The Wrong Swamp

I have a bunch of disjointed thoughts this week, most of them political in nature, so bear with me.

Governor Christie, the Trump Administration's leading authority on the opioid crisis, had his commision released a report with 56 recommendations...and no budget.  This comes a week after, when questioned "where will the money come from for your soon-to-be-released program, the Governor said that Congress will be held accountable for appropriating money.  Don't you think, Governor, that it would be great if you hinted to how much that might be?  When I heard his statement, I knew then that this administration is, once again, all talk, no show on the opioid crisis.

Bump stocks, not only are they not yet illegal, but they're back in business, Baby!  According to Bloomberg, the devices that convert a semi-automatic weapon into a fully automatic weapon are for sale, and selling big.  Why wouldn't they be?  Well, thanks to delays in Congress actually doing something, advocates and would-be consumers are rushing to buy them before any anticipated legislation is passed.  By the way, due to the fact that a large number of legislators are in the NRA's back pockets, my prediction is that this issue is dead.  The NRA's strategy of laying low during periods following dramatic gun violence is working in their favor again.  Thoughts and prayers are shit when it comes to gun violence, but it looks like this time thoughts and prayers are all we're going to get.

Unless you live under a rock, you know that a terrorist with brown skin drove onto a bike path in Lower Manhattan killing 8 and wounding many more.  The President immediately called out Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, blaming him for an immigration lottery that allowed the alleged perpetrator into this country.  He called it a "Schumer Beauty."  Funny though that the law was executed by a republican president, and that Schumer and the bipartisan "Gang of 8" tried to kill it in 2013 in an immigration reform bill after seeing that the 1990 lottery program had serious problems.  Senate Republicans blocked it in a 68-32 vote.  Well done, morons. (note: the Presidents travel ban wouldn't have stopped this attack...or the attack by the white terrorist in Las Vegas, or the one by white terrorist Dylann Roof, or white terrorist Cliven Bundy in Nevada and then his sons in Oregon.)

For $200, you too can create advertisements on FaceBook, create nationalist or religious groups...or both, and inspire them to parade/protest each other in order to create some long-distance chaos as Russians did in 2016 in Houston.  Right, they remotely started a riot.  Well done.  It's time, folks, that advertisements on social media should be monitored by the same agencies that monitor advertisements in print and on TV.  However, we need to be mindful about two things: 1) as much as the tech giants point out that this flew under their radar, they took the ad revenues all the same.  To FaceBook and Twitter, money is money, and as long as these ads were paid for, social media platforms were all too happy to pocked the money; 2) we need to be careful about banning these purposed propaganda campaigns.  Why?  First Amendment.  It would be a slippery slope to go from banning these ideas to banning any and all opposing and contrasting views. 

Suffice it to say, we have problems, and while I am the first one to point at the Cheeto-in-Chief,  many, if not all of the above, have Congressional implications.  It's time to get angry again people, angry at Congress for politicizing our lives, and acting only in ways that get them reelected through rhetoric and inaction.  The President is right.  As terrible as we, the people may think he is, Congress is worse.  Maybe we were focusing on the wrong swamp?