Sam Liccardo, Mayor of San Jose California - The New York Times
Stephan: For several years now as I have reported on the growing gun violence in America -- over 40,000 people in the U.S. have died from gunfire this year -- and gun ownership has grown to the point where there are more guns than people, I have worried about how this madness was going to be resolved given that the Republican Party is the rented tool of the death merchant gun industry.
Well, here is some good news from San Jose, California.
Credit: Daniel Zender / The New York Times
Recent mass shootings have spurred renewed calls from President Biden for a national assault weapons ban. Sensibly so. But for even the most ardent gun control advocates, it’s hard not to ask whether, in a nation with an estimated 400 million firearms, restrictions on new gun purchases accomplish too little without something more.
Amid the rising tide of firearms, reducing gun deaths and injuries requires new solutions. In San Jose, Calif., where I am mayor, we’ve embarked on two approaches untried in any other city or state: We’re imposing an annual fee on gun-owning residents and investing the revenues in violence prevention efforts. And on Jan. 1, the city will begin requiring gun owners to carry liability insurance to compensate victims harmed by the negligent or reckless use of a firearm.
These initiatives reflect the recognition that we can’t make 400 million guns go away, but we can make gun ownership safer. The recent surge in pandemic-era gun sales, the influx of […]
April M. Zeoli, Shannon Frattaroli and Lisa Geller, Associate Professor of Public Health at the University of Michigan | Professor of Health Policy and Management at Johns Hopkins University | Director of State Affairs at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health | - Talking Points Memo
Stephan: For several years now I have considered Texas a failed state created by the voters of Texas who have repeatedly voted against their own self-interest, by voting for White supremacy christofascists like Greg Abbott. It is amazing to me that they have done this given what has happened to Texas during the period of Abbott's governorship. Nothing makes this clearer than what is happening in Texas, where an increasing number of Texans are going around armed, compared with what is happening in San Jose, California. Read this story and weep for Texas.
Attendees hold American made AK-47 style 7.62mm semi-automatic rifles from Kalashnikov USA during the National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center, in Houston, Texas on May. Credit: Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty
It was only in the past few decades that laws criminalizing domestic violence came to be widespread and enforced. But now, the U.S. is in danger of backtracking on that legal framework precisely because of the nation’s historical legacy of turning a blind eye to domestic violence.
On Nov. 10, 2022, a judge in the Western District of Texas struck down the federal law that prohibits access to guns for people subject to domestic violence protection orders. He did this based on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, NYSRPA v. Bruen, which held that, to be constitutional, a firearm restriction must be analogous to […]
Stephan: We seem to be reaching a crescendo of reports about Trump's criminality. To me, his tax reports are less about money and more about the endless fraud, lies, and finagles Trump has used in relation to his taxes -- you can see why he never wanted any of this to come out. We are also seeing yet another example of the corruption of the American government, in this case, the IRS. What Trump's criminality has also made clear is that wealthy Americans live in one world concerning their taxes and the rest of us live in another world.
Donald Trump the most criminal individual to ever serve in goverment Photo illustration by Salon / Getty
Back in February of 2019, then-President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight Committee that his former employer had once shown him a big refund from the IRS and told him “he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”
It turns out that the man who once claimed in a presidential debate that not paying any taxes made him “smart” was right about that. The IRS is stupid, or at least lazy and incompetent. It let Donald Trump off the hook for years.
On Tuesday the House Ways and Means Committee finally broke its silence and announced that after years of legal battles and delays it would release Trump’s tax returns to the public, as they are authorized to do by the same law Republicans invoked when they investigated the IRS back in 2014. That probe, which was supposed to show that the IRS had targeted conservative organizations, […]
Stephan: What is standing out for me in this miasma of reports about the criminality of Trump and his minions, is the deafening silence of the Republicans. Whether it is the insurrection or Trump's taxes you hear no one in the Republican leadership speaking out critically. Rather the contrary as this report describes.
WASHINGTON — House Republicans are furious that Democrats have obtained and released details about former President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), standing with more than a dozen of his colleagues at a press conference Tuesday, said that if Democrats publicize Trump’s taxes, they will “jeopardize the right of every American to be protected from political targeting by Congress.”
But Brady, the top Republican on the House committee that obtained Trump’s tax information, declined to say that those in his party would not also take advantage of tax disclosure laws to obtain and release private tax information.
“We’re not going to speculate on what our actions will be,” Brady said in response to a reporter’s question. “What we know for certain is the Democrats [are] unleashing a dangerous new weapon that’s going to have severe consequences.”
In fact, Democrats aren’t exactly doing that. Since 1924, certain congressional committees have had the same power as the president to ask the Treasury Department for anybody’s tax returns. Both Republicans and Democrats have used that authority in recent years.
Stephan: You have probably heard something about George Santos, a newly elected MAGAt Republican Congressman from New York. How he is an utter and complete liar and fraud, who made up his educational credits, his employment history and... well everything about his background and who he is. And I mean everything as this report spells out. What stands out for me, once again, about this sorry little saga is the utter silence of the Republican Party, and the members of Congress. The Republicans are perfectly comfortable with a man who is a liar and fraud in every particular serving in the House as a representative. The Republicans in Congress now seem to me to be mostly a cast of cartoon characters, notable for their incompetence and lack of integrity. What also stands out for me is why the Democratic Party did not do a background check on this creep who so obviously made up everything about his background.
A photo of Leonard Antoine Horta Devolder and his family in Brazil. Credit: Gea Sierdsma
Congressman-elect George Santos’ emotional narrative of having Jewish grandparents who fled Europe during World War II appears to be untrue, like much of the rest of his campaign biography, according to genealogy websites reviewed by the Forward.
Santos, a Long Island Republican, has said that his father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish, and that both faiths “are mine.” The very first line of the “About George” page on his campaign website states: “George’s grandparents fled Jewish persecution in Ukraine, settled in Belgium, and again fled persecution during WWII.”
But the website myheritage.com lists Santos’ maternal grandparents as having both been born in Brazil before the Nazis rose to power — his grandfather, Paulo Horta Devolder, in 1918, and his grandmother, Rosalina Caruso Horta Devolder, in Rio, in 1927. An online obituary for Santos’ mother, Fatima Aziza Caruso Horta Devolder, who died in 2016, says she was born in Niterói, a suburb […]
