Month: October 2017

This gun fetish is killing us

by digby

Former Las Vegas Sheriff Bill Young’s daughter was at the concert last night and she called him when the shooting started and he rushed to the scene. She is ok but his description of events was harrowing.

But he said something very interesting on MSNBC on Monday morning  that I think is worth thinking about:

This could happen in any community at any time given the gun laws that we have in the United Stated, the 2nd Amendment, which I’m a strong supporter of. We’ve got an inividual that I don’t know if he has a history of mental illness or what his criminal history is. Obviously he had ten semi-automatic and automatic rifles at his disposal. I don’t know all the history of those rifles. I own 25, 30 guns, many many rifles myself, I’ve hunted and fished all my life here in this state.I support it.

But at the same time, you know, I think that we all have to be cognizant of the fact that this world has changed in the last 25 years in such a way, with some people’s fascination with guns that really don’t have any business having a gun because of the result that we have here today.

Something happened 25 years ago that started this trend. His name is Wayne LaPierre — he took over the NRA in 1993.

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Meanwhile, Trump spent the week-end golfing and tweeting

by digby

During the

Before the latest mass shooting horror, I wrote about Trump and the Puerto Rico horror for Salon:

Last Monday, as the catastrophe in Puerto Rico got worse and worse, this is what President Trump was doing:

President Trump last Monday reportedly called Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones four times imploring him not to let his team kneel during the national anthem.

It turns out that Trump thought he had hit on an excellent issue with the NFL protests and was more or less unaware that Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands were in crisis. The cable news networks hadn’t focused on the damage yet and were instead obsessing over Trump’s NFL comments, which he saw as a big win for him. According to The Washington Post, it was only when criticism of the federal response started to show up on TV that Trump even really knew there was a crisis.

As I noted several times last week, things kept getting worse and Trump got ever more manic. The Obamacare repeal-and-replace zombie was knocked out for the time being, although Trump inexplicably insisted that Republicans would have had the votes if not for a senator who was in the hospital. (This was completely false, raising the question once again as to whether Trump suffers from cognitive problems.)

On Friday, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign after it was reported that he’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private plane travel for no good reason. (Actually, Trump had reportedly been unhappy with Price since the secretary was seen drinking at Bullfeathers bar on the night last spring when everyone was burning the midnight oil to get the House repeal bill passed. So the private-plane gaffe was just a convenient excuse to get rid of him.)

Throughout all of this, Trump came under withering criticism for his handling of the Puerto Rico crisis, insisting that he was “getting great reviews” from all the officials on the island and explaining more than once that the problem was very difficult because Puerto Rico is “an island surrounded by water, big water, ocean water” so trucks couldn’t drive there. As of Friday night, Trump was still saying that the job was impossible, but also that he was doing a fabulous job.

On Saturday morning he lost it. He obviously saw footage of the devastation and then heard the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, contradicting his assertions that everything was going swimmingly. He lashed out on Twitter, predictably enough, saying something that will forever be part of his already shameful legacy.

The president continued tweeting all day, complaining that “his people” weren’t getting enough credit and rattling off statistics as if they proved something. At various points on Saturday he also brought up the NFL controversy again and even tweeted out a video of people standing for the anthem that turned out to be a year old.

Naturally Trump also began to suggest that the reports coming from the island were “fake news.” That’s become his stock answer for all criticism, although in this case it made even less sense than usual. Was he actually suggesting that the footage people were seeing on television was staged? This tweet may be the most ridiculous of that series:

To the people of Puerto Rico:
Do not believe the #FakeNews!#PRStrong🇵🇷

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017

Let’s see: Only 5 percent of Puerto Rico has power. There is no internet. Other than that, his claims made perfect sense. Puerto Ricans on the U.S. mainland, however, were not impressed with his excuses.

Trump was clearly enraged by Cruz and her emotional appeals for help. He kept mentioning how grateful the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosselló, was for everything Trump has done, even calling him “Ricky” at one point. He made a great show of complimenting by name those officials who have shown proper fealty to him during the crisis and made it quite clear that genuflecting to his power is the smart move if they expect results.

On Sunday, he continued to insult the mayor:

We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico. Outside of the Fake News or politically motivated ingrates people are now starting to recognize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great Military. All buildings now inspected . . .

Of course that’s not true. All buildings have not been inspected, and emergency supplies of water, food and medicine have not yet reached all who need them. Nobody knew what he was talking about. Not wishing to jab the hornet’s nest, Rosselló very gingerly told CNN that he was “not aware” of such inspections. After all, there are entire areas of the island that nobody’s even heard from yet.

Trump didn’t mention the mayor by name, but it was clear she is the “politically motivated ingrate” to whom he refers in his tweet. By this time, toadies seeking Trump’s favor had taken up the cause. A fellow mayor accused her of not attending FEMA meetings, saying she wants to run for governor. He told the Daily Caller that everything is going just great. Geraldo Rivera of Fox News, no doubt knowing that Trump would see him, confronted the mayor himself, saying, “I don’t see people dying,” which proves nothing but will make the president happy.

There’s no point in asking why Trump couldn’t be the bigger man and not insult and degrade the mayor of a stricken city facing an urgent humanitarian crisis. We know he can’t do that. But there is a method to his madness, the same method all bullies use: He’s using Cruz as an example for others. If you want his support, you’ll think twice about criticizing him.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said it plainly on “Meet the Press,” when asked by Chuck Todd why the president would go after Cruz under these trying circumstances: “When the president gets attacked, he attacks back.”

What we are watching unfold in Puerto Rico has strong echoes of colonial despotism, with demands that the natives pay proper respect to the crown. Trump isn’t a king, but he is an authoritarian by temperament and demands that he be treated like one. There are plenty of people who are willing to play the role of courtier and sycophant, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who proclaimed, “His heart’s in the right place,” when asked if he thought Trump was bringing people together. Ryan knows he isn’t. It’s just that he’s seen how Trump publicly humiliated Mitch McConnell and got the message loud and clear.

No gun violence is not a natural disaster

by digby

I wrote this for Salon back in October of 2015 after another mass shooting. Nothing’s changed. It just gets worse. Now we have a president who is fully committed to enabling as much gun violence as possible in America:

Mass shootings aren’t natural disasters: The twisted logic that govern American gun-control

It’s hurricane season and all along the east coast residents are girding themselves for major weather. Every once in a while a major storm makes landfall and property is destroyed and lives are lost. One hopes that doesn’t happen this year. But natural disasters are a fact of life people just learn to live with. Tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, major floods and fires are considered to be acts of God and while we try to mitigate the damage everyone knows that we cannot stop them. It’s just the way it is.

In America, gun violence is just another natural disaster. Like an earthquake for which you can never really be prepared, most people have come to see a mass killing like that which happened in Oregon yesterday as being unpreventable. We might as well try to stop the sun from coming up in the morning. All we can do is try to comfort the survivors and help people cope with the aftermath. On any given day we could personally be the victims of gun violence or turn on our TVs and computers and witness some kind of mass shooting, horrifying domestic dispute that ends in carnage, accidents or criminal activity. And that’s normal.

To the rest of the world, this is simply insane. Elsewhere they treat gun violence like a public health threat and limit the public’s exposure to it through strict gun regulation. Different cultures have slightly different approaches but there is no other developed country in the world that treats gun violence as if it were a simple fact of life they must live with.

But the fact that Americans accept this, doesn’t mean they want it to be this way. The polling shows that majorities of Americans support common sense gun regulations of the kind which are proven to work in other countries. The problem is that the political system is corrupted by the pro-gun lobbying groups which not only insist that society has no right to regulate their killing toys, they ensures that it has no ability to do it. Once again it has to be noted that after a disturbed young man went into an elementary school and gunned down 20 tiny first graders and 6 adults, everyone was so shocked that it was assumed that something would have to change. It was unthinkable that it wouldn’t.

But it didn’t.

I wrote about why in my last piece about gun carnage, after a disgruntled employee shot two former co-workers on live TV. We can thank one man who runs one powerful lobbying group, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. According to the Frontline documentary “Gunned Down” it was clear that the NRA was thrown by the Newtown massacre and there was personal pressure on board members to accede to some kind of gun safety regulation to appease the national sense of horror over the event. At the very least, they thought it would be wise for the organization to keep a low profile in the aftermath. But without telling anyone LaPierre staged a press conference in Washington DC and came out swinging. He said in no uncertain terms that there would be no compromise, no negotiation. He doubled down on the vacuous, insincere NRA logic that the reason those tiny children were gunned down in their 1st grade classrooms was the fact that there weren’t enough guns there. He infamously declared:

“The only way — the only way — to stop a monster from killing our kids is to be personally involved and invested in a plan of absolute protection. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun… What if, when Adam Lanza started shooting his way into Sandy Hook elementary school last Friday, he’d been confronted by qualified armed security?

“Our children— we as a society leave them every day utterly defenseless, and the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it.

The best they can do is to say that if we had sharp-shooters stationed in classrooms all over the country we could maybe cut the death toll. There would still be dead kids, of course. Maybe even more would die. But it is simply inconceivable to them that we might seek ways to end this violence in the first place. They say the world is full of monsters and predators. But just as we cannot hold back the tides it is impossible to keep deadly weapons out of their hands.

LaPierre gave no quarter after Newtown and the results speak for themselves. The bill the president pushed as hard as he could died in the Congress. And that, I believe, was the watershed that convinced Americans that we were impotent to deal with the problem. If the NRA is so powerful that it could single-handedly derail some very minor regulation in the wake of a massacre of babies then it just seemed hopeless. (And politicians wonder why people have lost faith in government.)

Yesterday, President Obama made yet another in a long line of impassioned speeches exhorting the congress to enact legislation to require a simple universal background check. He asked the press to show charts and graphs that illustrate the vast difference in deaths from firearms and terrorism, the latter problem of which we seem prepared to do absolutely anything to prevent and the former absolutely nothing. The difference is dramatic.

But the truth is that even national security will not deter gun-rights zealots from their rigid adherence to their cause. Recall that in December of 2001, as Attorney General John Ashcroft was rounding up American and foreign Muslims by the hundreds, he refused to allow the FBI to check records to see if any of them had bought guns. This would have violated their 2nd Amendment rights, you see. The New York Times reported:

[I]t is in keeping with Attorney General John Ashcroft’s strong support of gun rights and his longstanding opposition to the government’s use of background check records. In 1998, as a senator from Missouri, Mr. Ashcroft voted for an amendment to the Brady gun-control law to destroy such records immediately after checking the background of a prospective gun buyer. That amendment was defeated…

The Justice Department’s action has frustrated some F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials who say it puts the department at odds with its own priorities. Even as the department is instituting tough new measures to detain individuals suspected of links to terrorism, they say, it is being unusually solicitous of foreigners’ gun rights.

There is literally no reason the gun proliferation activists and the NRA will allow the common sense gun regulation that exists everywhere else in the developed world.

There are many fine people working to bring some sanity to American gun laws. In fact, one of the saddest consequences of all this gun violence is that each time a new mass killing takes place you see that more family members from previous horrific events have been radicalized by the government’s inability to deal with this problem. And one cannot give up hope. But the world’s worst terrorist attack couldn’t budge them. The wanton killing of 20 little six-year-olds merely motivated them to strengthen their resistance. Constant gun violence in work places and churches and movie theatres and schoolrooms has only caused them to redouble their efforts to put more and more guns into society. It’s hard to even imagine what could possibly make a difference at this point.

So Americans now carry on as if it’s as normal for average citizens to be randomly gunned down in a classroom or during a prayer meeting as it is for a tornado to tear through a small town in Oklahoma or wildfires to burn through the forest. All they can do is watch in horror and be grateful it hasn’t happened to them. Not yet anyway.

Almost exactly two years later, we have yet another “most deadly mass shooting in history” and our political leadership will do absolutely nothing about it.

Carry on.

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Horror in Vegas

by digby

I was watching the news last night when the first reports came through. Hoping against hope that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed to be I watched it unfold over the course of several hours. When I finally went to bed we knew that 20 people had died and 100 had been injured. Now it’s 58 dead and more than 500 injured. They were sitting ducks, out in the open. They ran for their lives.

And I saw this come over my twitter feed:

In the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, a Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist recklessly blamed the violence on a “coordinated Muslim terror attack,” citing no evidence beyond anonymous “sources.” 

As news of the shooting broke on social media, Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative commentator who regularly opened for then-presidential candidate Donald Trumpbefore his rallies in Las Vegas, tweeted that “sources on scene” and “credible news sources” told him the shooting was a “coordinated Muslim terror attack.”

Root authored a book titled “Angry White Male.” While opening for Trump during a rally in October of last year, he threatened violence against Trump’s political opponents. From NBC:

Opening for the Republican nominee, Root threatened the political elite, saying he and his fellow “Trump warriors” or members of the “Trump army” — a “citizen revolution” led by “conservatives, angry Republicans who hate establishment RINOS” (Republicans In Name Only).

He added, “Independents, working class Americans, Christians, gun owners, small business owners, military veterans and tax payers” — were going to violently take Washington D.C. with “pitchforks, jack hammers and blow torches.” 

“We’re coming to tear it down. We’re coming to rip it up. We’re coming to kick your ass. And we’re coming to put you in prison,” [Root] said.

Root’s column is published twice weekly by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is owned by billionaire Trump donor Sheldon Adelson.

He’s still saying that it’s a Muslim attack, some kind of coordinated attack because ISIS claimed responsibility. (They claim responsibility for any mass killing for obvious reasons.)

Trump spoke robotically and tweeted a tweet. He had nothing to say because you can’t blame the victims for being unarmed or cowardly as he usually does because they were mowed down by someone spraying them with automatic gunfire from the 32nd floor.

More guns can’t solve this one. So he, and the rest of the Republicans, have nothing to say.

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A palate cleanser
by Tom Sullivan

Atlanta First Congregational Church. Photo by Ganeshk via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

It is important in the long fights ahead not to turn inward. Not to get seduced by our own “dark side.” As the sitting president has shifted from reality-show to talk-radio mode, his M.O. seems to be to throw out daily red meat, not just to his followers, but to the press. And to goad the left into responding. He thrives on sewing chaos and stirring raw emotions. Limbaugh built a business model and his fortune on it, turning Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” into listeners’ daily, three-hour dose of outrage. They became conditioned to it, came to need it. Now with a different demagogue living in the White House, it’s best if we not react like Pavlov’s dogs to every Tweet. It’s the attention on which he thrives.

The sitting president is like that entity in the Star Trek TOS episode, “Wolf in the Fold,” a creature “deriving sustenance from emotion.” Dr. McCoy’s response to its attempts to generate fear among the Enterprise crew was to sedate them, depriving the creature of its food source.

Which is a roundabout way to say it was refreshing to read Sen. Kamala Harris’ talk at the storied First Congregational Church of Atlanta. She had her own message, a more American one.

Harris defended NFL players “taking a knee” as protected free speech:

“Let’s speak the truth that when Americans demand recognition that their lives matter, or kneel to call attention to injustice, that that is an expression of free speech, protected by our Constitution, and they should not be threatened or bullied.”

Harris did not shy from saying that racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism are real in this country that must be confronted honestly. She added, “Let’s speak the truth that there is a systematic attempt to suppress the right to vote in America.”

These are among the “forces of hate and division trying to tear us apart,” she said.

Per the Guardian’s report, Harris also criticized “the vilification and scapegoating of undocumented migrants, the plight of Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and the move by US attorney general Jeff Sessions to ‘re-escalate the failed war on drugs’.” And did so without mentioning the president or his staff by name. “I believe it is time we replace the divide-and-conquer.”

Harris continued:

“Americans have so much more in common than what separates us,” she said.

Her kind of patriotism, Harris said, was to believe in the country’s ideals and fight for them. “When we fight for the ideals behind the constitution of the United States,” she said, “that is the very definition of being a patriot.”

All without mentioning the creature by name, depriving it of oxygen. Even considering she was in a church, I do believe she gets it.

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Bypass social media on the overpass


by digby

Before there was Twitter and Facebook there was the Freeway blogger.  And he is still at it. I think it may be more important than ever. People are siloed into their little Facebook and Fox News world and they may not even hear the actual news anymore. Other may just be oblivious.

If nothing else, it probably gives drivers a little chuckle on their way to work — and the knowledge that they aren’t alone.

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Now watch this drive


by digby

He didn’t have to do this. It would have been an easy PR gesture to cancel his appearance at this thing and say he’s too busy with the hurricane response.

He won’t because he has said everything’s going perfectly. And it’s obviously the highlight of his week:

President Donald Trump will attend the Presidents Cup golf tournament, where he is set to participate in the trophy presentation on Sunday, according to the White House.

The trip comes a day after the president was criticized for golfing and tweeting Saturday while Puerto Rico continued to grapple with the response to Hurricane Maria, which has devastated the U.S. territory.

This is yet another way that he is telling his critics to go fuck themselves.

You can’t make this stuff up:

In Florida, Trump encourages a supporter to say this for the cameras: “Where was Obama on the last hurricane? He was playing golf!” pic.twitter.com/PAFG3NjwHx

— Jonah Green (@jonah_green) September 14, 2017

Update:

You won’t believe it. He dedicated the gold trophy to the victims of the hurricanes.

“On behalf of all of the people of Texas, and all of the people — if you look today and see what is happening, how horrible it is but we have it under really great control — Puerto Rico and the people of Florida who have really suffered over this last short period of time with the hurricanes, I want to just remember them,” the president said.
“And we’re going to dedicate this trophy to all of those people that went through so much that we love — a part of our great state, really part of our great nation,

Ron Johnson lets it all hang out

by digby

Granted, he is the stupidest member of the US Senate (at least until Roy Moore gets there) so it’s to be expected. Still, hearing a Republican say it out loud is always bracing:

When asked by a high school student in Wisconsin whether he considered health care a right or a privilege, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) compared access to health care to access to food and shelter, arguing that all three should be considered “privileges” for those who can afford them.

“I think it’s probably more of a privilege,” Johnson said in response to the question. “Do you consider food a right? Do you consider clothing a right? Do you consider shelter a right? What we have as rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have the right to freedom. Past that point, everything else is a limited resource that we have to use our opportunities given to us so that we can afford those things.”

Johnson then went on to argue that the role of elected officials is not to guarantee everyone a right to health care, but to grow the economy so that more people can afford access to health care. He also referred to comments made by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in 2011, when Paul compared the right to health care to “slavery.”

If asked I would guess he defines a right to “life” as a right to be born and not a right to, you know … live.

Also, we are a primitive, backwards country:

Of the 25 wealthiest nations in the world, the United States is the only country not to recognize health care as a right, providing some measure of universal health care to their residents.

Hey, as far as Ron Johnson is concerned, you don’t have a right to food or shelter either.

But don’t worry, nice rich people like Ron Johnson and Donald Trump might decide to be generous and throw you a crumb of delicious chocolate cake from their limousines if you beg very, very nicely.

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It’s going great. Yuge success. The best ever

by digby

Here are just couple of stories from Puerto Rico recounted by the LA Times:

Before Hurricane Maria struck, destroying their home and about 250 others in this southwestern coastal town, Heyda Ortiz thought she was protecting her elderly parents by bringing them to a shelter.

But last week, the shelter lost electricity, which her 84-year-old bedridden father, Eddie Ortiz — a U.S. Army veteran suffering from Alzheimer’s — needed to adjust his hospital bed and avoid ulcers. Another elderly man there died. A woman on a ventilator was transferred to a nursing home, but it had room for only her. The area still lacked cellphone service, so Ortiz could not call relatives for help.

“We had nowhere else to go,” said Ortiz’s mother, Antonia Morales.

After San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz made an impassioned plea for immediate, lifesaving aid, President Trump responded with a series of tweets Saturday that praised Gov. Ricardo Rossello and recovery efforts and attacked Cruz, saying she was among those who “want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.”

Ortiz, unable to do more for her parents herself, turned to city officials, who found them a hotel room. There’s sporadic water and electricity and no phone. Their food comes from the shelter, which relies on shipments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“We hope they will provide, little by little,” said Morales, 83.

Lajas Mayor Marcos Irizarry Pagán arranged for the family to stay at a hotel, along with another family of three, because he feared they couldn’t survive at the shelter.

“These are elderly people sick due to a lack of oxygen, diabetes — it’s a lot of complications and they can’t resist it. We want to help them, but our hands are tied,” he said.

FEMA sent its first shipment to Lajas on Friday. Police picked it up from a nearby city under guard, concerned about looting. The shipment contained 200 boxes of food and 786 24-packs of water for a town of 25,000.

“That’s not enough,” said Nasser Taha, the mayor’s legal advisor. “There is really a humanitarian crisis going on.”

The mayor was issued a satellite phone to contact FEMA in San Juan, but he said the agency never calls back. He has started using the phone to let residents call worried relatives on the U.S. mainland.

The mayor issued an order giving doctors and nurses priority in the lines at gas stations, but that doesn’t help much when the lines persist overnight, he said.

The town has one of the highest incidences of diabetes on the island, he said, and the insulin medication diabetics need to survive must be refrigerated.

When FEMA staff visited in recent days, the mayor asked why aid had been delayed and requested immediate help for those who need dialysis, insulin, oxygen and other treatments.

FEMA staff apologized, insisted the delay was not normal and assured city officials “that a barge was on the way,” Taha said. “We asked for a tank of oxygen. I cannot understand how it could take a week or two weeks to get a tank of oxygen.”

About 100 people died in the three days after the storm in the Lajas region, twice the typical rate, according to a local funeral director. Eight elderly people have died in Lajas since the storm, at least one directly related to a shortage of medical supplies.

“We don’t know if they didn’t have enough medicine, or oxygen — all of them were without electricity after the hurricane,” said funeral director Francisco Velez.

The one death that has been ruled storm-related was the former mayor’s 96-year-old father Hermenegildo Cotte Melendez, who died Monday after the town shelter where he had sought refuge lost electricity and his oxygen tank failed.

Leovigildo “Leo” Cotte Torres, 70, said emergency dispatchers initially refused to send his father to a hospital Sunday because they said none had oxygen. “The alternative was to take him to a shelter because there were generators there,” he said. But then the shelter generator failed.

The electricity was restored, but Cotte died a few hours later. He was buried Wednesday in the town cemetery. His empty $20 oxygen tank still sits in the family’s spare living room in the jungle hills above Lajas, under a portrait of Jesus.

Cotte’s family didn’t fault paramedics who they said tried to help by taking them to the shelter, or the mayor who they said tried to outfit the shelter as best he could. They faulted national leaders and emergency managers for not protecting some of society’s most vulnerable.

“People who are elderly have a right to live out their lives. They needed to be prepared,” said Charyleen Cotte, 43, as she sat with her father and friends outside his house Saturday. “Unfortunately, the decisions they are making are discriminating against the elderly who are bedridden.”

The shelter in Lajas is at an elementary school, where the elderly sleep on cots in open air rooms without air conditioning, electricity or, as of Saturday, running water and working bathrooms.

Among the evacuees was Victor Perez Zapata, a retired farmer who claimed to be 108. He was in good health and spirits, said wife Ada Montalvo Figueroa, 72, but she worried. At times, he has trouble breathing, and needs an oxygen tank. They had left it at home.

In a neighboring classroom, Juan Ortiz was watching over his 88-year-old father, retired sugar cane farmer Alejandro Ortiz Velez, who lay sleeping on a cot. On Friday they showered, preparing for days, maybe weeks without running water. Ortiz, 64, is diabetic, as is his neighbor, and after the shelter lost electricity they stored their insulin in a cooler.

“Yesterday my sister brought me ice, but we need more,” he said. “We don’t know what is going to happen. We’re waiting for the help. It’s like you’re in limbo.”

They lost their home in the storm, as did neighbor Antonio Soto Maldonado.

“They’re going to have to start school. Where are they going to put us?” said Soto, 68.

Also dependent on the shelter for food was a low-income senior apartment complex across town housing 117 people. They had lost electricity and running water by Saturday and were relying on a diesel-fueled generator, which they ran six hours a day to conserve fuel, said manager Lilian Santana. When it’s not running, the elevator in the four-story complex doesn’t run, either. They have enough gas to last until Thursday.

“We have not seen the aid — there isn’t any water to drink,” Santana said Saturday as she distributed meals to residents, two of whom had already run out of drinking water.

The Garden of Eden nursing home across town also was coping with shortages.

The 50-bed facility was full, with three people on ventilators, two on oxygen. Each day, owner Carmen Lopez went looking for diesel and food. She stopped using the 17 air conditioning units days ago.

“If I use them all, it will break the generator,” she said as she stood in a room surrounded by bedridden Alzheimer’s patients.

On Saturday, the line for $20 rations of gas — not enough to fuel Lopez’s building for a day — stretched for blocks, and the market had run out of bread and milk.

But her biggest concern was the lack of communications. If there’s an emergency, she can’t summon an ambulance. She knows what’s at stake for her charges: her husband is the doctor who signed Cotte’s death certificate after his oxygen tank failed. She has enough of the residents’ medicine to last about a month.

“Their families trusted us to be responsible for them. The situation is critical,” Lopez said. “When I reach the point where I’m running out of medication next month, what will I do? That’s what I worry about.”

What a bunch of ingrates, huh? These folks are old anyway, amirite?

President Trump told us there hasn’t been much loss of life so it’s all good. And they just refuse to believe him.

So now the hurricane victims are all “ingrates”

by digby