2023 Archives

Hopefully the deadly disasters sweeping Red states will wake up GOP voters & motivate them to demand their politicians stop taking money from fossil fuel billionaires while lying to their voters. Republicans have been lying to their voters in the Midwest and South for decades, and now those the same voters are dying as a result of unprecedented severe weather that ties directly back to those lies. This is a climate change story that fossil fuel billionaires and their GOP lackeys would rather you didn’t know.

Foreword By Mike Farrell Years ago, probably the late ’70s, I went to a fund-raising event in Los Angeles to hear Rev. George Regas, one of the founders of the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race. I remember being struck by a unique part of his fund-raising pitch that day. He said that our society’s priorities are upside down: human existence is being endangered by the makers of war, so in a rational society those working for peace should be funded by the government while the Pentagon has bake sales to raise its budget. He said it better than that, but the idea stuck with me. And when I think about it, so many of the things we do in this country tell me he’s right. The “official” policies are too often counterproductive in a society that claims to respect the dignity of each individual, in a state that claims to believe in equality and says it intends to “promote the general welfare.” The general welfare means, roughly, taking care of the needs of the common citizen. And that’s us, folks.

Many Americans are baffled. Why, they ask, would Republicans refuse to act when semiautomatic weapons designed for the battlefield are used against our children? Now that Donald Trump has been indicted, expect to see the fascist movement in America heat up quickly. And become more deadly. That it’s happening at the same time our children are experiencing an unprecedented level of slaughter is no coincidence (more on that in a moment) and helps explain Republican unwillingness to do anything about guns. Many Americans are baffled. Why, they ask, would Republicans refuse to act when semiautomatic weapons designed for the battlefield are used against our children? When we’ve had 38 school shootings — and over 100 mass shootings — all using semiautomatic battlefield-style weapons in the first 90 days of this year?

Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism should get together and decide what photos to release, for maximum impact and minimum trauma. And now we have another mass school shooting, this time in Tennessee with three 9-year-old girls dead as well as 3 adults. Immediately followed by another pathetic Republican congressman claiming that Congress can’t do a thing. A community is grieving, schoolkids across America are terrified, and after 130 mass shootings in the first 87 days of this year — 33 of them in schools and colleges — you’d think average Americans would finally understand the horrors of the gun violence Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court have inflicted on us. This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement. Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.