Police are supposed to protect and serve, but apparently all they were good for at the school shooting in Uvalde Texas was standing outside and beating up distraught parents. Why are cops cowards? Ted and Scott have different theories. Can mass shootings be prevented? Probably not, but Scott and Ted have suggestions on ways to mitigate the bloodshed. Finally, the war in Ukraine. Looks like Russia has the upper hand. What’s next?
Very few news events are quite as scripted as the aftermath of a mass shooting. Politicians on both sides of the aisle send thoughts and prayers. Democrats call for gun control. Republicans say something should be done about mental illness. The media speaks in hushed tones. Piles of stuffed animals and flowers appear at the massacre site. It’s always the same.
Ted and Scott dedicate the whole podcast to a subject nobody cares about: the abominable state of America’s criminal justice system. Major focus this week is on the decision by Michigan prosecutors to charge a 15-year-old child as though he were an adult. From the need for top-to-bottom reform at all levels of the criminal justice system to finding a place of agreement on sex with cats. This may not be the podcast America wants, but it is the podcast America needs!
Best friends and political cartoonist Ted Rall and Scott Stantis dissect a busy news week. Yet another school shooting, this one north of Detroit, prompts the question: can we do anything to control guns? Abortion rates are before the US Supreme Court and this time it’s really serious. This segues into an unscheduled digression about what the hell is wrong with the American left or even if one exists. And finally: should Democrats admit the truth — Joe Biden isn’t really running for reelection?
When you crank out five editorial cartoons and a couple of opinion essays a week, not to mention opining on the radio about this issue and that, it is easy to forget about the basics.
The big issues.
The stuff that really matters to you. It’s just as easy to forget to ask: what are our political leaders doing to address our most pressing problems? This is, after all, their job. It’s what we pay them for.
Pew Research Center pollsters regularly ask Americans what they consider to be the problem that worries them most. On April 15th, the #1 Biggest Problem in America was “the affordability of healthcare.” 56% of respondents called huge medical bills “a very big problem” and 30% said it was “a moderately big problem,” for a total of 86%. That’s pretty much everyone. It even includes people who have “good” insurance through their employers.
“Healthcare costs is the only issue of the 15 asked on the survey seen as a very big problem by a majority of Americans, though about half say that the federal budget deficit (49%), violent crime (48%), illegal immigration (48%) and gun violence (48%) are very big problems,” Pew reported.
This is proof positive. The Affordable Care Act obviously hasn’t fixed the problem it was designed to address, skyrocketing medical expenses. According to Gallup, a whopping 80% of patients still worry a great deal or a fair amount about healthcare costs, a number that has remained essentially unchanged year after year since Obama became president.
What are the two major political parties doing about healthcare costs? Not much.
Democrats think we should be grateful for the crappy system we have now. Three weeks ago the White House announced that President Biden had placed a phone call to Obama to celebrate Obamacare’s tenth anniversary. Biden campaigned on adding a “public option” to the ACA but then left it out of his budget. He floated reducing the eligibility age for Medicare from 65 to 60, then dropped the idea when asked where the money would come from. Democrats have no plans to fix Obamacare; they think it’s perfect as is.
Not that the Republicans are any better.
The Supreme Court ruling in favor of the ACA has forced the GOP to give up on its vague Trump-era “repeal and replace” mantra. Now they’re saying nothing at all. “If the Republicans have a health care agenda, they haven’t shown their cards,” Drew Altman, who runs the Kaiser Family Foundation, recently told Politico. They whine about Obamacare to get votes. But they don’t want to change it.
To recap: Americans worry about high doctors’ bills more than any other single issue. Yet neither party is even talking about, much less trying to actually do, anything to ease our pain. No wonder only 31% of Americans think Congress is doing a good job.
Run down the list of Americans’ other top priorities and you’ll find the same lack of responsiveness from “our” elected officials. Forget actual action. Our “public servants” don’t bother to give us lip service.
So it goes with other Big Worries: no action, no ideas, no hope.
Biden’s coronavirus-recovery and infrastructure spending plans blow up the budget deficit that voters cite as their #2 most worrisome issue; Democrats have no plan to offset their spending by, for example, slashing the constantly bloated Pentagon budget. Republicans, obsessed with social issues, issue easily-ignored boilerplate statements that the deficit is too high that presents “like a rote effort; like Republican karaoke,” as Scott Galupo described it in The Week. Not that Republicans have any credibility on the issue of fiscal responsibility.
On the #3 Big Issue, violent crime, both parties offer, again, nothing. Republicans and Democrats alike are urging municipalities to not defund the police, i.e., they want force levels and tactics to remain where they are now. Neither party offers an alternative or additional approach, like an initiative to increase access to mental-health treatment. In the absence of a new response nothing much will substantially change, as Biden tells donors.
Neither party has a real plan to address Top Issue #4, illegal immigration, or #5, gun violence. Democrats and Republicans alike intend to leave the southern border partially open in order to allow employers access to cheap labor, while continuing mass deportations to terrorize those workers into accepting slave wages. Neither party wants to do anything substantial about the proliferation of handguns used in the current spasm of violent crime, or question whether we still need the Second Amendment in the 21st century.
My point here is not to discuss the specifics of healthcare, the deficit, crime, etc. or what the best solutions to those problems are. Nor am I out to blame one party more than the other. My point is that neither the president nor Congress nor either of the two major parties is addressing the issues we care about in a credible way. When a political system fails to respond to people’s concerns or even take them seriously in the first place, it is doomed.
No one should be surprised when the whole bankrupt piece of garbage implodes.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
I’m from Dayton so I’m thinking about this today: Why hasn’t Congress done anything to address our national epidemic of mass shootings, namely reviving the assault weapons ban? People—Democrats and not a few Republicans—ask me that all the time. I bet all left-leaning pundits get that question.
The answer is simple. But it’s not something most people want to hear. It’s the same answer I give to another question I get a lot: why hasn’t Trump been impeached?
Congress hasn’t gotten off its collective pasty lobbyist-fattened ass because the streets of every major city are not currently filled with millions of pissed-off people throwing rocks at store windows and who refuse to go home until Congress passes real gun control.
Democratic voters want Trump impeached. They want it—lackadaisically. They don’t want him impeached so badly that millions of demonstrators are willing to fill the streets of every major city day after day, night after night, turning over police cars and setting stuff on fire, until Nancy Pelosi begins impeachment hearings.
This is a fun game! You name an issue lots of people care about. I’ll explain why the political class is ignoring it.
For example: What with experts predicting imminent human extinction, 98% of Americans are worried about climate change. (Who are the 2%? Happy to die but too lazy to commit suicide?) So why isn’t the U.S. government doing anything about it? Because—yes, you’ve got it now—the streets of America’s major cities are not choked by millions of citizens up for breaking things and fighting back the cops 24-7 until the politicians do something to increase humanity’s odds of survival.
You may disagree with my answers on the grounds that breaking windows is mean to storeowners, that burning things generates toxic gases, that cops are scary or that it’s more fun to sit home watching TV or playing video games than to run around in the streets dodging tear gas. You can rightly point out that the United States has no organized left-wing political group, much less one on the grassroots level, capable of organizing a mass street movement. You can, even more rightly, point out that we shouldn’t have to take to the streets because it’s Congress’ goddamn job to fix the environment and get rid of our insane president and ban the sale of military-grade guns to inbred derps.
What you cannot argue is that I am wrong.
It is an irrefutable incontrovertible fact that, when the nation’s cities are clogged with millions of angry Americans demanding radical change day after night after day after night, who break stuff and refuse to disperse and fight back against the cops and are willing to get beaten up and sometimes killed for their cause, and it’s impossible to carry on business as usual, our worthless public officials will yield to their demands and do what’s right.
Until then, mass shooters will continue to terrorize our public spaces, SUVs will belch greenhouse gases and Trump will tweet crazy racist BS. Bad things happen because good people don’t force them to stop.
Wishing out loud for other people, like Congress, to do something is worse than worthless. It’s damaging. You’re abdicating your responsibility to act. If you trust in “leaders” whose history shows they can’t be trusted, you’re committing political suicide.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
On the one hand, the news that another psychologically damaged man shot 17 schoolchildren to death with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle is not news. Put it on page 27 below the fold, maybe?
On the other hand, you have to be shocked because these are kids and who do we become if we stop being shocked? Congress and the president should put their heads together and act now.
On the one hand, the Second Amendment is an essential safeguard against government tyranny. While an authoritarian state (any state) will always have police and troops with better training and arms than its enemies at its disposal, owning a weapon will give many resistance fighters of the future the courage they need to fight back.
On the other hand, the population of Americans who live in rural areas was 95% when the Founding Fathers ratified the Constitution. Now it’s 15%. Once a major source of food necessary for survival, hunting today is mere sport. Considering the daily carnage of gun violence, the Second Amendment may be as obsolete as the flint-lock rifle. Perhaps we should repeal?
On the one hand, military-style weapons like the current mass shooters’ gun of choice, the AR-15, were designed for one purpose: to kill people efficiently. Until 2008 they were banned. Why not renew the assault weapons ban?
On the other hand, people really do use them to hunt. Having been on the receiving end of more than my fair share of death threats, I’d rather defend my homestead with an AR-15 than a less efficient, less accurate gun. Sorry, liberals, but gun rights people have a point: ban AR-15s and the next step will be a push to ban other weapons. Slippery slopes are a real thing; look how the pro-life movement has rolled back abortion rights via incremental, reasonable-seeming moves like bans on late-term terminations.
On the one hand, there are 270 million guns in the United States — almost one for every man, woman and child. Even if we banned guns, how would we force the gun genie back into its bottle of death? Send government goons to kick down every door in the country to search for them?
On the other hand, existing guns could be grandfathered into a ban on the manufacture and sale of new guns (including from one individual to another). Guns would get old. They’d rust. Those used for target practice would wear out. Trigger mechanisms are often the first to go. Like the fairly effective ban on ivory, the effect would become evident over time: a nation awash in weaponry would become less so with the passage of time.
On the one hand, states like Florida seem crazy for not requiring gun purchasers to register their weapons. Florida actually bans such regulations. Cars, boats, even bicycles and cats and dogs, must be registered. Why not devices that kill people?
On the other hand, gun ownership is different. It’s a constitutional right. Automobile ownership, operating a boat and having a pet are privileges guaranteed by state and local laws. Mandatory gun registration would be no more constitutional than forcing media outlets to apply for a state license before publishing (they do this in other countries).
On the one hand, many if not most mass shooters are mentally ill. Wouldn’t it make sense to prohibit sales of firearms and ammunition to people suffering from mental illness?
On the other hand, who gets to define what constitutes mental illness? Federal law bans sales to anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution.” New York, where I live, goes further, banning sales of guns to one “who has stated whether he or she has ever suffered any mental illness.” That’s very broad: “Heathers” and “Stranger Things” actress Winona Ryder, singer Mariah Carey, artist Yoko Ono and actress Roseanne Barr were all institutionalized. But no one thinks they’re going postal any time soon — frankly, I’d trust Winona with the nuclear codes more than Trump. The metric is also highly subjective. Gays were officially classified as mentally ill until 1987. Transgender people are still on the list.
On the one hand, people who knew him say they’re not surprised that Florida shooter Nikolas Cruz went berserk. The signs were there all along: violent Internet posts, ties to white supremacists, erratic behavior like threatening people with a BB gun. People saw something; why didn’t they say something?
On the other hand, this isn’t “Minority Report.” You can’t jail someone for what they might do. People are entitled to their opinions, no matter what they are. If you jailed everyone who acts strange or right-wing or loopy, half the country would be locked up. And anyway, who trusts the police or the government to decide which half?
On the one hand, if anyone deserves to die, it’s Nikolas Cruz.
On the other hand, what kind of society executes a “broken child,” possibly autistic, almost certainly emotionally damaged, absolutely wrecked by the recent death of his mother, his last surviving parent?
How does killing a killer send the message that killing is wrong?
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall) is co-author, with Harmon Leon, of “Meet the Deplorables: Infiltrating Trump America,” an inside look at the American far right, out now. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
CORRECTION: This piece has been corrected by the deletion of “because it’s the 18th school shooting so far this year, ” from the first sentence. I fell victim to a widely disseminated, now known to be untrue, statistic. Please see The Washington Post here for details.
Obama is a Uniquely Lazy, Ignorant, Weird President Who Has Done More to Undermine Faith in American Democracy Than We Could Have Imagined In Our Worst Nightmare
Obama will go down in history as a unique president. Because he’s black*, obviously.
Also because he’s a uniquely weird guy: a politician who knows nothing about politics — and doesn’t seem interested in figuring it out. Even while his presidency is in crisis, he’s so obliviously impassively oblivious you have to wonder if he’s living in the same dimension as the rest of us.
Officially (Dow Jones Industrial Average, rich people’s incomes, the fake unemployment and inflation figures issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics), the economy is recovering. Officially, the wars are ending. (“On the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan, not so much.) Yet Obama’s approval ratings are plunging, even lower than other recent two-term presidents at the same point in time — including the vile, insipid, illegitimate usurper Bush.
No wonder: Obama’s messaging is lousy. John McCain, a zillion years older than the president he lost to and operating with a brain damaged under torture, can see it — so why can’t Obama?
That’s what McCain was wondering aloud after a panel convened to advise Obama about the NSA issued its report: “Most presidents would have now given a speech and said, ‘OK, here’s what the recommendations are; here’s what I think we ought to do.’ Instead, it just came out.” Like a wet turd. “There’s not a translation of facts and events to remedies that the president supports.” How hard is it to tell the panel to submit their ideas to him first so he can repackage the ones he agrees with as his own? That’s Management 101.
Obama is ignorant. Doesn’t have a clue what his minions are up to. Which is bad. Obama’s ignorance is devastating because he lets us know that he doesn’t know. Reagan only read single-page memos, and though Americans suspected he was daft, they didn’t know. It makes a difference.
Chiming in from the even-a-right-winger-who-loved-Bush-can-be-right-twice-a-year corner of The Washington Post op-ed page, Charles Krauthammer marvels: “With alarming regularity, [Obama] professes obliviousness to the workings of his own government. He claims, for example, to have known nothing about the IRS targeting scandal, the AP phone records scandal, the NSA tapping of Angela Merkel. And had not a clue that the centerpiece of his signature legislative achievement — the online Obamacare exchange, three years in the making — would fail catastrophically upon launch. Or that Obamacare would cause millions of Americans to lose their private health plans.”
Dude went to Columbia and Harvard. He seems smart. What’s wrong with him? Is he — as his former colleagues at the University of Chicago, who noticed that he never published — lazy? He’s certainly a far cry from the LBJ who, according to his biographer Robert Caro, routinely burned the midnight oil committing every sentence of every bill, ever, to memory.
Obviously, a president who finds time to watch sports, play golf and kick off for vacations for weeks at a time — while the global economy is melting down — hell, while his signature legislative accomplishment, Obamacare has all but completely imploded — is lazy as all get up. Still, there’s nothing new about presidential sloth. Reagan, Clinton and Bush all worked less than the average minimum-wage worker whose misery they were steadfastly ignoring.
Obama is unique, though. It goes beyond laziness. He doesn’t follow tried and true practices of presidential governance that have served his predecessors for more than two centuries. Intentional? Who knows? It seems more than likely that (and this is so outlandish that I’ve literally waited years to write these words) he is so ignorant of history that he doesn’t know why and how previous presidents have failed and succeeded. Because, let’s face it, if this is three-dimensional chess, he’s down three queens.
The most blinding example of Obama’s ignorance of/unwillingness to/disdain for the act of governing/politicking is what I call Governus Interruptus — delivering a major speech on a problem, then failing to follow up with a policy initiative (a bill, say).
“President Obama’s speeches…are often thoughtful, nuanced, highly evocative, and exceptionally well-delivered — and worse than inconsequential,” Amitai Etzioni writes in The Atlantic. “They raise expectations — a world without nukes! Ending global warming! Finally curbing gun violence! — but are not followed by much of anything. These barren speeches are one reason the public, and especially the young, are becoming disaffected from politics, bad news for any democracy.”
Speaking of LBJ: When he announced “a national war on poverty” with one objective — “total victory” — to lift up the people “who have not shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whom the gates of opportunity have been closed” — he didn’t leave it at that. Food stamps, Head Start and other anti-poverty programs followed…laws that began as bills. Bills drafted by the White House and proposed to Congress, which the president strong-armed into passing.
Where is Obama’s nuclear disarmament bill? Why hasn’t he convened a global summit to address the environmental emergency, with the U.S. leading the way with dramatic initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases? Where is his gun control proposal?
Obama jawboned his way into the White House. Evidently Obama hasn’t read enough to know that talking isn’t governing.
Either that, or he doesn’t care.
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COPYRIGHT 2013 TED RALL
The government claims that unemployment is dropping, but that’s only because long-term unemployed Americans no longer count.
