Vote Democrat for so many reasons

Echo opinion letter published in the South Bend Tribune, in Indiana:

Midterm 2022, elections #VoteBlue

In early November we have the first midterm elections following the previous president’s term. Those four years were the most divisive and damaging led by a person who showed incompetence during COVID, costing hundreds of thousand lives, diminished respect by our allies and providing untruths on a daily basis. The news over the past year reflects tRumpziism behavior. His party members wrongly continued to support him and twice denied impeachment. 

Thankfully, this has been followed by a leader who placed global warming as a major priority, reunited NATO, renewed respect for the USA and is updating our infrastructure; most of this with only 50 Senate votes.

This election is a choice of continuing progressive changes; lower medical and drug costs, low unemployment, fewer children in poverty and better health care choices for women. 

Regressive candidates, including (Indiana GOP) Rudy Yakym, have a party platform to vote no for progressive bills. Because of their no votes, we continue to be able to purchase weapons of war, not a second amendment protection, and have strong restrictions on pregnant women’s health both of which will lead to more people dying. This is not a “right to life” party. Think of our country, not political affiliation, when voting in November. #VoteBlue

Tom Nowak in  South Bend Indiana

Midterm 2022 elections #VoteBlue

Mass shootings in America- echo opinion

Opinion Letter echo: Only in America- They commit atrocities because they can: 

https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/opinion/2022/01/08/america-gunman-can-fire-random-public-place/9092172002/

Only in the United States can an unchecked narcissist acquire a weapon of mass destruction — usually, a high-powered gun — with relative ease and virtually no legal resistance. 

Only in the United States can said narcissist take this easily acquired weapon of mass destruction and walk into a mall, restaurant, movie theater, nightclub or any other public place and start firing at random at people — a prospective slew of victims.

When this happens, news sources, law enforcement and psychologists recite the usual question: What was the motive?

Mass shootings are such a common occurrence in the United States that very few people even bat an eye when they hear of one. 

Sadly, the most common response is “We pray for their family” or “We pray for the victims and their families,” and little or nothing of substance then occurs. And, of course, this passive reaction enables another shooting on top of another shooting, which is followed by yet another shooting.

The motive should be clear to anyone because it is always the same: They commit these atrocities because they can.

Michael Snyder, Bremen- South Bend Tribune in South Bend, Indiana

A GOP silent echo - when Republicans refuse to stand up to Donald Trump

An opinion letter published in the South Bend Tribune:

The Republican silent caucus has enabled Donald Trump to execute the worst possible international crime against humanity by refusing to speak up about his incompetent leadership. This opinion letter describes how Republican silence is complicit in the Trump "betrayal of Kurds":

Americans don't approve of Trump's behavior

Donald Trump, the (fake!) Make America Great Again (ugh!) president, announced the sudden and unplanned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria a week ago. (Tragedy!) Within days of the troop’s withdrawal, Turkish military troops invaded Syria and began slaughtering Kurdish troops and civilian refugees. 

Meanwhile, ISIS terrorists and convicted killers escape from the prisons and disappear into the countryside chaos.
This abandonment of the U.S. commitment to the Kurds, to the joint forces fighting the ISIS threat and to all the U.S. troops who died in service and continued to fight is now a failure. Trump’s direct and obvious betrayal of American allies is complete.

But Trump’s global failure is not his alone. It’s a shared failure of every Republican in the House and the Senate. It’s a failure of Mitch McConnell and every Senate Republican, including Indiana Sens. Todd Young and Mike Braun. It’s a failure of every Republican House of Representatives member, including Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski (By the way- Rep. Walorski has an ugly website! She needs a big re-do. Her site looks like an abandoned farm.)

Trump’s failures are only possible when Republicans in the Senate and the House close their eyes in fear of speaking out. Every Indiana Republican contributed to this dishonor and betrayal in Syria.

How does any of this Make America Great Again? (Not!)

From Joseph Cooper, Mishawaka, Indiana

History lesson and warning - facing the Warsaw uprising 75 years ago

This essay by Marc A. Thiessen is a somber history lesson, but he doe not push his point of view far enough. Thiessen's narrative stops before he gets to the inevitable point, being a warning for the future.

In my opinion, what is happening on the US border with the concentration camp incarceration of innocent immigrants is analogous to the threat of Nazi SS soldiers creating terror and carnage on the insurgents in Warsaw Poland. If America did not have a free press, as per the First Amendment, there is no doubt in my mind that the Trumpzi administration would be prepared to advance, in the same way as the Nazis did in Warsaw, Poland. Theissen directs his moving essay to the Millennial generation, but he should have included Trumpzis.

That's my firm opinion.

The Warsaw Uprising is the subject of the the Leon Uris novel Mila 18 and it is an oversight for Thiessen to have ignored this acknowledgement in his essay.

Theissen's echo essay was published in the Indiana South Bend Tribune is a history lesson and also a warning.

American millennials have a lot of complaints about their lot in life. So here’s a question for them: When is the last time you had to walk through a sewer waist-high in human filth, choking on the toxic ammonia, yet unable to cough for fear of alerting the Nazi SS soldiers on the street above — knowing that if you did, they would open a manhole cover and toss in grenades or poison gas to kill you?

Here in Warsaw 75 years ago, teenagers did exactly that. Last week, surviving members of the resistance gathered in the Polish capital to mark the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, when the underground Home Army rose up, freed the city from Nazi occupation and held it for 63 days.

I came here with my 91-year-old mother, who fought in the uprising. Before the insurgency began, she served as an underground courier, carrying radios and messages across the city. She and her fellow girl scouts would sneak out of their homes after curfew — a crime punishable by death — to leave flowers at monuments to Polish heroes or paint anti-Nazi graffiti on walls. And during the uprising itself, she would dodge German sniper fire as she ran across barricades to carry orders and weapons to soldiers fighting on the front lines.

Only about a quarter of the Poles had weapons; many went into battle armed with little more than rocks. 

Kids as young as 10 or 11 would sneak up to German tanks and set them on fire using gasoline bombs. The Nazis responded with unbridled fury. In the city’s Wola district, they executed more than 50,000 civilians. By the time the Home Army was forced to surrender, nearly 200,000 civilians and 16,000 soldiers were dead, and 80% of the city was destroyed.

In our colleges and universities, first millennials and now their Generation Z successors have demanded “emotional safety,” insisting on “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” to protect them from ideas they don’t like, because they tell us that “words are violence.” No, they are not. Violence is SS officers using flamethrowers to clear buildings. Violence is defenseless civilians being put in front of Nazi Panzers as human shields.

In Poland, young people understand this. It was remarkable to watch how young Poles embraced the nonagenarian insurgents. More than 10,000 scouts and volunteers stepped forward to help with the commemorations — pushing the aged partisans in their wheelchairs, bringing them cups of water and soaking in their stories. On Aug. 1, at exactly 5 p.m. — the “W” hour, when the uprising began — the entire city came to a halt. As air raid sirens wailed, people poured onto the streets, setting off flares and car alarms, honking their horns — and chanting in unison, “Heroes, we will not forget you.”

I brought my kids — ages 17, 16 and 13-year-old twins — here to witness this. I wanted them to see with their own eyes what real adversity, sacrifice and heroism look like. I wanted them to put their fingers in the bullet holes that still mark the walls where the Nazis executed children their age. I wanted them to understand that these horrific events happened within the lifetimes of their immediate family, and that they must never take for granted the freedom, peace and security they enjoy.

Most of all, I wanted them to realize that they are growing up in what is, quite literally, the greatest time in the history of man to be alive. At no time since human civilization began has there been more prosperity, more freedom, more upward mobility, better life expectancy and less poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy or violent crime than there is today. This unprecedented moment was purchased for them by the sacrifices of a generation before them — men, women and even children their ages, who took up arms, stood up to evil and gave their lives so that they could live in a world of peace, liberty and limitless opportunity.

Their job is to never forget that sacrifice, and to uphold the values for which they fought. And most of all, to be grateful they never had to trudge through a sewer to avoid Nazis.

Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen.

El Paso was an outrage, and surely not the last. Americans need to react accordingly.- Indiana echo

An echo opinion published in the South Bend Tribune, an Indiana newspaper:

At some point, in the late 1960s, you could be forgiven for thinking that the FBI was in charge of the KKK. (KuKluxKlan)

It infiltrated, manipulated and ran the group into the ground. The name of the operation: COINTELPRO-White Hate. 

With violent white hate again on the rise, we should take some inspiration — even if the methods can’t be replicated — from the FBI’s past grappling with racist extremists.

If there were any doubt that the country has a white nationalist problem, the shocking attack on an El Paso, Texas, Walmart should remove it. These self-radicalizing freaks, a subset of the broader mass-shooting phenomenon, take inspiration from prior acts of vicious mayhem and cheer high body counts on internet message boards. They are domestic subversives and terrorists, and deserve to be treated as such.

There is no doubt that if we had suffered a string of massacres on our soil carried out by Islamic radicals, we’d do everything in our power to diminish and hopefully eradicate the danger — indeed, we have. The national response to racist extremists should show the same alacrity and resolve, while acknowledging that they represent a different, more-difficult-to-counter threat than the old Klan.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson told FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to go after the Klan as he had the Communists. Running until 1971 and involving 26 field offices, COINTELPRO-White Hate targeted groups and people deemed violent threats, not their ideology per se.

The effort was comprehensive and no-holds-barred. In his history of the FBI, Tim Weiner writes, “The FBI dangled small fortunes before potential KKK informers, offered outright bribes to Klansmen who could serve as double agents inside state and local police forces, planted bugs and wiretaps in Klaverns, carried out black-bag jobs to steal membership lists and (on at least one occasion) dynamite caches.”

In an article in the journal Social Science History, David Cunningham recounts how the FBI degraded, and came to effectively control, Klan groups.

The FBI acquired hundreds of Klan informants. According to one FBI official, “There would be a Klan meeting with 10 people there, and six of them would be reporting back the next day.” One informant even became the speechwriter for the leader of the United Klans of America, Robert Shelton.

The FBI worked to pre-empt violent acts, and gained an enormous influence over Klan groups. The New Orleans office was so successful at degrading the Louisiana chapter of the UKA that the office’s concern became propping the group up, lest its disintegration loosen the FBI’s control. The Charlotte office managed to decimate the violent North Carolina UKA and shift its membership to an alternative group under FBI influence.

Overall, Klan membership shrank from an estimated 14,000 members in 1964 to 4,300 in 1971. Per Shelton himself, “the FBI’s counterintelligence program hit us in membership and weakened us for about 10 years.”

Of course, the contemporary FBI obviously isn’t going to take over the “alt-right,” nor should we want it to. The abuses of the COINTELPRO programs — the FBI also targeted civil-rights groups and the New Left, among others — became notorious when they were exposed in the 1970s.

There are also practical obstacles to the FBI duplicating its anti-Klan work. The Klan was an organization, whereas today’s white supremacists are free-floating haters posting anonymously on the internet.

Yet the FBI needs to be intensely focused on this threat. The bureau should take an intelligence-based approach. It should monitor sewer message boards like 8chan, the forum for white-supremacist propaganda. Posters who cross from First Amendment-protected speech to incitement should be prosecuted. The FBI should interview anyone expressing sympathy with terrorism — just as it does with suspected Islamic extremists — and surveil such persons as appropriate and permitted under the law.

El Paso was an outrage, and surely not the last. We need to react accordingly.

Rich Lowry can be reached via email: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.

Senator Todd Young called to protect the earth from "unclean" coal

An echo opinion letter published in the South Bend Tribune, in Indiana: 

I love this cartoon, found while trying to put a graphic to the ridiculous assumption that there's even such a thing as "clean coal".

MaineWriter:  Reconsider 'clean' coal? There is no such thing. (In my opinion, "clean coal" is like trying to recreate the chemical composition of real gold.  It's not possible.)

Sen. Todd Young should not continue to pursue his “clean” coal agenda through his “Envigorate” American Energy Infrastructure Act.

Young has children! How can he ignore the damage that coal brings to our already suffering environment? The air and water that they will need will become even more tainted with this lunacy.

There are so many safer measures that can and should be taken. Indiana’s wind and solar energy has been growing and benefiting not only our planet but scores of people who have work. Young’s proposal will destroy the planet at a much higher price tag than common sense clean energy.

Young was voted into office to be the voice of Indiana people, not big money dirty lobbyists. In today’s political environment I often wonder just how much does the soul of a politician sell for these days?

I urge Senator Young to reconsider pushing this preposterous destructive action about "clean coal". The evidence is in and it finds the senator lacking.

Martha Varga,  South  Bend Indiana

Guns: echo view from Indiana - now is past the time

Past time to get serious about gun violence

By Harold E. Brueseke, lives in South Bend, Indiana, is a retired magistrate of St. Joseph Probate Court.

SOUTH BEND, IN- After the latest gun violence tragedy at Parkland, Fla., our nation and its leaders at all levels of government need to get serious, and immediately and effectively deal with the gun control and mental health issues that daily affect us all and rob too many families of their loved ones.

It is past time for the elected representatives in both houses of Congress to recognize that they are representatives of the entire nation and not just the parochial interests of their own districts/states. 

When they swear an oath to support the Constitution they have more than just a duty to make sure that they get re-elected. They certainly have taken advantage of the decision in Citizens United (558 U.S. 310 (2010)) which grants corporations a right to make broad financial contributions to candidates.

If a representative or senator only has the goal of assuring their her own re-election then they act selfishly.

If our teachers, first responders, or military can take risks when called upon to provide protection, then Congress needs to be willing to do the same. They should take the risk of making decisions that might be unpopular to their financial backers or those clamoring for them to do otherwise.

It is past time for Congress to act in a bipartisan manner and:

1. Defeat any attempt that would allow the use of a concealed carry permit issued in one state to legally justify concealed carry in any other state.

2. Tighten up the ability to purchase lethal weapons by requiring detailed background checks and a waiting period even at so-called gun shows.

3. Outlaw the manufacture, sale and possession of so-called automatic rifles (AR-15-style rifles) and large magazines that have been used with the rifles in school and other mass casualty shootings our nation has lived through since Columbine.

4. Provide national funding for mental health services for all individuals younger than 25 by the imposition of a minimal federal tax assessed against everyone without exemption. I can say from personal experience over almost 40 years exercising jurisdiction over juvenile offenders in St. Joseph County, that Indiana is at best sub-substandard if not totally lacking in this area.

The growth of such mass shootings is a national problem so there should be an effective national response that requires the sharing the expense by all of us. The funds derived from the tax could be distributed to the states in the form of block grants that could allow for local variations within federal standards in how the mental health services are provided.

It is past time to realize that we need not worry about “prying” weapons from the cold dead hands of owners of automatic rifles or other easily obtainable weapons. They are neither dead nor cold, rather it is our children, teachers, first responders and the public at large, who have been killed, who fit that description every time another mass shooting tragedy occurs.