The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Amazing late-summer weather

The South's misfortune is Chicago's benefit this week as a hot-air dome over Texas has sent cool Canadian air into the Midwest, giving us in Chicago a perfect 26°C afternoon at O'Hare—with 9°C dewpoint. (It's 25°C at IDTWHQ.) Add to that a sprint review earlier today, and I might have to spend a lot more time outside today.

So I'll just read all this later:

Finally, the leader of the Westminster city council in London really wants to close down the "American" candy stores opening up all up and down Oxford Street.

Lunchtime links

Happy Monday:

I would now like to take a nap, but alas...

Can you direct us to the nuclear wessels?

The former president's stooges have no idea how to deal with the Justice Department's allegations that he essentially stole highly classified nuclear secrets from the White House:

We should not lose ourselves in the logic of this inane claim – a fake claim of authority (in pectore declassification) wrapped in a demonstrable lie (the standing order). What is more noteworthy is that these are the claims of someone who is not getting any legal advice. Not bad legal advice. No legal advice. At present Trump is represented by two women, one an unknown lawyer from New Jersey and another former OAN host. But I don’t think this is even coming from them. These sound like panicked claims of someone improvising without the benefit of legal counsel. What I draw from this is the real facts of the case are likely worse than they appear.

This doesn’t mean necessarily that the President is in grave legal peril. What it tells me – pulling all these indications together – is that the President’s actions are simply impossible to defend. Why was he refusing to relinquish material the US government thought so sensitive and secret that they had little choice but to seize them at the first opportunity?

The other measure of this is the reaction from Republican elected officials over the last 48 hours, which as near as I can tell is total silence. It’s hard to march without marching orders and Trump is giving them very little to go on about what the facts are and what the bases are for defending him.

The Atlantic's Tom Nichols tries to wrap his head around what the actual fuck:

Perhaps the former president is worried about documents mixed in among other materials that could implicate him in various kinds of wrongdoing; this is my working theory, based on the fact that the search warrant cites three criminal laws, two referring to the unlawful removal and retention of records (including information that could harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary) and one regarding the destruction or concealment of documents in order to obstruct government investigations or administrative proceedings. (Interestingly, none of these laws require the information involved to be classified.)

Nothing can ever be ruled out where Donald Trump is concerned, and it’s certainly possible that Trump—whose history suggests that he never does anything for reasons other than profit or to service his debilitating narcissism—thought he could use America’s secrets for his own financial or political gain. But there’s no point in trying to pin this kind of intent on the former president, thus setting up impossibly high expectations of prosecution that will likely be dashed in the near future—especially when Trump may have already committed severe violations of a law that he himself signed in 2018 that makes his current actions a potential felony.

The short-term danger that the U.S. government had to avert comes from the possibility that Donald Trump as a citizen is as incompetent and lazy as he was when he was president, and that he could lose control of the materials he was keeping in his house.

The more indefensible his actions, the more his supporters defend him. It took certain European countries 12 years of extremist rule and several million allied troops to snap out of their delusions. I hope the Republican Party snaps out of theirs with less bloodshed.

Extremism looks like this

A man attacked and seriously injured author Salman Rushdie at a lecture in upstate New York this morning:

The author Salman Rushdie, who spent years in hiding and under police protection after Iranian officials called for his execution, was attacked and stabbed in the neck on Friday while onstage in Chautauqua, near Lake Erie in western New York, the state police said.

The attack, which shook the literary world, happened at about 11 a.m., shortly after Mr. Rushdie, 75, took the stage for a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, a community that offers arts and literary programming during the summer.

Mr. Rushdie was taken by helicopter to a local hospital, the state police said in a statement. His condition is not yet known. His agent, Andrew Wylie, said in an email Friday afternoon that Mr. Rushdie was undergoing surgery.

It was not clear what motivated the attacker.

[Rushdie] was there for a discussion about the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers and other artists who are under the threat of persecution.

While it's technically true that we don't know "what motivated the attacker," we can make a guess. If this wasn't religious extremism I'll post a public apology to religious extremists everywhere. And not for nothing, when our own home-grown Christianists get into the book-banning habit, they don't have far to go before this sort of thing happens. Fundamentalists of all kinds need to be removed from politics.

Meanwhile, as the Department of Justice reveals more details about just what TS-SCI documents related to our nuclear arsenal the XPOTUS stole from the White House, Republicans have used the warranted search as a fundraising talking point. Because they are the party of law and order. As Josh Marshall said today, "It is probably best to say that we are back in one of those fugue windows Trump Republicans have, much like January 7th-9th 2021, in which there’s a period of relative silence while a story is devised to explain why something inexplicable and indefensible is in fact awesome and totally fine."

Sure Happy It's Thursday

So, what's going on today?

Finally, I meant to post this earlier: Cassie, plotzed, after getting home from boarding Sunday night.

Busy day = reading backlog

I will definitely make time this weekend to drool over the recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's kind of sad that no living human will ever see anything outside our solar system, but we can dream, right?

Closer to home than the edge of the visible universe:

Finally, an F/A-18 slid right off the deck of the USS Harry S Truman and into the Mediterranean, which will probably result in a short Navy career for at least one weather forecaster or helmsman.

Responses to taxing ammunition and magazines

On Tuesday, when my white-hot rage at right-wing gun nuts and the politicians that support them had cooled a little, I proposed taxing ammunition and magazines as one of a set of options available to states to reduce gun violence through economic friction. After sharing a link to the post on social media, I got a response from an experienced hunter I've known for years:

"Military style weapon?" The Henry lever action rifle, maybe the most popular deer rifle ever used, was designed as a "Military weapon". Almost every long gun in a hunter's safe was a Military style weapon at one point or another. The 30-06 that I use for deer hunting is a gas operated, semi automatic rifle with a muzzle brake and detachable box magazine. Just because it has a walnut stock and engraved receiver i guess it is not a "Military style weapon". If you are serious about banning guns, say you want to ban all semi automatic rifles. Otherwise what are you talking about?

In my opinion we should be focusing on the people not the firearms. How about enforcing laws that are already on the books, strengthening background checks laws, and keeping guns out of the hands of people with serious mental illness. Fund the FBI so they can actually do the background checks, and require it in all 50 states. Prohibit gun purchase or possession by anyone with a history of violence, in all 50 states. Implement red flag laws that take away firearms from people who threaten mass shootings, are a danger to themselves or a danger to others. Require purchasers of semi automatic rifles to be 21 or older.

There is no feasible way to ban a "style" of rifle. Manufacturers will just modify the firearm, just like they did in 90s after President Clinton signed the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act. Sales will go up, just like they did then.

He adds:

Sport shooting is more common among gun owners than hunting. Some people just own a firearm for self defense. As far as hunting goes, I have several magazines for all of my hunting rifles in various sizes. The size depends on the game I'm pursuing and where I'm pursuing it. Deer is the most common thing I hear people talk about, but is not the only thing we hunt in this country. If I was hunting coyote, wolf, feral hogs, and most small game I'd prefer a larger magazine. If I'm hunting in bear country, you can bet I'm putting a larger magazine in my rifle and pistol.

I agree with some of what he said, as I responded:

The experience in other countries with similar laws and histories (Australia, Canada, UK, NZ) shows that removing certain kinds of guns from the equation reduces gun violence. I'm happy to make a distinction between hunting and everything else.

The argument that your hunting rifle is "military-style" isn't helpful. Sure, your gas-powered semiautomatic .30-06 (7.62 mm) rifle is essentially an M1 from WWII. Along the same lines, at one point the weapons of choice for armies worldwide were big sticks and rocks.

Even conceding that you shoot deer with a hunting version of a 1940s M1, you still don't need a .50-caliber cannon for that purpose. Or a 50-round, 9mm Thompson submachine gun, which predates the M1 by a couple of years. I mean, since early Gatling guns in the 1860s, we have had firearms that have *no* conceivable use as hunting or sporting weapons, with more destructive power than is safe to permit in private hands. Just as there are reasonable civilian uses for most types of explosives, we still don't let private citizens own tactical nukes or plastics.

Of course we need to look at the people who want to own guns, the same way we need to look at the people who want to drive cars. But no one gets an AR-10, and no one gets a tank. Maybe we make an exception for licensed ranges where people can fire AR-10s and drive tanks, but they don't get to take them off the property.

Getting back to my original proposal, is a $1 per round tax on your 7.62 ammo going to hurt your hunting? Really? It'll cost you $2 more to bag a deer. But maybe if the little shit who shot up the parade on Monday had paid a $90 tax on his ammo along with a $400 tax on each magazine, the cost would have been just enough for him to forget about it.

Finally, I have to say, it's frustrating trying to argue for a moderate position on this or any other issue when no one will accept any compromises. You know firearms, N. You know the difference between an AR-15 and a Winchester Model 70. Could you shoot up a crowd with the Winchester? Sure. But you'd never do as much damage as you would with an off-the-shelf Armalite.

I don't want to ban guns or stop legitimate sportsmen from hunting. I just want to make it very, very difficult for people to get weapons like the one that made 2-year-old Aiden McCarthy an orphan on Monday.

We're going to keep having this argument, but the fact remains, we're the only country in the world where this keeps happening.

A suggestion to reduce gun violence that can pass the current Court

To absolutely no one's surprise, the little shit arrested for murdering six people in Highland Park, Ill., yesterday turned out to be a 22-year-old white kid with a violent social media history. And of course he bought the gun legally.

Every society has its psychopaths and angry young men. But most societies acknowledge this, and make it really hard for those assholes to buy guns. Here, we make it easier to buy a gun than to buy a car. That's just insane, but politically hard to change.

Right now, with the current right-wing Supreme Court and Senate, we can't pass meaningful gun safety laws. But I have an idea. Let's make it harder to get military-grade weapons through taxation.

What if Illinois added use taxes for ammunition and magazines? Any ammunition of magazines purchased in or brought into Illinois must have a tax stamp. Failure to show the proper stamp multiplies the tax by 10. Tax rifle ammunition at $1 per round, pistol ammunition at 25¢ per round, and shotgun ammunition at 10¢ per round, reflecting the social costs (externalities) of each. And tax magazines at $10 per round for the first 10 rounds and then $100 per round after.

So if you really want that Glock 9mm pistol with the 17-round magazine, filling it will cost you $800 in magazine tax and $4.25 in ammunition tax. But if you simply must have that AR-15 with its 20-round mag, then it's $1,100 for the magazine and $20 for the ammo.

This tax won't really bother legitimate hunters as hunting rifles tend to have 5-round magazines ($50 + $5), and a good hunter won't waste rounds on a deer. And, of course, there would be exemptions for law enforcement and Federal agencies. (Illinois has a huge Navy presence, for example, and the state can't tax them.)

Is this nibbling at the edges? Of course; obviously we need to ban these weapons entirely. But I think it would pass the current Court. And if it adds enough friction to purchasing military-style rifles to deter just one mass shooting a year, it will have saved lives.

Thoughts?

Thursday afternoon round-up

A lot has happened in the past day or so:

Finally, let's all congratulate Trumpet, the bloodhound who won the Westminster Kennel Club's dog show last night. Who's a good boy!

Around the world in a month?

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), currently locked in a cage match with Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-MS) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) for "Dumbest Person in Congress," is under investigation for some pretty dumb shit:

Colorado officials are examining allegations that Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican representing the state’s western half, inflated the mileage she logged on the campaign trail in 2020 and then used more than $20,000 in reimbursements from donors to pay off years of tax liens on her restaurant.

The allegations have bounced around liberal circles since The Denver Post first reported in February 2021 that Ms. Boebert had cashed two checks from her campaign totaling $22,259 for mileage reimbursement. The number equated to 38,712 miles — well more than the 24,901-mile circumference of the planet.

At the core of the inquiry are eight tax liens from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment totaling $20,000 and filed against Ms. Boebert from August 2016 to February 2020 for failure to pay unemployment premiums on her business, Shooters Grill.

In late 2020, Ms. Boebert reimbursed herself for mileage from the 2020 campaign and paid off the liens.

“As you are both fully aware, utilizing an illegal source of funds or ill-gotten funds to pay off a tax lien is illegal in Colorado and under federal law,” the Muckrakers complaint to the attorney general stated, adding, “That is the very definition of ill-gotten funds.”

This won't really go anywhere before the November election, of course, but it will eventually get there. It'll be fun to watch though.