“If you scratch the anti-woke activist, a bigot bleeds. Thom Hartmann explains why the word woke is the GOP’s favorite target. But keep your eyes open during the video…!”
The national debate about gun violence and gun policy reform rests on an understanding of the Second Amendment shaped by the NRA and other pro-gun extremists. Their definition asserts that the right to bear arms is – and always has been – a bedrock Constitutional right that guarantees freedom.
But what if the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is historically wrong? How has the NRA’s version fed a gun violence epidemic that threatens and terrifies everyone, with disproportionate impacts on communities of color and other vulnerable communities? And how is the NRA’s Second Amendment increasingly infringing on other fundamental rights like free speech and safety?
WHAT: “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment and What Came After” online teach-in WHO: Constitutional law professors Carl Bogus and Mary Anne Franks, with moderator Gloria Pan, Senior Vice President of Gun Control, MomsRising WHEN: Thursday, June 8, 2023, 8:30 pm ET / 5:30 pm PT WHERE: Online, from wherever you are
This teach-in about the Second Amendment (2A) will start with a look at history reaching back to the founding of the country. We’ll examine how the NRA began crafting and selling its own version of 2A steeped in white supremacy, bringing us to our current era of runaway gun violence, a rising number of hate crimes, and insurrectionism. Other topics to be covered include:
The impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Heller decision on gun violence rates and on vulnerable communities
The unfolding impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bruen decision
How 2A is increasingly infringing on other foundational constitutional rights
Two of our country’s foremost constitutional thinkers about gun rights will serve as faculty at our teach-in:
Carl Bogus is Distinguished Research Professor of Law at Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island. In his new book Madison’s Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, Professor Bogus shows that – contrary to conventional wisdom – the fitting symbol of the Second Amendment is not the musket in the hands of the minuteman on Lexington Green but rather the musket wielded by a slave patrol member in the South.
Mary Anne Franks is an American legal scholar, author, activist, and media commentator. She is a professor of law and the Michael R. Klein Distinguished Scholar Chair at the University of Miami School of Law. In her book, The Cult of the Constitution: Our Deadly Devotion to Guns and Free Speech, Professor Franks examines the thin line between constitutional fidelity and constitutional fundamentalism and how the NRA has fanned the flames of the latter.
Please forward this email to everyone you know who is looking to better understand the roots of gun violence, who is searching for new ideas and a way forward to finally achieve a safer future with true freedom for everyone.
In solidarity,
– Gloria, Joy, Jessica, Kristin and the whole MomsRising.org & MamásConPoder Team
Seventy-nine years ago this coming Tuesday. An incredible invasion against the once invincible Nazi war machine. Those who landed on the Normandy shore that day had to be among the bravest of the brave. The future of the world was on their shoulders.
I use one post every year to remind us of the sacrifices that took place that day. Among the early landers that day was my late father-in-law. Barely a kid of 20 years. He made it to the beach under heavy fire and was able to survive and come back.
I am not sure where he went after the landing. He would never talk about the war. His medals were in the bottom drawer of his dresser, only to come out after he died. Like many who fought, the experience was so painful that he could just never talk about it. I told him thanks once and that was as far as it went.
So every year I have some quiet time to consider his sacrifice and the sacrifices of all the others. Many never got but a step off the boat.
Dwight Eisenhower ran the operation. He knew all the marbles were bet on this one. He had prepared a statement should the unthinkable happen and the invasion failed. As you know it didn’t. Eisenhower was the greatest of war heroes and became a pretty good president. He was not led by ideology but by practicality. I would so love a Republican like Ike again.
As for my Father-in-law, like so many he came back settled in a small town and married his high school sweetheart.
He wasn’t very political, but every now and then he would grumble about how the little guy was always getting screwed. I have no doubt what he would think about how things have turned in this country.
“There’s no way I can lose Iowa. We’re going to have to do some really bad things to lose at this point.” — Former President Donald Trump, speaking to the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale.
As Trump was saying that, information was spilling all over the place that investigations are uncovering some potential trading in Top Secret documents in one investigation and multi-state strategies to overturn the 2020 election. Gotta wonder if those are considered to be “really bad things”? Or will Iowans just laugh off his being a traitor to our country and select him?
D-Day this Tuesday. Commemorate accordingly. They stopped fascism in their day and we are very thankful. Now we must do our part.
A) Who said “Republicans are ‘Not Interested’ in whether Biden bribe allegation is true,”? Yes this is a real quote from last week.
B) Speaking of questions, Jen Psaki’s favorite punching bag, Peter Doucy, asked President Biden what question that drew a guffaw from the President?
C) And speaking of President Biden, he sure had a good week. For one thing employment numbers came in at what level Friday?
D) The other bit of good news for the President was that what legislation passed late Thursday night?
E) Trouble in the hate state of Texas. What major Texas Republican officeholder was impeached last weekend and faces a trial in the state senate?
F) How many Americans were in the landing force on Day, 1944?
G) What country passed a law last week making homosexuality a capital crime?
H) What was the first country in the world to make same sex marriage legal?
I) Ron DeFascist claimed on Fox that in his 8 years as president he will defeat what perceived evil?
J) Remember Tara Reid? Neither do I. However the once accuser of President Biden as a sexual assaulter popped into the news last week when she did what?
K) The far right went into an absolute tizzy when it was discovered that what one of their darling merchants actually had a D-E-I (diversity, equity and inclusion) office in their corporate structure?
L) The movie Milk followed the life of the first openly gay politician in the US, Harvey Milk. Who played Harvey Milk. In that movie?
M) The soon to be indicted Donald Trump said Wednesday that as soon as he is president again he will nullify what part of the constitution?
N) What billionaires may have been saved by a federal appeals court in New York that will shield their family from lawsuits growing out of their business practices?
O) What ancient poetess was known for her references to lesbian relationships?
P) Fort Bragg is no more. The huge army base in North Carolina has been renamed what?
Q) Speaker McCarthy’s newest quest to quiet the extremists in his party is to create a commission that will look at cutting what programs as we move to 2024 elections?
R) New acronym to learn – what are UAPs and what did we used to call them?
S) What two new horses are expected to jump into the Republican primary horse race next week?
T) The brother of what sitting US senator issued a statement disavowing any connection between him (the brother) and his senator brother’s racist statements?
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton admits to suppressing 2.5 MILLION votes in 2020 from Democratic Harris County
Trump tried to steal 11,780 votes in GA
Republicans cooked up fake electors schemes across the country
But they accuse Dems of stealing elections?!GIVE US A BREAK. – Lindy Li tweet
A) Iowa’s oldie Senator Grassley – he has never cared about truth
B) Peter Doucy asked the President if like Ron DeSantis Biden was considering pardoning Donald Trump (or words to that effect). Biden had a good laugh
C) 339,000 vastly over media estimates. I believe that puts his total of jobs created over 13 million in just over 2 years
D) The bill to raise the debt ceiling
E) Ken Paxton
F) 73,000
G) Uganda
H) The Netherlands in 2001
I) leftism
J) Moved to Russia – and I hope never to be heard from again
K) Chik-fil-A
L) Sean Penn
M) the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th amendment – I am sure you will have questions
N) The Sackler family whose company Perdue Pharma made Oxycontin. This may only apply in New York – stay tuned
O) Sappho
P) Fort Liberty. Braxton Bragg was a confederate general and slave owner.
Q) Social Security and medicare. The timing just couldn’t be better – just before an election tell seniors they will be facing cuts.
R) UAP = Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. They used to be UFOs (unidentified flying objects)
S) Chris Christie and Mike Pence. Both are currently polling behind “None of the above”
T) Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama had his brother Charles call him out last week for his racist remarks.
Aren’t you all kinda curious what the DOJ is gonna do about the 2.5 million votes that Ken Paxton refused to count in Texas in 2020? – Woman In The Moon tweet
I don’t watch a lot of television anymore – mostly sports and some game shows and a few PBS series. Seems like television series that has any real value has gone to the pay for streaming route leaving the old network and basic cable channels pretty much void of interesting content. And of course as far as I know most cable channels and the streaming channels are owned by the four or five major entertainment conglomerates.
I can’t remember who owns what anymore, but a company like Disney owns ABC and ESPN etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So if they have a show that has any possibility that they can somehow milk to raise the bottom line, they will do so. Make the suckers pay as it were.
So imagine my surprise Wednesday when when I saw the “1619 Project” listed as a show on ABC. My first inclination was that the listing must have somehow been misplaced from the PBS grid line, but no – PBS had their own usual programs on.
This seemed like a gutsy move by one of the entertainment corporations to put something on commercial TV that actually might spark a little controversy. Now I do not know a lot about the “1619 Project” but I do know that it has a decidedly different perception of American history and society than the white washed dreck that most of us learned in high school.
I also know that the “”1619 Project” was one of the catalysts that spurred a major backlash by far right Republican state legislatures across the country to mandate that public schools teach the same old white washed dreck that has made high school history such a chore. In many cases legislatures also added some ‘big brother’ provisions so if a teacher steps out of line then the teacher can be in some cases fired and worse.
The last thing I know is that the woman behind the”1619 Project” is an Iowan – Nikole Hannah-Jones. So I was curious what she had put together as a product of an Iowa public school system. I believe she is a graduate of West Waterloo High School.
With all that as a background I recorded the “1619 Project” Wednesday and had a chance to watch about a half an hour of it Thursday. This is the kind of television (or movies for that matter) that I can sink my teeth into. Right out of the gate, Ms. Hannah-Jones introduces us to a different perspective and what led her to the “1619 Project.”
She then moves on to some discussion of historical stories that you never heard. A threat by the British governor of Virginia to arm slaves in an attempt to quell the rebellious colony. President Lincoln trying to tie emancipation of slaves to a push to get them to voluntarily go to Africa – return would be the wrong word as most by then were born in the US.
Such stories as this were interweaved with the constant – and still ongoing – fight for the right to vote and full citizenship. Among the tools Ms. Hannah-Jones uses are interviews with some of the early civil rights participants. She is visibly shaken as one older man describes his experience at the infamous Parchman Prison in Mississippi during the 1960s civil rights movement.
Reality make the best stories and there is little as real as black peoples’ fight for full citizenship in this country.
Now that I look it up I see that this was a one night only event on ABC. While I am glad they put this on their broadcast channel so a wide audience could experience the reality of race in this country, once more ABC and Disney raise one of the main criticisms of media and capitalism in this country.
It appears the Wednesday broadcast was only a teaser to get folks to sign up for their Hulu streaming service. And now back to our regularly scheduled mush. Well, thanks for a brief shining moment anyway.
Call me confused. Here we go again. Iowa is sending National Guard troops to the Texas borderline this summer. Is this a really good use of Iowa’s tax payer money and manpower? I guess it depends on what lens you view it through.
If you are an Iowa taxpayer who has seen a legislature and a Governor enact any number of stupid policies such as dismantling our public school system or loosening child labor laws you might think this is yet another really stupid stunt meant to raise the far right fear machine while doing nothing that pertains to Iowa.
But if you are a far right wing Governor of a small midwestern state who might have her eye on a vice-presidential spot on her party’s ticket, a stunt like this is the perfect vehicle to raise the usual bogeymen of right wing politics while being fawned over by Iowa’s supplicant press.
Raising the specter of bogeyman scary foreigners is one of the right’s favorite games. Meanwhile here in Iowa farms are in need of workers. As Art Cullen observes in a guest column at the iowacapitaldispatch.com that immigrants are vital to livestock operations and meat packing plants:
It’s an open secret that the livestock economy vitally depends on immigrants, mainly from Latin America, to put cheap pork on your grill and cheese in your larder. Everybody knows we couldn’t get by without them. Yet we cheer on the most strident anti-immigrant outrage.
What gives? Do they resent that corporations have taken over pork and dairy production? Because they scarcely could exist without immigrants. Help-wanted signs are everywhere. You hear it all the time: We just can’t find help. The Legislature wants you to prove work for welfare with a 2.8% state unemployment rate. It just loosened up child labor laws, too.
In rural food processing hubs like Sioux Center or Storm Lake, it takes someone bent on the American Dream to scoop manure or work in the blood-drying room. Tyson pays $21.50 to start at the Storm Lake pork plant and cannot keep the roster full. How would you like to load turkeys on a truck at 2 a.m. when the sleet whips sideways and that squawking feathery rage is coming right at you?
Yet we clap when someone talks about keeping Venezuelans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Hondurans and Mexicans out.
Cullen then goes on to note that:
Who’s going to milk the cows or cut the bung out of a hog hanging upside down? Billy went off to be a commodities broker at the Chicago Board of Trade, and his parents back in Sioux County are proud. But we still have work to do here. Honest work. Hard work. Few others want to do it. Those are facts, too. We rely on Latinos to git ’er done.
Why, then, would you want to deport people who are indispensable to your dairy?
As Cullen noted Iowa loosened child labor laws to meet some of their labor shortages. Yet Iowans will be cheering a string of far righters who will be waving the immigrant bogeyman in their faces for the next 8 months.
Once again I must be missing something.
And if every person at the southern border is a would be fentanyl entrepreneur, why is there such a demand for the drug in Iowa? Perhaps a Governor whose eyes weren’t focused on a promotion at any cost to her constituents would expend some effort on that question.
Lastly I was confused that the one time lunch time darling of the far right, Chik-fil-A, has seen a sudden reversal of favor as someone discovered that within the Chik-fil-A corporate structure there is a D-E-I office. For those unfamiliar with the latest in acronyms that is a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office. Such an office deals with integrating diverse people into an organization.
As you can imagine D-E-I is scorned in right wing world. Those on the right are calling for boycotts of Chik-fil-A. So if you are a MAGA think about where else you can get a crappy meal at noon. It is not easy being a bigot these days. And for Chik-fil-A they may have to open on Sundays to make up their losses.
And one small reminder. When Iowa’s 4 far right Republican congress members voted to raise the debt ceiling Wednesday, do not forget that just about a month ago they voted for a bill tat would make significant cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food programs. That is who Feenstra, Nunn, Hinson and Miller-Meeks really are.
“It all looks clean on the land. But of course it doesn’t look clean in the water.” Dr. Chris Jones
“As our streams have been degraded our farms now look clean. You drive across the countryside and all our farms look like this – corn and soybeans, no weeds… we have 25 million hogs in Iowa but you can drive across Iowa and never see a hog – with 25 milllion of them – but you never see them because they’re in these buildings up on the horizon. And so it all looks clean on the land but of course it doesn’t look clean in the water.” – Dr. Chris Jones
Dr. Chris Jones’ compelling presentation on the factors behind Iowa’s water quality crisis during the launching of his new book, “The Swine Republic” in Fairfield. Following the presentation, Jones answers a wide range of audience questions.
0:00 Introduction 7:42 Dr. Chris Jones presentation 36:41 Audience questions
The book launch was organized by Southeast Iowa Sierra Club and cosponsored by Jefferson County Farmers & Neighbors, Inc., Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, Sustainable Living Center, and Radiance Dairy.
This is from a guest column in the Des Moines Register yesterday. David E. Drake is a physician and member of the Volunteer Physician Network. He declined an invitation from Kim Reynolds for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at the governor’s mansion with a group of other physicians. He declined because he believes Reynolds and the republican controlled legislature have failed to protect the public health in Iowa.
Under Senate File 514, the State Board of Health is eliminated. It had existed in Iowa for almost 150 years, providing informed regulations and oversight over health facilities and public health across the State. Some of the Board of Health duties are simply eliminated (preventing the spread of disease, promoting health behaviors, and advocating for the importance of public health standards) while others are shifted to a new Council on Health and Human Services that requires only one health professional to serve instead of a majority.
Firearms in Iowa unchecked
A National Public Radio report on May 12 said that “firearms are the number one cause of death for kids and teens … and play a huge role in suicide as well.” In Iowa, military-style weapons are readily available and legal to openly carry; the need for a permit to carry a concealed weapon has been phased out. Public health requires us to legislate against the sales of further offensive guns, as well as high-capacity magazines. We must take action before a mass shooting occurs in Iowa and to prevent shootings in our schools and other areas where teens, students, and the public hang out. We need to legislate and get beyond “thoughts and prayers.”
The conclusion
No. I will not attend the May 31 evening of drinks and hors d’oeuvres at the governor’s mansion, and I encourage my invited Iowa physician colleagues to do the same. The governor and our current Legislature have failed to protect public health in the state of Iowa. One day when the focus changes to safeguard our public health, I’ll drink to that.
David E. Drake, D.O., provides remote psychiatric services to indigent Iowans and in private practice. Contact: drakeoffice@gmail.com.
Governor Kim Keynolds: (515) 281-5211 U.S. Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 Iowa Members of Congress - Rep. Randy Feenstra (R) - Rep. Ashley Hinson (R) - Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R) - Rep. Zach Nunn (R) Iowa US Senators - Senator Joni Ernst (R) - Senator Charles Grassley (R)
“If you scratch the anti-woke activist, a bigot bleeds. Thom Hartmann explains why the word woke is the GOP’s favorite target. But keep your eyes open during the video…!” 
Blog For Iowa 