Cruel reality of living with failed Trumpzi leadership

Opinion echo published in the Madison, Wisconsin newspaper Capital Times - by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

The country was rocked by two mass killings this past weekend. The first was in El Paso, Texas. The slaughter of 22 people in El Paso's Cielo Vista Walmart was an act of a white supremacist. A manifesto he allegedly posted online shortly before the massacre echoed President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric. "This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas," the alleged shooter wrote.

Late that night in Dayton, Ohio, throngs of people were enjoying the Oregon entertainment district when another white man in his 20s opened fire, killing nine people in about 30 seconds before police killed him. Among those he murdered was his sibling. Unlike the El Paso killer, the Dayton shooter left no "manifesto" to explain his motivation for the rampage, but had in the past expressed violent fantasies, an obsession with mass shootings, and classmates said he kept a rape and kill list while in high school. Misogyny is often linked to mass killers.

Trump read a speech from a teleprompter Monday, rambling on about mental health and violent video games, largely toeing the NRA line. While he did suggest support for a national "red flag" law, allowing court-ordered confiscation of guns from a person deemed a threat to others or to him- or herself, Trump said, "Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun." In fact, people who suffer from mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of gun violence than perpetrators of it. He also called for the death penalty for mass shooters.

While the Dayton shooter is dead, the El Paso shooter turned himself in to a police officer not far from the scene of the crime. His online declaration began, "I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto." In fact, how New Zealand's elected leader, and society at large, responded to that massacre last March of 51 Muslims should be the model for what happens in this country.

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the world's youngest elected leader. After the Christchurch massacre, committed by a single gunman armed with an arsenal of legally purchased semi-automatic weapons, Ardern immediately pushed a ban on almost all semi-automatic and military-style weapons through Parliament. "Fifty people died and they do not have a voice. We in this house are their voice," she said. In less than a month after the massacre, the assault weapons ban became law in New Zealand.

Trump did call Ardern to express condolences. Ardern said of the call: "He asked what offer of support the United States could provide. My message was sympathy and love for all Muslim communities." When addressing her nation in response to the massacre, Ardern said: "Many of those who will have been directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand."

Before departing from the White House to visit survivors in Dayton and El Paso Wednesday, Trump refused to take back his use of the word "invasion," which he has repeatedly used to describe the arrival of immigrants and asylum seekers at the southern border. According to Media Matters for America, "Between January and February, President Donald Trump's Facebook page ran about 2,200 ads referring to immigration as an 'invasion.'" His use of the word "invasion" was invoked as justification by the killers in El Paso, Christchurch and in Pittsburgh last year. There, the shooter entered a synagogue and gunned down 11 Jewish worshippers who he believed supported "invaders."

These horrific events have spurred political momentum for a change in the broken gun laws that have for far too long made the United States a virtual free-fire zone.

The response in New Zealand was to ban assault and semi-automatic weapons, and to embrace diverse immigrant communities. In the United States under Trump, the opposite is happening. Next month, laws will take effect in Texas loosening gun restrictions -- for example, forbidding the banning of guns in schools and churches. Then, on Wednesday, the day Trump was ostensibly consoling wounded survivors in Dayton and El Paso, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted the largest single-state workplace enforcement action ever, arresting 680 people at several Mississippi food-processing plants, accusing them of being undocumented.

The scourge of guns and the war on immigrants continue.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,400 stations, including WORT here. She is the co-author, with Denis Moynihan and David Goodman, of the newly published New York Times best-seller "Democracy Now!: 20 Years Covering the Movements Changing America."

El Paso - when hatred came from an outsider to attack innocent people

The El Paso Times' editor Tim Archuleta has a few things he'd like Donald Trump to know before his (unwelcomed) Wednesday visit to El Paso.

Over the weekend, a mass shooting in an El Paso, Texas Walmart left 22 people dead just hours before another shooting killed nine in Dayton, Ohio. Trump is slated to visit both cities Wednesday, but before he gets there, Archuleta wrote an open letter to Trump emphasizing that "the violence that pierced El Paso, drawing you here today, is not of our own community."

The suspected El Paso shooter drove from Dallas to conduct "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas," he said in what appeared to be a pre-shooting manifesto. "The hatred that came to us came from an outsider," Archuleta said in his letter, adding that "this is not the El Paso we want the world to know." He went on to describe how people from El Paso lined up to donate more blood, ice, and water than were even needed. And he praised El Paso's relationship with its sister city Juárez, Mexico, countering Trump's declaration that El Paso's proximity to the border made it "one of our nation’s most dangerous cities." It was all wrapped up inside a stunning front page that listed the names of the shootings' victims above a bold message to Trump.

Dear Donald Trump:
You arrived on tragic day....during a visit El Paso Texas.

Less than a week ago, 22 of our own were killed as they shopped in a neighborhood store, as they prepared for their weekends, as they provided for their families.

Most of them were from El Paso.  

Eight victims were from our sister city of Juárez, steps away.

During your visit, you will find us in the agony of our mourning.

The violence that pierced El Paso, drawing you here, is not of our own community. 

It was an outsider came who came to El Paso to shatter our city, to murder our neighbors. A white man from another Texas city came to target the more than 80% of us who share Hispanic roots.

We are horrified to have witnessed this violence in our city.

This is not the El Paso we want the world to know. This is a city with a deep tradition of racial harmony. It is a city of warm, compassionate, patriotic, accepting residents who did not deserve this suffering.

But, Mr. Trump, while we are sorry to have seen such violence and to have felt such pain, one other thing must be said about today.

Your visit was on very good day for El Paso.

In spite of our suffering, you will see the city that makes us proud. 

El Pasoans join hands and pray during the Hope Border Institute Prayer Vigil on Sunday, Aug. 4, 2019, in El Paso, Texas, a day after...Mark Lambie/El Paso Times

As our neighbors lay bleeding in hospitals, El Paso stood in line, in 104-degree heat, to donate blood — so much blood that organizers had more than they could handle.

As families waited to be reunited with missing loved ones, El Paso quickly brought so much water and ice to their aid that donors were turned away.

When a gunman passed over one man to target others, that man didn’t turn and run. He grabbed soda bottles from the shelves and started throwing, trying to distract the gunman from his evil intent. He was shot twice because of it. His name is Chris Grant. He is from El Paso.


El Pasoans Come Together to Heal at Vigil Outside Walmart

Two days after a mass murder at a Walmart in El Paso, the community continues to hold vigil and prayer. (Mark R. Lambie, El Paso Times)

As Grant lost blood and stumbled from the store, a woman helped stop the bleeding. She helped rush him to medical care. She had been shopping on her day off. Her name is Donna Sifford. She has been in El Paso since 1992. She is a port director for Customs and Border Protection.

They met again later at the hospital and embraced. Now, they are friends as well as neighbors.

This is El Paso.

Make no mistake. Our city is in pain. We were targeted by a white supremacist, and we are suffering. We will remember the names of the 22 neighbors who died. 

Their names are printed here. (I posted this article link to Twitter.)

The violence of that day may have been a product of his hatred. It was not a product of our community.

Our community did not deserve this.

Our compassion for one another goes back to the city’s founding.

We were pioneers when a basketball coach from a small college we now know as UTEP started five African American players in a national championship basketball game for the first time — and won.

Fort Bliss, a key U.S. Army base, draws service members from around the world. They make us an international city many times over. When these patriots retire, many are purposeful in making El Paso their home.

When Pope Francis visited the Americas, he chose Juárez to conclude his trip. From there, he could reach out to the world on both sides of the border.

In El Paso, we embrace our relationship with Juárez. We are not separated by a border fence. In El Paso, the border is an opportunity. Commerce helps everyone share in the American dream. 

We all want the same thing — we want our country to prosper. That’s not different from your goal for America.

For many of us, our parents were born in Mexico. We are proud of that and we are also proud Americans.

America is our country. We are home.

Not everyone who visits El Paso has understood this.

During a visit to El Paso in April 2017, then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called El Paso “ground zero.” He said our city was “the front lines … where we take our stand” against cartels and human traffickers.

Mr. President, in your February State of the Union address, you claimed that El Paso was “one of our nation’s most dangerous cities” before a border wall was built.

Mr. President, that is not El Paso.


El Pasoans Grieve at Hope Border Institute Interfaith Vigil

Our city and Juárez were always linked. Today, we are intertwined more than ever. The evil that visited us targeted people from El Paso and Juárez alike. In our sorrow, we are more alike than ever.

Some in our community doubt we will be able to change your view of our border community. But it is important to us that we explain all that is good about El Paso.

In El Paso, when a baby in a onesie was covered in blood in an attack on a neighborhood store, a man scooped her up and raced for the exits.

In El Paso, when our neighbors were hurt, people and businesses donated more than $1 million in just two days to help them.

Our people are scared. Many of us feel our city is still viewed as a target.

But El Paso does not lash out in anger, even when we are treated unfairly.

In El Paso, we won’t ever look at someone who is different with prejudice in our hearts.

The hatred that came to us came from an outsider. 

It did not come from El Paso.

Tim Archuleta is editor of the El Paso Times.

Republicans are failed leaders - they must respond to protect Americans from gun violence

Echo opinion by E.J. Dionne published in The Las Vegas Sun

What has happened to Republicans? At one time, Republicans supported safety and security.

OPINION:
The right and wrong sides of guns, white nationalism

When one side proposes ways that human beings might begin to solve a deadly problem while the other side leaves it up to God, you know which side is right.

When one side proposes solution after solution to contain gun violence — and offers compromise after compromise to get something done — while the other side blocks action every time, you know which side is right.

When the president of the United States and his most incendiary media allies fuel hatred of those who are not white while his opponents say we should stand in solidarity with one another, you know which side is right.

When one side brushes aside the dangers of racist and white nationalist terrorism while the other side says we need to be vigilant against all forms of terrorism, you know which side is right.

"....America's democracy is failing.....and its moral compass is broken" - E.J. Dionne

And when Americans are gunned down in incident after incident, when we are numbed by repeating the same sorrowful words every time, when we move within a news cycle from “something must be done” to “the Senate will block action” or “the politics are too complicated,” you know America’s democracy is failing and its moral compass is broken.

Our rancid political culture is, quite literally, killing our nation. And the problem is not caused by some abstraction called “polarization” or by “the failure of both sides to understand each other.” Those are the alibis of timid souls so intent on sounding “balanced” that they turn their eyes from the truth.

What is that truth? When it comes to gun violence and the need to confront white nationalism, one side is right and one side is wrong.

Until we face this, even two mass shootings within 24 hours will do nothing to galvanize action. In El Paso, 22 people were killed at a shopping center Saturday and 26 were wounded by a gunman who, according to police, appears to have posted an anti-immigrant screed online before the shooting. Then at 1 a.m. Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, another mass shooter left nine dead and 27 injured in an area known for its lively nightlife that is heavily patrolled by police. The shooter was killed in less than a minute.


“Think about that minute,” said Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley. “The shooter was able to kill nine people and injure 26 in less than a minute.” (!)

The gun-permissiveness crowd wants us not to think about that minute. It puts the lie to the gun lobby’s claim that having armed people nearby when a mass killer strikes is all we need to keep us safe.

The wrong side in this debate does not want us to come together. On the contrary, its goal after every mass shooting is to deflect and divide. Here’s what Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said when asked by reporters what we should do about gun violence. “Listen, there are bodies that have not yet been recovered,” Abbott replied. “I think we need to focus more on memorials before we start the politics.”

But Abbott, reading from the National Rifle Association’s script, started “the politics” right at that moment, and it is an insidious form of politics. Simultaneously, he deflected by pretending it’s impolite to answer substantive questions and divided by saying that those who raise them disrespect the dead.

Nothing disrespects those who are slaughtered more than the political paralysis Abbott and those like him are encouraging.

Invoking God and calling for prayer should never seem obscene. But it is always obscene to use the Almighty to escape our own responsibility.

“God bless the people of El Paso Texas. God bless the people of Dayton, Ohio,” President Donald Trump said in a Sunday morning tweet from his New Jersey golf club.

Yes, may God bless them. But may God also judge Trump for a political strategy whose success depends on sowing racism, reaction and division. May God judge him for stoking false and incendiary fears about an immigrant “invasion,” the very word echoed by the manifesto that police suspect was the El Paso shooter’s. May God judge the president for cutting programs to fight white extremism at the very moment when the FBI is telling us that we are more at risk from white nationalist terrorists than Islamist terrorists.

In pursuit of a mythical middle ground, the faint-hearted will counsel against calling out the moral culpability of those who divide, deflect and evade. Meanwhile, the rationalizers of violence will continue to claim that only troubled individuals, not our genuinely insane gun policies, are responsible for waves of domestic terrorism that bring shame on our country before the world.

But sane gun laws are the middle ground, and most gun owners support them. Opposing the political exploitation of racism is a moral imperative. And refusing to acknowledge that only one side in this debate seeks intentionally to paralyze us is the path of cowardice.

E.J. Dionne is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Governor Kasich should be our Republican president

Kasich says it’s a ‘bad idea’ to phase out Medicaid expansion

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Republican party zealots were determined to hire a party loyalist to be the 45th President of the United States, but it's a crying shame they didn't pay more attention to the qualifications of Ohio Governor John Kasich.  

If I were a registered Republican (oh, by the way, Kansas Secretary of State Kobach, who said, "Americans may even be unable to re-enter the US" - my party affiliation is already public information)- but I'm a Democrat, the man I would have supported is John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio. 

Of course, Governor Kasich was brutally overlooked in the 2016 Republican primaries.  In retrospect, this snub by the conservatives in the right wing of the GOP created a political quagmire, because now the party is so deep with extremists, that they will never in my lifetime be able to crawl out.  Unless, of course, Governor Kasich decides to attempt Presidential leadership, one more time.

Here's one reason why I would ask Governor Kasich to challenge the mentally incompetent Donald Trump.  It's because Governor Kasich cares about people. He has dedicated his life to public service and earned his chance to take his moral leadership to the highest levels of government.

Reported in Dayton Daily News:

Gov. Kasich vetoes plan to stop new Medicaid enrollment in Ohio- by staff writer Lynn Hulsey

Ohio Governor John Kasich signed the state budget late Friday (June 30),  but not before vetoing a controversial enrollment freeze for the state’s Medicaid expansion that he spearheaded in 2013.

The two-year $133 billion 2018-2019 budget was approved on party lines Wednesday in the Republican-dominated House and Senate.

Kasich’s move sets up a veto standoff with the Ohio General Assembly, dominated by fellow Republicans who ignored many of his key proposals in the executive budget he proposed earlier this year.

After the Senate added the Medicaid freeze to its proposed budget Kasich’s office said freezing enrollment under the Medicaid expansion could cause 500,000 Ohioans to lose coverage in the first 18 months after the ban went into effect on July 1, 2018. The “freeze could lock enrollees in poverty” and “likely would result in a legal challenge,” according to a memo released by the Governor’s Office of Health Transformation.

Kasich pushed for expanding Medicaid in Ohio under the Affordable Care Act and has spent much of the past week in Washington, D.C., protesting the Medicaid cuts in the U.S. Senate’s proposed health care bill.

Even if the legislature overrides his veto, the freeze cannot go into effect without the state first obtaining a federal waiver.

Kasich went around lawmakers in 2013 when he expanded the program that now extends coverage to about 725,500 Ohioans at a cost of more than $5 billion — the bulk of which is picked up by the federal government.

GOP lawmakers and conservatives say the rising costs of Medicaid are unsustainable. (MaineWriter- why is it the rising costs of waging wars aren't considered to be "unsustainable"?)

“We think especially on Medicaid there are some real strong efforts to try to address the real problems we have with that program, both on the fiscal side and from the standpoint of trying to improve the whole healthcare system,” said Greg Lawson, research fellow at the conservative Columbus think tank, Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

But Medicaid supporters say the freeze will do real harm to Ohioans.

“Passing the Medicaid expansion freeze and kicking people off of Medicaid is unacceptable, harmful, and cruel and unusual punishment,” said Rep. Emilia Strong Sykes, D-Akron.

House Minority Leader Fred Strahorn, D-Dayton, and State Sen. Peggy Lehner, R-Kettering this week called for a veto of the Medicaid freeze.

“Ohioans need to be healthy in order to be productive in their day to day lives. Without the ability to afford doctor visits, hospital stays, nursing home care, home health care, and long term care costs, families will spiral into debt, illness and despair,” wrote Strahorn and three other top House Democrats in a letter urging Kasich to veto the bill.

“I will vote to sustain the veto,” said Lehner, who voted for the budget on Wednesday. “And I am not at all sure that the Senate has the votes to override.”

Earlier on Friday John Fortney, press secretary for Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof, R-Medina, said Obhof “runs the caucus democratically, with a lower case ‘d.’”

“Robust debate within the group is always encouraged. With that, Senator Lehner doesn’t speak for the caucus, but is entitled to her own opinion,” Fortney said.

On Friday Senate Democrats released a list of items they want Kasich to veto, including the freeze.

It is anticipated that state GOP lawmakers may attempt an override. The House has a meeting scheduled for Thursday and the Senate is expected to meet the week of July 10.

A three-fifths vote of each house is required to override a veto, so for the Senate that means 20 votes. The House would need 60 votes to reverse a Kasich veto.

Several local legislators said they would vote to override a veto of the freeze.

“To veto that language would be to perpetuate a program that is not affordable into the future,” said State Sen. William P. Coley, R-West Chester.

“I will vote to override the freeze,” said State Rep. Wes Retherford, R-Hamilton. “As far as any others I will have to see what all he vetoes before deciding them. I believe it is very important that we remind the governor that this is not his personal kingdom, but that the legislature is an important and equal part of the state government.”

State Rep. Kyle Koehler, R-Springfield, also said he would vote to override a veto of the Medicaid freeze.

Republicans in the General Assembly gained enough seats after the 2016 election to override a veto from Kasich. In fact, Republicans have the largest majority in the 50 years since the current number of legislative seats was set.