September 27, 2024
Listen to the Lambs
by Deborah DiMicco

Blaming the shooter and leaving it at that will not protect our lambs, our children, from the next school shooting.

~ American Negro Spiritual

The school shooting at Apalachee High School was the 45th school shooting of 2024.

Listen to the lambs.

“I really don’t want to go back. I shouldn’t have to go back to school worrying about dying.” said a 14 year old Apalachee student.

Listen to the lambs.

At the sound of gunshots, students took refuge behind an upended teacher’s desk. One began to pray.

“Everybody was crying. Everybody was on the floor hugging each other.” Some texted their parents “I love you.” “This can’t be happening,” said another.

Oh, but it can. The 14-year-old shooter, Colt Gray, used an “AR-platform style weapon.” Since the ban on assault weapons was allowed to lapse in Congress, assault weapons have become one of America’s most popular firearms. It’s “reliable, adaptable and accurate” according to the NRA. It fires 60 rounds per minute. And it’s relatively cheap.

The four who were killed at Apalachee High School? They didn’t stand a chance.

Trump sidestepped the gun issue, saying the shooter was a “deranged, sick monster.” JD Vance says school shootings are “a fact of life.” Really? So how did this “sick monster” get his hands on a gun? How did the Uvalde shooter? The monsters are out there, and Trump and the NRA and gun-rights activists are quick to blame the shooter, completely missing the point that by refusing any kind of restrictions on gun ownership, they are aiding and abetting every single one of these shooters. Trump and his gun supporters claim they are pro-life, yet they refuse any attempts to keep guns out of the hands of the “monsters.”

Four more dead. The 45th school shooting of the year.

Listen to the children. All a-crying.

If we as a nation do not take the steps necessary to ban assault weapons, to require background checks, to enact red flag laws and safe storage laws, the “monsters” will continue to get guns. And innocent children and teachers will continue to die.

The US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared that firearms are the leading cause of death for children and adolescents. If we do not stand up to the NRA and the politicians in its pocket, if we do not stand up for life - for children and families at risk every day because a child simply wants to go to school and safely return home, we share the blame with Colt Gray and the many other gun-toting monsters who preceded him. And, undoubtedly, the other monsters who will follow.

September 25, 2024
Trump and Vance Lie "Like Truth"
by Deborah DiMicco

At the end of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth finally realizes that he has been totally conned by the three witches, the “Weird Sisters,” who lie “like truth.” Today in America we have our own potential tragedy in the making with the weird Republican candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance who also “lie like truth.”

Witness Trump’s hysterical insistence during the debate that, in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets. “They’re eating the dogs!” “I saw it on television!” The white nationalist and Neo-Nazi groups who started this false rumor were "thrilled." A woman who claimed her cat was stolen found the cat in her basement, safe and sound. And Springfield, which has a history of welcoming the oppressed dating back to its days as a stop on the Underground Railroad, and which has by and large welcomed the Haitians as neighbors and productive employees, was thrown into turmoil. Even the Ohio governor, Republican and Trump supporter Mike DeWine, criticized Trump for his reckless lies.

Lest we scratch our heads at Trump’s rattled, addled claims, we need look no further than JD Vance’s doubling down on this story (that has been repeatedly debunked by authorities). Vance weirdly, openly admitted, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Vance will lie like truth to call attention to a situation that does not exist, loudly and repeatedly, to con us into voting for him and for Trump.

There is a cynicism at play here in this weird MAGA campaign that is so shamelessly, blatantly unencumbered by evidence or facts. It is a campaign that believes that we are all marks, just gullible targets easily brainwashed by their repetition and amplification of lies until they become our “truth.” We are smarter than that. We deserve better than that. Their disdain for us is clear in their brazen mendacity; they will say anything, no matter how outlandish, to get or to steal our vote.

During his debate with Harris, in little more than an hour, Trump made some 64 false claims. As President, Trump told some 30,000 lies. He's been telling lies ever since, the most sinister of which are aimed at eroding the integrity of our elections.

When asked if he would accept the results of the 2024 election, Trump equivocated, saying he would accept the result only if it is a “fair and legal and good” election. The operative (and mutable) word here being “good.” We cannot let ourselves be fooled by this con man and his ableist assistant. They are telegraphing that they will do anything, sink to any low to commandeer this election at the cost of our democracy.

They lie. That’s the truth.

September 5, 2024
Profiles in Narcissism and in Courage
by Diane LeBas

"If I lose, the contest has been rigged." Most of us leave this narcissistic fantasy behind in grade school, but it fueled Trump's claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and now, amplified once again by Donald and his MAGA crowd, this senseless and nonsensical fantasy is fueling his efforts to delegitimize the 2024 election in advance and to create social and political discord.

False fraud claims like the ones that Donald and his Always Trump minions cooked up strike at the heart of our democracy: if the voting process is corrupt, they assert, the results of that process must also be corrupt. Whether they were concocting accounts of voter misbehavior or citing imaginary irregularities in the vote count, the MAGA herd felt free in 2020 to damage the lives of good citizens and to threaten the guardrails that protect our democracy.

The most notorious, the most malicious—and likely the most expensive—episode of false fraud claims occurred when Trump and Rudy Giuiliani, "America's [Former] Mayor," falsely accused Fulton County, Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss of tampering with ballots in order to give candidate Biden an advantage. Amplified by the MAGAphone, this conspiracy theory exposed the poll workers to threats of extreme violence. As Freeman later testified before the January 6 Congressional hearing, the episode "turned her life upside down." She had to flee her home and keep her identity hidden. She had become an election worker, she explained, to honor her forebears who had been excluded from voting. Eventually, the two won a defamation lawsuit against Guiliani for $148 million—an amount he is trying very hard not to pay. In 2022, Moss won a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for "doing the hard and unseen work to run our Democracy."

Closer to home, lawsuits against various Boards of Elections, including the Bucks County Board of Elections, Secretary of State Boockvar, The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began on October 28, 2020, five days before the General Election on Tuesday, November 3rd. The lawsuits included many complaints about mail-in votes, vote counting, and the certification of votes, but not one of these lawsuits against alleged fraud prevailed. In probably the most far-reaching lawsuit, on November 9th, the Trump campaign challenged election results in a number of key Democratic counties. The lawsuit was eventually denied by a Trump-appointed US Circuit Court of Appeals Judge who wrote, "Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here."

Despite all of their righteous anger, Trumpers have found proof of little, if any, actual voter fraud. That's because we have very little voter fraud in the United States: the systems that are designed to prevent fraud work very well and Americans' respect for the norms of democracy protect us from voting chaos. The Brennan Center's report, The Truth about Voter Fraud, puts the incidence rates of voter fraud between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.

Demonstrating his total inability to learn, Trump is again howling about voter fraud—this time fraud he imagines is committed by immigrants. Trump is now demanding a law denying noncitizens the right to vote in federal elections. The joke is on him: There is already such a law. And noncitizens do not vote. Nor do dead people.

(Parts of this article were informed by The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped it by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague.)