complicity

Well, it's about time that a republican in office said what the rest of us already know. But no, Senator Flake, you don't get to take a bow for calling the moron in office a dangerous fool who is leading both this country and world to unmitigated disaster, and announcing you won't be complicit.

You already are.

And so are you, Senator Corker, and you, Senator McCain.

Each of you voted in favor of every single one of the unqualified, corrupt swamp rats that now make up our cabinet.

Each of you voted for Betsy DeVos, knowing that she owned charter schools and had every intention of changing regulations that would personally benefit her. Each of you turned the other way when she rescinded rules protecting women on campus from being raped. Each of you have been completely silent while she has dismantled protections for our special education students, the single most vulnerable among our most precious commodity, our children.

Each of you voted for Tom Price, even though it was obvious that he violated the law in purchasing and dumping stock in companies that benefited from legislation he was considering. None of you said a word about his use of military and government airplanes at the public's expense.

Each of you voted in favor of Steve Mnuchin for Secretary of the Treasury in spite of his knowingly hiding two billion in income from his disclosure statements and then trying to explain how he, a heavy hitter at Goldman Sachs, could not figure out the complexity of the financial disclosure form.

Each of you voted for both Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zincke knowing they had conflicts of interests that would completely bar them from working in the field that they now head. Mr. Pruitt spent a career suing the Environmental Protection Agency trying to get them to roll back regulations that protect us, all so that his friends could make a larger profit. The same for Mr. Zincke, who conducted an exhaustive investigation of national parks and monuments that would lose their designation upon his say so while simultaneously vacationing in the Greek islands at our expense.

Each of you voted for Ben Carson, who declared that he was not qualified for the position he was nominated for, but accepted anyway.

Each of you voted for Rick Perry, who could not remember and probably cannot spell the name of the department he now heads, which by the way, is the department that controls the nation's nuclear capabilities.

I could go on. Look at the cabinet. Nearly every single one of them has spent a career fighting against what they are now charged with heading, and now that they are cabinet secretaries, continue to fight against the very interests they are charged with protecting.

And each of you voted to allow them to do so.

Each of you turned a blind eye when he continuously debased his office and every tradition this country holds dear. No financial disclosures? Ok. Emoluments clause? What's that? Conflicts of interest and self-dealings at every turn? Nothing to see here. A psychopathic urge to declare war on anyone he disagrees with? Why else do we have a military? Tweets as official government pronouncements? Have you ever seen somebody so in tune with technology?

And where were each of you as he spent the last few weeks insulting a pregnant lady who just lost her husband who was serving this country and sacrificed his life -- for what?

But he insults a couple of you in congress and now he's a dangerous, deranged fool.

Newsflash to Senators Flake, Corker and McCain. Oh, and to you too Senators Sasse and Graham:

He was a psychopathic fool when he declared for office, and when he ran for and was elected. And he has not changed. Just because you come out and pooh pooh his behavior once in a while does not make you a hero. It makes you COMPLICIT because you promoted all this, you campaigned for all this, and you condoned all this, just so that your political party could be in power, the good of the country be damned.

Well damn you. Every single one of you.

You are not heroes. You are not straight shooters. You are cowards.

No, let me clarify that. You are fucking treasonous cowards, because you knew this was going to happen, and you let it happen all so that you could bar innocent refugees from entering a country founded by refugees, doing so because they don't look or talk like us.

So no, Senator Flake,you do not get to go to the well and say you are not going to be complicit in the debasement and destruction of our traditions and in what made this country the greatest on earth until January 20 of this year. You especially don't get to announce that you are leaving government, thereby allowing some other fool possibly with a similar background and political bent as the fool in the White House to take your place, and now when you have nothing to lose, point out what the rest of us already knew.

Not when you were in a position to stop it before it started, when you knew what was going to happen, but voted to allow him to destroy us anyway.

You do not get to go to the well, with your voice cracking with emotion and say No More!!! That time was months ago, and you allowed it to happen.

So now, you have a year left. 'And so do you Senator Corker. And the rest of you. That is plenty of time to at least try to reverse this nonsense. I do not believe a single word any of you said until you actually do something other than try to give rich guys such as the billionaire in chief and yourselves tax breaks beyond your wildest dreams while paying for them with my 401K.

Call him out. Bring on the articles of impeachment. It should not be difficult to figure them out. The more difficult issue will be figuring out when to stop adding to the articles.

Want to do it quickly? There's the 25th Amendment. There isn't a certified health care professional out there, with the possible exception of the guy who said he had heel spurs who would not say he's insane or at least not mentally capable of fulfilling his constitutional duties in a sane, rational and safe manner.

Until you do that, you are the problem as much as he is or will ever be. He may not be able to help himself, but you were among the only ones who could have prevented this. So no. You do not get to take a bow now.

Damn you.

Damn every single one of you complicit sons of bitches.

gold star condolence calls

I do not have training in grief counselling.  I have no background in psychology, other than taking a "gentleman's C" in basic undergraduate psychology courses at Penn that I probably did not deserve.  I have no on the job experience in international diplomacy, unless you count the time I deposed an attache to the UN mission from Pakistan, and ended up getting punched by him during the proceedings, which is a story for another time.  I am not a military veteran.

I am not all of these things, but I am a human being, hopefully one with at least a little bit of empathy towards the feelings and human condition of my fellow man.  I also believe I am possessed of at least half a brain, and a few ounces of common sense, which many may disagree with.

All of this being said, I offer the following script to be used by the neanderthal in chief for his next phone call to a gold star family, who has just lost a loved one killed in action overseas:

"Hello.

"On behalf of this very grateful country, Melania and I wanted to extend our condolences and very best wishes to you and the rest of your family and your friends for the loss of _______________.  To that, let me add our personal condolences as well.  You and your family, and especially your son/daughter are in our thoughts and prayers.

"I did not know your son/daughter personally, but I have been told by his/her commanding officer that he/she was brave, loyal and kind, and had the respect and admiration of his//her entire unit.  We know that he/she was willing to lay down his/her life and make the ultimate sacrifice defending our freedoms and the ideals this country was founded upon, and for this we will always be grateful.

"Your son/daughter was one of the best, and we are so very sorry for your loss.

"Is there anything I can do for you?"

That's it.  That is all you need to say.  Please do not ad lib or go off script.  We know how that generally turns out for you.

I know we risk a lot by including the last sentence, but there has to be some sort of an ending.  Besides, most of the time, the response of the family is going to be something along the lines of "your call and your thoughts are enough" and that ends the call after you say "God Bless" and hang up. 

It may be delicate at at time like this, but in reality, the words you chose are very simple, because in the context of what is appropriate, there are not that many to choose from.

So do yourself and the rest of us a favor, and just read the above over the phone.  Heck, unless you are skyping, you are on the phone.  The grieving parents/widows/children will not know you are reading from a script, and probably will not care.  You do not even need to care yourself.  Just read the script, and make it sound like you care.  If you can't do it, hire somebody.  Alec Baldwin could do it.  Come to think of it, I would possibly be available.

You know where to find me.

guns

I know a guy who lives in the great American West.  I am not going to name him or where he lives.  I am not even going to give him a pseudonym.  Well, maybe I'll call him the Gun Guy.

Anyway, a few years ago, black talon bullets, the ones that expand outward into a sharp prism like pattern upon impact with their target thereby creating and inflicting the maximum possible damage, were going to be outlawed.  The bullets had come to be known as "cop killers".  In their wisdom, the geniuses in congress never did get around to completely outlawing these bullets that have absolutely no use in civilian life, but some state governments, seeing the carnage or the potential for carnage that these bullets posed did.  So, at least on the federal level, there was a threat that the cop killer bullets were going to be outlawed, but nothing ever came of it.

But that did not stop the Gun Guy.

When Gun Guy thought black talon bullets were going to be outlawed in his state, he went straight to his local gun shops and bought up cases and cases of these bullets.  As many as he could find.  As many as the shops would sell him.  He then brought them back to his home, where he stored these cases in his garage, I guess because he could not store them anyplace else in his house.  They barely fit on the shelves in the garage.  He proudly showed me the boxes of these bullets.  He then admitted that he could not hunt with them, nor could he target shoot with them, as they were not practical for either use.  In jest, I asked if he planned on hunting humans, which he rightfully laughed off.  I then asked if he had any of the bullets loaded in any of the weapons he had in his house to use in case he needed to defend himself from an unwanted intruder, and was told that he would not use these bullets in his house because of the potential collateral damage they would cause to his property, even if it meant defending his life.

So, Gun Guy spent thousands of dollars, maybe even tens of thousands of dollars, on bullets he never could and never would use.  Why?

"Nobody in Washington is going to tell me what I can buy".

I called Gun Guy a moron.  We walked out of the garage and into his house.  We never talked about his armory again.

And in a nutshell, that demonstrates what the rest of us are dealing with.

Which brings me to Las Vegas, the latest stop in the can you top this mayhem tour of the goons who run the NRA.

It is illegal for a civilian to own an automatic weapon, the kind that I am told can fire up to nine bullets per second.  The reason should be obvious to anyone.  There is no legitimate reason for a civilian to need a weapon that fires nine bullets a second.  Self defense would seem to dictate that one single shot, or perhaps two or three should do the job.  So you cannot go into Joe's Gun Shop and buy a fully automatic weapon.

But in Nevada, you can go into Joe's Gun Shop and for somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred bucks, you can buy a modifier that turns a semi-automatic weapon, which for some reason is legal to own, into a fully automatic weapon, which is not.  Let us contemplate this lunacy for a moment.

You cannot buy a fully automatic weapon, but you can buy something to modify a weapon that is sort of automatic along with a product that has no use other than to make your sort of automatic weapon fully automatic.  You can make both purchases simultaneously and legally.  You might as well hang a sign around your neck while making the purchase that announces to the dealer that you intend on taking your sort of automatic weapon home and converting it into a fully automatic weapon, which the dealer is not allowed to sell to you.

And that is legal in Nevada.

And you can take that now fully automatic weapon, and load it with cop killer bullets.

And use it.

You can sling that now fully automatic weapon over your shoulder and walk around Las Vegas showing off to the world the immense size and firing power of your penis.... I mean your weapon, you know, the gun, not your penis, because Nevada is an open carry state.  You can announce to the world that you bought a sort of automatic weapon and converted into a fully automatic weapon, which is illegal to buy, and in Nevada, that is legal.

You can then take as many of those weapons as you want into a large hotel/resort/casino in Las Vegas and openly carry that cache to your suite on the 32nd floor of the hotel, a suite that overlooks the venue of a large outdoor country music festival, because in Nevada that is legal, and nobody will stop you.

You can then bring hundreds, maybe thousands of rounds of ammunition up to your 32nd floor suite overlooking a large outdoor country music festival, where you have brought and set up dozens of modified, and now fully automatic weapons, and nobody will stop you because in Nevada, this is still legal.

You can then spend three days in your suite setting up your weapons in such a manner as to aim them in the general direction of a large outdoor country music festival, because until you overtly threaten anyone or fire the weapons, in Nevada, that is legal.

And the great part about all of this, aside from the fact that all of this is legal in Nevada, is that all of the casinos have comprehensive surveillance systems throughout the common, public areas of the grounds.  I know this because I have represented a number of casinos over the years in my law practice.

So the hotel/resort/casino knows that you are carrying dozens of weapons into your suite, although I will concede that the surveillance may not have picked up on the fact that you were also carrying all those rounds of cop killer bullets, but they will do nothing about it, because in Nevada carrying all those weapons and all that ammunition through a hotel lobby into your suite is perfectly legal.

Move on.

Nothing to see here.

You can then spend a few days setting cameras up in your suite that will let you know if the police or hotel security is coming to see if you are having a nice day while you set up your array, because in Nevada, this is all legal.

And then the firing starts.

And in one instant, which cannot be stopped, because everything that led up to that one instant is legal in Nevada, everything changes.

Fifty-nine people are dead.

More than five hundred are wounded.

And the NRA wants to make it legal to put silencers on those weapons.  Why?  To protect the hearing of the shooters.  It seems to me that for five bucks, they could buy ear plugs.  In the mean time, at least the rest of us can hear where the shots are coming from and make some sort of attempt to find cover, even if it is just about impossible to run from somebody shooting up to nine cop killer bullets a second at you.

And by the way, they also want to further loosen the restrictions on fully automatic weapons.

And they also want to prevent jurisdictions from restricting people from buying these weapons of mass destruction and carrying them into their state where concealed or open carry is not permitted.  In other words, they would like it so that that you can go to Nevada, where all of this is legal, and take your stash to California, where is it not, and make it so California can do nothing about it.

And they say now is not the time to talk about this.  So when is the right time?  Just let me know.  I will be there.  I will look you, the NRA, the gun manufacturers, who we all know are the same people, and their bought and paid for buddies in congress in the eye, and tell them this one -- and all the other ones -- is on you.

I do not want your thoughts and prayers.

Thoughts and prayers will not bring back the dead or unwound the wounded.

Thoughts and prayers will not prevent the next attack, and we all know the next attack is coming.  The only questions are when and where.

We do not want thoughts and prayers.  We want action.

The ultimate job of our government is to protect us.  That is what they say when they go to foreign lands and shock and awe a civilian population that has done nothing to us.  But protection starts at home.

And protection does not mean to protect profits of gun manufacturers.

Repeal the Dickey Amendment and allow government funds to be used to study the public health effects of gun violence.  We all know what every single one of those studies will find.

Repeal the laws that protect gun manufacturers from civil liability.

GET THE GOD DAMN GUNS OFF THE STREETS AND OUT OF THE HANDS OF THOSE WHO HAVE NO BUSINESS OWNING OR POSSESSING THEM.

We are watching.  The NRA likes to remind you that they vote.

WE VOTE TOO, AND THERE ARE MORE OF US THAN THERE ARE OF YOU.