sonora2sonoma

True to her word, New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced today that assault rifles are now banned in New Zealand in response to the recent mass shooting incidents there. The opposition party supported the ban, its leader saying it was “in the national interest to keep New Zealanders safe.” New Zealand has no legal provision to own weapons for self defense, unlike in this country, where the Constitutional right to bear arms has been perverted by interest groups such as the NRA to equate with the sort of right-wing paranoia that envisions a fictitious “they” who are coming to “get your guns.”  If countries were rated on the mental health of their citizenry, New Zealand would rate at or near the top; the USA would place in the single digit column.

Another measure of New Zealanders’ sound judgment in this matter is the prime minister’s vow to never repeat the name of the party who perpetrated the massacre. To its credit, the Washington Post omitted the name of the attacker in the article from which this information was sourced. To bring attention to those who commit such heinous acts by giving them notoriety is to compound the damage they have wrought and serves to inspire or encourage other unstable individuals who might be contemplating the commission of similar acts. One means of lessening the likelihood such behavior will occur is to remove the possibility of infamy from the equation.

By swiftly enacting an assault weapons ban, New Zealand has become a model of responsible governance and one that we would do well to emulate. They have done with legislative action what we attempt to accomplish with “thoughts and prayers.” While it’s too soon to measure the degree of effectiveness of the New Zealanders’ weapons ban, we have ample evidence in this country of the ineffectiveness of thoughts and prayers as a solution to this problem. Ardern’s statement that there is no reason for New Zealanders to own assault weapons is every bit as accurate here as it is there, yet our politicians offer no more than empty platitudes in the face of countless repetitions of this dystopian tragedy.

The solution lies not in expecting those in Congress who are in thrall to the NRA to suddenly turn on their benefactors and do something decent for a change. The cure is to vote those SOBs out of office and replace them with people of integrity for whom belief in justice and fairness matter more than selling out to the highest bidder.

Tim Konrad

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment. The little orange roughy wants a wall so he can tell his supporters he kept his word, never mind that Mexico was supposed to pay for it—also on his word, or that his word at this point means nothing since he lies almost every time he opens his mouth. And, since he overestimated the degree of influence he has over Mexico by about, say, 100%, he wants us taxpayers to pay for it, even though almost everyone agrees the wall will not stop the flow of drugs across the border, which is one of the main reasons the would-be dictator says a wall is needed, nor will it mitigate the impact of the hordes of Godless asylum-seekers marching northward, if only in his imagination.

And the congressional Republicans—those stalwart upholders of mom, apple pie and unprecedented corruption—quick to approve every tax dodge but fiscal hawks when it comes to funding social programs or repairing crumbling infrastructure, are poised to allow this massive misuse of public funds, no matter its constitutionality, for no better reason than their continued obeisance to this fool has shrunk their cojones to the point where their voices are starting to change. They have hocked whatever vestiges remained of their integrity and good sense to avoid the dreaded wrath of an orangutan in a business suit who masks his insecurity with false bravado as he intimidates and threatens everyone foolish enough to think it matters what he thinks or says.

I can’t help but wonder just what these people who hitch their wagons to the (t)rump train are thinking when they do so. Do they really believe whatever perceived gains they may achieve by associating with him will endure, or that they will be able to somehow get out of this unscathed? To witness otherwise seemingly intelligent and responsible people making such poor choices in full public view is not simply puzzling—it’s deeply disturbing! Common sense is anything but, and its absence among this lot proves the point admirably.

Nancy got it right. He’s not worth it!

Tim Konrad

Not wanting to focus entirely on gloom with regard to the president’s decision to declare a national emergency as a means to repair his damaged ego, and being in the habit of analyzing the possible consequences of various responses to a given situation, I found some hope amid the melancholy—some reason, unlikely as it may seem, for optimism.

Should the president’s declaration of a national emergency survive court challenges and be successful, what would prevent a future Democrat in the oval office from using the same means to address two issues that by any reasonable definition are real bona-fide national emergencies here and now—climate change and gun violence?

I’m aware this isn’t a new idea, but it’s only appeared in the news so far as a kind of admonishment to Republicans in congress who are viewed as supportive of the president’s declaration to make them mindful of the dangers of setting precedents.

Don’t get me wrong! We should support every effort to challenge what the president is attempting to do. I’m just saying if those efforts should fail and the precedent is set, why not consider the newly confirmed presidential prerogative a tool to employ to address actual issues posing real threats to our country and the world.

To use the fruit of the Republicans’ abused logic, twisted reasoning and cowardly capitulation as a tool to undo the environmental mayhem resulting from the president’s deregulation agenda and blunt the effects of the insidious cloud of intimidation and misinformation issuing forth from the NRA would be a wholly appropriate response to the cancerous miasma of the trump/McConnell partnership.

Tim Konrad

The current occupant of the White House just tweeted the following:

In the beautiful Midwest, wind-chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Warming? Please come back fast, we need you!

Also today, trump took umbrage with the assessment of the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, released yesterday, suggesting ironically that “perhaps Intelligence should go back to school.”

Contradicting the nation’s top intelligence officials, who said Isis remains a formidable organization capable of attacking the United States, trump asserted, without evidence, that the Islamic State’s control of Iraq and Syria “will soon be destroyed.”

To the security team’s assessment that North Korea was “unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities,” trump maintained he believes there exists a “decent chance of denuclearization.”

Regarding Iran, where Coats testified that the Iranians are not trying to build a nuclear weapon and are complying with the arms control agreement forged with the Obama administration, trump referred to the intelligence chiefs’ assessment as “naïve,” alleging, again without evidence, that they were testing rockets last week and “are coming very close to the edge,” whatever that means.

Among other matters discussed in the security assessment yesterday, the area in which trump appears the least receptive, and arguably one with the most potential for negative consequences for our country, is the report that “China and Russia are working together to challenge U.S. leadership in the world, undermine democratic governments and gain military and technological superiority over the United States.”  Whether tone-deaf, willfully ignorant or co-opted by the Russians, trump’s loyalty to Vladimir Putin defies logic.

The security chiefs’ assessment, on the other hand, is informed by facts on the ground, rather than wishful thinking, or, more correctly, magical thinking, the former being a figure of speech and the latter a psychiatric condition. Speaking of the “information warfare” waged on social media leading up to the 2016 election, Coats & Co. testified they “expect our adversaries and strategic competitors to refine their capabilities and add new tactics as they learn from each other’s experiences, suggesting the threat landscape could look very different in 2020 and future elections.” To counter this threat, Coats said, U.S. spy agencies are “turning their main focus away from fighting global terrorist networks toward countering Russia and other state adversaries seen as geopolitical threats to the United States.”

But that won’t address the danger posed by having a chief executive who is unencumbered by policy, untroubled by mendacity and unmoored from reality. To quote Eileen Sullivan in today’s New York Times, one very real danger in such dysfunctional goings-on is that “divergent views of a president and his intelligence agencies may diminish trust from the public and from American allies about United States foreign policy goals.” Distrust of government officials produces distrust of government; uncertainty about where you stand if you’re, say, an ally of the United States is fraught with peril. Neither of these is a desirable outcome.

To reduce it to terms trump might understand, how can you make deals with someone who is constantly moving the goalposts?

But, it turns out, trump is not the consummate dealmaker his boastful claims would indicate. Yesterday’s New York Times featured a piece by Michael Gerson, former Bush II speechwriter, tiled coincidentally, (t)rump is a Fraud, in which he asserts “no one can reasonably claim to believe in (t)rump’s brand as it was sold in 2016. We have plumbed the shallows of his boasts. They are refuted lies. And whatever else the president may be, he is a fraud.”

Perhaps Austan Goolsbee said it best in noting whatever issues from trump’s mouth is “a fraud wrapped in quackery inside of a bamboozle.”

In light of that observation, another of Goolsbee’s pronouncements seems apropos: Follow the trump directive—“we should not spend any more time talking about Donald trump’s policy ideas than he spent coming up with them and at the end of this sentence we’ve already violated the directive.”

Tim Konrad