Month: February 2018

Lindsey, Donald and the DREAMers


by digby

I posted yesterday about the bizarre statement from the Department of Homeland Security regarding the pending Immigration compromise which sounded as if it had been drafted in the Breitbart mens room. Apparently Lindsey Graham thought it was a little bit weird as well:

“Who the hell wrote this?”

That’s how Sen. Lindsey Graham described his furious reaction to a Department of Homeland Security statement condemning a Senate immigration plan carefully crafted by Republicans and Democrats.

Graham has been working for months on writing a proposal that could win Senate approval. He’d spoken to President Donald Trump just days earlier, warning him, “I want to work with (you), but I’m not going to tolerate … some of the things coming out of this White House.”

Once a Trump favorite, Graham found Thursday he was seen as an “obstacle” by at least some senior members of the administration.

The unprecedented crosstown rhetorical battle began in the morning, when DHS blasted out a press release saying a Senate Democrat-Republican agreement to protect 1.8 million undocumented immigrants from deportation “would effectively make the United States a Sanctuary Nation where ignoring the rule of law is encouraged.”

Graham fired back with his own statement saying he was “disappointed” with DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for sanctioning the release.

At a news conference a few hours later, Graham later revealed the department screed was penned by a one-time press secretary to Tom Tancredo, who as a Colorado GOP congressman sought to derail comprehensive immigration overhaul legislation in the mid-2000s.

“You’ve got the two most extreme characters in town running the show,” Graham said of the former Tancredo aide and Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser who has spent years as a congressional staffer fighting expansions of legal immigration.

By the early afternoon, a senior White House official was telling reporters on a phone briefing that Graham was a deterrent to landing a deal to codify the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which Trump will end on March 5 unless Congress extends it.

“If you look at the history of failed immigration reform bills, at some point you have to ask yourself the question whether Lindsey Graham’s involvement in drafting those bills means that instead of being the solution to the problem Lindsey Graham’s presence on those bills is the problem,” said the official, who later sniped, “I’m not aware when Lindsey Graham became the chair of the Democratic conference.”

The official would not put a name to the remarks.

“I don’t know who it is. All I can say is, they’re brave enough to be anonymous,” Graham said in response to the call. “So here’s what I can say: Stephen Miller is an outlier on immigration, he’s an extremist and the president who has turned the keys of the car over to him will never get anywhere.”

It looks like Lindsey’s in the dog house. And his influence on the immigration issue is over:

After Trump won the 2016 election in part by campaigning to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, conservative hardliners are questioning whether Graham is the right person to lead immigration talks on Capitol Hill, asking whether someone who is more in line with the president’s base should be running point — someone like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

Cotton has spent the past month demeaning Graham’s participation in immigration negotiations.

“I think it’s embarrassing for a senator to punch down and attack a staffer,” Cotton told reporters. “It impugns the president for any senator to say a president is being led around by his staff.”

But the criticism lodged against Graham on Thursday from White House officials went beyond typical verbal sparring. And immediately after the exchanges, few fellow Republicans were eager to enter the fray to defend him.

White House legislative director Marc Short, at the Capitol for meetings with lawmakers, told reporters he “obviously” didn’t know who the unnamed official was. Short refused to comment on the remarks.

“I still feel like I’ve had a good relationship with Sen. Graham and appreciate the chance to work with him on lots of things. I don’t happen to agree with him on this particular issue but I’ve found he’s been a good help for me on a lot of issues,” Short said.

I’m sure Graham will find a way to help. He’s already working the Christopher Steele angle with everything he’s got. He’ll be back on the golf course with his Dear Leader any day now.

Senators on both sides of the aisle agreed Graham had been an instrumental in trying to find an immigration compromise. As he headed to the Senate floor to take a procedural vote on the Republican-Democrat proposal that was ultimately doomed — it failed to advance, falling six votes short of the 60 needed — he said he wasn’t looking to sugarcoat the situation, or his position.

“I have no interest in lying to the American people about what’s going on at the White House,” Senator Mike Rounds said. “I’m a proud Republican who believes in more immigration, not less.”

Proud Trumpists, which includes the vast majority of the GOP today, want to deport as many Latinos, Muslims and Asians and members of African shithole countries as they can. Not to worry. They’ll let “hard working” Norwegians in.

That is the official position of the Republican Party in 2018. Let’s not kids ourselves. Any hope that “only Trump can go to Mexico” for the DREAM kids the way Nixon went to China was always a joke. He’s a stone cold racist and most of his followers are too.

As the New York Times’ David Leonhart wrote today:

[F]orget for a minute about what President Trump keeps saying about the Dreamers — that he cares about them — and focus on his actions: First, he went out of his way to cancel their legal protection from deportation, a cancellation scheduled to take effect in March. Then Trump rejected an emerging bipartisan deal to restore those protections. And this week he announced that he wouldn’t restore the protections unless Congress passed a long list of other fairly radical immigration changes, like a border wall and sharply reduced legal immigration. 

The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent has put together a more detailed version of this timeline. 

Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote: “Trump doesn’t want a fix for Dreamers but he does want a suite of unpopular changes that he’s holding Dreamers hostage to pass. This is his crisis, and he shouldn’t be allowed to confuse that.” 

What can Democrats do? They are the minority party, and they can’t force Trump to change his policy, as I’ve argued before — frustrating as that may be. They also shouldn’t give into his demands for radical immigration changes and encourage more political hostage-taking. (Greisa Martinez Rosas, a prominent advocate for Dreamers, makes the same point in Sargent’s piece.) 

In the end, the choice is Trump’s. Democrats and Dreamer advocates can lobby him and other Republicans, hoping to put political pressure on them, as happened on health care last year. But Trump will ultimately have a decision to make. Sometime in the next few weeks, he will have to decide whether he is really willing to allow federal law enforcement to begin deporting people from the country they call home. 

I’m going to guess yes. But that’s just because I have been closely observing this sociopath for the last couple of years  and I see no evidence that he will ever do the right thing. Ever.

The best hope now lies with the courts. God help them. 

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I wrote about Donald Trump’s classification gambit for Salon this morning:

Ever since the House Intelligence Committee voted to release Rep. Devin Nunes’ now-legendary “memo,” and then sent it up to the White House for presidential permission to declassify it, I’ve been wondering: How is it possible that the subject of an investigation gets to look at the evidence against him and decide whether or not it sees the light of day? There’s no appeal of President Trump’s decision in a case like that. He has the ultimate and unquestioned power to do it. Is there any other situation in our society where this could happen?

There’s been surprisingly little discussion of this bizarre circumstance. It came up briefly during this week’s annual assessment of global threats before the Senate Intelligence Committee, when Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., quizzed FBI Director Christopher Wray on the subject:

According to the White House statement, the president was the one that authorized the memo’s declassification. Do you believe there’s an actual, or at least appearance, of a conflict of interest when the president is put in charge of declassifying information that could complicate an ongoing investigation into his own campaign?

Wray demurred from offering an opinion on that, merely stating that it was within the president’s authority to decide on declassification. Harris pressed further, asking if he would hand over sensitive information on the Russia investigation if the president asked. Wray replied, “I’m not going to discuss the investigation in question with the president, much less provide information from that investigation to him.” That’s pretty unequivocal.

Then Harris got the real issue into the discussion by asking whether the president had the right to declassify information if he received it from a member of the Congress. She wondered whether the president should recuse himself from making decisions regarding his own case. Wray declined to answer, saying the president would have to review all these questions with the White House counsel.

Anyone who’s following this story closely knows exactly what Harris was getting at. From the moment the House Intelligence Committee decided to investigate foreign interference in the 2016 election, Nunes — who was a member of the Trump transition himself — has been coordinating with the White House. He was caught red-handed last summer, making an utter fool of himself by holding a press conference in which he pretended to be delivering recently discovered information to the president, which was later revealed to have been provided to him by the White House in a midnight caper worthy of Inspector Clouseau.

Nunes then claimed to “recuse” himself from the probe, but although Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, is now supposed to be in charge, Nunes remains involved up to his eyeballs, often working in secret and without consultation with the committee. It’s extremely likely that he’s still coordinating with the White House and sharing information about the case.

That is, unfortunately, not illegal. As Wray told the committee, the president has the right to classify and declassify any information the government produces and there’s nothing that says members of Congress cannot provide him with whatever sensitive evidence they turn up that implicates him. Nobody ever expected members of a congressional oversight committee, even those of the president’s party, to be so servile that they would willingly give up their own prerogatives in order to protect a president suspected of conspiring with a foreign government.

Trump was advised by White House counsel Don McGahn at the beginning of his term that the president “cannot have a conflict of interest,” which he has repeated on a loop whenever he’s asked about his myriad financial and business conflicts. Perhaps Trump believes he similarly “cannot have a conflict of interest” in terms of his legal exposure in the Russia investigation. McGahn should know better. This is the sort of assumption that got Nixon into trouble.

Natasha Bertrand at the Atlantic spoke with several experts on this subject, all of whom were troubled by the unprecedented situation. On the question of whether or not Trump should recuse himself from making decisions about classified documents pertaining to the investigation, some said he absolutely should, while others pointed to difficulties regarding the president’s duties as commander in chief. David Kris, a FISA expert who served as assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, told Bertrand that Trump should be careful:

Nixon showed us that level of intimacy between politics and law enforcement with his infamous “enemies list,” which outlined ways to “use the available federal machinery,” like IRS audits, “to screw our political enemies.” Since then, every presidential administration, from Carter to Trump, has adopted policies limiting interactions between the White House and the Justice Department to protect the independence of prosecutorial decisions.

Trump doesn’t understand that and he never will. As recently as last month he was telling the press that he likes to “fight back” and they “call it obstruction” — pretty much admitting that he has tried to obstruct justice. He is the last person on earth who would recuse himself from an investigation into his own conduct. He would consider that to be just plain stupid. If he can declassify sensitive information that makes him look good and keep secret that which could incriminate him, he’ll do it without a second thought. He will push the boundaries as far as possible and they are very far indeed.

But the problem goes far beyond Donald Trump. The classification system in the Unites States is a mess. It’s been more than 20 years since the Moynihan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, chaired by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was released, showing that over-classification actually harms national security by making it more difficult to accurately assess threats and share information. The Brennan Center offered an updated study showing the same thing in 2011.

If we manage to get through the Trump years in one piece, perhaps one of the salutary effects of his blatant abuse of power will finally be a serious attempt to revise these rules. This is no way to run a modern democracy. Look where it’s gotten us.

A bullet in the head
by Tom Sullivan

In this week’s post-school-shooting clutter, this tweet from Full Frontal correspondent Ashley Nicole Black stood out:

Teens have been eating tide pods for like a month and legislators in multiple states have already introduced bills designed to make it harder for teens to get tide pods.— Ashley Nicole Black (@ashleyn1cole) February 15, 2018

So in response to a threat to health and safety, some political leaders are prepared to act quickly. Like they did in Australia in three and a half months:

On this side of the Pacific, the president says we need to “tackle the difficult issue of mental health.” Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) president Philip Van Cleave agrees. The problem with mass shootings, he tells John Oliver in the video, is people.

The Washington Post’s Max Boot agrees too. He reminds readers that just last year, Congress passed and the president signed a bill revoking an Obama-era regulation that would have made it harder for people with a mental illness to obtain firearms.

Boot writes, “No other country experiences this kind of terror on an ongoing basis — save places such as Afghanistan and Syria that are actually at war.”

Boot continues:

It simply beggars the imagination that Republicans, in thrall to the National Rifle Association, continue to insist there is no relationship between gun ownership and gun crime. Instead of effective regulations, they offer “thoughts and prayers,” as if mass shootings were acts of God like earthquakes and hurricanes that mere mortals are powerless to prevent. This was Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R.-La.) after the Las Vegas shooting: “I just hate to see this issue politicized. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, but they do in this world, and what happened in Las Vegas was terrible. But we can’t legislate away every problem in the world.”

Nor do we. Instead, we put in place regulations to help protect consumers, communities and the environment, rules that make capitalist acts between consenting adults predictable and less risky. We pass laws to make food and cars safer. We hire police to enforce traffic laws, not believing law enforcement can stop every speeder, but because their presence and the threat of punishment tamps down speeding. We just refuse to do the same with firearms.

Boot writes:

Politicians, primarily but not exclusively Republicans, are turning their idolatrous worship of the Second Amendment into a suicide pact. If the United States had been under assault from Muslim terrorists, they would have acted long ago. But apparently homegrown mass murderers are of scant concern even though they kill far more people than terrorists do.

To casual observers, especially to those in more civilized countries, a societal suicide pact might fall under the colloquial definition of crazy.

And yet mutual suicide appears to be Kimber Firearms’ recommendation for a romantic way to celebrate Valentine’s Day, his and hers hammers thoughtfully pre-cocked for a light, final trigger pull.

The retweet from the @NRA has strangely disappeared. Here is the original retweet.#GunControl #Florida #parklandshooting #Parkland #stonemanshooting pic.twitter.com/W0oybTO3DC— Mark (@mark_melbin) February 14, 2018

The NRA pulled down its retweet after the Florida school shooting on Wednesday. Kimber Firearms did as well.

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

Pro-gun, anti-immigrant Americans are our rulers. Get used to it.

by digby

For all the talk about gun control today, by Monday nobody will be talking about it. Immigration reform stalled today in the Senate when only 34 Republicans voted for Trump’s atrocity of a bill and they couldn’t get 60 votes to break the filibuster of the bipartisan legislation Trump promised to veto anyway.

Mitch McConnell blamed the Democrats for not really wanting reform (even though 47 of them voted for the bipartisan compromise) and said it’s time to move on. I don’t know what will happen from here. Maybe the courts will buy some time. Maybe Trump will decide not to be a total asshole for one and will fulfill his promise to protect “the kids.” All he has to do is extend DACA. It’s that simple.

Anyway, here we are. No gun control. Again. No immigration fix. Again.

Ron Brownstein explains why:

The likelihood that Congress will ultimately stalemate on both issues—refusing to adopt any new restrictions on access to firearms and deadlocking over extending new protections to young people brought to the country illegally by their parents—is particularly striking given the overwhelming public support in polls for at least some action on both fronts. In polling last summer by the non-partisan Pew Research Center, 84 percent of adults said they supported background checks for all gun purchases (65 percent strongly), and 68 percent said they supported a ban on assault weapons (53 percent strongly).

Depending on the poll, up to about 85 percent of Americans say they support legal status for the so-called Dreamers, who have received temporary protection from deportation under former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And while three-fifths of Americans in an ABC/Washington Post poll last fall said they opposed building President Trump’s border wall with Mexico, nonetheless about two-thirds of respondents said they would accept a legislative deal coupling protection for the Dreamers with increased border-security spending. Support for such a deal was even greater among Republican-leaning voters than Democratic-leaning ones. Despite this public support for legislation on both issues, it appears likely that Congress will pass nothing.

The predictability of deadlock testifies to the power of the intertwined cultural, demographic, and economic divide now separating urban and non-urban America—and how closely the nation’s partisan split follows the contours of that larger separation. It also shows how population-distribution patterns that concentrate Democratic strength in the House of Representatives into the largest urban areas, combined with the small-state bias that accords each state two senators regardless of population, elevate rural over urban priorities in these polarized debates.

Republicans represent what I’ve called a “coalition of restoration” centered on the older, blue-collar, evangelical, and non-urban whites most uneasy about the tectonic cultural and economic forces reshaping American life. That means that compared with the nation overall, most Republicans are representing areas with more guns and fewer immigrants.

Forty-two of the 51 Republican senators, for instance, were elected from one of the 30 states where immigrants represent the smallest share of the population, according to Census data. Republicans hold just nine of the 40 Senate seats in the 20 states with the highest immigrant-population share. Likewise, 26 of the states Trump carried in 2016 were among the 30 lowest in immigration-population share; he won just four of the top 20.

Continuing the pattern, over four-fifths of House Republicans represent districts where the immigrant share of the population lags the national average. But, conversely, gun ownership is much more common among Republican-leaning constituencies and communities than in the nation overall. Pew last summer found that only about two-fifths of all Americans lived in a household with a gun in it; that result was similar to long-term Gallup polling and represents a measurable decline from the 1980s and early 1990s, when about half of households had a gun.

But at the same time, Pew found that nearly three-fifths of Republicans (and those who leaned toward the party) either owned a gun (44 percent) or lived in a house where someone else did (12 percent). Gun ownership was also higher than the national average among adults without a college degree, and especially elevated among those who lived in rural areas—two critical constituencies for the modern GOP. In the South, Midwest, and West—basically, everywhere outside the strongly Democratic-leaning Northeast—the percentage of rural households with a gun spiked to around 60 percent.

Across all of these measures, Democrats present an inverse picture. They now rely on a heavily urbanized “coalition of transformation”: minorities, Millennials, and college-educated and secular white voters, especially women. With that profile, the party is rooted in the places most touched by immigration. Sixteen of the 20 states Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 ranked in the top 20 for the highest share of immigrants. Thirty-one of the 49 Democratic senators, or nearly two-thirds, represent those 20 states. Nearly an identical percentage of House Democrats hold seats with a higher share of immigrants than the national average.

The gun divide is equally sharp. Just one-fifth of Democrats (and Democratic-leaners) said they owned a gun in the Pew survey; only another one in 10 lived in a house where someone else did. That’s roughly half the percentage among Republicans.

Only about one in four adults in two key Democratic constituencies, African Americans and those with a college degree or more, said they owned a gun. That number was about one in five for people living in cities and less than one in six for Hispanics—two other important constituency groups to Democrats.

Economic contrasts reinforce these cultural and demographic divides. Republicans dominate the states with higher per capita carbon emissions because they tend to be the places engaged in energy production and manufacturing; Democrats win most of the states with lower emissions because they tend to be the places, primarily along the coasts, that have transitioned furthest into the post-industrial information economy. Clinton, similarly, won 17 of the 20 states with the highest share of college graduates, while Trump won 27 of the 30 with the fewest.

The trends all track together. The interior states with few immigrants and more gun owners also tend to be more blue-collar, and more connected to manufacturing and the resource-extraction economy. The largely coastal states with many immigrants and fewer gun owners also tend to be more white-collar, and more connected to global markets and the digital economy. The contrasts are even more pointed when viewed at the metro and non-metro level within states.

With this hardening political divide, the few swing votes in Congress typically belong to the legislators caught, in effect, behind enemy lines: the Democrats representing mostly white, non-urban constituencies and the Republicans in diverse metro areas. That explains why West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin was a leader in efforts to forge a bipartisan consensus on background checks for all gun sales after the Sandy Hook school shooting. It also explains why Arizona Republicans Jeff Flake and John McCain have been central to efforts to reach a bipartisan compromise on immigration in the past several weeks.

And yet in recent years, as the conflict between the coalitions of restoration and transformation has grown more intense, even most of those outlier legislators have been pulled toward their party’s side in this fight. In 2013, every Senate Democrat, even those from red states, voted for an immigration-reform bill that included a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants. And on Thursday, most of the Senate Republicans from the 20 high-immigrant states—including Georgia’s David Perdue, Florida’s Marco Rubio, Nevada’s Dean Heller, and Texas’s Ted Cruz and John Cornyn—opposed the bipartisan compromise on immigration amid intense resistance to the plan from Trump and many conservative media voices.

On guns, the general pattern over the past 15 years has been that gun-control opponents have succeeded somewhat more than gun-control advocates in pressuring the legislators behind enemy lines to cross over. When Congress last year voted to overturn an Obama regulation making it tougher for people with mental illness to obtain guns through the national background-check system, virtually all of the House Republicans from metropolitan areas sided with gun-control opponents to back the repeal. (That included many of the Republicans from blue-state metro areas who top the Democratic target list in 2018, such as Steve Knight and Mimi Walters near Los Angeles, Barbara Comstock in Northern Virginia, Leonard Lance in New Jersey, Carlos Curbelo in Miami, and Ryan Costello and Brian Fitzpatrick outside of Philadelphia.) And while few House Democrats crossed party lines to support the repeal, it did win backing from five Senate Democrats facing reelection this year in states Trump carried (including Manchin).

The structure of congressional representation in both the House and Senate tilts the scales in these arguments toward rural interests, even as population growth tilts more emphatically toward urban centers. If you assigned half of every state’s population to each senator, the supporters of the 2013 background-check bill represented 194 million people, while the opponents, who were centered on sparsely populated Plains and Mountain states, represented only 118 million, according to my calculation at the time. But, using a filibuster, the opponents were able to block action. (The proposal would have faced uncertain prospects anyway in the House, which then, as now, was controlled by Republicans mostly representing non-urban areas.)

These Trump voters trump everything. They rule us.

The United States is not an actual representative democracy.It wasn’t designed to be. It’s a nation in which rural white men and the wealthy decide for everyone else. The rest of us get what they deign to give us. Same as it ever was.

Jeez Louise

by digby

The Washington Post’s Helaine Olen addresses Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s wife Louise Litton’s pathetic excuses for behaving like the rich spoiled trophy wife she is and notes some data that sheds light on why these people are so awful:

Not all rich people are like this, of course. Some are decent people who care and other are pragmatic realists and understand that it’s in everyone’s best interest for there to be a strong middle class and a generous safety net which means that wealth must be fairly redistributed through taxation. But they aren’t numerous.

I recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons the European democracies have a stronger safety net is because they draw their politicians from a wider variety of jobs — teachers, union workers etc instead of so many from the legal profession and big business. That might make a difference. It will be interesting to see if all this grassroots energy that’s getting Democrats to run for offices throughout government will result in a bit more class diversity in our politics. It can only help.

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The disabled aren’t exempt from their cruelty

Apparently there are some shyster lawyers out there who game this system which can be dealt with by other means. But the shopping mall money has been pushing to get these regulations changed so that they can evade the necessity to accommodate the disabled.

The GOP House passed it today with the help of 12 Democrats.

This congress is basically a full blown spending spree for wealthy political donors. They worked and waited for years and now they have a super-rich president and a compliant GOP congress and they’re getting their reward all in one go.

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Sen Cotton on the Rounds-King Commonsense Coalition bipartisan immigration bill: “If the Republicans have simply acquiesced to the Democrats’ position, it’s a Democratic bill, calling it bipartisan doesn’t make it so.”

Actually having many co-sponsors from both parties and Independents is the very definition of bipartisan. He seems to think that unless a bill is passed by a majority of Republicans it isn’t. He is wrong. In fact, historically speaking, this used to happen all the time.

But he’s not the only one having a total meltdown over this. Look at what your taxpayer dollars are paying for today coming from the Department of Homeland Security:

The Schumer-Rounds-Collins proposal destroys the ability of the men and women from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to remove millions of illegal aliens. It would be the end of immigration enforcement in America and only serve to draw millions more illegal aliens with no way to remove them.  By halting immigration enforcement for all aliens who will arrive before June 2018, it ignores the lessons of 9/11 and significantly increases the risk of crime and terrorism. 

It is an egregious violation of the four compromise pillars laid out by the President’s immigration reform framework. Instead of helping to secure the border as the President has repeatedly asked Congress to do, it would do the exact opposite and make our border far more open and porous. It would ensure a massive wave of new illegal immigration by exacerbating the pull factors caused by legal loopholes.  By keeping chain migration intact, the amendment would expand the total legalized population to potentially ten million new legal aliens – simultaneously leading to undercutting the wages of American workers, threatening public safety and undermining national security. 

The changes proposed by Senators Schumer-Rounds-Collins would effectively make the United States a Sanctuary Nation where ignoring the rule of law is encouraged.

I sure hope nobody put this in a text message to his girlfriend or somebody might think there was a political bias at the Department of Homeland Security.

It continues in equally heated language.

One more time: shut down the pump

by digby

My own contribution to the horrific mass shooting rituals we all endure is this post, which I’ve sadly reprised more times than I can count:

Shut down the pump: a little parable for our time


Here is an interesting story for you to read today:

British doctor John Snow couldn’t convince other doctors and scientists that cholera, a deadly disease, was spread when people drank contaminated water until a mother washed her baby’s diaper in a town well in 1854 and touched off an epidemic that killed 616 people.
[…]
Dr. Snow believed sewage dumped into the river or into cesspools near town wells could contaminate the water supply, leading to a rapid spread of disease.

In August of 1854 Soho, a suburb of London, was hit hard by a terrible outbreak of cholera. Dr. Snows himself lived near Soho, and immediately went to work to prove his theory that contaminated water was the cause of the outbreak.

“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days,” Dr. Snow wrote “As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption (sic) of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”

Dr. Snow worked around the clock to track down information from hospital and public records on when the outbreak began and whether the victims drank water from the Broad Street pump. Snow suspected that those who lived or worked near the pump were the most likely to use the pump and thus, contract cholera. His pioneering medical research paid off. By using a geographical grid to chart deaths from the outbreak and investigating each case to determine access to the pump water, Snow developed what he considered positive proof the pump was the source of the epidemic… Snow was able to prove that the cholera was not a problem in Soho except among people who were in the habit of drinking water from the Broad Street pump. He also studied samples of water from the pump and found white flecks floating in it, which he believed were the source of contamination.

On 7 September 1854, Snow took his research to the town officials and convinced them to take the handle off the pump, making it impossible to draw water. The officials were reluctant to believe him, but took the handle off as a trial only to find the outbreak of cholera almost immediately trickled to a stop. Little by little, people who had left their homes and businesses in the Broad Street area out of fear of getting cholera began to return.

It took many more years before it was widely accepted that cholera came from the water. (In fact, it took a priest trying to prove that it was God’s will to finally do it!)


But here’s the relevant takeaway: they didn’t need to cure the disease to end the epidemic. What ended it was shutting down the pump.


Here’s another story for you to think about today:

From 1984 to 1996, multiple killings aroused public concern. The 1984 Milperra massacre was a major incident in a series of conflicts between various ‘outlaw motorcycle gangs’. In 1987, the Hoddle Street massacre and the Queen Street massacre took place in Melbourne. In response, several states required the registration of all guns, and restricted the availability of self-loading rifles and shotguns. In the Strathfield massacre in New South Wales, 1991, two were killed with a knife, and five more with a firearm. Tasmania passed a law in 1991 for firearm purchasers to obtain a licence, though enforcement was light. Firearm laws in Tasmania and Queensland remained relatively relaxed for longarms. In 1995, Tasmania had the second lowest rate of homicides per head of population.

The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 transformed gun control legislation in Australia. Thirty five people were killed and 21 wounded when a man with a history of violent and erratic behaviour beginning in early childhood opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two military style semi-automatic rifles. Six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, this mass killing at the notorious former convict prison at Port Arthur horrified the Australian public and had powerful political consequences.
The Port Arthur perpetrator said he bought his firearms from a gun dealer without holding the required firearms licence.

Prime Minister John Howard, then newly elected, immediately took the gun law proposals developed from the report of the 1988 National Committee on Violence and forced the states to adopt them under a National Firearms Agreement. This was necessary because the Australian Constitution does not give the Commonwealth power to enact gun laws. The proposals included a ban on all semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and a tightly restrictive system of licensing and ownership controls.

Some discussion of measures to allow owners to undertake modifications to reduce the capacity of magazine-fed shotguns (“crimping”) occurred, but the government refused to permit this.

Surveys showed up to 85% of Australians supported gun control,but some farmers and sporting shooters strongly opposed the new laws.

This did not solve the problem of mental illness or end the primitive capacity of human beings to commit murder and mayhem. Those are huge problems that their society, like all societies, is still grappling with every day. But it did end the epidemic of mass shootings. They have not had even one since then. 


The lesson is this: End the epidemic and then we can — and must — talk about root causes, extremist ideology, mental health facilities and our violent culture. But first things first — shut down the damned pump.

Kushner’s crushing debt is a security risk

The Gun Debate Paradox 


By Spocko 


Twenty four hours after every mass shooting the media asks, “What can we do?”  Now they also ask, “Why has nothing been done to fix the problem yet?”

The coverage timeline will include calls to the NRA, who will decline to comment.  Experts will discuss legislative efforts for change that are widely supported by the public, such as universal background checks. The media will wonder why, with so much support, gun control legislation failed. The media might also point out that at the state level legislation has expanded the availability of  guns in more places.  This is what The Trace editors call the paradox of the gun debate.

“While widespread public support exists for many gun regulations and policies — including bump stocks—
pro-gun advocates are significantly more active than their counterparts when it comes to engaging politicians and government agencies.”

For people who want to limit the proliferation of guns, the failure of legislation following mass shootings is discouraging.  But for the men who want more people with guns in more places, a mass shooting triggers renewed vigor to fight gun-control legislation and pass laws making it easier to bring guns into more places.

 

 Trace has done some great work explaining how the NRA marketing team and their activist base does it.  For example, when the ATF was looking at reclassifying bump stocks as machine guns under federal law, the NRA base mobilized  The ATF got 36,000 comments, 85 percent of commenters were opposed to the regulation of bump stocks. And these weren’t form letters from Russian bots either.

In addition to the online work, the guns everywhere people made sure to have plenty of speakers lined up to testify at state legislation committees opposing any bump stock ban. Three months later and bills to ban bump stocks are being shot down. House panel votes against bill to ban bump stocks in Virginia

So while one part of the NRA says, “We would be okay with some bump stock rules.” –the rest of the members follow the script they have been following after Sandy Hook which is:

1) Buy more guns
2) Oppose any laws that would regulate guns
3) Push legislators to pass laws that enable more people to carry guns in more places.
4) Buy more guns

I use the phrase pro-gun men on purpose.  While researching why past state gun control legislation had failed, but “gun rights” legislation had passed, I came across an earlier piece that I found fascinating. It referenced a  study published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly by  Kristin Goss, a researcher at Duke University.

Goss analyzed the results of Pew Research Center surveys administered in the six months following the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. She found that pro-gun men were significantly more likely to engage in political activism than any other group, dwarfing the efforts of individuals in favor of increased regulation, regardless of gender.

Just how active are the pro-gun advocates? See the chart below.

What One Study Tells Us About How Pro-Gun Men React to Mass Shootings by Elizabeth Haq

The NRA is pushing the idea that nothing that can be done legislatively about guns, except making it easier to get more of them into the hands of more people. At the top of the list now will be arming teachers and churchgoers.

In the next 24-48 hours the media will be writing think pieces wondering why these killings continue. Meanwhile the NRA will have people calling their state legislators offices, and testifying in committees and pushing bills making more guns available in more places.

Just because previous legislative efforts on gun control have failed, does not mean all future efforts will. It is possible to learn from these failures. The NRA wants people fighting their guns everywhere agenda to be discouraged. Don’t be.

Next time: It’s time to make the gun lobby pay for the mass death and injuries their gun proliferation legislation has made possible.