James Hohmann/WaPo:
The Daily 202: 10 ways politics may — or may not — change after the Las Vegas shooting
Virtually no Republican in Congress, and certainly no one in leadership, is willing to cross the powerful gun lobby. Even if Trump decided he wanted to act, which he will not, his party would block him….
But Vegas makes it much harder for Republicans to roll back existing gun laws.
In the wake of the attack, House Republican leaders have decided to table a bill that would loosen restrictions on purchasing gun silencers. At least for now. “That bill, introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), has been approved by the Natural Resources Committee and was expected to be on the House floor soon, though it had not yet been scheduled for a vote,” Politico reports. “Consideration of the bill was (already) postponed earlier this year after Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot in June at a congressional baseball practice.”
Khaled Beydoun/WaPo:
We have yet to determine whether [Las Vegas shooter Stephen] Paddock was motivated by anyone or anything, so many are tiptoeing around terms such as “terrorist.” But if Paddock were Muslim, his status as a local individual would be entirely irrelevant, and the motive of “Islamic terrorism” or “jihad” would likely be immediately assumed, even without any evidence.
The Las Vegas shooting raises several questions linked to race and religion and how they figure into our imagining and policing of terrorism. President Trump has ushered in the third phase of the war on terror, and his brazen “clash of civilization” rhetoric around U.S. anti-terrorism policy and programming has fixated on Muslims.
ProPublica:
Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. Were Close to Being Charged With Felony Fraud
New York prosecutors were preparing a case. Then the D.A. overruled his staff after a visit from a top donor: Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz.
In one email, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coordinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the emails, they worried that a reporter might be onto them. In yet another, Donald Jr. spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the email chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the email.
There was “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales,” one person who saw the emails told us. “They knew it was wrong.”
Reed Galen/RCP:
These are questions we rarely ever had to ask ourselves. We never would’ve thought about them. But too many mass shootings later, there is no segment of society, no demographic, no geography, no political bent that is safe from the AR-15 or the AK-47 on American soil. That is a disgrace. What’s worse than that? So many of us are so desensitized to these horrors that we’re beginning to believe that this is now just part of life.
Don’t. Don’t allow yourself to fall into that trap. We cannot and we must not forget the shattered latticework of lives affected by these events. Change can only begin and end with us. It won’t be delivered to our doorstep by Amazon. If chaos truly presents opportunities, let’s take this one and make something of it. We owe it to all those kids, office workers and concert-goers who will never have the chance.
David Frum/Atlantic:
Trump’s speech to the nation after the Las Vegas atrocity, however, was steeped in hypocrisy. He is the least outwardly religious president of modern times, the president least steeped in scripture. For him to offer the consolations of God and faith after mass bloodletting is to invite derision. “It is love that defines us,” said President Trump, and if we weren’t heartbroken, we would laugh.
Those who praised the speech, as CNN’s John King did, are reacting on reflex. This is the kind of thing we are used to hearing from Republican politicians; Trump is a Republican politician; therefore this is what he should say.
But whereas Vice President Pence could have pronounced those words with sincerity, or a convincing simulacrum thereof, Donald Trump looked shifty, nervous, and false. Speeches are watched as well as heard, and the viewer saw a president who wished he were somewhere else because he had been compelled to pretend something so radically false to his own nature.
Aaron Blake/WaPo:
Terrorism or not? Las Vegas reignites a real — and really important — debate.
This may seem like a semantic debate. Lots of people are dead and wounded, and a word isn't going to change that. But that word does have all kinds of implications for how these episodes are treated both by the federal government and in our national discourse. It's important.
Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) noted the implications of the debate.
As for the technical definition of terrorism, it importantly deals with the motive rather than the size of the carnage. Federal law says terrorism is “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” In other words, whether 50 people are killed or a few people are hurt, what matters is what the attacker intended.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue on guns was very powerful. It’s not enough, Jimmy.
No question, Kimmel said many of the things that needed to be said. He demolished the dumb talking point that now is not the time to debate solutions: “We have 59 innocent people dead, it wasn’t their time, either.” He excoriated the fact that gun violence has now become accepted as routine. He rightly contrasted inaction on guns with our willingness to use government to combat other public safety threats. He even named names, tearing into Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan for offering empty “thoughts and prayers” while doing nothing, because “the NRA has their balls in a money clip.”
But Kimmel nowhere fingered the Republican Party as the obstacle to action on this issue, instead aiming the blame at “congresspeople.” If you are Jimmy Kimmel, and you want more regulation of guns, the Republican Party is your problem. The Democratic Party has long supported and pushed for the very same solutions Kimmel called for last night. The GOP has blocked them.
James Fagone/HuffPost:
WHAT BULLETS DO TO BODIES
The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront every day.
[Trauma surgeon Amy] Goldberg jumped in. “As a country,” Goldberg said, “we lost our teachable moment.” She started talking about the 2012 murder of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Goldberg said that if people had been shown the autopsy photos of the kids, the gun debate would have been transformed. “The fact that not a single one of those kids was able to be transported to a hospital, tells me that they were not just dead, but really really really really dead. Ten-year-old kids, riddled with bullets, dead as doornails.” Her voice rose. She said people have to confront the physical reality of gun violence without the polite filters. “The country won’t be ready for it, but that’s what needs to happen. That’s the only chance at all for this to ever be reversed.”
It is so hard to ask families and relatives to release these pictures. Don’t say: “if they would just...” If you haven’t been there, you don’t know what you are asking. Not everyone has the strength and resolve of Emmett Till’s mother.
Monkey Cage Blog/WaPo:
In our research, we discovered that people who live close to a mass shooting are more likely to support gun control than those who don’t.
Alice Dreger/Chronicles of Higher Education, in a piece I find hard to characterize, about academic freedom. BTW, sexual discussions with Alice are not only not rare, they are what she does. The blowjob reference is not gratuitous:
Take Back the Ivory Tower
Democracy depends on having a public capable of thinking
Forgive me while I reminisce about the days when I worked at a place that protected a Holocaust denier on the faculty.
This was in early 2006, when I was only about a year into my decade of being on the faculty at Northwestern University. An electrical-engineering professor named Arthur Butz had just made a statement denying the Holocaust. In response, our university president, Henry Bienen, issued a statement I saved like a prize: "There is no question that the Holocaust is a well-documented historical fact," but "we cannot take action based on the content of what Butz says regarding the Holocaust — however odious it may be — without undermining the vital principle of intellectual freedom that all academic institutions serve to protect."
In other words, the brilliance of the many depends fundamentally on the right of the one to be stupid. Reading Bienen’s statement, I knew Northwestern was a place where I could do what I needed to do as a scholar and teacher. We had the right to be wrong!
And that was true. Until Northwestern’s administration changed, along with the rest of academia, and I learned the hard way that I had been branded.
Trigger warning: Here comes the blowjob.
Dan Drezner/WaPo:
Yesterday the Chicago Council on Global Affairs released its first in-depth poll about what Americans think about America first [Full disclosure: I am on the advisory board that oversees this survey.] My Post colleagues Dan Balz and Emily Guskin suggest that the reports are not good for the Republican Party:
“The council’s survey finds that Trump’s most fervent supporters solidly support his views on these issues, but Republicans with less favorable impressions of the president are far less enthusiastic and are more closely aligned in their attitudes with the overall population.
The survey also underscores the degree to which Trump, despite the bully pulpit of the White House, has been unable to shift public opinion in his direction on foreign policy issues. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Public attitudes have moved away from a number of the positions he espoused during his campaign and since.”
Someday…. this might happen. It’s years and years away. Endpoints:
Researchers go after the Holy Grail in flu research with the first big study for a universal jab
Meanwhile it’s (seasonally) time to consider getting a flu shot. Hardly perfect, but worth the jab.
If flu shots don’t work for you, try this. Works for me:
NBC:
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was on the verge of resigning this past summer amid mounting policy disputes and clashes with the White House, according to multiple senior administration officials who were aware of the situation at the time.
The tensions came to a head around the time President Donald Trump delivered a politicized speech in late July to the Boy Scouts of America, an organization Tillerson once led, the officials said.
Just days earlier, Tillerson had openly disparaged the president, referring to him as a “moron,” after a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon with members of Trump’s national security team and Cabinet officials, according to three officials familiar with the incident.
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