Sadly, we’ve learned to expect mass shootings on a regular basis in this country. Americans are no longer safe from gunfire in schools, supermarkets, malls, movie theaters, music festivals, churches, mosques, and temples.
Over the past few days, we’ve learned that it can be dangerous to make mistakes like knocking on the wrong door, turning into the wrong driveway, opening the door of a that you mistook for your own, or even accidentally letting the ball you and your child are playing with roll into a neighbor’s yard.
Will this nightmare ever end? It sure doesn’t look that way.
Hundreds of miles apart, the two men stood in courtrooms, accused of shooting at someone who had made a wrong turn.
In a courthouse in Fort Edward, N.Y., Kevin Monahan, 65, was denied bail on Wednesday in a case where prosecutors say he fatally shot Kaylin Gillis, 20, after she and a group of friends mistakenly drove up his driveway while looking for another friend’s house.
In a small courtroom in Liberty, Mo., Andrew D. Lester, 84, carried a cane as he pleaded not guilty on Wednesday in the shooting of Ralph Yarl, 16, who had come to Mr. Lester’s door mistakenly thinking it was the address where his younger siblings were waiting to be picked up.
The two shootings were among recent cases involving gun attacks on individuals who were simply lost, or had seemingly made a minor misstep during an everyday task. On Tuesday, in Elgin, Texas, two teenage cheerleaders were shot just after midnight after apparently trying to get into the wrong car in a supermarket parking lot. The police said Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., 25, was charged with deadly conduct, a felony.
Lester told authorities that he was “scared to death” when he saw Yarl outside his door. (Yarl is black and Lester is white).
Monahan’s lawyer claimed that Monahan saw “several vehicles speeding up his driveway.” The lawyer also said that Monahan “feels terrible that someone lost their life.” Right. He feels so terrible that police only arrested him after a “standoff.” See this story at the New York Post.
Back to the NYT article:
Neighbors said that Mr. Monahan, a self-employed builder and longtime resident whose home sits on about 40 mostly wooded acres, had a reputation as a sometimes surly character who loved dirt bikes and largely kept to himself….
Adam Matthews, who lives next to Mr. Monahan and has known him for decades, said his neighbor could be aggressive and intimidating. “He was a difficult guy,” Mr. Matthews recalled, adding he was “known to have altercations with people.”
Édouard Manet, Tama, the Japanese Dog (circa 1875).
He added that Mr. Monahan was “always concerned with trespassing” and that the wide opening of his driveway resembled a road to some drivers. At one point, he said, Mr. Monahan had draped a chain across the mouth of his driveway, though the chain was no longer there last weekend….
Mr. Lester lives in a modest beige house outfitted with surveillance cameras, though city data shows there is relatively little crime in his quiet neighborhood near the northern edge of Kansas City. Neighbors said that his wife was recently moved to a nursing home, leaving him alone in his house. He spent considerable time at home in a living room chair, watching conservative news programs at high volume, a relative said….
Klint Ludwig, a grandson, said in an interview that he and his grandfather used to be close. The two had become estranged in part, Mr. Ludwig said, because Mr. Lester had embraced right-wing conspiracy theories.
Mr. Lester used to tell his grandson about serving in the military decades ago, and recount stories of working as a mechanic in the airline industry. They celebrated holidays together with extended family who lived in the Kansas City area. Mr. Ludwig, who described himself as left wing, said that Mr. Lester kept a large number of firearms in his home, including rifles and handguns.
But at a family gathering during the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Ludwig said, Mr. Lester began sharing a conspiracy theory involving Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious disease expert.
“I was like, ‘Man, this sounds crazy,’” recalled Mr. Ludwig, 28. “I told him it was ridiculous.”
The two have not had a relationship since, Mr. Ludwig said.
Lester’s former wife of 14 years told the NYT that their marriage was “troubled,” and that he was violent. “I was always scared of him,” she said.
I saw the grandson on CNN this morning, and he said that Lester watches Fox News all day long.
A grandson of the man charged with shooting a Black teen in Kansas City’s Northland last week said he was “appalled” and “disgusted” at his grandfather’s actions and is thankful Ralph Yarl is recovering.
“I was horrified. I thought it was terrible,” Klint Ludwig said of his immediate reaction to hearing about the shooting of the 16-year-old. “It was inexcusable. It was wrong.
Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Evening (1939).
“I stand with Ralph, and really want his family to achieve justice for what happened to them. Their child or grandchild or nephew’s life was fundamentally changed forever, over a mistake and someone being scared and fearful.” [….]
Ludwig, who lives in the Kansas City area, told The Star on Wednesday that he also was disgusted at the way authorities handled the case.
He was critical of the way both police and the Clay County prosecutor conducted the initial investigation, releasing Lester and not charging him after he was first brought in. “The only reason why he is now receiving charges and an investigation is being held was because of community outreach to bring attention to this,” Ludwig said. “The response has been great. It’s been amazing to see this solidarity and coming together as a community.”
On the Fox News connection, Ludwig said he used to be close to his grandfather.
“But in the last five or six years or so, I feel like we’ve lost touch,” he said. “I’ve gotten older and gained my own political views, and he’s become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line. I feel like it’s really further radicalized him in a lot of ways.”
Ludwig said his grandfather had been immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”
“And then the NRA pushing the ‘stand your ground’ stuff and that you have to defend your home,” he said. “When I heard what happened, I was appalled and shocked that it transpired, but I didn’t disbelieve that it was true. The second I heard it, I was like, ‘Yeah, I could see him doing that.’”
Two Texas cheerleaders were shot, and one of them critically injured, early Tuesday after one girl mistakenly got into the wrong car in a grocery store parking lot, she said.
The Elgin, Tex., shooting is the third headline-making incident in less than a week in which someone was shot while approaching a person they apparently did not know.
Edvard Munch, St. Bernard Dog
Elgin police responded to reports of gunshots outside an H-E-B supermarket at 12:15 a.m. Tuesday, authorities said in a news release. They arrested and charged Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr., 25, with deadly conduct, a third-degree felony, in what they called “an altercation … in the parking lot of HEB” in which “multiple shots were fired into a vehicle.”
One of the victims was identified by a coach as Payton Washington, an 18-year-old high school senior and cheerleader for the Round Rock Independent School District, near Austin. Washington “sustained serious injuries” when she was shot in the back and one leg, police said. She was transported to a hospital by helicopter and is in critical condition, they said. A GoFundMe for Washington says she is “stable in the ICU and will have a long road to recovery.”
The other cheerleader struck by gunfire, Heather Roth, suffered a graze wound on one of her legs and was released from the scene of the shooting, authorities said.
At a Tuesday night vigil shared to Instagram Live, Roth said she and three other cheerleaders with Woodlands Elite Cheer Co. had just completed their Monday night practice when they arrived at the H-E-B parking lot, which their carpool used. When Roth got into a car she thought was a friend’s, she realized that a man was in the passenger seat and quickly got out, she said. After Roth got into her friend’s car, she said, she saw Rodriguez approach and rolled down her window to apologize….
“He pulled out a gun, and then he just started shooting at all of us,” Roth said, according to KHOU, an CBS affiliate in Houston. She added, “Payton opens the door, and she starts throwing up blood.”
A manhunt is underway near Charlotte, North Carolina, for a man who reportedly shot and seriously wounded his 6-year-old neighbor and her dad when a basketball rolled into his yard.
Robert Louis Singletary, 24, should be considered armed and dangerous, Gaston County Police said. He’s 6-foot-2 and about 223 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair.
Two-poodles,1891, by Pierre Bonnard
The shooting began after kids had been “playing basketball, and a ball had rolled down that way and had rolled into the yard and they went to go get it,” neighbor Jonathan Robertson told CNN affiliate WBTV.
“We never expected anybody would break a gun out amongst all those kids,” he said. “I mean that was insane.”
The 6-year-old girl said she was shot in the cheek and described to WBTV her understanding of what happened.
“I couldn’t get inside in time so he shot my daddy in the back,” she said.
The incident was another case this week alone in which young people were shot after seemingly ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time, including two teen cheerleaders mistakenly approaching someone else’s vehicle in a Texas grocery store parking lot, a 16-year-old who rang the wrong doorbell in Kansas City and a 20-year-old who turned into the wrong New York driveway.
The shootings reflect the consequences of a country with more civilian guns than people, according to the Small Arms Survey, and the toxic stew of fear, paranoia and distrust that influences so many and leads to violence.
William White, the father of the child is in the hospital with “serious injuries.”
I suppose these types of shootings have happened in the past, but now they are being highlighted because four of them happened in over a brief time period. Mass shootings are seem to be happening more frequently too.
The number of mass shootings in the United States on Saturday was higher than on any other day so far in 2023, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that tracks US gun-related violence.
They spanned across six states, killing at least 10 people. The most deadly was in Alabama, where a shooter targeted a Sweet 16 party, killing four people between the ages of 17 and 23, and injuring an additional 28. Another two people were killed in a shooting at a park in Louisville, Kentucky, where the community was still reeling from a mass shooting at a bank on April 10.
Both CNN and GVA define a “mass shooting” as a shooting that injured or killed four or more people, not including the shooter.
Before this weekend, the most mass shootings on any day this year was New Year’s Day, which saw six mass shootings, according to GVA.
But seven mass shootings in one day is not the highest this country has seen in recent years. Over each Fourth of July weekend between 2020-2022, there was at least one day with mass shootings in the double digits.
In 2020, the 15 mass shootings that occurred across 13 states on July 5 made for the highest number of mass shootings in one day since 2013, according to GVA.
I hate to say this, but it really looks like we’ve lost the battle to stop gun violence. There are so many guns out there. How will we ever reverse this trend? I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’ll see an end to this in my lifetime. And we can blame the NRA, the Supreme Court and yes, Fox News. Please convince me I’m wrong. This next article makes me want to slit my wrists, but I’m afraid Brynn Tannehill may be right, even though I hope and pray she’s wrong.
Bather with a Griffon dog Lise on the bank of the seine, Pierre Auguste Renoir
I wrote this article long before the latest mass shooting that just happened, this time in Louisville, Kentucky, because we all know the pattern, and it never changes. There’s a mass shooting and dead innocents, often children. Angry calls for Republicans to do something, and nothing gets done. The incident fades from the 24-hour news cycle, and we resume the waiting game for the next one. It’s Sisyphus with a boulder that rolls downhill and crushes him over and over for eternity.
That’s something that people who support gun control measures need to understand: The war is lost. There is no conceivable way for things to change for the better within the next 20 to 30 years, short of a national divorce. There is no way to change hearts and minds of Republicans or the courts. There is no way to change who is in office in most states. There is no way to replace who sits on the courts quickly or change conservative disdain for stare decisis.
In reality, mass shootings will only become more and more common over the next few years as Republicans have decided that the only solution to gun violence is adding as many guns as possible to the mix.
At the state level, gerrymandering ensures that red states will never put in place elected representatives who would pass gun control. With the primary system as it is, there is zero chance that Republican primaries in these states would suddenly start producing candidates who would support limiting access to guns, much less taking away assault rifles.
In blue states, they already know that there is no hope that the courts will uphold the laws they pass. The Supreme Court effectively overturned the California law that limited magazine size, after ruling in 2022 that states can do little to prevent anyone from buying a gun in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. The conservative Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, ruled in 2023 that the Second Amendment prevents the government from taking guns from people under restraining orders for committing domestic violence. Nor is the government allowed to prevent them from buying guns.
Some Republicans still want to pretend that they’re engaging with the subject seriously: blaming mental health issues, video games, lack of prayer in schools, and transgender people for mass shootings. But this is simply a distraction: Other countries have all those things, but they don’t have mass shootings. The United States is the only country where people have such ready access to hundreds of millions of firearms, and we are the only country where mass shootings happen with such grim regularity….
Short of a national divorce, there is nothing that can be done at this point. Mass shootings, and the accompanying piles of dead bodies, are as American as Mom and apple pie. Continuing to pretend that our current system can fix this is tantamount to accepting the status quo. This is going to upset a lot of people and make them angry. I could be wrong; I’m not a psychic. However, no one has proposed a plausible way to get meaningful gun reform through. It’s not for lack of trying either: Every effort for the past decade has failed despite public outcry after each horrific mass shooting. If there was a way, someone would have already found it. But the truth hurts when it means changing your whole worldview: that the war is lost, and your country cannot be saved from not only what it has become but what it chooses to be.
Read the rest at the link if you can stand it.
There is a lot more news happening today, so please share links to stories on any topic that interests you. Take care and stay safe everyone.
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The machinations of religious extremists, Mitch McConnell seeking endless power, and white nationalists have brought us to this moment. Many of the fundamental rights established over the last 100-plus years are now being disassembled by a Supreme Court stacked with extremists appointed under very dicey circumstances.
I never thought I’d ever see such a radical overreach to tear down well-established precedents backed up with stories bringing us back to the Wild West with its primitive firearms and the rejection of medical science and the establishment clause based on nothing but wild dreams of a white male religious zealot to drag us way back in time. So a guy about 300 years ago who liked to dox witches gets a say in what happens to American Women’s bodies but they don’t? The court made sure in case-after-case that we knew they didn’t care about established laws. Their religious, economic, and social agendas are dominant not anything else.
Our taxes can now be used for religious indoctrination. Anyone can conceal/carry a weapon just about everywhere they want. Most importantly, women have been designated state property with little control over their bodies. Police no longer are held responsible for reading folks their Miranda rights. Who will they come for next?
I’m gratuitously using John (repeat1968) Buss for this thread because the images of the Spanish Inquisition are just about as horrid as you’d think they would be. But that is exactly how I feel about the Roberts’ Court. They are a group of inquisitors.
I am not state property. My Daughters are not state property. My granddaughters are not state property. No Woman or girl in this country should ever be assigned the role of chattel again.
*At the time of this picture, Barrett was on a beer run after meticulously hemming the new male court attire and Roberts was taking a leak on the Supreme Court steps.#SupremeCourt#SecondAmendmentpic.twitter.com/YX8BHADE4l
— John (repeat1968) Buss (@repeat1968) June 24, 2022
Here are some links to information on these horrible decisions.
Striking down Roe v. Wade
"We will not go back and we will not back down": Planned Parenthood president and CEO responds to Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, adding, "every single person who is running for anything is going to eat this decision for breakfast." https://t.co/EqNTvRMLLdpic.twitter.com/f8McPR4L67
The decision had been anticipated since the Supreme Court took the Dobbs v. Jackson case this year. A leak of the decision last month showed a 6-3 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which was indeed the final outcome.
I’m going to highlight Speaker Pelosi’s words because she’s the one most responsible for getting rid of this abomination.
Speaker Pelosi says Dems will fight ‘ferociously’ to enshrine Roe
Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is “outrageous and heart-wrenching” and vowed to fight against it in Congress and at the ballot box.
The ruling is the result of the GOP’s “dark and extreme goal of ripping away women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions,” she said.
“Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party and their supermajority on the Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers,” Pelosi said.
During her weekly news conference, shortly after the SCOTUS decision, she warned that Republicans in Congress want a nationwide ban. She indicated the only way to stop that was to keep the GOP from gaining a majority in the midterm.
“A woman’s right to choose is on the ballot in November,” Pelosi said.
And, from Hillary:
Hillary Clinton: Opinion “Will live in infamy”
Former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted that the Supreme Court’s decision “will live in infamy” as a step backwards for women’s rights.
“Most Americans believe the decision to have a child is one of the most sacred decisions there is, and that such decisions should remain between patients and their doctors,” she wrote.
Clinton also called on the public to support and donate to Democratic candidates, to protect reproductive rights by winning elections “at every level.”
Thousands of people gathered in New York City and across the country to show their support for abortion rights nearly two weeks after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The New York Times
Abortion will be banned in thirteen states. Each state will have to work out it’s own law to meet this horrid decision. Again, I’m just glad that My OB/GYN Doctor Daughter and her daughters are in Washington State. It’s enshrined in their State Constitution. My Colorado Daughter says she’s safe there too. I can’t imagine having working equipment and living here in Lousyana. My governor signed death sentences for many Louisiana women yesterday.
This is by Caroline Kitchener writing in WAPO: “Roe’s demise marks new phase in state-by-state battle over abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the landmark precedent will prompt immediate changes to the country’s abortion landscape”.
The tremors from Friday’s sweeping Supreme Court decision to strike down Roe v. Wade will ripple across the country almost immediately, with roughly half of all states poised to ban or drastically restrict abortion.
In many states, trigger bans will activate as soon as a designated state official certifies the decision, which Republican lawmakers expect to happen within minutes.
“They just need to acknowledge, ‘Yes, this has occurred,’ ” said Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R), who has championed much of his state’s antiabortion legislation, including its trigger ban. “I’ll be happy to see the butcher mill in Little Rock, Arkansas, shut down for good.”
All the Republican Politicians speaking out on this have their white patriarchal churchman voices out. Like Rapert, quoted above, they use yellow prose and outrageous language.
Although the Supreme Court’s decisions in Roe and Casey established such a right, Alito continued, those decisions should nonetheless be overruled despite the principle of stare decisis – the idea that courts should not overturn their prior precedent unless there is a compelling reason to do so. Noting that some of the Supreme Court’s other landmark decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, rejecting the “separate but equal” doctrine, had overruled precedent, Alito emphasized that Roe was “egregiously wrong and deeply damaging” and – along with Casey – should not be allowed to stand. Instead, Alito concluded, the issue of abortion should “return … to the people’s representatives.”
Roberts agreed with the decision to uphold the Mississippi law, but he would have done so without formally overruling Roe and Casey. Echoing a position that he took at the oral argument (which then, as now, did not seem to attract any other supporters), Roberts would have allowed states to continue to regulate abortion without regard to whether the fetus has become viable – that is, the point at which it can survive outside the womb. In Casey, the court ruled that states may not ban abortions after the point of viability, which is typically considered to be at 22 to 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The right to terminate a pregnancy, Roberts reasoned, should “extend far enough to ensure a reasonable opportunity to choose, but need not extend any further.” But the court could and should, Roberts wrote, “leave for another day whether to reject any right to an abortion at all.”
In a rare joint dissent, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan pushed back against the majority’s characterization of the decision as leaving the issue of abortion to the states. Friday’s ruling, they cautioned, is likely to have a “geographically expansive” effect, as states may pass laws that include restrictions on traveling out of state to obtain abortions. “Most threatening of all,” they added, nothing in the majority’s decision “stops the Federal Government from prohibiting abortions nationwide, once again from the moment of conception and without exceptions for rape and incest.”
“Whatever the scope of the coming laws,” they concluded, “one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”
BOSTON, MA – 5/7/2022 Members of The Boston Red Cloaks carried signs hung from clothing hangers as they marched on the State House and advocated for reproductive freedom on Saturday. The Boston Red Cloaks were joined by over a dozen others as they rallied in support of Roe vs. Wade. Erin Clark/Globe Staff Topic: 08ROEVWADERAALLY
Let me just give you some links analysis at Scotusblog to the other decisions that will make all of us more unsafe.
Thursday’s landmark decision came less than six weeks after a gunman killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, and less than a month after 21 people – 19 children and two teachers – were shot to death at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. In response to those shootings, the Senate this week reached an agreement on bipartisan gun-safety legislation that, if passed, would be the first federal gun-control legislation in nearly 30 years. The 80-page bill would (among other things) require tougher background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21 and provide more funding for mental-health resources.
The state law at the heart of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen required anyone who wants to carry a concealed handgun outside the home to show “proper cause” for the license. New York courts interpreted that phrase to require applicants to show more than a general desire to protect themselves or their property. Instead, applicants must demonstrate a special need for self-defense – for example, a pattern of physical threats. Several other states, including California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey, impose similar restrictions, as do many cities.
The lower courts upheld the New York law against a challenge from two men whose applications for concealed-carry licenses were denied. But on Thursday, the Supreme Court tossed out the law in an ideologically divided 63-page opinion.
The court rejected a two-part test that many lower courts have used to review challenges to gun-control measures. That test looked first at whether a restriction regulates conduct protected by the original scope of the Second Amendment and then, if so, whether the restriction is fine-tuned to advance a significant public interest. Instead, Thomas wrote, if “the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct,” the government has the burden to show that the regulation is consistent with the historical understanding of the Second Amendment.
Applying that new and more stringent standard to the New York proper-cause requirement, Thomas found that the challengers’ desire to carry a handgun in public for self-defense fell squarely within the conduct protected by the Second Amendment. The amendment’s text does not distinguish between gun rights in the home and gun rights in public places, Thomas observed. Indeed, he suggested, the Second Amendment’s reference to the right to “bear” arms most naturally refers to the right to carry a gun outside the home.
After reviewing nearly seven centuries’ worth of historical sources, beginning in the 1200s and going through the early 1900s, Thomas concluded that although U.S. history has at times placed some “well-defined restrictions” on the right to carry firearms in public, there was no tradition of a broad prohibition on carrying commonly used guns in public for self-defense. And with rare exceptions, Thomas added, there was no historical requirement that law-abiding citizens show the kind of special need for self-defense required by the New York law to carry a gun in public. Indeed, Thomas concluded, there is “no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”
Thomas obviously missed the part about most sheriffs of small towns in the Wild West collecting guns at the city borders before anyone was allowed to head to the salon. Is that okay Uncle Thomas?
The Supreme Court limited the ability to enforce Miranda rights in a ruling Thursday that said that suspects who are not warned about their right to remain silent cannot sue a police officer for damages under federal civil rights law even if the evidence was ultimately used against them in their criminal trial.
The court’s ruling will cut back on an individual’s protections against self-incrimination by barring the potential to obtain damages. It also means that the failure to administer the warning will not expose a law enforcement officer to potential damages in a civil lawsuit. It will not impact, however, the exclusion of such evidence at a criminal trial.
The court clarified that while the Miranda warning protects a constitutional right, the warning itself is not a right that would trigger the ability to bring a civil lawsuit.
“Today’s ruling doesn’t get rid of the Miranda right,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “But it does make it far harder to enforce. Under this ruling, the only remedy for a violation of Miranda is to suppress statements obtained from a suspect who’s not properly advised of his right to remain silent. But if the case never goes to trial, or if the government never seeks to use the statement, or if the statement is admitted notwithstanding the Miranda violation, there’s no remedy at all for the government’s misconduct.”
These guys really like to give the state the power to oppress and let gun-toting fascists run free, don’t they?
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that two Republican legislators in North Carolina can join a lawsuit to defend the constitutionality of the state’s voter-identification law. Two lower courts had rejected the legislators’ request, reasoning that the state’s Democratic attorney general and the board of elections were already defending the law, but the justices reversed those rulings. In an 8-1 opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court ruled that the Republican legislators have a right to intervene in the lawsuit.
Thursday’s decision addressed only the legislators’ right to join the lawsuit to defend the voter-ID law; it did not address the underlying issue of whether the law violates federal voting-rights protections.
The law at the center of the case requires voters to provide photo identification to cast a ballot and directs county election boards to provide ID cards at no cost to voters. The state’s legislature passed the law in 2018, and it went into effect over a veto by the state’s governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. The North Carolina NAACP then went to federal court, where it argued that the law violates both federal voting rights laws and the Constitution. When Philip Berger, the leader of the North Carolina Senate, and Timothy Moore, the leader of the state’s House of Representatives, asked to intervene in the lawsuit, the district court rebuffed their request, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld that decision.
In an 18-page opinion, Gorsuch explained that the first issue before the court was whether the Republican legislators had an interest in the outcome of the dispute that would be “practically impaired or impeded without their participation.” As a general rule, Gorsuch posited, barring a state’s authorized representatives from intervening in a federal lawsuit challenging a state law will have such an effect on a state’s interests. And in this case, Gorsuch continued, other provisions of North Carolina law had specifically given its legislative leaders the power to defend the state’s interests in cases like this one.
What’s more, Gorsuch added, the 4th Circuit was wrong to presume that the state’s attorney general, Democrat Josh Stein, had adequately represented the state’s interests. That inquiry, Gorsuch wrote, is backward, because the Supreme Court’s cases have made clear that would-be intervenors generally have to meet only a relatively low bar. But such a presumption, Gorsuch continued, “is inappropriate when a duly authorized state agent seeks to intervene to defend a state law.” “Normally,” Gorsuch said, “a State’s chosen representatives should be greeted in federal court with respect, not adverse presumptions.”
Gorsuch acknowledged the NAACP’s concern that allowing legislative leaders to intervene to defend state laws could in some cases make litigation more complicated and potentially unwieldy. “But that case is not this case,” Gorsuch stressed. The legislative leaders “bring a distinct state interest” to the case – and indeed, “federal courts routinely handle cases involving multiple officials sometimes represented by different attorneys taking different positions.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone dissenter.
This is bound to work its way back to them.
This has been the hardest post I’ve ever had to right except for the ones related to Trump taking over the presidency. It’s obvious that elections have consequences. This includes the state and local levels. These next two will show us if we’ve lost the Republic, our democracy, and hope for our future. Just do what you can to get out the vote.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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I’m going to make this entire weekend TV-free. It’s easy for me because all forms of sportsball bore me and I certainly don’t need to see the endless talking heads as it’s been a depressing enough week already. Most movies and tv shows bore me too so my plan is to read and do creative stuff. I’ve got pies to bake, pictures to paint, and music to make!
There were a lot of depressing and insulting things argued during the Mississippi Forced Birth Enslavement and child-trafficking law loved completely by the out-of-touch right-wing Christianists on the court. They must have missed being exposed to the idea that women have moral agency during their important lessons in life sessions. BB covered a lot of it yesterday.
A lot enraged me but none more than the white savior complex of Amy “great white savior” Coney Barret. She seems to feel since she adopted two black children and saved them from whatever hell she imagines with her white nationalist vision and missionary position she can ride to the rescue of all zygotes and embryos everywhere in the country. She feels she knows what’s right and that adoptions are just the answer to everything surrounding a woman’s pregnancy. Adoption justifies the state enslavement of pregnant women resulting in state trafficking of commodity babies. It’s her perfect concoction of everything is better when the rest of us are just the property of white men.
I’m sure as many of you have experience with friends that were adopted and also couples that adopted for a variety of reasons. Even with all the best intentions and best parenting, I’ve never met an adopted person that hasn’t presented some combination of similar emotional and psychological issues. They always feel lacking in a way that I never experienced even though they can be a tremendous variation on that theme. My first real experience came with a young black woman who was adopted by a kind elderly white couple and never quite felt she fit into any community that she met. I’ve always hoped that since multi-racial families are more prevalent that has become less of an issue. I also had a friend who adopted a boy only to find out a procedure could take care of her fertility problems. She then had four kids right after him. His biggest problem was one of his grandfathers continually reminding him that he wasn’t really theirs. Then, another friend had been adopted by a white couple because they wanted her baby. It took years for her to be able to tell her son that he wasn’t her brother. They really couldn’t be bothered with her after the boy was born.
Stuff like this leaves scars. And these are examples of what most people would call successful adoptions. None of the parents in these scenarios are the monsters that many adopted or foster kids get a place with. I won’t even share the trauma I’ve seen an adopted nephew go through even though his parents try everything. Every time a girl breaks up with him he goes through a loss like I’ve never seen in a person. At the moment, I live with someone who was adopted and it’s a variation on this all over. She’s got a form of detachment disorder and just is constantly in therapy over those issues and other personality disorders. She spent time in an orphanage. She loves her parents. They’re annoying in the same way most parents are but again, there are just issues that come along with all that and some people handle it better than others or have been further complicated before they get to their adopted family. It’s a forced birth fairy tale that adoption all rainbows and unicorns for everyone!
Gustav Klimt – Hope, II, 1907
These kids didn’t end up in the foster system although a few came from orphanages. I want to share these three articles with you written today. BB shared a few yesterdays. Don’t get me wrong. Adoption isn’t like they used to do which was to dump a girl in an unwed mother’s home, take the child from her, then put the child wherever. But, it still has that feeling that the state shouldn’t be forcing child trafficking and making women nothing but vessels. This is the worst kind of state interference in a woman’s moral agency. It’s autocratic and it’s purely based on one’s interpretation of a few religions. Babies are not commodities. Fetuses cannot live on their own and women do not just play passive host vessels. My last much wanted pregnancy nearly killed both of us and me several times with cancer I developed during it. Every woman has a different story and every child has a different story. The state just can’t write us all off under one big power grab like we’re all property. It’s a woman’s decision to make. PERIOD.
Twice in oral arguments this week for the abortion case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked pro-choice advocates: Would banning abortion be so bad if women could just drop their newborns at the fire station for someone else to adopt? She conceded that forced pregnancy and birth are “an infringement on bodily autonomy,” but suggested, misleadingly, that the real choice is between having a later abortion and “the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.”If advocates for abortion rights were so worried that “the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy” would harm women, asked Barrett, who adopted two children from Haiti, “Why don’t the safe-haven laws take care of that problem?”
The attorney for the clinics, Julie Rikelman, reminded Barrett that it’s 75 times more dangerous to give birth in Mississippi than to have a pre-viability abortion, disproportionately threatening the lives of women of color in particular. U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said citing laws where parents can relinquish their newborns, no questions asked, “overlooks the consequences of forcing upon her the choice of having to decide whether to give a child up for adoption. That itself is its own monumental decision for her.” People who have lived and studied the realities of adoption also had a lot to say about Barrett’s blithe solution — one that drew on a well-established conservative political strategy to put adoption forward as the kinder face of the anti-abortion movement.
The day after oral arguments, I had a conversation with Angela Tucker, a transracial adoptee, host of The Adoptee Next Door, and media consultant; Kate Livingston, Ph.D., a birth parent and educator of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; Kathryn Joyce, journalist and author of The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption; and sociologist Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., who studies abortion, adoption, and reproductive decision-making in the United States.
As an adoptee myself, I was floored by Justice Barrett’s assumption that adoption is an accessible and desirable alternative for women who find themselves unexpectedly pregnant. She may not realize it, but what she is suggesting is that women don’t need access to abortion because they can simply go do a thing that is infinitely more difficult, expensive, dangerous and potentially traumatic than terminating a pregnancy during its early stages.
As an adoptive mother herself, Justice Barrett should have some inkling of the complexities of adoption and the toll it can inflict on children, as well as birth mothers. But she speaks as if adoption is some kind of idyllic fairy tale. My own adoption actually was what many would consider idyllic. I was raised by two adoptive parents, Alice and Terry, from the time I was an infant, and grew up in a home where I knew every day that I was loved. A few years ago, I found my biological mother, Maria, and three siblings I didn’t know I had via a DNA test and Facebook.
The first time I spoke to Maria on the phone — she lives in Alabama, not too far from my parents, and I live in Brooklyn — she apologized repeatedly for giving me up and told me she loved me and that I would always be family. “You are blood,” she would say later. I told her, and continue to tell her, every time she brings it up, that the apology is unnecessary. I had a wonderful childhood and I believe she had made the right decision. But she remains heartbroken about the years we missed together.
Both Maria and my mom, Alice, oppose abortion on religious grounds. My mom is white and Southern Baptist; Maria is Hispanic and Pentecostal. Both like to point to me to justify their beliefs, saying that had Maria gotten an abortion, I would not exist. It’s a familiar argument: The anti-abortion movement likes to invoke Nobel Prize winners who might never have materialized, or potential adoptees who might have cured cancer, if they hadn’t been aborted at eight weeks.
Here is my third offering on this topic.
To follow her own words in a 1998 law review article, Barrett should have recused herself from deciding this case (and all other abortion cases) if she has any integrity at all. https://t.co/8a9M0Dhcxo
You could make the argument that from Alito on … they all should step down. They were hired by the Republicans to tank Roe and whatever follows that insults their personal religious fetishes. We all have the right to practice our religions but not to force them on others via the state. It’s hard to believe they’re on the Supreme Court and they have such open disdain for the First Amendment of the Constitution.
When should a Supreme Court justice’s deeply held religious beliefs require recusal — that is, that the justice not participate in a particular case? A difficult question, to be sure, but one that Justice Amy Coney Barrett has already answered for herself. And her answer requires her recusal in abortion cases.
The Supreme Court hears arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Wednesday, which challenges the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Under current precedent, the law is unconstitutional — as both the district court and the court of appeals held. Both Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, and Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania v. Casey, decided in 1992, hold that a state cannot ban abortions prior to viability, approximately the 24th week of pregnancy. Mississippi has asked the Supreme Court to overrule those precedents.
To follow her own words in a 1998 law review article, Barrett should have recused herself from deciding this case (and all other abortion cases) if she has any integrity at all.
In “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases,” published in the Marquette Law Review, Barrett (then a law clerk to a federal court of appeals judge) and her co-author address the dilemma that faces devout Catholic judges in capital cases. She writes that such judges are “obliged by oath, professional commitment, and the demands of citizenship to enforce the death penalty,” but they are also “obliged to adhere to their church’s teaching on moral matters.” They are therefore “morally precluded from enforcing the death penalty.”
What’s a Catholic judge to do, then? According to Barrett’s article, the judge must recuse herself. She can neither enforce the death penalty and violate her religious conscience, nor fail to enforce it and violate her oath of office.
And even in a case in which a judge has discretion whether or not to sentence a convicted criminal to death, he cannot resolve to keep an open mind and then claim to have done nothing wrong if he decides not to impose the death penalty. Because, Barrett writes, “A judge who suspends his moral judgment during sentencing sets his conscience aside” and “cuts himself loose from his moral moorings.” That unloosing is itself a sin, she concludes — analogous to “looking lustfully at a woman” and thus committing adultery “in his thoughts.”
Barrett’s bottom line is that an “observant Catholic judge” may not “formally cooperate in bringing about the defendant’s execution.” And for that reason, “if one cannot in conscience affirm a death sentence the proper response would be to recuse oneself.” To do otherwise is to “betray a public trust” by manipulating the law “in order to save lives.”
Here are a few other links to how Christianists are forcing everyone to follow their distinct takes on Christianity. They sound more like the Taliban every day. And take it from me, as a former Methodist who was frequently called not a real Christian, they will come for all of you.
A North Dakota school district superintendent sent an email that says racial injustice is being pushed by a “political ideology,” called for a “Christ centered Republic” and deemed critical race theory “bigotry cloaked in academic theory,” according to InForum.
The news service, which obtained a copy of the email that was sent to a North Dakota Council of Educational Leaders-run listserv, reported that in Starkweather Public School District Superintendent Larry Volk’s email, he said that it was “time to move away from godless corrupt woke, left-wing ideology and back to the devout Christ centered Republic the founders envisioned.”
Volk also vowed in his email that critical race theory “will never be taught in our district. We will not teach institutionalized bigotry promoted by the left.”
“Racial injustice has been pushed by a political ideology — not a race of people. There is no systemic racism in America created by our Founding Fathers — the racism is the project of the godless Democrat party that has rejected god, family, faith and America and embraced secularism in the form of Marxism,” Volk said in another portion of the email. “My district will continue to teach the Christian heritage and origins of the American Republic focusing on primary source documents from the founding era,” he added.
In an email to The Hill, Volk defended his email, which included some political commentary regarding a list of historical events, figures and groups, saying that “my goal is simply to teach as accurately as I can.”
Yeah, Jesus the street preacher and social justice warrior would surely not recognize the description of his work here.
My last set of links is basically a group of writers telling Dems to face the culture warriors .head-on and decimate them. As Amanda says below, “fight early and fight often.” There are also some gun fetishists that need to be dealt with.
In other good news, Donald Trump is still NOT president. We’re just back to fighting old battles like Women’s Rights, Voting Rights, and probably GLBT rights shortly. Have a peaceful and joyful weekend!
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“Are you the boss? What makes one a boss? People need the stuff to prove themselves. Big houses, sports cars, jewelry. The stuff is never enough. Once you out-wealthy the people around you, you will have to compare with a new group. Even you’re the most wealthy person, you still have to worry about the No.2 catching up. Owning big guns, having beasts as pets, even having huge muscles can’t boost your masculinity either. As long as you’re still seeking compliments and recognition from others, you’re wimpy inside. At the end of the day, you let people decide who you are. They’re the boss. It’s your life. Be your own boss.” Gray Zao , “Whose the Boss” from the Collection Women, Guns, Oil Paintings
Three mass shooting plots were thwarted in recent days with the arrests of three men in unrelated cases, authorities in Connecticut, Florida and Ohio said.
Tips from the public aided in the three arrests, which occurred from Thursday and Friday. Police in each case said the men, all white and in their 20s, posted online or sent text messages with threats of committing mass shootings.
Details of the cases show apparent similarities with recent actual mass shootings, in the US and elsewhere, which go beyond the demographics of the suspects.
One man is suspected of building his own rifle, another of trying to “break a world record for longest confirmed kill ever,” and the third of threatening on Instagram to attack a Jewish community center.
… in Ohio, 20-year-old James Patrick Reardon was arrested for allegedly threatening to carry out a shooting at a Youngstown Jewish community center.
An Instagram account belonging to Reardon shared a video that showed a man firing a gun, New Middletown Police Chief Vincent D’Egidio told CNN. The post — which was shown to an officer out on an unrelated call — tagged the Jewish Community Center of Youngstown, D’Egidio said.
It’s unclear whether the man shooting the gun was Reardon or someone else.
Andy Lipkin, the executive vice-president of the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation, said the post was accompanied by a caption that read, “Police identified the Youngstown Jewish Family Community shooter as local white nationalist Seamus O’Rearedon” — Seamus being a Gaelic version of Reardon’s name.
The rest of the Instagram account contained anti-Semitic comments, white nationalist content, and images of Reardon or someone else shooting guns, D’Egidio said.
A search warrant was executed and authorities found a cache of weapons and ammunition, D’Egidio told CNN.
The Occupant of the White House’s response to questions about the arrests was pure word salad.
Asked today about banning high-capacity magazines, Trump ended up talking about “the concept of mental institution” and “the concept also of voter identification”: pic.twitter.com/TYhZArfTZy
“It’s hard when nothing happens. Dramatic life is easy. When there are laughs and tears, time flies by. Even when you’re struggling, you feel alive. People fulfill their lives by solving problems after problems. The real challenge comes when life is only normal. The regular, average daily life is dull. People can’t stand that doing average chores and getting average rewards. That’s why people make trouble and do stupid things. People don’t cherish peaceful life. You have to admit that, messing up life is intriguing. It’s dangerous but interesting. Driving on a straight highway makes people sleepy. They rather drive on a curvy bumpy road.” Gray Zao, “At Ease” from the collection Women, Guns, Oil Paintings
A new Public Opinion Strategies (R) survey finds that 72% of suburban women think gun laws should be stricter, compared to 4% percent who said they should be less strict and 23% who said they should be kept as they are now.
In addition, 55% said they think stricter gun laws would help prevent gun violence. And 90% support requiring universal background checks for gun purchases at gun shows or other private sales, which would require all gun owners to file with a national firearms registry.
Furthermore, 76% said they would ban the purchase and use of semi-automatic assault-style weapons like the AK-47 and the AR-15.
In an age where anyone can access just about anything on the internet, white boys in the US seem particularly at risk from dangerous radicalisation online.
Many mass shooting suspects in the US have three things in common: They are young, white and male.
The suspect behind the El Paso shooting that killed 22 people in Texas is believed to have posted a racist manifesto online.
Police investigating a deadly attack in Dayton the following day said the gunman was influenced by a “violent ideology”, although no motive has been disclosed.
The dangers of the internet are not a novel talking point for parents and teachers, but these most recent tragedies have sparked renewed debate over what families can – and should – do when it comes to raising white boys in America.
“The red flags started going up for us when, a year or so ago, [our kids] started asking questions that felt like they came directly from alt-right talking points,” says Joanna Schroeder, a Los Angeles-based writer, media critic and mother of three.
She tells the BBC one of her two sons began to argue “‘jokey’-toned alt right positions”, asking questions like why black people could “copy white culture but white people can’t copy black culture”. She began learning about how other boys their age were sharing sexist and racist memes – likely spreading from online forums.
Last week, Ms Schroeder’s Twitter thread about parenting white boys in a world rife with easy access to extremist viewpoints by monitoring their social media and teaching empathy became a widespread talking point, amassing nearly 180,000 likes, 8,500 comments and shares across social platforms.
““Can I sit next to you?” Said the girl. “What? Who are you?” Said the woman. “I don’t know. A girl?” “How old are you?” “6, I guess.” “Oh, you’re a war baby.” “What’s that?” “You’re born and have lived your whole life in wartime.” “Are you a war baby, too?” “No.” “You’re a peace baby?” “Y…Yes. Everyone used to be a peace baby.” “What’s peace like?” “It’s like…um..normal?” “War is normal.” “Oh… Then peace is the opposite of normal.” “Like having a family?” “Yes… Hey, you need a mom?” Gray Zao, “Train Trip” from the collection “Women, Guns, Oil Paintings”
If new gun legislation doesn’t pass in September, it won’t get done before the 2020 election, sources involved in the talks between the White House and Capitol Hill tell Axios.
The bottom line: “It’s September or bust,” said a source involved in the discussions. “We’ll either have everything ready for when Congress returns, drop it on the floor, vote on it and move on — or we blow it.”
The state of play: The president genuinely wants to expand background checks, according to White House and Hill officials. He’s directed the Domestic Policy Council and Office of Legislative Affairs to provide him with options for a reform package, these sources said.
As of now, Trump has expressed support for big, vague ideas — including tougher background checks and restrictions on firearms access to the mentally ill — but on the gun issue, consensus typically evaporates when lawmakers dive into the details.
It’s also still unclear whether House Democrats, who have already passed a bill to extend background checks to all gun purchases, would support a slimmer package.
We’ve reached an inflection point on the gun debate, with Republicans openly talking about passing laws to limit people’s access. That doesn’t mean that will happen. There’s only one person who can push the party to support gun-control laws, and it’s President Trump.
And as the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, fade into the background, it seems as if Trump has little appetite for taking on such a heavy lift, and every intention of resuming his position in line with the National Rifle Association: no new gun-control laws.
Two comments Trump made recently make that evident:
On Sunday, while talking to reporters in New Jersey, he was asked where gun control stands. His answer indicated that he’s not really involved in these negotiations.
So, Congress is working on that. They have bipartisan committees working on background checks and various other things. And we’ll see. I don’t want people to forget that this is a mental health problem. I don’t want them to forget that, because it is. It’s a mental health problem. And as I say — and I said the other night in New Hampshire; we had an incredible evening — I said: It’s the people that pull the trigger.
The problem with that, from the perspective of those who want expanded background checks and red-flag laws, is that Congress hasn’t passed gun-control laws in more than two decades. Democrats have come around recently to prioritizing gun-control laws. A package of background-check bills was one of the first things the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed earlier this year.
But not Republicans. They need a president to lead them before taking on such a politically perilous endeavor. Otherwise, their leaders are just as happy to set this debate aside. A key player in letting gun-control laws pass the Senate is a politician who is up for reelection next year in a pro-gun state, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)
Maybe Trump was being noncommittal in public and is in extensive talks in private with Republican leaders on gun control. But if that’s the case, these talks are unusually secretive.
“Don’t scare, it’s me.” The girl and the cat have been closed for a while. “Come here. Let’s find something for you.” The cat let her hold it up and lied on her shoulder. “What were you looking for? Birds? Mice?” They couldn’t find anything. The area wasn’t just no man’s land. It should be no life’s land. “Well, do you eat bugs? I don’t think so.” The cat jumped off her shoulder and started rummaging dead bodies. “No, you don’t eat human flesh. No way.” “See what you found. Beef jerky! You scared me.” Gray Zao, “Girl Soldier holding an RPC and a cat on her shoulder” from the Collection “Women, Guns, Oil Paintings”
This is most of the problem in all of this. The Republicans enable Trump and do not question his judgement or actions. They simply do nothing. Paul Waldman writes this in The America Prospect: “There Will Be No Justice for Trump’s Enablers”.
There is Trumpite here or there who has really suffered from their identification with this president, like Sanders’s predecessor, Sean Spicer. What got Spicer in such trouble, however, was the fact that he felt shame for his service to Trump. Everyone knew he was lying whenever he went before the cameras, and he obviously knew that everyone knew, and felt bad about it. That’s what made his brief tenure so embarrassing, and why he’s one of the few that left the White House with his reputation having suffered the proper degree of damage.
There are others who fared as poorly, if they pled guilty to crimes, or were accusedof domestic abuse, or undertook a spree of penny-ante corruption. But they’re still the exceptions, when true justice would demand that every last one of them be ostracized and denounced. Sure, one sees the occasional story about something like young Trump staffers complaining that no one wants to date them. But there will be no truth and reconciliation commission, no universal condemnation, no shunning of even the worst offenders.
The reason is that the entire Republican Party will make sure it doesn’t happen, because nearly all of them are implicated.
Consider someone like Stephen Miller, probably the most villainous figure in the administration. The latest revelation about Miller is that he tried for some time to find a way to get states to bar undocumented immigrant children from going to school; he was thwarted not because other officials said, “My god, what kind of monster are you?” (they didn’t) but because the scheme was obviously illegal.
Now try to imagine the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute saying to Miller in 2021, “We’re sorry, but we cannot offer you a senior fellow position, because your actions during the last four years were so morally abhorrent that we do not wish to associate ourselves with you.” The very idea is ridiculous. We know what will happen: Heritage, AEI, and any number of other prominent conservative organizations will fall all over themselves to offer Miller a comfortable sinecure from which he can continue to advocate a whiter future for America.
In fact, they’ll undertake a massive project of historical revisionism to convince the country that what we just lived through was all a figment of our imagination. “Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” Trump said last year, and this project will attempt to convince us that what we saw, read, and experienced never actually happened. Donald Trump was a fine and responsible president, they’ll say, and even if he might have gotten a little silly on Twitter from time to time, anyone who supported him should take pride in their service to the GOP and to America.
And since the entire Republican Party will repeat this line again and again and again, it will become, if not conventional wisdom, at the very least a respectable position to hold. At worst, if Trump leaves office in disgrace Republicans will say what they did when George W. Bush slinked off in 2009 with the two wars he started still dragging on and the country experiencing the worst economic crisis in 80 years: I never liked him anyway. He wasn’t a real conservative. And of course I didn’t figure that out until it was all over, so don’t blame me.
Voters must hold every one public official accountable in November 2020.
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The suspected gunman on the run after riddling a Tennessee Waffle House with bullets dubbed himself a “sovereign citizen,” before being arrested in July 2017 outside the White House.
Travis Reinking, 29, used that term — which the FBI has also used to describe a group of anti-government extremists — during a clash last year with the Secret Service, according to a police report obtained by USA TODAY.
Reinking told agents he needed to see President Trump and defined himself as sovereign citizen who had a right to inspect the grounds, according to an arrest report by the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. He was arrested on an unlawful entry charge after refusing to leave the area.
The FBI has said sovereign citizens “believe that even though they physically reside in this country, they are separate or ‘sovereign’ from the United States.”
The agency has also defined sovereign citizens as “anti-government extremists who claim the federal government is operating outside its jurisdiction and they are therefore not bound by government authority—including the courts, taxing entities, motor vehicle departments, and even law enforcement.”
Coit Tower Murals – Industries of California by Ralph Stackpole 01
This guy has a politically extreme view that motivates him. He’s another Timothy McVeigh sort. So, when do we hear the WHITE CHRISTIAN MALE TERRORIST label?
It’s unknown if Reinking’s 2017 sovereign citizen self-designation was in line with the FBI’s definition or if it played any role in the Antioch, TN Waffle House attack, which left four dead.
A motive has not been released and investigators are continuing to probe Reinking’s background, which includes several past incidents with law enforcement.
On Aug. 24, 2017, sheriffs deputies in Tazewell County, Illinois took a state-issued card from Reinking that Illinois requires for someone to own a weapon. During a Sunday news conference streamed online, Tazewell County Sheriff Robert M. Huston said Reinking volunteered to give up his four weapons.
However, Reinking’s father was present when those deputies came to confiscate the guns, Huston said. The father had a valid state authorization card and asked the police if he could keep the weapons. Deputies gave Reinking’s father the weapons, Huston said.
“He was allowed to do that after he assured deputies he would keep them secure and away from Travis,” Huston said, referring to Reinking’s father.
Huston and Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson said they believe Reinking’s father returned the weapons to Reinking.
Murder warrants were issued for the suspect, identified as a 29-year-old White male named Travis Reinking. He’s accused of killing four people and wounding four others 3:25 a.m. Sunday at a Waffle House restaurant in Nashville. Reinking, who was naked, fled on foot, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department tweeted.
The motive behind the shooting is unknown, authorities said, according to CNN. It appears to be a random mass shooting. Investigators, however, are typically slow to declare mass shootings by White males a domestic terror attack, even though White men constitute the largest group of domestic terrorists in the nation.
Such narratives are unique to white male mass shooters. As are the efforts to humanize and to offer cultural autopsies that point to potential gambling addictions or mental illness as the reason behind a mass shooting rather than a pervasive evil inherent in white male killers.
The erasure of “white male” mass shooters from public discourse produces coverage that depicts Paddock and countless others as individuals who we must empathize with. Paddock deserves empathy because he is not the imagined Muslim terrorist, the criminal Latino immigrant, and the Black thug. Whereas they are terrorists and super predators who “terrorize communities,” who undermine the safety and tranquility of our communities,
I shouldn’t have to carry a gun to feel safe getting waffles.
Nobody should.
I shouldn’t have to hope I’m seated near a mythological “good guy with a gun” to feel safe getting waffles.
Nobody should.
Nobody should.
We should be able to eat our waffles in peace. We should be able to send our kids to school without worrying that they’ll be gunned down. We should be able to go to church and not wonder whether an AR-15-toting person who fell through the mental-health-services cracks might stand up and open fire.
But we don’t feel that way. We can’t. This nation’s gun obsession has made it impossible, and those who stand in the way of any action that might limit access to guns — even to domestic abusers or the mentally ill — are insisting that their outlandish “right” to own any firearm they want supersedes our perfectly reasonable right to eat our waffles without toting a sidearm.
There’s a word for all this: terrorism. People don’t like to use that word when it comes to guns and Americans. But what are we really dealing with here if not terror? What do you call it when people are made to feel unsafe in the most public of places?
Four young people were gunned down early Sunday morning at that Waffle House near Nashville. A 29-year-old man from Morton, Ill., is the suspected shooter, and police say he used an AR-15-style assault rifle, the same type of firearm used in the Parkland school shooting (17 dead), the Texas church shooting (26 dead), the Las Vegas music festival shooting (58 dead) and the Orlando nightclub shooting (49 dead).
Police said the father of suspected Waffle House shooter Travis Reinking handed his son back an AR-15 found at the scene, after it had been seized by authorities in relation to another incident.
In 2017, the year before Reinking became the subject of an intensive police manhunt after a deadly shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House, officials said he went to a local pool wearing a pink dress and swam in his underwear while coaxing life guards to fight him. Soon after, he traveled to D.C., and tried to cross a security barrier near the White House, declaring himself a “sovereign citizen” who wanted to speak with President Trump.
Police reports dating to May 2016 offer a glimpse of what officials described as Reinking’s “mental problems.”
This is just no way to run a country. No other civilized country lets military weapons out to just any one. The data shows we don’t need to live this way. If our government is the problem then we need to vote the gun fetishists out.
Because all 27 Coit Tower murals were painted at the same time, in 1934, they presumably were meant to be seen as a whole. Now that all the murals have undergone the most intensive restoration in their history, an effort is being made to get people up there, but only in groups of four to eight, and only as part of a docent tour.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
It’s a Sad Day Sky Dancers!
And, from Hillary:
All the Republican Politicians speaking out on this have their white patriarchal churchman voices out. Like Rapert, quoted above, they use yellow prose and outrageous language.
Thomas obviously missed the part about most sheriffs of small towns in the Wild West collecting guns at the city borders before anyone was allowed to head to the salon. Is that okay Uncle Thomas?
These guys really like to give the state the power to oppress and let gun-toting fascists run free, don’t they?
This is bound to work its way back to them.
DudeBro gunned down 
Oh, wait! Some one did recognize this for what it is!!! 
Oh, wait… here’s another!
Government can do something about it. We’ve got these problems because NRA lobbyists fund the bad guys. 
Today’s art are a selection of various PWAP commissioned murals in California. You may remember that 
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