Month: February 2018
Weird GOP Legislator Blocks Bill to Prohibit “Bump Stocks” on Guns
A gunman in Las Vegas opened fire on the crowd at a music festival last Oct 1. murdering 58 people and injuring 851 more. During the horrific crime, the shooter fired more than 1,100 rounds from his hotel room using a “bump fire” stock to turn a rifle into an automatic weapon.
Today, a GOP legislator in the Arizona state house is blocking a bill that would outlaw bump stock devices and trigger cranks, defying popular support for this common-sense gun safety measure.
Republican state Rep. Eddie Farnsworth, who is the Chair of the state Judiciary and Public Safety Committee said that the bill will NOT get a hearing, because he thinks it’s a waste of time and personally doesn’t support it.
However, the general public is interested in having this bill heard, according to the organization Gun Violence Prevention Arizona.
The bill, HB 2023, was introduced in January by state Democratic Rep. Randy Friese and Rep. Daniel Hernandez, both of Tucson. Friese, who is a trauma surgeon, saved the life of then-Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head at a supermarket parking lot in 2011. Hernandez, who was an intern in her office at the time, held his hand over Giffords’ wound to slow the bleeding.
Voters in Arizona can contact Farnsworth to demand a hearing on the bill, by:
‘That’s it?’ The Nunes Memo big reveal is a dud, but the actions of Republicans have damaged our national security and federal law enforcement agencies
If you have not listened to the legal experts discuss the Nunes Memo on The Lawfare Podcast: Special Edition: Memo #Released, here is a post By Quinta Jurecic, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes that summarizes the points made. Thoughts on the Nunes Memo: We Need to Talk About Devin:
After more than two weeks of mounting anticipation and hype, the memo on alleged surveillance abuses prepared by Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has finally been #released. So does the memo document surveillance abuses “worse than Watergate,” as Rep. Steve King tweeted last month? Or is it nothing more than disingenuous spin, as House intelligence committee Vice Chairman Adam Schiff argues—“a burn-the-house down strategy to protect the president”?
Former FBI director James Comey came down strongly on Schiff’s side Friday afternoon—suggesting as well that the memo didn’t pack much of a punch:
Note: Zack Beauchamp at Vox.com captures the consensus reaction to the Nunes Memo, The Nunes memo is a dud: After reading it, “there is only one conclusion a fair reader could draw: There is absolutely nothing here.”
What IS glaringly obvious…
Cross-posted from RestoreReason.com. Sources are referenced in original posting.
After I became an Arizona school board member and public education advocate, I was routinely asked, “doesn’t the Legislature understand what they are doing to our public schools?” I would respond with, “of course they do, it is all part of their plan.” That was five years ago and although we are still fighting the same battles, some things have changed.
Today, many more people understand that the privatization of America’s system of public education is actually the end game. The public is more “woke” than ever to the privatizers’ pursuit of profit and power via the $500B+ K-12 education market in the United States. Of course, the privatizers don’t refer to it that way. Rather, as reported in the Washington Post, they couch their war on public education as a benign attempt to improve the system. As Stacy Hock, a major Koch donor and co-founder of Texans for Educational Opportunity, said, “The lowest hanging fruit for policy change in the United States today is K-12, I think this is the area that is most glaringly obvious.”
Arizona’s insane dentist charges FBI with ‘treason’ (Updated)
Now that Arizona’s most embarrassing member of Congress, Rep. Trent Franks, has resigned in disgrace after soliciting his female staff members to be his sex surrogate (Eeew!), we have a new challenger for the title of Arizona’s most embarrassing member of Congress: Arizona’s insane dentist, Rep. Paul Gosar.
If you follow Rep. Gosar’s Twitter feed — and if you do, I have to ask “what in God’s name compels you to do this?” — you will have noticed that the insane dentist has been completely off the rails of late. Paul Gosar calls for ‘dreamers’ to be arrested, deported at State of the Union speech.
But with the release of the Nunes Memo today, the insane dentist really has topped his insane Twitter rants.