Phony-Baloney Reasonings

I've been hearing people rant and rave that we need universal background checks.

Show me where that would have done a thing. The Asswipe of Pittsburgh owned his gun legally. The Asswipes of Dayton and El Paso apparently did, as well.

But "something must be done, goddamnit."

More Lies and Bullshit From Trump

Trump on guns:

“We have done much more than most administrations,” he said, without elaboration. “We have done actually a lot. But perhaps more has to be done.”

Such as?

This, though, was the big laugh:

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” Trump said, adding that he had directed the FBI to examine steps to identify and address domestic terrorism. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America,” he said.

That is one steaming load of shit from Our Fascist in Chief.

Let's refresh, shall we? Skipping over Trump's long record of racism before he took up residence in the White House, including his being the Chief Birther, there is no denying the fact that American white supremacists have viewed Trump as their guy from the day he rode down that escalator to open his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, murderers and criminals. When American Nazis gathered in Charlottesville for their Tiki-Torch march, it was Trump who said that they included "good people". Trump openly stated that a federal judge of Hispanic heritage couldn't fairly judge the Trump University fraud case "because I'm building a wall." If an immigrant commits a crime, Trump seizes on that to lambaste all immigrants. He has openly encouraged immigration from northern European (white) countries. When an attendee at one of his rallies said that immigrants should be shot, Trump thought it was funny. He's been avidly promoting the notion that America is under attack from waves of filthy immigrants, a line of propaganda that has been picked up by the Right Wing Noise Machine. His racial slurs towards people of color are beyond enumeration in this post. He and his spawn have been retweeting racist memes for years.

Trump has knowingly and openly stoked these fires of racism and xenophobia. For him to now claim to be astonished by the heat of the flames is like the Menendez Brothers asking for leniency because they're orphans.

As to the calls to "do something, goddamnit", legislating from an atmosphere of fear and panic is inane at best. The last time we did that, we got the absurdly-named USA Patriot Act. If you don't know what a liberty-gutting shit-show that piece of excrement has been, then you have not been paying attention for the last seventeen years.

(Also, this.)

When Are We Going to Realize that White Nationalism is a Terrorist Ideology?

A shooting at a supermarket in the US state of Texas that left 20 dead could have been a hate crime, officials say.

A 21-year-old white man was arrested at the Walmart store where the attack took place in the city of El Paso, near the US-Mexico border, on Saturday.

A document, apparently posted shortly before the attack and believed to have been written by the man, espoused white nationalist and racist views.

The tract called the attack a response to "the Hispanic invasion of Texas".

The shooting was an act of terrorism. If you are not clear on that, imagine, if you will, that the shooter had been yelling "Allahu Akbar" as he killed people.

This Asswipe drove from Dallas to El Paso, to a Wal-Mart that is hard by the border, to kill Hispanics. This is the second terrorist act against Hispanics in less than a week.

White nationalism is a ideology of hatred. Yet their sympathizers in Congress, in the GOP, in the DHS, and now, in the White House, do their utmost to allow violent extremists to do their bloody deeds.

The first step in changing this is to remove the Chief Racist now residing in the White House.

Your Sunday Morning Jet Noise

A Lear 28:

D-Day Reunion

A GI rode the M/V Cape Henlopen which, as USS LEST-510, carried him to Omaha Beach:

Caturday

Cat in the bag:

I advised the cat's staff to cut off the handles of that bag.

Grocery Stores to CT Gov. Lamont: Fuck You.

The new one-term governor of Connecticut[1], a Democratic version of Trump,[2] pushed through a ten cent tax on plastic bags, with a ban two years down the road. Besides reducing plastic bag use, Lamont figured to pull in $55 million in additional tax revenue.

Except that the two biggest grocery chains in the state, Stop & Shop and Big Y, chose to pull the plastic bags altogether. They say they're doing it out of environmental consciousness.

I think that's bullshit. They could have pulled the bags at any time. My belief is that neither chain wanted to fuck around with keeping track of the bags and charging tax on them. Especially Stop & Shop, which has a lot of self-checkout lanes and they'd have to police the customers over how many bags they were taking.

So in a way, they are saying "fuck you if you think you're getting more tax revenue, you assholes."
________________________________________________
[1] Ned Lamont spent the campaign telling voters that he wanted to put up toll gantries to charge tolls to out-of-state heavy trucks. It wasn't more than a few days after he won the election that he said that nope, he wanted to charge tolls on everything. His proposal to do that died in the legislature. Even his party, which controls the statehouse, couldn't stomach that.
[2] Another one of those limited/no government experience businessmen who think they can fix everything.

ProFa Violence, Again

A Kentucky man is accused of punching a protester outside an Ohio rally for President Donald Trump.

News outlets report 29-year-old Dallas Frazier of Georgetown was arrested Thursday night and charged with misdemeanor assault.
...
A criminal complaint by Cincinnati police says Frazier was in a car near the protesters outside and jumped out, shouting “You want some” before repeatedly punching [a] 61-year-old protester in the face, breaking his glasses. Frazier was led away by authorities as protesters chanted “Lock him up.”

That's a really gutsy Trumpanzee, punching out a man over twice his age.

Words from two and a half years ago:

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi Party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is Nazi. Nobody cares about their motives anymore. --- Julius Goat

Because It's Friday

Pacing UP 4014:

Colbert's Cold Open-- Heh

Dead on!