How could a good guy with a gun have stopped the shooting in Highland Park?

How is anyone surprised by gun violence in the U.S.?

How much more evidence do we need to understand the despair in the U.S.?

On the day we celebrate our rights and freedoms, the scourge of gun violence shattered more American communities.        
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there were six mass shootings in several cities today, and fourteen mass shootings in the first four days of July 2022.      
The organization defines a mass shooting as involving four or more shooting victims, not including the shooter.

There are those who believe that Shinzo Abe's influence will increase after his tragic assassination.

I fear the epitaph of America might read: "Murdered by rugged individualism."

What has happened to the Republican Party?        
Donald Trump's legacy is his golf clubs where he will host the Saudi Golf League.

Liz Cheney is remarkable. She has earned our nation's respect.    
She is a kind of Margaret Chase Smith.

I am reminded that Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are doing what their oath requires of them. What then becomes remarkable is the total failure of other House members who are either silently complicit or openly supportive of the attempted insurrection and sedition plotted and executed by Donald Trump.

On which leg is Donald Trump standing when he calls the U.S. a "cesspool of crime"?

For what little is known about the efforts of DOJ to investigate the events surrounding January 6, the U.S. Attorney General told NBC, "We pursue justice without fear or favor. We intend to hold everyone, anyone who was criminally responsible for the events surrounding January 6, for any attempt to interfere with the lawful transfer of power from one administration to another, accountable.

Separate from DOJ'S investigation there is also an investigation headed by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation into Donald Trump and his team's efforts to overturn his defeat in Georgia.

A lawyer working on Donald Trump's effort to stop the lawful transfer of power wrote in a private email: "We would just be sending in 'fake' electoral votes to Pence so that 'someone' in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the 'fake' votes should be counted."      
The lawyer then had second thoughts, and in a follow-up email,  
alongside a smiley face emoji wrote: "'alternative' votes is probably a better term than 'fake' votes."

In his effort to stop the lawful transfer of power Rudy Giuliani told the Speaker of the Arizona House that they had lots of theories, they just didn't have evidence of voter fraud. Under oath, the Arizona Republican House Speaker detailed that Trump's team had nothing to back up their claims of voter fraud; he said he didn't know if it was gaffe, but that he and others in his Arizona group, which included his counsel, specifically remember Rudy saying "We've got lots of theories, we just don't have the evidence" which they kind of laughed about.

The abortion issue is one of the most personal and painful issues facing us.    
"The Torah, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and later rabbinic sources consider the woman's physical and emotional health before that of the fetus. Until the baby is born, Judaism considers the fetus to be part of the woman's body. She is never the villain when difficult choices need to be made." -- Rabbi Mara Nathan

Caring about life issues from womb to tomb has all kinds of intellectual, spiritual, and moral challenges attached to it.    
Valuing pregnant women, actually seeing them, should not be one of the challenges.  
The law, as dictated by old white men, is a terrible means of dealing with abortion.    
The Supreme Court effectively decimated Roe v Wade and Casey.      
State legislatures, composed primarily of conservative white men, have churned out a slew of draconian anti-abortion laws. The circumstances of pregnancy and the reality of women's and young girls' overall health seem not to matter - women and young girls (and their doctors) are the enemy, the villains, in the anti-abortion legislation.

In conservative Kansas, voters went to the polls in unexpected numbers; the voters in Kansas rejected the idea to categorically view women as the villain and the enemy.

"When setting out on a journey do not seek advice from those who have never left home." -- Rumi

"One idiot is one idiot.    
Two idiots are two idiots.    
Ten thousand idiots are a political party."    
-- Franz Kafka

Imagine Jim Jordan as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

...the same Jim Jordan who asserts that only 74 million U.S. citizens are "real Americans."

It is now or never for the Republican Party to separate itself from Trump.    
Eric Trump brags his father destroys political dynasties: Bush, Clinton, Cheney      
Beware: Trump is destroying the Republican Party and undermining the Constitution.

ReTrumplicans are dominating the Republican Party

their ideology: "whatever-Trump-wants" (a total contradiction to the U.S. Constitution) 

In 2020 there was no party platform, just a simple resolution that the party was for Trump.

David McCullough, who only occasionally got involved in contemporary political affairs, called Trump "a monstrous clown with a monstrous ego."    
David McCullough died August 7, 2022 at age 89.

Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly spoken out about the importance of the judiciary's independence and to rebut perceptions of the Supreme Court as a political institution not much different than Congress or the presidency. He memorably claimed, "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges." The Chief Justice emphasizes that the country does not want political branches telling the Court what the law is nor public opinion guiding their decisions.

Chief Justice Roberts totally ignores Mitch McConnell stealing two Supreme Court seats from the American people: first blocking the nomination of Merrick Garland following the death of Antonin Scalia in February 2016 because it was a presidential election year; then after Amy Coney Barrett's nomination one week after Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death in September 2020, confirming her nomination one week before the 2020 presidential election.

Today Associate Justice Elena Kagan said "Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves ... when it looks like they're an extension of the political process or when they're imposing their own personal preferences"...

She cautioned that the court looks political and forfeits legitimacy when it needlessly overturns precedent and decides more than it has to, that it risks damaging its own legitimacy when big changes in the law follow changes in the court's membership...

The public has a right to expect "that changes in personnel don't send the entire legal system up for grabs."

The Associate Justice's remarks are similar to points she's made in dissenting opinions she wrote or contributed to in recent months when the court voted to overturn Roe, imposed limits on the Biden administration's efforts to fight climate change, expanded gun rights, and weakened the separation between church and state.

He's doin' the work!  
I'm with you, President Biden.

 "One man chose the war in Ukraine,

  one man can end the war in Ukraine.

  If Russia stops fighting, the war ends. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends.

 One man is shredding the international order."

-- Antony Blinken, U.S. Sec'y of State