“Not my job.”
“Nothing we can do.”
“Not our role.”
“Shit happens.”

These four statements are the total and complete strategy of the New Trumplican Party regarding public policy that protects the citizens they represent.  Politicians in the Trumplican party seek office for one reason and one reason only, and that is to grab, and then keep power.  There is no thought given to public policy that helps anyone (except for themselves and their patrons).  The public policy initiatives they pursue are purely cynical, designed to keep their gerrymandered base wrapped around the axle and ready to explode at any minute.  Their ENTIRE strategy is to keep their alternate dimension dark, dangerous, unstable, unhappy, and increasingly fearful.  That’s it, period, the end.

The key feature of this strategy, which I call The Dodge, is to do nothing to prevent massive tragedies, then heap blame on strawmen to deflect responsibility for their own negligence.  The most advantageous feature of this strategy is that nothing bad ever sticks to them.  From statewide power outages to mass shootings in schools, The Dodge allows those in charge of governing to brush those off to “free market” principles or “god given constitutional rights.”  “There’s nothing we can do because constitutional freedoms won’t let us,” is the rote answer to all gun violence.  The “free market” is also a common excuse; here’s one –  “healthcare must be free market.”  This Dodge allows insurance companies to overprice and deny health coverage to millions of Americans.  Another good one is, “We won’t talk about immigration reform until the border is 100% sealed and there are zero border crossings.”  Since “sealing the border” is impossible, they have the excuse to never have to do anything.

Abbott is masterful at The Dodge.  He paid no political price for his incompetence and corruption with both ERCOT and the PUC that caused the massive power outages that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy and cost as many as 700 Texans’ lives.  “Free market” was his excuse as well as bald faced lying by blaming wind turbines for the outage.  He also did it during the pandemic, providing zero support for closed businesses to protect people from the spread, and then using economic deprivation as an excuse to open the economy far too early, even overruling local government officials actually trying to protect people.  After causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, Abbott then blamed the CDC, the WHO, China, Anthony Fauci, Peter Hotez, Lina Hidalgo, and other “liberals” to cynically gain political advantage using illness and deaths that he caused as a weapon.

We’re not surprised when shitbags like Abbott, Patrick, Cruz, Cornyn, McCarthy, and many others use The Dodge to avoid accountability for their own corruption.  However, the most shocking and disgusting abusers of The Dodge are the six SCOTUS judges that now say that the Court has no role to play in reining in massive extreme gerrymandering, protecting voting rights, stopping unlimited buying of elections by billionaires, preventing massive pollution enabled by their rollback of EPA regulations, stopping the rewriting of the Second Amendment to create a right for idiots to carry and use assault weapons in public, and protecting women’s right to equal protection under Roe v. Wade.

These politicians (I’m including SCOTUS justices in that description) use The Dodge to deflect all responsibility for their own incompetence and profound corruption.  And it works.  By continually piling on boogeyman after boogeyman they can blame everyone and everything for problems they create or fail to solve.  Such boogeymen include(d) gays, ACORN, those who “hate the troops”, immigrants, China, gays, “gun grabbers”, “welfare queens”, gangs, gays, drug cartels, old people, “radical Democrats”, gays, “voter fraud”, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, transgender kids, drag performers, gays, and, last but not least, wokeness.  Oh, and gays.

By creating these boogeymen, these politicians accomplish their key goal which is gaining and staying in power by avoiding accountability.  They couldn’t care less if you live or die.  The textbook examples of this callousness is their disregard of human lives taken my massive gun violence and their willingness to sacrifice the old and sick for the economy during the pandemic.  If you doubt any of this conclusion, I invite you to listen to Rep. Burchett (T) Tennessee:

’nuff said.

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.

About an hour east of me, along I-84, lies Rufus, OR (pop 270). Don’t blink, you’ll miss it. Named for an early settler, Rufus Carroll Wallis, it’s a little over 1 square mile in size. The mayor, Dowen Jones, was elected with a whopping 76 votes in 2018. I was shocked this week to read a story about Rufus in my morning WaPo.  The story is bizarre. On Halloween night, an SUV traveling on I-84 abruptly pulled over to the shoulder. A car slowed after seeing the maneuver, and tried to get the license plate to possibly call for help. As they passed, Mr. Mayor decided to make Halloween really scary, stepped out of the passenger side and began shooting at the vehicle which contained 2 adults and 2 children. They were not injured but I guess they did get a good description because he was arrested the next day and charged with attempted murder and assault. The city council president was surprised, and told NBC news he was a good guy. A good guy with a gun, until he wasn’t.

Texas is now distributing DNA kits to schools.  Abbott signed the law to do so at the end of the 2021 legislative session, feigning that they were to be distributed to identify children who were kidnapped and trafficked.  The occurrence child kidnapping is tragic, but rare.  What is more common, especially in Texas, is mass shootings by deranged young men who are legally allowed to purchase assault rifles and unlimited ammunition that can kill dozens of kids in just a few minutes.  The law was passed after the mass shooting at a public school in Santa Fe.  The state says the kits are to be used in the event of an “emergency” and are trying to make it about kidnapping, but since bullets fired from an AR-15 cause massive injuries, including decapitating 6 year old school children, the kits are necessary to identify the bodies of victims of these now commonplace shootings.  In Uvalde, some of the children’s bodies were so mangled that they had to be identified by their shoes.

The answer to mass shootings is unbelievably “complicated”, and only 32 of 33 advanced countries around the world have figured it out.  The only way we stop these shootings is banning these weapons and the ammunition shot from them.  We can only do that with brave leadership.  Because Americans don’t vote like they should, that brave leadership will never materialize and the problem won’t be fixed.  The gun and DNA kit manufacturers are perfectly happy with the status quo.

Texas has been in the iron grip of Republicans since 1995.  The results are obvious – total corruption of state leadership including a talk radio host and bar owner on the verge of winning yet another election for lt. governor, the top law enforcement officer who’s been under felony indictments for over 5 years headed for re-election, and hyper gerrymandered state house and senate districts that are non-competitive.  In the 27 years of GOP leadership in the state we have slid from US leadership in personal rights, education, science, healthcare, and livability to 49th, according to CNBC’s latest livability study.  Not surprisingly, Texas was ranked as 5th for business.

And, if people don’t turn out to vote, it’s going to get worse.  Texas Republicans, like those in over 30 GOP controlled states, have passed dozens of laws to suppress the right to vote and even take away the votes of millions if the party doesn’t like the result.  Using The Big Lie as an excuse, they’ve enacted crushing laws that make it harder to register, harder to vote, both in person and by mail.  In Arizona right now, armed thugs are “guarding” ballot drop boxes intimidating voters and following them home.

Texas won’t be saved from actual fascism if they don’t start voting.  I really don’t give a damn if they vote Dem or Repub, but they need to vote.  Single party control has never worked, and never will.  Texas and the US will never survive without a vigorous democracy that includes lively debate based on facts.  You can’t reason with radicals.  You have to just beat them at the polls.

I learned how to shoot and clean a gun/shotgun, and load shells when I lived in RI. I shot targets, trap (my favorite) and skeet with 22 and 357 handguns, 210, 10 and 20 gauge shotguns, and even got my shoulder smacked by a 30-06 rifle. Only once for that last one. Never shot a real live thing, though. This is all to say I am not an anti any gun screaming liberal who has never touched one in my life. I just choose to not have one. I don’t hunt but am happy to cook up whatever y’all want to kill. I don’t get joy of any kind by hitting a bullseye over a man shaped target, even though sometimes it might make me feel good. And I’m not a fan of video games of any kind.  Now that is out of the way, I need to tell you what yanked my chain yesterday.

We have a Facebook Group for Happenings in our little town in SW WA, a nice rural area population about 2500 including the general urban area. It’s a red county, as are all of them east of the Cascades. But our town is on the western edge, which I told you is somewhat purplish. Someone advertised a concealed weapons class. No big. They happen all the time and are usually good for multiple adjoining states (OR, WA, ID). They hold them at hotel meeting rooms and honestly, that doesn’t bother me a bit. Well, this guy wants to hold his class in the town park. You read it right, a concealed weapons class in the town park. I was disturbed by this but went about my day. Later, I revisited and found that people were wanting to sign up in droves. I commented that I felt the park was an inappropriate venue for such a class. Well, smack me silly, I stood alone. They were not amused when I suggested they ‘get a room’ or hold it at the gun club. I reached out to a longtime resident of a friendly political persuasion for support, and the response was, it’s just a class. This from a Berner, no less, with peace stickers all over their hybrid. I can’t help but think if this is going on in my little neck of the woods, what’s going on everywhere else? Reality check time, WMDBS customers, am I over-reacting?