 40 years.  Add that to decades of gutting the ATF and attacking any authority trying to curb gun violence, and the takeover of America by gun nuts is complete.  SCOTUS has already communicated that the gun safety law debate is over and insanity won.  The Congress won’t protect us, the President can’t effectively act alone so he can’t help; red state governments have completely unraveled what gun safety law we had left, and ideologues sue local and state governments who dare try to protect their citizens.  This war is lost.

Until the Court was bought by the multi-billion dollar Federalist Society, we had a chance.  But that was lost with the triple assist from TFG.  The SCOTUS is now a zombie court that has asserted that it has no authority to protect Americans from massive gun violence, radical gerrymandering and unlimited money that has completely corrupted our elections and destroyed democracy from within.  This war is lost so we have two choices – give up and go arm ourselves and join in the chaos and carnage; OR fight back.  Grass roots is all that’s left and the job is massive.

The only solution to this dystopian alternate reality is to get rid of the Second Amendment.  I know that sounds crazy, but we’re already up to our eyeballs in crazy, so we have nothing to lose.  In 2018, Justice John Paul Stevens proposed just this in an op-ed in the NY Times.  He was right then, and remains right today.  Let’s stop niggling over definitions of assault weapons and semi-auto firearms.  The solution is to start – and win –  a new war that takes back the safety of our citizens away from the gun nuts and zealots.  I know that by no means is this going to be easy, but it’s the only solution left.

Lookie what was on CNN just now:

You get a classified document, you get a classified document, you get a classified document, everybody gets a classified document!You get a classified document, you get a classified document, you get a classified document, everybody gets a classified document!

You get a classified document, you get a classified document, you get a classified document, everybody gets a classified document!

Have they been to Jimmy Crater’s house yet? Maybe we’ll get lucky and find Hunter Biden’s laptop and Hillary Clinton’s server there.

And you know if Bill Clinton has any, he’s already smoked them.

On the heels of my New Year’s resolution we come upon a few stories that have circulated over the past month. My response to these stories used to be anger. I would rant and rave about this and that to my friends. I suppose I may do some of that, but the reality is that I am just more sad than anything. There is a feeling of hopelessness that is just overwhelming.

The first story involves the all too familiar. There was yet another mass shooting this weekend involving an AR-15. So, why the sadness? Obviously any senseless and arbitrary loss of life is sad. If you aren’t sad then you are probably angry. If you are neither of those things then your humanity is slowly slipping away.

Of course, that’s not why I am sad. I’m sad because we will go through the cycle of thoughts and prayers, ringing of garments over easy access to guns, the ensuing arguments over what AR stands for in the AR-15 and whether that even matters in the question of whether anyone should own one. We will argue about whether it’s guns or mental health and of course those that argue mental health will offer absolutely zero ideas of what to do about it. Someone else will say we shouldn’t politicize this tragedy and that the time to address these things is some undeterminable time in the future. We will wait several weeks and then there will be another one almost like it.

The second story that brings sadness is the continued arguments over COVID treatment and vaccines. At this point, it is not an argument I want to participate in. Are these vaccines dangerous? Ineffective? Are the over the counter or prescribed treatments effective? These are all important questions and they are questions I don’t have answers for. I’m not a medical doctor.

It is the fact that these things are being debated in political circles at all that is the depressing thing. We have medical experts. There is a learning curve for them just like there is for us in our chosen profession. As they learn more, treatment improves. It is the same cycle for any other disease we have discovered. Politicizing science is just so damned depressing.

Finally, we get to the George Santos/Matt Gaetz/The Former Guy portion of the proceedings. I suppose we can throw in the Bidens just for fun. At this point, this shouldn’t be difficult. If you committed a crime you should go to jail. That includes the Bidens. As we know, there is no proof of a crime on their part, but that’s usually when these things break down. In these other cases we know full well. In some cases there are four or five different jurisdictions standing around and wondering if someone else will relieve them of their burden. They just hope that some court, some prosecuting attorney, or the grim reaper himself will just fix it.

Add these all up and you can hopefully see why the anger and outrage has shifted to depression. Things just seem to be getting worse. Things just seem to be hopeless. The only solution/advice I have is that paying attention only feeds the hopelessness. Maybe it is time to unplug for awhile.

Soooooo …  I’m fixin’ to tell you a story that the Republican political contributions conduit, WinRed, screwed over an old woman living on a fixed income and when the family complained, the Federal Elections Commission says, “Hey that’s okay, Buddy, because if God didn’t want ’em sheared, he shouldn’t have made them sheep.”

It starts here.