High Plains Blogger

crime news, State news

Compromise can work

U.S. Senate advances bipartisan gun legislation backed by Cornyn | The Texas Tribune

Ted Cruz keeps demonstrating why he is such a loathsome politician, suggesting repeatedly why it’s better in his sick mind to go down on principle rather than seeking common ground.

The Texas Republican junior U.S. senator was one of 34 GOP senators to vote “no” on a bill crafted in part by his Texas Republican colleague, John Cornyn.

Cornyn was the lead GOP negotiator on a bipartisan effort to seek legislative remedy to the gun violence that continues to break our hearts, such as what happened not long ago in Uvalde.

OK, the bill ain’t perfect. It’s a start, though, toward curbing violent outbursts.

The National Rifle Association, naturally, has condemned the effort. The NRA doesn’t want anyone to mess around with what it says are constitutional guarantees of firearm ownership. Except that the bill doesn’t stop law-abiding Americans from owning a firearm. Ted Cruz is in the NRA’s hip pocket.

The Texas Tribune reports: The legislation does not restrict any rights of existing gun owners — a nonstarter for Senate Republicans. Instead, it would enhance background checks for gun purchasers younger than 21; make it easier to remove guns from people threatening to kill themselves or others, as well as people who have committed domestic violence; clarify who needs to register as a federal firearms dealer; and crack down on illegal gun trafficking, including so-called straw purchases, which occur when the actual buyer of a firearm uses another person to execute the paperwork to buy on their behalf.

The legislation includes $11 billion for mental health services and $2 billion for community-based antiviolence programs. It also includes money to help young people access mental health services via telemedicine, money for more school-based mental health centers and support for suicide hotlines.

Is this the stuff of radicalism? Hardly. It’s a reasonable start.

national news

Stop the tease, Democrats

I am going to make this plea once more to U.S. House Democrats serving on the 1/6 select committee.

Stop teasing us with declarations that you have provided proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Donald J. Trump should be prosecuted for his role in instigating the 1/6 insurrection against the government.

You see, I don’t need convincing. However, I do not want to get my expectations elevated to an unreasonable level that Attorney General Merrick Garland is going to indict Trump for inciting the assault on our government as members of Congress — and the vice president — were tallying the Electoral College totals from the 2020 presidential election.

That was the one Trump lost to Joseph R. Biden.

The televised hearings have been compelling. I have been riveted by the testimony. The witnesses who have told of Trump’s active participation in the conspiracy to overturn the election have painted a grim and frightening picture of an individual who was derelict in his duty to protect the Constitution and to quell the violence that erupted on Capitol Hill.

Let’s allow the AG to do his work without hearing the same things I am hearing from committee Democrats … that he’s got enough to prosecute.

crime news

Gun deal appears done

U.S. Senate Democrats and Republicans have come together to approve a deal that takes some important baby steps toward curbing the gun violence that has claimed so many innocent lives.

It isn’t the perfect deal. Then again, as the saying goes, senators sought to avoid letting “perfection become the enemy of the good.”

The package does a number of good things. As the Detroit News reports: The legislation would toughen background checks for the youngest firearms buyers, require more sellers to conduct background checks and beef up penalties on gun traffickers. It also would disburse money to states and communities aimed at improving school safety and mental health initiatives.

It isn’t perfect. I would have liked to see increasing minimum age requirements for buying firearms and strengthened universal background checks.

However, what has come out of the Senate deal negotiated by a bipartisan group of lawmakers is better than what we had already.

Which was nothing.

President Biden is going to sign the bill when it arrives in the Oval Office. The proposed legislation isn’t all that he wanted, either. However, he served long enough in the Senate to understand that compromise at times is the only way to achieve important goals.

Progressives want more legislative remedies. Archconservatives want nothing done. Neither extreme is correct.

The best answer lies in the vast middle ground. Senate negotiators have cobbled together a decent start on the quest to restore sanity in a nation plagued by senseless gun violence.

national news

Republicans turn on Trump

Jan. 6 hearing: Ga. election worker and her mother say Trump’s ‘lies’ led to death threats (msn.com)

These congressional hearings are getting juicier and seem to be tightening the noose around Donald J. Trump’s proverbial neck.

We heard from two Georgia election officials about how Trump sought to bully them into “finding” enough votes to steal the election from Joe Biden. We also heard from a Georgia secretary of state who also wondered out loud how The Donald could brazenly seek to break the law.

These all are Republicans, who were ostensibly Trump supporters until the former POTUS decided to seek to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The most gut-wrenching testimony, though, came from two Georgia election workers who had their reputations dragged through the mud. Trump and his lawyer, Rudolf Giuliani, singled out two women by name as seeking to dump illegal ballots.

The women told of the threats against their lives. According to Yahoo News: In a hearing before the House select panel investigating the events that led to the Capitol riot, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, an election worker in Fulton County, testified that false claims made by the former president, his personal lawyer and their allies about her and her mother, “Lady” Ruby Freeman, a temporary election worker, “turned my world upside down.”

It’s important to understand something about these two women: They are not public officials. They are volunteer poll workers who dedicate their time to public service. Yet they became targets of The Donald and his thoroughly disgraced — and disgraceful — lawyer. They spoke blatant lies about these women who today told their side of the tragic story.

I am awaiting word now from Trump and how he’s going to spin the things he said about Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. He only will illustrate even more graphically his despicable nature.

national news

Pence lies about ‘falsehoods’

Way to go, former Vice President Mike Pence. Just about the time you are beginning to bask in some sort of misplaced glory over what we have learned about your conduct on 1/6, you offer a patently ridiculous piece of sh**.

Pence said the following in an interview with Larry Kudlow, a one-time Trump economic adviser, who asked Pence: “Have you ever seen a president who refuses to accept blame, and I want to add to that, commits so many falsehoods? I’m being very polite here, calling it falsehoods – falsehoods, you know, on any given day. He’s out there saying stuff that just ain’t true. Have you ever seen anything like that?”

Pence responded: “Never in my lifetime. I said today that there has never been a time in my life where a president was more disconnected from the American people than we see today.”

Do you get where the former VP is saying? He is suggesting that President Biden is more of a liar than The Donald.

Well, so much for the kudos over refusing to break the law during the 1/6 insurrection. As of yesterday, Trump is still trying to cover the overfed backside of The Donald, the POTUS who actually said Pence “deserved” to be hanged, per the insurrectionists’ chants at the 1/6 assault on the nation’s Capitol Building.

I am at a total loss as to how this individual, Pence, is able to look himself in the mirror.

economic news

Gas tax holiday? Sure, let’s do it!

President Biden is considering a temporary suspension of the federal fuel tax we motorists pay every time we put the go-juice into our motor vehicles.

I have kinda waffled on this one, but I’ve decided that it’s worth doing to give Americans — such as my family and me — some relief from the pain we are enduring at the fuel pump.

The “tax holiday” would save us about 18 cents per gallon of fuel with each visit to the service station. The savings over time isn’t a huge amount, but it’s significant enough to give us a little bit of a break from the gouging (I believe) that is occurring.

Energy companies are raking in huge profits while soaking us at the pump. Joe Biden is trying like the dickens to talk the oil company moguls into drilling for more fossil fuel, which would shore up the supply. He has ordered the release of 1 million barrels of petroleum each day for six months from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Surely, there’s a downside to the tax holiday. The federal fuel tax pays for infrastructure maintenance and improvement. That money will dry up, forcing the government to find other revenue sources to pay for the necessary improvements to our highways and bridges.

For now, though, I will — with reluctance — endorse the idea of a tax holiday … just go get some relief from the pain and sticker shock.

It won’t allow me to continue driving the way I did before this monstrous spike in fuel prices. It just won’t hurt quite as much whenever I park next to the pump.

national news

1/6 hearing drama builds

Who could have thought that congressional hearings would produce so much drama?

I am one who anticipates it with today’s scheduled hearing on the insurrection that occurred 1/6. The star witness at the televised hearing will be a Georgia state election official whom Donald Trump demanded “find” more than 11,000 votes that would have turned the state’s electoral outcome from favoring Joe Biden to endorsing Trump.

Brad Raffensberger, a Republican Georgia secretary of state and acknowledged Trump supporter, refused to do The Donald’s bidding. What’s more, the world has heard Trump’s voice making the demand. Raffensberger, you see, had the foresight to record the phone conversation.

I am going to wonder how the Trumpkins are going to deny Trump said what we know that he said.

Let the drama continue.

State news

All together now: No secession for Texas!

Texas can’t secede from the U.S. Here’s why. | The Texas Tribune

Let’s all say this together, shall we? Texas cannot — under the law — secede from the United States of America!

Texas tried that once. It didn’t work out. We joined several other southern states to go to war with the United States because slave owners wanted to maintain the right to own fellow human beings as property. The Civil War came to an end in April 1865 and Congress wrote a law that prohibited secession. Period, man!

That didn’t dissuade the Texas Republican Party, though, from delivering a resolution at the end of its conference in Houston this past weekend that calls for a statewide referendum aimed at “achieving Texas independence.”

I have declared already that the Texas GOP has gone ’round the bend. This resolution only strengthens my argument.

The secession argument keeps rearing its disgusting head whenever right-wingers get pi**ed off about something, or anything! They want to remove the state from the clutches of federal control, believing foolishly that the state can solve its own problems.

“It is now time that the People of Texas are allowed the right to decide their own future,” state Rep. Kyle Biedermann, R-Fredericksburg, said in a statement announcing the resolution at the GOP conference.

The Texas Tribune reports: “The legality of seceding is problematic,” Eric McDaniel, associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Texas Tribune in 2016. “The Civil War played a very big role in establishing the power of the federal government and cementing that the federal government has the final say in these issues.”

Yeah, a “very big role,” indeed.

The Confederacy committed the ultimate act of treason in declaring war on the U.S. government. The Civil War cost the nation more than 600,000 lives in the bloodiest conflict in its history.

President Lincoln’s second inaugural speech in March 1865 — a month before he would be assassinated — declared his intention to heal the wounds that ripped the nation apart. “With malice toward none and charity for all,” he said, the nation must move forward together.

Now we hear from the lunatics of Abraham Lincoln’s own Republican Party wanting to secede once again. Why? Because they don’t want the feds setting the rules all Americans must follow.

Do you see what I mean, therefore, about how nuts today’s Republican Party has become?

national news

Strange world, indeed

June 20, 2022 kanelis2012

We have entered a strange time in our nation’s history when two sides of a great — and widening — divide cannot seem to make themselves heard by the other side.

I am going to refrain from the “both sides do it” argument; I will aim my fire at those on the far right of that divide, the Donald Trump cultists who — despite mountains of evidence to the contrary — continue to live in the fantasy created by The Big Lie.

That the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from their guy and that the theft lies at the heart of all that is wrong with the government. They refuse to cede an inch of that turf to reality, to the truth, to the facts that are spread before them.

Donald Trump brought in a fellow named Christopher Krebs to tighten the integrity of the 2020 election. Krebs did his job. He did it so well that when he declared that the most recent presidential election was the “most secure in the history of the nation,” Trump fired him. He didn’t want to hear the truth from his own guy!

And so … a needless, pointless and feckless battle rages on. There is no way in the world, or so it seems, to persuade the Trump Cultist Corps that their guy lost a free, fair and legal election to Joseph Biden Jr. They hang their message on The Big Lie that Trump keeps telling. Indeed, the Texas Republican Party just concluded its weekend meeting in Houston with a resolution that declares President Biden to be “illegitimately elected.”

Where in the world do we go from here?

I hate to think there is no way out of this blind alley. So, I won’t think it. I will retain my eternal optimism that eventually self-restorative sanity will take its resume in our national discussion. The alternative, as we have seen, is unacceptable.