Neil MacFarquhar, National Correspondent - The New York Times
Stephan: In gun-crazed America, it is business as usual to have weekly, even daily mass gun murders, augmented by random routine murders of a shooter's family, friends, or strangers and, of course, thousands of suicides by gun. No other democratic nation in the world has anything like this problem, and as this story describes it is getting worse.
I am beginning to get emails from readers telling me that they had planned to visit the United States but have come to believe the country is too dangerous to visit. In Texas, a state governed about as badly as any state in the union, the Republicans have just passed a law, and the state's moronic governor has just signed it, that allows any Texan (with a few narrow exceptions) to carry a gun concealed or displayed with no license or training where they like when they like. Now, what do you think is going to happen? The answer is simple. More gun deaths. More murders, more violence, more families destroyed. Aren't you proud to be an American?
Law enforcement at the scene of a shooting outside a banquet hall near Miami on Sunday. Credit: Lynne Sladky/Associated Press
The upbeat mood at an album release party at El Mula Banquet Hall in Miami-Dade County was shattered when three men in ski masks jumped out of a stolen white Nissan S.U.V. and fired randomly into the crowd early Sunday.
Some revelers fired back. The whole encounter unrolled in about 10 seconds, leaving two people dead and 21 others injured. It was one of the worst shootings in the Miami area in recent memory, and came just a day after one person died and six were wounded in a drive-by shooting in another part of the city.
Memorial Day weekend typically kicks off a three-month summer season for violent crime, and in the past few days there were also homicides at a nightclub in Dallas, on a freeway in Detroit and in an apartment building in Baton Rouge, La., where a 1-year-old was among the three people killed.
With the pandemic precautions that kept people at home receding, officials and police departments are bracing for […]
Stephan: On the basis of facts not partisanship, Republican governor and Trumper Greg Abbott is a notably stupid, nasty man, and an incompetent governor. Here is a story that demonstrates yet again his sheer nastiness and lack of humanity.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during a press conference at the Texas State Capitol. Credit: Lynda M. Gonzalez-Pool/Getty
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued a disaster declaration that directs state child-care regulators to “take all necessary steps” to deny or discontinue within 90 days state licenses for any facilities that house migrant children.
Why it matters: The directive could force the relocation of 4,223 migrant children currently residing in state-licensed facilities in Texas, according to the Dallas Morning News reports.
There are roughly 17,000 unaccompanied children in the United States.
Texas currently has 52 state-licensed general residential operations and child-placing agencies, which partner with the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement to care for undocumented children, per the Dallas Morning News.
What they’re saying: “The Biden administration’s immigration policies are failing Texans, causing a humanitarian crisis in many Texas communities along the border,” Abbot said in the order, which was dated May 31.
Stephan: I am seriously concerned that we are in a cold civil war, one that could become violent. What happens to Trumper world when Trump is not reinstated as president? What happens if he is indicted and convicted for any one of a dozen of his many crimes. We are in the most dangerous period of our history since 1860.
America’s former president and leading psychopath.
Hundreds of people gathered in Texas for a QAnon-sponsored conference over Memorial Day weekend to hear the biggest boosters of Donald Trump’s Big Lie downplay the Capitol riot and bandy about new threats of a coming coup.
Key Trump allies, including Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Allen West; and perhaps most notably Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., attended the three-day event, dubbed “For God & Country Patriot Roundup,” at the Omni Hotel in Dallas.
The QAnon conference came amid reports that Trump is attempting to orchestrate another election coup from his far-off kingdom at Mar-a-Lago. According to a Tuesday tweet from the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, the former President has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August.” Trump’s reported thinking echoes that of his former lawyer’s, Sidney Powell. On Saturday, Powell told attendees to the QAnon conference that Trump “can simply be reinstated.”Read the Full Article
Stephan: I have been telling my readers for years now that the Republican Party is actively and explicitly working to sabotage democracy in America. Now here are 100 other scholars who agree. What I find particularly threatening to the nation's wellbeing, is that about a third of Americans believe they would be happy in a White supremacy authoritarian, fascist state.
How can this possibly be true? 1) 63% of Americans have never been outside the borders of the United States. They have no real conception of what such a state would be like. 2) The average IQ in the U.S. is 98, and in the Red value states particularly it is even lower, they just aren't smart enough to understand what such a system of governance would do to their lives. 3) 27% of the population have overactive right amygdalas and those people are motived more by fear, anger, and resentment than they are by facts. 4) We are becoming a majority-minority nation, and about a third of Whites are completely freaked out by that.
The election of 2022 is going to tell us how this is going to play out. It's up to you and me to preserve democracy. Are you prepared to do what it will take?
More than 100 scholars have issued a dire warning that Republicans are putting the nation’s democracy in danger by restricting access to voting and perpetuating the fiction that the 2020 presidential election was not secure.
“We, the undersigned, are scholars of democracy who have watched the recent deterioration of U.S. elections and liberal democracy with growing alarm,” said a statement released Tuesday by the New America think tank. “Specifically, we have watched with deep concern as Republican-led state legislatures across the country have in recent months proposed or implemented what we consider radical changes to core electoral procedures in response to unproven and intentionally destructive allegations of a stolen election.”
The statement was signed by more than 100 academics with expertise in politics, government, international affairs, public policy and other areas.
In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s election loss and subsequent lies about the integrity of the voting process, Republican state lawmakers across the country have introduced legislation that would make it harder for people to vote, citing concerns about […]
Robert Reich, Economist, Professor, Author, and Political Commentator, former Secretary of Labor - Raw Story
Stephan: I completely agree with Robert Reich. If someone votes for a Republican one is voting against the continuation of American democracy.
Republican senator Lyndsey Graham
The greatest danger to American democracy right now is not coming from Russia, China, or North Korea. It is coming from the Republican Party.
Only 25 percent of voters self-identify as Republican, the GOP’s worst showing against Democrats since 2012 and sharply down since last November. But those who remain in the Party are far angrier, more ideological, more truth-denying, and more racist than Republicans who preceded them.
And so are the lawmakers who represent them.
Today’s Republican Party increasingly is defined not by its shared beliefs but by its shared delusions.
Last Friday, 54 U.S. senators voted in favor of proceeding to debate a House-passed bill to establish a commission to investigate the causes and events of the January 6th insurrection. This was 6 votes short of the number of votes needed for “cloture,” or stopping debate – meaning any further consideration of the bill would have been filibustered by Republicans indefinitely.
So there will be no investigation.
The 54 Senators who voted yes to cloture – in favor of the commission – represent 189 million Americans, or […]
