Crooked Media - What A Day: The Tex talk

A particularly deadly mass shooting happened over the weekend—in Texas, again—and it’s playing out eerily like the last one there.
 

• On Saturday, a 33-year-old, Nazi-sympathizing gunman armed with an assault rifle killed eight people and wounded seven others at a popular shopping mall in Allen, TX, a suburb of Dallas. Among the victims were two elementary-school students. A mass shooting is typically defined as the killing of four or more people. Texas has seen almost one a month in the past year. What have Texas Republicans been doing in that time? Making guns even more accessible, not less.
   

• Less than a year has elapsed since the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, TX, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered at the local elementary school. Months later, the state senator representing Uvalde was told to stop bringing up gun-control legislation or face being barred from speaking at all. Multiple mass shootings have occurred in Texas in the intervening months, as gun control remains a non-starter in the GOP-dominated State Capitol. 
   

• Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has made a big display of attending vigils for victims of each massacre, while simultaneously ensuring that gun massacres remain a uniquely American (and especially Texan) horror. He again said he would not regulate firearms and justified it with the false claim that mass shootings have no relationship with the strictness of a state’s gun-control laws, insisting that the “root cause” is “mental health problems.” As a nation, we’re forced to go through this whole disgusting song and dance every couple of months: A mass shooting occurs, Republican politicians offer their hollow “thoughts and prayers,” do nothing to tighten gun control, blame mental-health issues, then do nothing to address mental-health issues either. Abbott has cut over $200 million in funding from the state agencies that provide mental health services. 

The shooting in Allen was the second-deadliest of the year nationwide so far, but there appears to be no threshold of death high enough to make Republicans consider even the most basic preventative changes. 

• The shooter, Mauricio Garcia, enlisted in the Army in 2008 but was terminated after three months after failing a mental-health evaluation. According to neighbors, Garcia had been working as a security guard, and federal officials are investigating his apparent interest in white-supremacist ideology. Social media accounts believed to be Garcia’s suggest white-supremacist and neo-Nazi views. Garcia ranted regularly in recent months about Jewish people, women, and racial minorities. In the weeks leading up to his attack, Garcia posted more than two-dozen photos of the Allen Premium Outlets mall, including several screenshots of Google location information, which helped him monitor the mall for foot traffic patterns. Another one of his posts included a series of shirtless pictures displaying white-power tattoos, including a swastika and SS lightning bolts. 
   

• On Monday, a committee in the the Texas House of Representatives took the surprising step of voting to advance a bill that would raise the minimum age to purchase certain semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21. The bill would represent bare-minimum gun-safety legislation, which means it faces staggering odds in Texas. Relatives of victims of the Uvalde shooting have been pushing for that for months, and it is absolutely worth fighting for, but it would not have affected the shooter in Allen. 

One of the searing wounds of life in modern America is the feeling that our regular mass shootings are an intractable problem. But the world brims with evidence that it doesn’t have to be this way. After “only” two recent mass shootings, the populist president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, promised an “almost total disarmament” of the country, similar to the measures Australia took after a deadly mass shooting in 1996. The problem is not immutable, it is unique to the Republican Party in the United States. These tragedies are preventable, and we should never stop fighting to stop them.

Six months after they cost the GOP victories in critical midterm races across the country, many election deniers are eyeing political comebacks. No one promoted the Big Lie more dutifully than Kari Lake, who lost her bid for Arizona governor to Democrat Katie Hobbs. Now, Lake is considered the GOP nominee-in-waiting for the 2024 Senate race. She’s also been a featured speaker at CPAC’s Reagan dinner and won CPAC’s straw poll for prospective vice-presidential nominees. In Michigan, conservative community-college instructor Kristina Karamo lost her race for secretary of state after campaigning on the Big Lie, despite the fact that a Republican-led state-Senate investigation, and more than 250 audits, found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. She has still (insanely) yet to concede that race, but has now been elected chair of the Michigan Republican Party. Similar stories abound: Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Lee Zeldin in New York, Sarah Palin in Alaska, Jim Merchant in Nevada—none has paid any price within the party for losing on a lie. Virtually all of the high-profile election-denying candidates who lost their elections will remain present in state politics for years to come, and it’s imperative to continue beating them until Republican voters realize the jig is up.

President Biden is set to meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other congressional leaders to resolve the debt-limit hostage situation created entirely by the unhinged GOP.

A group of government employees sued Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and President Biden on Monday to stop them from complying with the law limiting the national debt, which the plaintiffs claim is unconstitutional. (Ed note: Must be that they read our other newsletter.) 

State-Rep. Bryan Slaton (R-TX), who has railed against drag artists as “groomers,” resigned from the Texas House of Representatives on Monday after an investigation found that he had an inappropriate, sexual relationship with his 19-year-old aide, and gave her alcohol. Look on the bright side, Bryan! You won’t have to vote for more gun massacres again anytime soon.

Russia launched more drones than it has deployed in months against Ukraine on Monday, the eve of Russia’s May 9 holiday commemorating the defeat of Nazi Germany known as Victory Day. 

Disgraced former president Donald Trump declined his final chance to testify in the civil trial brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, who has accused Trump of raping her in 1996. 

That trial’s jury heard closing arguments from Carroll’s and Donald Trump’s legal teams today. 

The White House is preparing new regulations that would require airlines to compensate passengers if their flights are canceled or delayed for reasons within the company’s control. 

At least two American couples have been caught trying to smuggle hundreds of pounds of Fruit Roll-Ups into Israel, which is experiencing a shortage of the candy due to a TikTok trend. I think we can all agree that the human experiment was a mistake.

The Irish Times has uncovered a decades-old secret agreement between Ireland and the United Kingdom that allows the U.K. to police the former’s airspace, despite the fact that Irish Ministers and military officers have warned against the arrangement for years. The agreement was drafted at the height of Cold War-era tensions between the Soviet Union and the west, and signed in 1952. According to the investigation, the agreement was renewed periodically over the past 70 years, most notably in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, to ensure that the British Royal Air Force was authorized to shoot down rogue aircrafts in Irish airspace. The agreement stipulated that the Irish government would have to approve drastic action by British defense forces, but glossed over questions of international law and the Irish public’s right to know. Certain government officials received legal advice that the agreement was not technically a treaty, and therefore could remain undisclosed. Shane Ross, who served as Ireland’s last Transportation Minister, argued that the agreement should be made public, but failed to convince other members of the government.

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Cars will be permanently banned from Dublin’s College Green in order to improve the area for pedestrians and cyclists. 

A group of five women in the South Carolina state Senate keep successfully blocking a near-total abortion ban from passing in the state. Three of them are Republicans.