Month: May 2022

We’ve had at least 11 mass shootings since Uvalde

Can you believe this?

After a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers last week, many politicians, public figures and gun-control advocates said the U.S. government should ensure mass shootings could not happen again.

But mass shootings have already happened again — and again. At least 14 mass shootings have taken place across the United States since Tuesday, from California to Arizona to Tennessee.

This Memorial Day weekend alone — spanning Saturday, Sunday and the federal holiday on Monday — there have been at least 11 mass shootings.

These incidents, gleaned from local news reports and police statements, meet the threshold for mass shootings as defined by the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research organization.

GVA defines a mass shooting as one in which “four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.” Several of those shootings occurred at parties, and one at a Memorial Day event.

At least seven people have been killed and 49 injured in the mass shootings over the holiday weekend, according to GVA and local news sources. Since the Uvalde shooting last Tuesday, at least10 people have been killed and 61 injured in mass shootings.

Brian Stelter, chief media correspondent and news anchor at CNN, interrupted a broadcast Sunday about the response to the mass shooting in Uvalde to tell viewers about another — in Tennessee.

“Mass killings like Buffalo and Uvalde become national news, but many mass shootings do not. They just end up being local stories,” Stelter said, in a clip that has been viewed over 334,000 times on Twitter.

On Saturday evening, six teenagers were injured by gunfire in Chattanooga, Tenn., in what Mayor Tim Kelly said was probably “an altercation between other teenagers.”

The victims, who were between the ages of 13 and 15, were transported to a hospital, and two had life-threatening injuries, according to the Chattanooga Police Department.

Kelly said he was “heartbroken” for the families of the victims and “angry” about political inaction on gun laws during a news conference following the shooting.

The Chattanooga shooting was one of at least five mass shootings that took place on Saturday alone, according to GVA.

We live with this as if it’s just the way it is. It’s a bloodbath — and it’s 100% because of the American gun culture. It’s sick.

Mehdi Hassan

FYI 🤦🏽‍♂️https://t.co/uSDl2C0Nti

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 30, 2022

Truth …

A Bizarro World Republican organizes election vigilantes

Right wing lawyer Cleta Mitchell has escaped the scrutiny and humiliation of Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell but she shouldn’t have. She was right in the middle of everything. And she still is:

In a hotel conference center outside Harrisburg, Pa., Cleta Mitchell, one of the key figures in a failed scheme to overturn Donald J. Trump’s defeat, was leading a seminar on “election integrity.”

“We are taking the lessons we learned in 2020 and we are going forward to make sure they never happen again,” Ms. Mitchell told the crowd of about 150 activists-in-training.

She would be “putting you to work,” she told them.

In the days after the 2020 election, Ms. Mitchell was among a cadre of Republican lawyers who frantically compiled unsubstantiated accusations, debunked claims and an array of confusing and inconclusive eyewitness reports to build the case that the election was marred by fraud. Courts rejected the cases and election officials were unconvinced, thwarting a stunning assault on the transfer of power.

Now Ms. Mitchell is prepping for the next election. Working with a well-funded network of organizations on the right, including the Republican National Committee, she is recruiting election conspiracists into an organized cavalry of activists monitoring elections.

In seminars around the country, Ms. Mitchell is marshaling volunteers to stake out election offices, file information requests, monitor voting, work at polling places and keep detailed records of their work. She has tapped into a network of grass-root groups that promote misinformation and espouse wild theories about the 2020 election, including the fiction that President Biden’s victory could still be decertified and Mr. Trump reinstated.

One concern is the group’s intent to research the backgrounds of local and state officials to determine whether each is a “friend or foe” of the movement. Many officials already feel under attack by those who falsely contend that the 2020 election was stolen.

An extensive review of Ms. Mitchell’s effort, including documents and social media posts, interviews and attendance at the Harrisburg seminar, reveals a loose network of influential groups and fringe figures. They include election deniers as well as mainstream organizations such as the Heritage Foundation’s political affiliate, Tea Party Patriots and the R.N.C., which has participated in Ms. Mitchell’s seminars. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, is a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute, a right-wing think tank with close ties and financial backing from Mr. Trump’s political operation.

Ms. Mitchell says she is creating “a volunteer army of citizens” who can counter what she describes as Democratic bias in election offices.

“We’re going to be watching. We’re going to take back our elections,” she said in an April interview with John Fredericks, a conservative radio host. “The only way they win is to cheat,” she added.

Can you believe the chutzpah?

The good news is that as long as Republicans win elections there won’t be a problem. It’s only when they lose that our country will be under assault. So that’s good.

Guy at Trump rally in WY today says he thinks Liz Cheney will be defeated. “If not, we’ll know that the system’s rigged.” pic.twitter.com/RQ1VHZOORm

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 28, 2022

Lest you think this is some fringe movement by loonies like Sidney Powell. Note that the RNC and the Heritage Foundation is involved.

Paul Krugman on the economy

I’m off giving various talks in Europe, and doing some homework. It seems to me that there’s a widespread (among wonks) narrative here that doesn’t actually look right, as suggested by this chart from Eurostat

The narrative is that inflation in the US and the euro area are quite different. The US is overheated, with additional inflation from supply chain+Ukraine. Europe, the story goes, is all supply chain etc, bc it didn’t have as much fiscal stimulus

But European unemployment — which is structurally higher than US — is below pre pandemic. Core inflation was 1 percent in the last month.

So actually the European story looks much more similar to the US than I thought. In both cases no reason to panic: no sign of inflation getting embedded, so what’s needed is cooling-off, not a punishing recession. But it’s really more or less the same story.

Originally tweeted by Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) on May 30, 2022.

Here’s Krugman’s latest on this subject:

…[T]he economy is probably cooling off as the Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening gains traction. And the news flow on inflation has changed character. For most of the past year, just about every report on prices surprised on the upside. These days many, though not all, reports are surprising on the downside. Measures that attempt to gauge underlying inflation, like the “core” consumption deflator released this morning, are mostly, although not all, drifting down.

Furthermore, there is no hint in the data that inflation is becoming entrenched. Consumers expect a lot of inflation in the short run, but much less in the medium term:

Workers expect to see raises of only about 3 percent over the next year, barely above historical norms:

Markets have noticed the relatively good news on inflation. We can more or less directly calculate market expectations of inflation by looking at the “breakeven rate,” the interest rate spread between ordinary United States bonds and bonds that are indexed to protect investors against inflation. And breakeven rates have come down a lot over the past month or two:

Officials at the Federal Reserve have also noticed. They’re a long way from declaring victory and going home, however: Interest rate hikes are still very much on the agenda. But some officials are talking about a possible pause a few months from now, depending on what the data are showing at that point.

Monetary hawks are enraged. A few days ago the billionaire investor Bill Ackman attracted a lot of attention with a tweet declaring that markets are crashing because investors don’t believe the Fed will do its job:

While we don’t know for sure whether inflation itself is getting under control or not, Ackman’s claim that “inflation expectations are getting out of control” was clearly false given both market and survey data. But many others are echoing his furious attack on the central bank, as you can see just by searching “Fed behind the curve.”

So what’s going on here? To understand current inflation discourse, you need to be aware that there is a substantial group of economic commentators who always believe the Fed is printing too much money. They believed this during the depths of the Great Depression; they believed this in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.

At root, I’d argue, monetary permahawks are motivated by politics — by the fear that flexible use of the printing press will give too much room for big government, and also perhaps by a sense that printing money expropriates their hard-earned wealth. And hey, motivated reasoning can happen to anyone; it has certainly happened to me, although I try to fight it and admit it when I was wrong.

So how have the permahawks reacted to the inflationary surge of 2021-22? With stern expressions of concern, of course. But you didn’t have to do much reading between the lines to detect a fair bit of underlying glee that this time their proclamations of doom were finally coming true.

And some of them are clearly furious at any hint that the extent of the doom might be limited. They’ve spent years, even decades, preparing to celebrate — I mean deplore — stagflation. And though, as I wrote last week, we may well be in for a brief period of high(ish) inflation and rising unemployment, this probably won’t be the stagflation they were looking for.

So let me make a conditional prediction. If inflation does come down, as, for example, the Congressional Budget Office expects, the volume of dire warnings about runaway inflation will actually increase, at least for a while. The good news is that this wave of doomsaying will probably be, um, transitory.

If Krugman is right, this will probably not help the Democrats much in November. In my experience it usually takes at least a year for the general understanding of economic conditions to change. And right now, people think we are in a hellscape of unprecedented proportions, despite the incredibly low unemployment and wage gains. Inflation has people freaked out. It’s been many decades since we experienced anything like it and it’s immediate and easy to see in your everyday life. It will take a while even after it goes down for people to feel it.

I hope he’s right about all this. The feeling that life is hurtling out of control is exactly the environment that will most easily usher in a new era of authoritarianism. People reach for simple solutions when they feel that everything is chaotic and unpredictable and we have some authoritarians champing at the bit to give them some.

It always was

Cynthia Bir shows Scott Pelley the difference between bullets shot from an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun using specially-formulated gelatin targets that were designed to represent soft tissue in the human body. https://t.co/WDkV1dxyME pic.twitter.com/a14aHSdGlH

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) May 29, 2022

James Fallows wrote a great history of the AR-15 way back in 1981. You should read the whole thing. It puts the lie to this notion that it’s not a weapon used for offensive purposes:

Between 1965 and 1969, more than a million American soldiers served in combat in Vietnam. One can argue that they should never have been sent there, but no one would argue that, once committed to battle, they should have been given inferior equipment. Yet that is what happened. During those years, in which more than 40,000 American soldiers were killed by hostile fire and more than 250,000 wounded, American troops in Vietnam were equipped with a rifle that their superiors knew would fail when put to the test.

The rifle was known as the M-16; it was a replacement for the M-14, a heavier weapon, which was the previous standard. The M-16, was a brilliant technical success in its early models, but was perverted by bureaucratic pressures into a weapon that betrayed its users in Vietnam. By the middle of 1967, when the M-16 had been in combat for about a year and a half, a sufficient number of soldiers had written to their parents about their unreliable equipment and a sufficient number of parents had sent those letters to their congressmen to attract the attention of the House Armed Services Committee, which formed an investigating subcommittee. The subcommittee, headed by Representative Ichord, a Democrat from Missouri, conducted a lengthy inquiry into the origins of the M-16 problem. Much of the credit for the hearings belongs to the committee’s counsel, Earl J. Morgan. The hearing record, nearly 600 pages long, is a forgotten document, which received modest press attention at the time and calls up only dim recollections now. Yet it is a pure portrayal of the banality of evil.

Nearly a century before American troops were ordered into Vietnam, weapons designers had made a discovery in the science of “wound ballistics.” The discovery was that a small, fast-traveling bullet often did a great deal more damage than a larger round when fired into human or (for the experiments) animal flesh. A large artillery round might pass straight through a human body, but a small bullet could act like a gouge. During the early stages of the congressional hearing, Ichord asked Eugene Stoner, the designer of the original version of the M-16, to explain the apparent paradox of a small bullet’s destructive power. The answer emerged in the following grisly exchange.

ichord: One army boy told me that he had shot a Vietcong near the eye with an M-14 [which uses a substantially heavier bullet] and the bullet did not make too large a hole on exit, but he shot a Vietcong under similar circumstances in the same place with an M-16 and his whole head was reduced to pulp. This would not appear to make sense. You have greater velocity but the bullet is lighter.

stoner: There is the advantage that a small or light bullet has over a heavy one when it comes to wound ballistics. … What it amounts to is the fact that bullets are stabilized to fly through the air, and not through water, or a body, which is approximately the same density as the water. And they are stable as long as they are in the air. When they hit something, they immediately go unstable. … If you are talking about .30-caliber [like a bullet used in the M-14], this might remain stable through a human body. … While a little bullet, being it has a low mass, it senses an instability situation faster and reacts much faster. … this is what makes a little bullet pay off so much in wound ballistics.

The farsighted Willard G. Wyman, the commanding general of the Continental Army Command, had asked Stoner to design a rifle precisely to take advantage of the “payoff” of smaller bullets. The AR-15, the precursor of the M-16, used .22-calliber bullets instead of the .30-caliber that had long been standard for the Army. As early as 1928, an Army “Caliber Board” had conducted firing experiments in Aberdeen, Maryland, and had then recommended a move toward smaller ammunition, perhaps of the .27-caliber range; but the Army, for reasons that were partly technical but largely traditional, refused then and for the next thirty-five years to change from the .30-caliber bullet, which it chose to describe as “full-sized.”

A second discovery about weaponry lay behind the design of Eugene Stoner’s AR-15. In studies of combat units during World War II, S. L. A. Marshall found that nearly four fifths of combat soldiers never fired their weapons during battle. This finding prompted the Army to take a closer look at the weapons the soldiers used. It turned out that one group of soldiers was an exception to this rule: those who carried the Browning automatic rifles (BARs). These were essentially portable machine guns, which could spray out bursts of continuous fire. (The rifles that the other soldiers carried, M-1s, were “semiautomatic,” requiring a separate trigger squeeze for each round.) Within a combat group, firing would begin with the BAR man and spread out from him. The nearer a soldier with an M-1 stood to the BAR man, the more likely he was to fire. The explanation most often suggested was that the infantryman carrying a normal rifle felt that his actions were ultimately futile. John Keegan said in The Face of Battle, “Infantrymen, however well-trained an well-armed, however resolute, however ready to kill, remain erratic agents of death. Unless centrally directed, they will choose, perhaps badly, their own targets, will open and cease fire individually, will be put off their aim by the enemy’s return of fire, will be distracted by the wounding of those near them, will yield to fear or excitement, will fire high, low, or wide.” The normal infantryman could not see the enemy clearly or have any sense of whether he had made a hit. The BAR man, by contrast, had the sense that he could dominate a certain area—“hose it down,” in the military slang—and destroy anyone who happens to be there.

[…]

At about the time the m-14 was adopted as the Army’s standard, Eugene Stoner was completing his work on the AR-15. Stoner was known as one of the great figures in the special calling of small-arms design. Like some of the other outstanding American rifle designers—including John Browning, inventor of the Browning automatic rifle, who had to sell his weapons to foreign governments after rejection by the American ordnance corps—Stoner had never seen his models win easy acceptance by the Army. He was working for the Armalite Corporation when he finished developing the AR-15.

The rifle combined several advantages. One was the lethal “payoff” that came with its .22-caliber bullets. The smaller, lighter ammunition meant that the rifle could be controlled on automatic fire by the average soldier, because its kick was so much less than the M-14’s. The rifle itself was also lighter than the M-14. These savings in weight meant that a soldier using the AR-15 could carry almost three times as many rounds as one with the M-14. This promised to eliminate one of the soldier’s fundamental problems in combat: running out of ammunition during a fire fight. The rifle had two other, technical advantages. One was the marvelous reliability of its moving parts, which could feed, fire, extract, and eject 600 or 700 cartridges a minute and practically never jam. The other was a manufacturing innovation that drastically cut the cost of the weapon. The parts were stamped out—not hand-machined, as in previous rifles—and they could be truly mass-produced. The stock was made of plastic, which further cut the cost, and to traditionalists, this was one more indication that the AR-15 was not a real weapon. They said that you couldn’t use a plastic rifle as a club. Stoner’s reply, in effect, was that with the AR-15’s reliability and destructive power you wouldn’t need to.

The AR-15 was tested in 1958 at three military bases. The reports were favorable, but there were reservations from the ordnance establishment about the propriety of using such small-caliber ammunition. To reconcile the differences in opinion, the Army commissioned an extensive series of tests at its Combat Developments Experimentation Command, known as CDEC, at Ford Ord, California. These tests ran from the fall of 1958 until the spring of 1959, and were designed not to follow the usual marksman’s pattern but to simulate the conditions of small squads in combat. In the tests, the AR-15 was matched against the M-14 and another lightweight rifle, made by Winchester. The results, released in May of 1959, included these findings:

a. With a total combat weight per man equivalent to that planned for riflemen armed with the M-14, a squad consisting of from 5-7 men armed with the [AR-15] would have better hit distribution and greater hit capability than the present eleven-man M-14 squad. …

b. By opinion poll, the experimentation troops favor the [AR-15] because of its demonstrated characteristics of lightness in weight, reliability, balance and grip, and freedom from recoil and climb on full automatic. …

h. The attributes demonstrated by the prototype weapons of the lightweight high-velocity category indicate an overall combat potential superior to that of the M-14. Such advantages include … lightness in weight of arms and ammunition, ease of handling, superior full automatic firing capability, accuracy of the Winchester and functional reliability of the Armalite [AR-15].

The report’s conclusion was that the Army should develop a lightweight rifle “with the reliability characteristics of the Armalite” to replace the M-14. “Concurrent with the adoption of a lightweight high-velocity rifle,” the report said, “serious consideration [should] be given to reduction in the size of the present squad,” in light of the increased firepower of the new weapons. The repeated references to the “reliability” of the AR-15 bear emphasis, in view of the weapon’s unreliability after it had been transformed into the M-16 and sent to war.

After the CDE tests, the Army admitted the theoretical “promise” of the lightweight system but rejected it as a practical proposition. Emphasizing the importance of having all rifles and machine guns use the same ammunition, the Army ordered full production of the .30-caliber M-14.

However, advocates of the AR-15 enlisted the support of a redoubtable gun enthusiast, General Curtis Lemay, then the Air Force’s Chief of Staff. Based on his interest, the Air Force conducted further tests and inspections and declared the AR-15 its “standard” model in January of 1962. The Air Force then took a step that later had enormous significance. On the advice of the Armalite Corporation, which owned the design for the rifle, and of Colt, which had the contract to manufacture it, the Air Force tested the ammunition that the Remington Arms Company had developed for the AR-15. After the tests, the Air Force declared the ammunition suitable for its purposes. In May of 1962, it ordered 8,500 rifles from Colt and 8.5 million rounds of ammunition from Remington…

Read the whole thing it’s fascinating.

NRA bamboozlers get a dose of their own

https://t.co/oKeV2Af0PU Heh Wayne, how is Maria Butina doing? pic.twitter.com/DyAEKDhuJ8

— BRT 🌻 (@BioRecTech) May 29, 2022

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

You can set your clock by the daily mass shooting

Step away from the computer for a couple of hours and there’s another mass shooting in the news. So many, in fact, that if you blink you’ll miss one. Or several. I did.

NPR:

According to the Gun Violence Archive, an independent organization that collects data from over 7,500 sources, eight people have been killed and another 45 injured in the five days following the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

A mass shooting, defined by the Gun Violence Archive, is an incident in which four or more individuals are shot and either injured or killed, excluding the gunman.

Wednesday, May 25

In Philadelphia, a man riding a mountain bike opened fire Wednesday night on a home where a young man and his date were preparing to leave for prom, CBS3 Philadelphia reported. Police said the gunman shot a 19-year-old man, a young woman – also 19 – and the young woman’s 34-year-old mother and 60-year-old man.

The boy was in critical condition and the other three victims were stable as of Thursday morning.

Friday, May 27

Six people were shot at a graduation party in Alabama early Thursday, The Anniston Police Department reported on Facebook. None of the injuries were life threatening. Over 150 people, as young as 14, were at the party at the time. Stray bullets struck nearby vehicles, the police reported, and several firearms were recovered at the scene.

That same day, ABC13 in Michigan reported a 40-year-old mother and her three children – ages 3, 4 and 6 – were shot killed about 50 miles north of Grand Rapids. The mother’s stepfather suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was in critical condition as of Saturday. A surviving daughter told ABC13 that the stepfather shot the children and then the mother.

Saturday, May 28

In Chattanooga, Tenn., six people were shot a block away from the Tennessee Aquarium downtown, Local 3 News and CNN reported. Two of the six victims suffered life-threatening injuries. The victims were in the teens and early 20s.

Police in Colorado Springs, Colo., are investigating a shooting in a bar parking lot that killed one man and wounded three women, KKTV11 News reported. Witnesses said the shots appear to have come from a moving vehicle.

ABC30 in California reported that three teenagers were wounded and one man killed in a shooting in Fresno Saturday night. The three teenagers expected to survive, but the man, in his 20s, died from his injuries.

Shots broke out at a house party in Malabar, Fla., Saturday night, striking four people between 15 and 18 years old, 1010 News reported.

Sunday, May 29

Fox32 in Illinois reported that five people remain in serious condition after they were shot in Chicago’s West Garfield Park. The victims range from 16 to 33 in age.

In Taft, Okla., a 26-year-old man is in custody in connection with a shooting at a crowded Memorial Day festival that left one 39-year-old woman dead and seven others wounded. The surviving victims range from 9 to 56 and are suffering from non-life-threatening injuries, Fox23 News reported.

Police in Detroit told WWJ News Radio that a group of three men and two women came under fire around 3:40 a.m. Two of the men who were struck are in stable condition, but the third is in critical condition, WWJ News Radio reported. The women weren’t shot, but received minor injuries from broken glass. (The Gun Violence Archive includes this incident on its list. NPR has reached out to the group to clarify its methodology in this case.)

The Merced Sun-Star in California reported Sunday morning that four people, two youths and two adults, were shot sometime after midnight Sunday. One of the victims was killed, one is in critical condition and two were treated for non-life-threatening injuries.

Bad takes are as common as mass shootings these days, and spit out like bullets from a 30-round magazine. Second Amendment absolutists and bad takes by the U.S. Supreme Court have helped land us here. The world looks on in horror at the gun-fetish madness gripping the United States.

Reading the NPR account above, it is hard not to wonder if in fact the Constitution is a suicide pact. Or at least the 2nd Amendment to it.

Found this interesting account of that cliché from a Columbia law professor from 2003. The suicide pact rhetoric, writes George P. Fletcher, “has far more frequently been invoked in the course of arguments for protecting constitutional rights – not arguments for sacrificing them to security concerns.” But for protecting whose rights and whose freedoms? Fletcher writes:

The Genesis and History of the “Suicide Pact” Slogan

Justice Robert Jackson was the first to use the phrase “suicide pact” – in his dissent in the 1949 case of Terminiello v. Chicago. His initial usage was also, to my knowledge, the first and only anti-civil liberties judicial usage of the maxim.

In Terminiello, the Supreme Court upheld the free speech rights of a right-wing hatemonger. In Jackson’s dissent, he suggested that the inflammatory speech was likely to produce a violent reaction from the mob outside. Jackson had just been a prosecutor in Nuremberg. And he was fearful that the kind of fascistic acts he had just prosecuted might become commonplace in the United States. He worried about an American version of the Weimar complex: If we do not crack down on Hitlerian types, he thought, our fate may be like that of Germany in 1933.

In the 1960’s Justice Arthur Goldberg revived the “suicide pact” maxim in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez and Aptheker v. Secretary of State, but for a very different purpose. Goldberg protected the rights of Communists to travel, and of wartime military deserters against loss of their citizenship, at the same time that he gave verbal deference to the tough-minded view that we would never commit national suicide. The result was pro-civil liberties, and the idea was that the initial Constitutional design was wise, and should be followed.

Even since then, the standard usage of the phrase has been to guard the judge’s flank against critics anxious about the stability of American democracy – not to kowtow to such critics by sacrificing liberty for security. The phrase is used to explain that Constitutional rights can be upheld without having security catastrophically suffer.

That last proposition is seriously in question. Especially with a Supreme Court that in Heller (2008) thumbed its nose at common understanding and common sense. The late Justice Warren Burger’s take was prescient:

The Burger quote continues, “The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.”

The NRA’s “twisted interpretation” has warped the court majority, twisted people’s minds, and maimed and killed uncounted thousands. We are all less secure as a byproduct.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com.

Murdoch will make sure of it

I’m looking forward to the January 6th Committee hearings and I have every expectation that they are going to be riveting and in some cases surprising. They have a lot of info that we haven’t seen. I assume they are going to put together a blockbuster presentation. But no matter what they come up with, it won’t be like the Watergate hearings, unfortunately.

Margaret Sullivan explains:

You’ll be hearing a lot about Watergate in the next several weeks, as the 50th anniversary of the infamous June 17, 1972, burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters approaches. There will be documentaries, cable-news debates, the finale of that Julia Roberts miniseries (“Gaslit”) based on the popular Watergate podcast (“Slow Burn”). I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at the Library of Congress on the anniversary itself — and you can certainly count on a few retrospectives in this very newspaper.

The scandal has great resonance at The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973 for its intrepid reporting and the courage it took to publish it. And it has particular meaning for me because, like many others of my generation, I was first drawn into journalism by the televised Senate hearings in 1973, and was enthralled by the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” based on the book by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Yet thinking about Watergate saddens me these days. The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of hisco-conspiratoraides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.

It’s not just our politics that have changed. It’s also our radically transformed media environment.

“The national newspapers mattered in a way that is unimaginable to us today, and even the regional newspapers were incredibly strong,” Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” told me last week. I have been immersed in his nearly 800-page history — a “remarkably rich narrative,” former Post executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. called it in a review — that sets out to retell the entire story.

Graff depicts Watergate not as a singular event but as the entire mind-set of the Nixon presidency — “a shaggy umbrella of a dozen distinct scandals,” as he told me. By the time the break-in captured the attention of the most Americans, they were essentially “walking into the second or third act of a play.”

Woodward and Bernstein were almost alone on the story for months. But eventually the leading newspapers of the nation started to cover the hell out of the burgeoning scandal and the percolating questions of what — and when — the president knew about the burglary plot.

Americans read this coverage in their local papers; many cities still had two or more dailies at that point. Later, they were riveted by the proceedings of the Senate Watergate Committee, whose hearings were aired live on the three big television networks during the summer of 1973. Graff reports that the average American household watched 30 hours of the hearings, which were also rebroadcast at night by PBS. (“The best thing that has happened to public television since ‘Sesame Street,’” one Los Angeles Times TV critic noted.)

Still,“we forget how close Nixon came to surviving Watergate,” Graff told me. “Even at the end of the hearings, there was no guarantee that Nixon was out of office.”

What changed that? The increasing public awareness of the president’s wrongdoing and the coverup. “The sheer accumulation of the lies,” he said, “at a time when the idea that a president could lie to America was unthinkable.”

Flash-forward to today. The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection will hold hearings beginning early next month, some of which will be televised during prime-time hours. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who is a prominent member, predicts the revelations will “blow the roof off the House” — offering evidence, he promises, of an organized coupattempt involving Trump, his closest allies and the supporters who attacked the Capitol as they tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

I’m willing to believe that the hearings will be dramatic. They might even change some people’s minds. But the amount of public attention they get will be minuscule compared with what happened when the folksy Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina presided over the Senate Watergate Committee.

Our media environment is far more fractured, and news organizations are far less trusted.

And in part, we can blame the rise of a right-wing media system. At its heart is Fox News, which was founded in 1996, nearly a quarter century after the break-in, with a purported mission to provide a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to the mainstream media. Of course, that message often manifested in relentless and damaging criticism of its news rivals. Meanwhile, Fox and company have served as a highly effective laundry service for Trump’s lies. With that network’s help, his tens of thousands of false or misleading claims have found fertile ground among his fervent supporters — oblivious to the skillful reporting elsewhere that has called out and debunked those lies.

As Graff sees it, the growth of right-wing media has enabled many Republican members of Congress to turn a blind eye to the malfeasance of Team Trump. Not so during the Watergate investigation; after all, it was Sen. Howard Baker, the Tennessee Republican, who posed the immortal question, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Even the stalwart conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona was among those who, at the end, managed to convince Nixon that he must resign.

(Actually, Howard Baker was pimping for Nixon when he asked that famous question. At that point there wasn’t any evidence that Nixon was in on the cover-up. The tapes proved him an ass and he had to change direction. I don’t think any of Trump’s would do that even if there was videotape of Trump meeting with the Proud Boys and giving them instructions to storm the capitol. But in those days there was still a tiny bit of shame about being a total hypocrite. That’s all gone now.)

“Republican members of Congress understood that they had a unique and important role as the legislative branch to hold the abuses of the executive branch in check,” Graff said. “That freedom of action was made possible because there was no right-wing media ecosystem.”

Not everything was good about the media world of the 1970s. It was almost entirely white and male, barely open to other views or voices. This was long before the democratizing effect of the Internet, which has elevated the ideas of people of color, women and other marginalized groups.

But it was a time when we had a news media that commanded the trust of the general public, a necessity in helping bring Nixon to justice. That, at least during his presidency, was never possible with Donald Trump.

As we remember Watergate, we ought to remember how very unlikely its righteous conclusion would be today.

Richard M. Nixon’s presidency would have survived.

Of course it would have. And it just proves how incredibly destructive the right wing propaganda machine really is. If you want to point to one thing that’s destroyed our politics more than any other, that would be it, in my view.

But let’s not forget that the fact Nixon was never held accountable for the crimes he committed opened the door to the total defiance of norms, traditions, rules and laws now practiced regularly by Republicans.

It’s the gun culture, stupid

Joel, 44, and Lynne, 43, in Austin, Texas, with their children and 80 per cent of their gun collection pic.twitter.com/9TNyG3pWTY

— Joey R Johnson 👨‍👨‍👦🏳️‍🌈 (@Johnson__joey) May 28, 2022

Former US army soldier Eric, 30, and his partner, Morgan, 22, in Lake Forest, California. pic.twitter.com/QzctSfYhYL

— Joey R Johnson 👨‍👨‍👦🏳️‍🌈 (@Johnson__joey) May 28, 2022

David, 25, lives in Kailua, Hawaii, and bought his first revolver after finishing high school. pic.twitter.com/6wC681TTmF

— Joey R Johnson 👨‍👨‍👦🏳️‍🌈 (@Johnson__joey) May 28, 2022

Kitija, 29, owns the biggest firing range in the Hawaiian Islands. She began hunting as a child. pic.twitter.com/rPnH81hDjH

— Joey R Johnson 👨‍👨‍👦🏳️‍🌈 (@Johnson__joey) May 28, 2022

“Let me repeat that, armed Americans are killing our schoolkids”

This has been making the rounds and I think it’s worth sharing:

Armed Americans are killing our schoolkids while they study. They routinely kill them by the dozens for various reasons all across our country. Let me repeat that, armed Americans are killing our schoolkids.

The murderers of our children are excused – if not of their acts, but of their tools of murder – by a populace that has been conditioned to accept firearm ownership as a symbol of our unfettered Constitutional liberty under the Second Amendment.

This acceptance has created a deadly inertia that prevents us as citizens from keeping our kids alive in school.

But these atrocities are NOT the work of a “well-regulated militia”, the opening words of the Second Amendment and the semantic justification prohibiting the “infringement” of private ownership of firearms.

These horrific acts are perpetrated by private citizens with hate in their hearts and nothing but freedom on their minds. These are not the acts of a “well-regulated militia”. These are the acts of armed thugs.

How are we to stop this horror? Thoughts and prayers sure as hell aren’t getting the job done. We Americans are long overdue in bringing this insanity to a screeching halt. Why don’t we act?

It might be because we have tied one of our own hands behind our back in how we look at the Second Amendment. Maybe we have convinced ourselves that it is all about protecting guns.

And maybe the gun lobby is complicit in our self-delusion.

Maybe we need to read the Second Amendment not as a Constitutional prohibition of firearms regulation, but rather as a Constitutional requirement for the regulation of people owning firearms. I don’t think that the term “well-regulated militia” could be any more clear.

What if every gun owner in America was required, as a prerequisite of gun ownership, to belong to an organized and regulated militia? How would that violate the Constitution?

The Second Amendment’s authority could be used to gather all gun owners into an armed citizens’ militia intended (as I think the Framers intended) to protect the nation instead of terrorize it. And they would be given the training and discipline to do it much better than they are doing now.

What if, as a condition of gun ownership, citizens were required to submit themselves to military discipline like a rigid chain of command, regular conditioning and training, a military code of conduct, advancement by merit and other regulations of their behavior? That is certainly one valid way to look at the Second Amendment.

This well-regulated militia could serve as a civilian adjunct of our National Guard, and be called to active duty in times of emergency. They could not only help the National Guard protect our borders and our schools, they could also help fill sandbags during floods, rescue folks from blizzards and otherwise make themselves useful.

They would learn that being an armed citizen means a lot more than shooting bad guys or kids. Succinctly stated, they would be inside the tent pissing out and not outside pissing in.

I see no reason why Romeo Bouchard, Aaron Dorr and the whole WyGO crew wouldn’t jump at the chance to do something that actually helps protect gun ownership instead of just flapping their gums about it. They should be the poster boys for this well-regulated militia and what it can do to fulfill the promise of the Second Amendment, and not just hand models for Glocks.

Meal Team Six and the Wyoming Full Gospel Gun & Glee club should be right up at the front of the recruiting line for this effort. With a little discipline and training, they might not look like such imbeciles when they go strapped.

A well-regulated militia that deserves the name would help protect the state and the nation in times of need. The would be responsible gun owners. They would not consider their fellow citizens and their school children as little more than target practice.

We tried thoughts and prayers and kids keep dying in school. Let’s try something else. Lets try a well-regulated militia for once.

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Rod Miller is a life-long Republican and Wyoming native. Born into a ranching family that has been in the Cowboy State since 1867, he ran against incumbent Liz Cheney for Wyoming’s lone U.S. House seat in 2018.

I wish I believed that there are a lot of Republicans like him out there. Sadly, I don’t think there’s much evidence of it. Most Republicans are just waiting for the news cycle to change and then they’ll move on to CRT and Dr Seuss and trans children. The real problem.