The Schloss-Blog is wondering today why shootings have become so commonplace in our everyday conversations and why Donald Trump isn't in jail already (because he likely never will be).
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Five dead, eight wounded in Louisvlle, Kentucky. Six dead in Nashville, Tennessee.
A week apart.
As of the Louisville shooting, at a bank's offices, there were 145 mass-shooting incidents in the United States so far this year and 11,623 were dead overall in shootings as well.
Why?
Maybe because more than 30 states allow no-permit/open-carry of weapons. More than 30. Only five states prohibit open carry.
Five.
And the District of Columbia.
Comforting, huh?
Three 9-year olds were killed in the Tennessee shooting. Their parents sent them off to school that morning not even suspecting they'd never come home or that they'd be planning their funerals before that day was over.
9-year olds!
An AR-15 bullet rips into someone of that age and body mass like a ballistic missile. They might as well have stood out in the middle of an Interstate highway.
Yet, in Tennessee, the Republican-controlled state legislature expelled two Black members for protesting that the body has done nothing to mitigate against shooting incidents like this. This is the same body where State Representative Paul Sherrill suggested adding "death by hanging" to the state's death-penalty statute.
Racist sweetheart, huh?
In Kentucky, one of the state's most-respected legal minds who was a close friend of the governor was shot and killed.
This is the United States of America. Republicans formerly swore by law and order. Now they swear by allowing weapons of mass destruction to be carried openly while they restrict women's health by legislating against their reproductive rights.
Republican legislators are pretty shitty people. Pretty, pretty shitty.
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Taking a look at Republican candidates for president and seeing a lot of people totally afraid to invoke Donald Trump's name.
Why?
Political pundits say they're afraid Trump will go after them.
Really? Because prosecutors from New York to Atlanta are not afraid of going after Trump. Can't imagine that one of those prosecutions won't stick, between Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis and DOJ Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, let alone E. Jean Carroll and her civil suit for rape and defamation.
Maybe all those prosecutions are what Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley and prospectively Tim Scott see as Trump's vulnerabilities that will do what they can't; knock him out of the race.
Hutchinson has been openly critical of Trump, saying the party has to move past him. Haley, for all of her courteous campaign stops, has been privately critical of Trump in fundraising solicitations to big-time Republican donors.
However, almost universally, the Republican field has been critical of Joe Biden and the Democrats, despite Trump being critical of the rest of the Republican candidates. Well, DeSantis.
We'll see what happens on a debate stage, when they criticize Biden but Trump insults them.
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Quick takes:
Is it just me, or do we talk about mass shootings the same way we mention hurricanes, floods and, dare I say, people getting cancer or COVID?
PassGAN AI, in a test, cracked 51 percent of common passwords - in under one minute!
Thirty-four-year-old Jeremy David Hanson was sentenced to prison for making threats to the publishers of the Merriam-Webster dictionary for having "inclusive" words in their latest edition. In other words, for updating their LGBTQ definitions.
Finally, FAST COMPANY published a list of five things you should do every morning to get your day started right. They include: setting your pace; getting moving; rewiring your brain; finding stillness; and eating healthy. Gee, how come they left out making your bed and brushing your teeth?
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Good night, Mrs. Calabash. Here's to you, E. Jean Carroll.
More Sunday night on my Radio Free Phoenix rock 'n' roll show. And stay tuned for Bohemian Night Cat John Kirk DeRitis immediately thereafter.
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