Déjà Vu All Over Again 🤡 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤡 🕎

Guns, Guns, Hate: On Saturday, a shooter killed two and wounded nine others at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. For two of the survivors the shooting was one of those increasingly American déjà vu moments as each of them had earlier survived other school shootings. Late yesterday, authorities in Providence released the “person of interest” they had in custody, announcing that their investigation is moving in “another direction,” police talk for we zeroed in on the wrong guy and are now searching for the real and very dangerous shooter. So maybe not such a good time to be in or around the Brown campus or Providence or anywhere else if you happen to be Jewish because while we were digesting the Brown horror, a father and son terrorist team in Sydney Australia said hold my beer, we can top that and went on a shooting spree at Bondi Beach, killing fifteen people and hospitalizing 27 more who were celebrating the first night of Hanukkah. Among the dead are a ten-year old girl, an elderly Holocaust survivor and two rabbis.  Among the injured is an Israeli survivor of October 7, a human rights lawyer who had moved to Australia to work with the country’s Jewish Community on combatting anti-Semitism. Clearly, he’s needed in Australia where anti-Semitism and acts against Jews and Jewish institutions have surged since October 7. Australia’s total population is around 25.7 million of which somewhere around 117,000, or 0.4%, are Jewish.  So few people being the target of so much hatred should be shocking but sadly if history has taught us anything, it’s not and as Bret Stephens put it in today’s NY Times when globalization of the intifada is a rallying cry and leaders fail to pushback, murderous rampages like Bondi Beach happen. Because the events at Brown and Bondi Beach weren’t awful enough for any weekend especially one marked by what’s supposed to be the joyous Hanukkah holiday, last night we learned that actor/director all around nice guy Rob Reiner, first introduced to many of us as Archie Bunker’s son-in-law Meathead, and his wife Michele were stabbed to death at their Brentwood, California home. In their case, it wasn’t guns, anti-Semitism, or a random act of violent crime.  Instead, it’s reported that the likely murderer was the Reiner’s troubled adult son.  If only we could roll the clocks back and start the weekend over again.

More 💩:  It’s tiresome to hear again and again, but Trump who has his Department of Justice looking into how the 2020 election which he clearly lost was rigged was complaining about it again this weekend. This time he also added in the 2024 California results.  To state the obvious, he did not win in 2020, and he did not win California in 2024. Also, as if lying about election results, inflation, grocery prices, boats in the Caribbean, and his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein isn’t enough he’s now ranting again about snakes.  This time his assertion is that 28,000 people were killed by Peru’s “most venomous in the world snake.”  Between 2000 and 2015 only ten people died in Peru of snake bites and the most venomous snakes in the world reside in Australia not Peru. The snake thing, while trivial in the scheme of things is indicative of his instability and how much he lies, about everything, lots of which affects all of us much more than those Peruvian vipers. One of those things is health care.  His plan, the one he was going to release in two weeks, doesn’t exist.  Some Republicans are trying to come up with something, anything, that they can pass quickly but at this late date just about the only thing that would spare people from seeing their health insurance premiums skyrocket would be a clean extension of the Obamacare subsidies.  Funny thing about sending Congress home for months to avoid a vote on the Epstein files is that when time is needed to hammer out a compromise plan, there’s no time left to do so though oddly enough RFK and his anti-vax health fantasists have found the time to plan putting black box warnings on COVID vaccines, the ones that saved millions worldwide.  Anyway, the Trump administration has its priorities and apparently as they said last week going after antifa, an amorphous organization that doesn’t exist except in the mind of Trump’s FBI is apparently its focus.  Of course, the neat thing about an amorphous organization is that the FBI can label anyone it doesn’t like, as in anyone who loudly criticizes Trump or organizes a rally against his policies as antifa and so it’s fair to assume they will. The few remaining WW II veterans might want to weigh in on what being anti-fascist really means.  As to the DOJ, while Lindsey Halligan is still a faux US Attorney, the lesser-known Julianne Murray who until last week had been the faux US Attorney from Delaware has resigned her post. There’s a good chance that a few more of Trump’s unconfirmed “acting” US Attorneys will follow suit though they’d be wise to act fast because while Murray like Alina Habba before her is going to work elsewhere at the DOJ, it’s not clear how many more people AG Bondi can absorb into make-work jobs in her office.