Borscht 🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Guns, Guns, Schools:  School is back in session and since guns remain easily accessible even to a fourteen-year-old with a known history of making online threats, yesterday two teachers and two students were shot to death by that student with an AR-platform style weapon at Winder, Georgia’s Apalachee High School. Nine additional victims were hospitalized. The state of Georgia is in the upper third for firearm mortality in the US.  Adults there don’t need a permit to buy rifles, shotguns, or handguns, don’t need to register their guns, don’t need a permit to carry rifles and shotguns and don’t need to do anything special to keep their guns away from their children, even those with a history of making gun related threats.  In 2022, Georgia repealed provisions requiring people to obtain a license and be subject to background checks before carrying concealed weapons in public spaces.  After the shooting, Georgia’s Governor Kemp who oversaw the elimination of his state’s concealed carry law refused to answer any questions about how to make Georgia’s schools safer from gun violence saying instead that “this is not the day to talk about safety or policy.  We need thoughts and prayers.”  So, although the shooting was tragic, nothing about it is all that surprising.  Just another day in America when a politician like Kemp who is popular enough to deal with pushback from the gun lobby is unwilling to talk about or do anything constructive about guns beyond those thoughts and prayers. 

Russia, Russia, Election:  We’re in the midst of another hotly contested election year where everything that matters is up for grabs so it’s also not all that surprising that Russia is once again engaging in election interference.  Yesterday the Department of Justice indicted, in absentia because they are in Russia, two employees of Russian government owned media company Russia Today (RT) for covertly providing $10 million in funding to Tenet Media, a Tennessee based US company that platforms right wing MAGA commentators including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson both of whom have many millions of followers on YouTube.  According to the DOJ indictment, the “commentators” were fed RT curated content through Tenet and were paid $400,000 per month to produce anti-woke, anti-Ukraine, pro-Trump videos.  Pool, Johnson, and the other so-called influencers who received the Russian payments claim that they didn’t know that they were Russians tools, but they had to know that something was full of borscht because the payments they received were above market. The RT folks were also involved with the bizarre video of former Fox star Tucker Carlson’s much mocked Russian supermarket shopping spree. In addition to the indictments, the DOJ seized more than 30 web domains that it said were part of a broad and ongoing effort by the Russian government to influence the 2024 election.  Trump who has appeared with Pool and who hosted him at Mar a Lago reacted to the DOJ’s action by saying it was just more evidence that he is being targeted because those Russian guys, like his good friend Hungary’s Viktor Orban are nice.

Campaign Trail:  Trump also suggested that the upcoming September 10 debate with Kamala Harris will be unfair, alleging that ABC news is providing Harris with an advance look at the questions they plan to ask.  He made that accusation yesterday at a Pennsylvania “townhall” where he was thrown softball questions by his Fox friend, sometime campaign advisor, Sean Hannity while answering a very limited number of pre-approved questions from the audience.  For her part Harris, who was endorsed yesterday by former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, once a member of House Republican leadership, was in New Hampshire where instead of embracing Hanibal Lecter or alleging that all recent migrants seeking asylum had recently been released from insane asylums, she talked economic policy. Harris’ plans include providing more tax incentives to small businesses and a significantly lower capital gains tax increase for high earners than the one previously proposed by President Biden. So maybe Elon Musk, the billionaire immigrant who hates immigrants, who has been reposting AI generated pictures of Harris dressed as a Communist apparatchik all over his X platform is wrong about her being a leftist stooge?  Or maybe he’s too busy auditioning for that promised position in Trump’s administration?     

Only the Best?  In other candidate news, Mark Robinson, the Holocaust denying evangelical Republican candidate for Governor in North Carolina reportedly has a serious and rather time-consuming porn addiction, he’s also on record saying that the US should go back to the days when women weren’t allowed to vote. Presumably, Robinson who is Black is okay with allowing Blacks to vote but then again, maybe not because consistency and logic aren’t his thing.   So, to clarify women making porn is okay, voting not so much, and definitely no single women with cats teaching kids. There’s a reasonable chance that the Trump endorsed Robinson, this election cycle’s equivalent to last cycle’s Republican Pennsylvania governor wannabee/wacko Doug Mastriano who lost resoundingly to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro could help push North Carolina into Harris’s column.  Robinson isn’t the only Republican candidate who might help out the Democrats, Montana’s Trump endorsed Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, who given Trump’s popularity in Montana stands a reasonable chance of toppling incumbent Democrat Jon Tester, was caught on tape making derogatory comments about the state’s Native Americans, about 6.5% of the state’s population. Something about the Tribe members all being drunk and tossing beer cans at 8 AM in the morning.  Sheehy who doesn’t really live in Montana might not realize just how much of a slur that was or more likely he’s just racist.      

#BringThemAllHomeNOW