Donald Trump Is Right!

Well, the know-it-all media has, once again, missed the point of what our President is saying about school safety. All they are doing is poking holes in a plan without actually looking at the far-reaching program he is offering to make our schools safer.

So, let’s look at what President Trump really wants, and how much better we all will be under the Trump reforms.

He has correctly identified the core problem of school shootings - mental illness. And he identified the second problem - not enough well-trained and well-armed teachers to take down any madman who shows up with a gun.

Now there may be a couple of problems with his plan to eliminate those problems, but I am sure they can be dealt with easily. Let’s take a look.

First, he is absolutely right. Anyone who goes and shoots up a school killing dozens of innocent children has to be crazy. So, anyone who is absolutely crazy has to be stopped from buying a gun.

And, he was right to let us know that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies missed signals that this latest shooter - we need not give him any more publicity - was going off the deep end.

Now that one is easy to fix. Any time there is a signal that someone may be getting too violent, officials should immediately make sure they can not buy a gun, and that any guns they already have should be taken away, at least until they are judged to be mentally stable.

What? You don’t know that the only way to do those things is to have someone judged mentally incompetent and an immediate threat to themselves or someone else. It is called involuntary confinement, and it can only be ordered by a court.

 Now, our liberal courts ruled many times that people can say many nasty things on the internet and not be arrested. Something about the First Amendment. They have also ruled that having six or seven rifles in your house is not - in itself - grounds for having those guns taken away. Something about the Second Amendment.

No. Under the law, you actually have to do something. Like get into a fight and hit somebody. Or have a psychiatric evaluation that you are not competent. Just like the court did to Santa in Miracle on 34th Street.

So, here’s what we should do. Bigly, and right away. Anyone who is arrested for assault or domestic violence - or for any other crime in which force or intimidation was used - has to have all their guns taken away immediately. They can always go to court later and prove the initial charge was dismissed, or show other mitigating circumstances to get their guns back. That is, as I understand it, the heart of the Trump plan.

                                                   The First Problem

Now, it may take a while. According to FBI and Department of Justice statistics, there were 386.3 homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults per 100,000 people in the U.S. last year, or nearly 800,000 total crimes. Now, even if you figure that some people never get caught, and others commit a lot of crimes, that’s still an awful lot of people to track down.

And we also know that people can change over the years. That someone who is perfectly sane today may become a real threat to our safety a few years from now. So, everyone who owns a gun will have to be examined every two or three years, proving they are not going to become a menace to society. If they disagree, they can always go to court to get their weapons back. 

See, our President is bringing gun control back to our nation. Let’s praise him for doing something that Hillary could never do, or even Paul Ryan.

                                              Now, Let’s Get Serious.

Letting teachers carry concealed weapons in school as a way of stopping a madman with an assault rifle isn’t really smart. For lots of reasons. Here are some obvious ones.

1 - When the alarms sound and kids are hiding under their desks, the armed teacher will go out and, possibly, find someone in the hall with a gun. Is it another teacher? Is it a plainclothes cop? Is it someone who will turn and shoot at them? And, they turn. So, what to do? Live or die?

2 - When someone calls the police to save all the kids, they arrive. Well-trained SWAT teams, if they are available. Other police if they are not. Now, SWAT teams - let’s forget the TV shows for a minute - are really good at what they do because they train over and over again, knowing how to go into a room and scan for a threat. They work together so often that each member of the team can count on the others, everybody is covering everyone else’s back. And so, they break in a door, see 25 kids hiding in fear under their desks, and a man or a woman with a gun in their hand. Expect anything good to happen?

3 - Let’s assume that the shooter is crazy, but not stupid. Let’s also assume they are suicidal and don’t mind showing the world how badly they were treated. So, what to do when you break into that school or library or any other place you can find a lot of kids? Well, of course, you shoot all the adults first.

4 - Now, let’s assume that all the teachers are trained well and get the time off to deal with emergency drills, and go to the firing range a couple of times a year. And let’s assume that we have bricked up all the windows in the school building and taken all the other steps to turn it into a hard target - the kind that terrorists drive up to with a truck bomb. Well, are we safe yet? Nope. After all the kids still have to arrive at school each morning and leave at the end of the day. And, they are all coming and going in very thin-skinned school buses.

Now, we have just two other things to consider before agreeing to give those well-trained teachers a few bucks to make the school safe.

First, you need to have all the students pass through a metal detector to get into school each day and have all their backpacks checked for weapons. Say it will take 30 seconds or so for each student. That’s two a minute, or 120 an hour. Now, say there are 1,200 students in the school. That means you have to set up 10 screening stations to get all those kids into the building each day.

                                                     And That's Not All

It means the school buses have to start rolling an hour earlier, and the parents have to get their children ready an hour earlier. And all those soccer moms you see on the street with their little ones at 6 a.m. waiting for the bus will be there at 5 a.m.

Now, we have to have the teachers and the aides in school an hour early, because all those students who are filtering in - one every 30 seconds at each of those 10 screening stations - will have to be supervised.

Hey, maybe all the teachers will pitch in. We could give them a couple of bucks. Heck, they might even find someone to watch their own kids as they wait on the street for a school bus at 5 a.m.

And now, the final problem. (Actually, I don’t know if it really is a final problem. My list is still only half-baked.)

 Donald Trump has probably never fired a gun. Certainly, his bone spurs kept him out of the army, and I never saw a picture of him at a shooting range. Certainly, he has never walked a beat at night, or responded to a domestic violence call or had to go to a bar and break up a fight. That’s the kind of thing real police do. They also go to funerals.

Under President Obama, our nation saw an average of 135 police killed on duty each year, which was less than the average of 162 in the eight previous years. Of those 135 deaths, 42 involved firearms. Accidents were the biggest cause of fatalities. Always have been.

Now my point is that walking around with the power of life and death in your pocket - and that is exactly what a gun is - makes you see things a little differently. Police who walk through a neighborhood learn very quickly for signs of danger,  the same way they look for signs of drug dealing or someone who is drunk or high and is walking into heavy traffic.

So, let’s take the teacher and send him down a hall in his school to break up a fight. With a gun in his pocket. And a crowd of kids egging one of them on, just to show the teacher who really runs the school. The teacher with his hand in his pocket, on the gun. And, then the pushing starts.

Hey, that’s probably worth a couple of bucks. The teacher can save up and go to a group therapy session and explain how they are having trouble working with their students, finding time to give extra attention and understanding inside the classroom and trying to make life and death decisions in the hallway outside.

Of course, they could just wait for one of the kids in the hall to take out a gun and start shooting, but - as we have already learned - adults will be the first target.

Gee, I wonder if there is a simpler way to keep school kids from being killed with assault rifles. Maybe the NRA has a booklet on that.

Carnage

Sometimes, it seems like all the stories about the latest mass shooting on some college campus or some crowded street or in an elementary school are all the same.

They do blend, because - after all - there are just so many ways of writing about heroic deeds under pressure, little nuggets of bravery and courage amid the unimaginable carnage, and the inevitable wringing of hands and promises that it will never happen again.

Until it does.

But, after well over a dozen mass shootings in the United States so far this year - and its only  February - maybe it is time to take a look at the problems with our reporting of these events and the near-impossible job of actually doing anything to stop them.

Let’s go someplace you never expected. Let’s look at the myths under all the stories.

What? You didn’t realize there was a myth here? Well, there are lots of myths underneath the endlessly changing flow of details about any mass shooting. Myths so common that we no longer talk about them. Maybe the lone cowboy bringing justice to the wild, wild West, or the idea that there must have been something - some little thing - that could have been done to stop the clearly mad, clearly misguided shooter, or that, somehow, we are losing the battle of respect for human life to those nasty rap songs and the endless violence of video games.

Well, upon reflection, powerful and unwritten myths were a big part of almost every story that I wrote for the past half century or so. See, the environmentalists were right and global warming is wrecking havoc on our beaches. See, the conservatives were right and hundreds of thousands of dollars is being wasted in those anti-poverty training programs. See, no matter how much the (liberals, conservatives, fill in whatever you like) whine and cry about the deficit, our economy is humming along, we are getting pay raises and the future looks really bright.

Myths all. And they work, because - on some level - they are all true. 

Environmentalists are right, although you can’t really draw a straight line between a single event and a massive world-wide climate change. Money really is wasted in anti-poverty programs. All you can do is try a whole lot of things, and hope one or two of them work under the current conditions and with the people you are trying to reach. And the debt really is killing our economy, but not in ways that are immediately obvious.

So. let’s look at some of the myths that surround mass shootings. The ones that are so taken for granted by us and the media that we barely even see them.

I’ll start with the first big one. There are good guys and there are bad guys, and if we could only spot the bad guys we could keep them from killing innocent people. True and  not true. The true part is obvious. Less obvious is that fact that, until the demented shooter takes out their automatic weapon, they are still one of the good guys. You know, the good person with a gun who could stop a bad man with a gun.

Yep. If a shooter kills 18 people on a Tuesday, on the Monday before he or she was just a law-abiding citizen of a state that lets almost anyone buy all the weapons and all the ammo they can find in the store. Those not-yet killers are seen as just obeying the law, stocking up on legal weapons and ammo, and helping to keep the world safe by their faithful adherence to the Second Amendment. You know, just like us.

So, it’s not a question of catching the bad guy, but of figuring out just when one of the good guys turn to the dark side. Butting into their private lives. Taking away their legally-purchased guns. Perhaps, even, making them get a new permit to buy a gun or keep a gun, especially when they start turning mad or senile. Gasp. Gasp. Not a good thing to talk about in an election year.

Then there’s the myth of violence. You know, if we could tone down the music or ban the video games, our culture would be calmer. There is a minor theme here, too. A lot of shooters are loners or have been bullied, so if only we could stop bullying and make people more social, the gun violence would stop.

Well, let’s deflate a bubble. There wasn’t too much violence in the United Stales in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, except by corporations against workers trying to form a union, or whites against blacks in the South, or - maybe - against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor was bombed.

Then World War II came along, and more violence was seen all over the world than anyone had ever imagined. Millions died. Our movie houses were full of war hero stories with lots of shooting and dying. And, we didn’t have much gun violence in the streets, probably because not too many civilians had automatic weapons except for the FBI and the mobs.

Well, the violence has grown steadily with Republicans and Democrats in the White House, with decade-long wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan and police actions and advisor actions all across the globe. Our entertainment on television is noble - SWAT teams and SEAL teams and investigators from any number of real or imagined agencies. All of them causing the death of some evil-doer at the end of the show, unless it’s a two-parter.

But, no, there has never been a proven causal link between violent video games or violent movies or violent music and real violence in the street. There is a link between bullying and violence, but it only seems to work one way - some shooters have said they were bullied when they were growing up. But, not many people who were bullied go on to become mass shooters.

There is a link to shooting and gun control, but it is so obvious that a lot of politicians don’t mention it. Guns are really very good at what they do, which is to kill people. The right ones will fire quickly - dozens or hundreds of bullets a minute, depending on just what you have purchased. And, it seems that when they are harder to get, there are fewer mass shootings to deal with. 

Now, lots of members of Congress want to have a “perfect” solution to gun violence - we can’t ban a bump stock because bump stocks were only used in a few shootings. We have to deal with mental illness before we go about violating the Constitution and ban the sale of guns, or just some guns, or of magazines that hold 12 or 20 rounds or more.

Imagine, if you will, that some bleeding-heart liberal would go to Congress and say “You can’t pay for the wall that President Trump wants to build, because it won’t stop every single illegal alien from crossing the border into the United States.” Not that it’s wrong, or too expensive, or wildly impossible to actually construct. No, just that it won’t stop every illegal crossing.

Or, pretend that someone is standing before a judge, convicted of running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people out of millions of dollars. The judge asks if he has something to say before passing sentence.

“Yes, your honor. I know I stole a lot of money, but putting me in jail won’t stop everyone who tries to do the same thing in the future. I know I deserve some kind of punishment, but you can’t impose it until it solves the whole problem of fraud in investing,” he replies.  With a smile.

My last myth is prayer. Which will be unpopular to say, but is nonetheless true. Some of our elected officials seem to be using prayer as a safe way of not doing anything to solve the problem of gun violence.

It was comforting, very comforting, when another president, several years ago, prayed for the victims of a racist shooting. It is natural to want to comfort victims of any disaster, natural or caused by uncontrollable violence.

But, after 15 or 18 or 22 times, the words start to seem hollow, unless - of course - they are followed by actions. Automatic weapons get harder to buy, the power grid in Puerto Rico is rebuilt, the poor and their undernourished children get the schools the need to grow out of poverty and the food they need to grow up strong. And, maybe, their cousin still trapped in a hell-hole of sectarian violence in Afghanistan or southern Africa will be able to escape and come to the United States.

That would be the answer to a prayer. A real answer. A sincere one.

The Cracks Are Starting To Show

Well, everything seems to be on schedule. It’s  been just one year, and already the cracks are starting to show. No, not those cracks, the other ones.

The obvious cracks in the Trump administration were easy to see and just as easy to predict. Just looking at his family shoehorning their way into the circle of power in the White House - and listening to their endless bland interviews about being champions of women’s rights and running the company business just like Dad would have done it - was enough to tell you all you needed about the power struggle taking place behind what was a very transparent curtain.

And, no, not the bitter bickering among the hired help - the people who thought they were sharing power with our President - over who got to look more important or who was promised a second scoop of ice cream after dinner was over. As they dropped away, one by one, it became clear that watching the Trump staff was like watching a game of musical chairs, everything going faster and faster as the players dropped away, until only one was left. Then, the Donald would come and pull their chair away. As I said, predictable.

No, the cracks I am talking about are more fundamental and will cause a lot more damage as they widen.

The first crack is in Congress, where the Republicans - without real Democratic opposition - are fighting among themselves more and more. Some have tested the political winds and decided not to run again. All their votes for the rest of the year will be cast with one eye on a future job, and the guys who want to work as high=paid lobbyists for solar energy companies are not in lockstep with their future coal lobby brethren.

Worse, the ones who think they will serve for a decade or more are starting to worry about the deficit and realize that the nation can’t keep adding a trillion dollars of debt every year. Sooner or later, the voters will blame them. There’s one big crack to patch up.

The second crack is showing among the one per-centers. You know, the ones that got most of the tax breaks.

Now - to borrow a line from a really famous author - the rich are different from the rest of us. Among other things, they know they are not in the same boat. They don’t deal with lines or traffic jams, don’t have to worry about making reservations for a plane. They take a helicopter to the Hamptons and look down on traffic, or just fly to some other hideaway not savaged by global warming.

But, just as they don’t suffer from the problems most of the rest of us face, they also are beginning to realize that - in one sense - we really are all in this together.  Yes, the stock market has made that point rather well.

They could smile modestly as Donald Trump claimed, over and over again for the past year, that it was reaching new heights almost daily, all thanks to his administration and the tax breaks he provided. Heck, they all trusted their accountants to look at the detailed tax code changes most of us couldn’t read and understand anyway and assure them that they were going to make far, far more after tax income than any minor loss they might suffer in the short term.

Heck, it wasn’t as if they were losing their jobs because of consolidation. And, they could promise huge bonuses - especially using the phrase “up to” to set limits - to keep everything warm and happy. After all, CEO’s make most of their money through bonuses, it is time workers did the same. Right? Well, wrong, wrong, wrong.

People who live paycheck to paycheck, the way much of our workforce does, can’t live on the hope of an end-of-year bonus. Heck, the bank they go to for a loan won’t count a one-time bonus as income when they try and decide if the loan will be approved.

So, as our nation goes marching into the golden dawn of the new Trump economic era, all those companies who were waiting for big new trade deals with other countries are beginning to see they don’t really have any. Our solar panel industry might be grateful about the 30 per-cent tariff Trump imposed on Chinese solar panels, if only there was an industry big enough to take up the slack. But, there isn’t.

So, Trump’s wealthy backers are doing what wealthy backers always do, which is to calculate how much they are really gaining and how much they are really losing, and how big a liability is building because of what they have already done. 

You can’t just spend a lot of money and put your name on an opera hall and more and avoid the social pressure that your name recognition is generating. Heck, they know a bad deal when they see one.

Finally, crack number three is showing, in the Democratic party. Now it’s fair to say the Democrats were not prepared for Hillary’s loss and a huge leadership crisis developed, one that was showing cracks along generational lines, regional lines, socio-economic lines and racial lines almost from day one.

But when Nancy Pelosi pushed so hard for the Dreamers that the Democrats shut down the government - and made an eight-hour speech begging Paul Ryan to allow a vote on saving them - it sort of put all her cards on the table. With no political capital left to raise the stakes.

Now there is supposed to be a big budget deal coming up for a vote that might set things right, if enough Democrats and Republicans go along with it and if the President agrees to sign it.

But, why should he? After all, he gets what he wants by walking away from existing deals and insisting they be made better. More money for the wall and he might sign it. Or not. What does he have to lose?

Could he be losing Paul Ryan? That’s the crack I’m watching for next.

Readership Lost (a personal observation)

They’ve stopped following me in Ukraine.

Not that it’s a big loss, but the two people from there who once followed me are no longer listed in the statistics column that bloggers can look at to see where the people who click on their site come from.

Now, to be fair, I still have followers in Canada, Morocco, Peru and the Phillippines, but I have to admit the loss of the Ukraine does leave a sort of dark cloud over a small part of my ego.

Not a single bot or algorithm from that international hot spot seems to think I am worth targeting, at least enough to see what I have said and to put it in some kind of file to follow public opinion in the USA. And, they are designed to do just that. It’s the reason they were created.

 To be even fairer, I don’t seem to have any followers in Russia or Israel either, although the people in those countries are probably smart enough to disguise their searches and run them through servers located in some other nation, like - for example - Morocco, Peru or the Phillipines. I am giving Canada a break because of that nation’s obvious interest with its largest trading partner and because I once blogged about Maple syrup.

Now I could probably overlook that loss of the Ukraine completely if I didn’t have the kind of  mind that loves to puzzle over things that I don’t really understand. It’s why I took science courses in college that I didn’t have to, and why I had so much fun in a Chaucer course. You really have to understand English society in the 1300’s to see how remarkable a collection of tales it is, and why the Wife of Bath holds a good claim to being the first major independent female character in all of English literature.

But, I digress.

What the loss of Ukraine really means to me is that somehow, somewhere, something has changed that I do not understand. Why, if I was once worth following, am  I followed no longer. Could it be the iron hand of Vladimir Putin clamping down on free speech and communication in that nation? Could it be that my opinions are no longer of interest there, or that the geopolitical conditions have changed so much they are no longer relevant?

I could ask Marie Yovanovitch, who you will all no doubt recognize as the U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine. A few days ago, she urged that nation to move forward in establishing an anti-corruption court. It seems that corruption in Ukraine has been recognized as a major problem there. The irony just drips.

But, back to my problem. When something happens, I try to understand it. Which means understanding what led up to it. 

 It’s the same process that made me change my mind about Hillary Clinton. Before the election, I thought she was a great candidate and would make a great president. Then she lost, and I justified my opinion by saying she got three million more votes than Trump did. Then I realized that she and the Republicans could look at the same numbers, count the same electoral votes, and campaign in enough places and buy advertising in enough markets to become president. Which they didn’t.

After a few months, I realized that made her a bad candidate.

Which, of course, brings us to the Republicans in Congress. For years, lots of them pointed out what they thought was wrong with government, and - like their Democratic colleagues - promised everything to everybody. They would spend more, lower taxes, help out the poor and free people of government restrictions.

Well, now that they are in power, the footnotes are coming. They did lower taxes for everyone, and at the same time raised taxes on lots of people. And, those tax cuts are just temporary, while the tax cuts on businesses will never expire.

They said local governments should be free of unnecessary federal restrictions, but now that they are in power the definition of what regulations are necessary seems to have expanded. If a city in California wants to tell its police not to look into the immigration status of everyone who crosses paths with them, will that signal the downfall of our republic? I don’t think so.

I could go on and on, but the arguments here are already getting old. No less true, but old.

I just wish I could stop thinking of the Congressional GOP majority as reprogrammed bots, and wondering just who reprogrammed them.  And when their hardcore supporters will start wondering the same thing.

Well, I suppose we could just follow the tax cut money.

Liar's Poker

Ever since Donald Trump’s election, I’ve been trying to figure out what happened and - more recently - what is still happening in Washington.

It’s harder than it looks. Heck, all the commentators on all the networks and all the talk radio stations have been explaining it to me, and I still don’t get it. Correction - I still didn’t get it. Now I do.

We have all been in a bar, taking part in a monster game of Liar’s Poker.

For readers who don’t hang around in bars enough (ah, my wasted youth), Liar’s Poker is a game of bluff. For the eggheads, it is also a game of statistical analysis.

Someone goes to the bartender and gets a batch of singles from the register. Etiquette says that you give her a $10 and smile when she gives you the eight singles you asked for.

Then, all the players look at the single dollar handed to them and take turns bidding on who has the best hand. 

If the first player bids three fives, they are betting that there are three fives among all the dollar bills handed out. The next bid has to be higher, so the next player has to bid at least three sixes or four twos. Why? Three sixes beat three fives, and four of a kind beats three of a kind. The bidding goes up each turn until all the players get a chance to challenge or make a higher bid.

When everyone challenges, the players turn over all the bills and see if the winning bid made - are there really five nines among the bills?

Just clarify before the game. One is an ace, 0 is a 10.

 Fast, simple. Bluffing is encouraged. If there is a big winner at the end of the night, they buy the next round of drinks. That is a losing proposition financially, but it is considered a great honor.

And so, we come to the Trump campaign and all those election promises. No one challenged, and he won. New York’s governor said people in the state could deal with the fact that state taxes are no longer deductible by changing the tax from real estate to a payroll tax, or by letting people simply write a check to the state for their taxes, but use it as a charitable deduction.

The IRS challenged the idea. He lost.

See how easy it all becomes when you look at it as a game of bluff?

Just say “I have a memo that proves this whole investigation of the President and Russia is illegal, because it is all the fruit of a poisonous tree” - Congressmen talk that way - and it doesn’t matter that you didn’t really write the memo (which you claimed) or even read it. A bluff is a bluff.

Then you get challenged on it, and you lose. Unless you keep up the bluff and threaten to release another memo about the State Department. The jury is still out on this one.

Pretend you are Paul Ryan and you have to deal with an all-out attack on the integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by the man you named to head the House intelligence committee. Just say the memo that attacks the leadership of the FBI isn’t actually attacking the FBI.

Well, he’s learning. Not learning much, it seems, but learning that once you jump on a tiger’s back, you better stay there. I believe his exit plan is to exit Congress, letting the rest of the Republicans decide who they want to follow him as their leader. (Majority or minority as the case may be.)

And now, we have the president saying that this now-infamous and one-sided memo - which is so full of flaws that counting them would be meaningless - has totally cleared him of any involvement in the Russia probe, and so it is time to end it.

But wait, wasn’t the Russia probe started to see if Russia influenced our last election and to come up with ways to keep it from happening again? And you can’t spend your entire life in Congress railing against crooked lawyers and people who escape justice because of a legal technicality. “Well, your honor, I know the jury convicted my client of murder, but the DA parked illegally on the way to get his search warrant - here’s the ticket - and so you have to find my client not guilty. Fruit of the poison tree, you know.”

So, what to do here?

Well, you can just finish your drink, turn the dollar bill in your hand over, and read the inscription “In God We Trust.” And listen carefully. You can almost hear all those elected men and women who make up the congressional majority adding “all others pay cash.”