After Trump spoke, a sophomore at the Parkland school stated the obvious in an interview with CNN. “There’s no reason that a kid 19 years old that’s been investigated already, and not even a year ago, being able to purchase an AR-15,” said Isabella Gomez.
.. In our country, a nation with a gun homicide rate 49 times higher than other wealthy countries, lunatics have easy and legal access to these guns.
.. The cops know the politicians are failing the kids as well. “What about the rights of these students?” said the Broward County sheriff, Scott Israel, in relaying the grim news of the latest massacre. “Don’t they have the right to be protected by the United States government, to the best of our ability?”
.. After Australia suffered the deadliest mass shooting in its history, a massacre of 35 people in 1996 by a man with a semiautomatic rifle, the country banned such weapons. There hasn’t been a mass shooting since.
National Parks for the 1 Percent
But the Trump administration has proposed nearly tripling the entrance fees to select national parks, to $70.
.. Trump administration wants to jack up the price of admission to our most spectacular public lands while moving to cut the Park Service budget by almost $300 million. The new fees would add $70 million.
.. he also plans to take away land already protected in ways similar to national parks.
.. You’d pay $107 to get into Disney World. But national parks are not theme parks, market-driven to match the latest entertainment blockbusters.
.. In the bizarro world of this administration, taxpayers are being asked to subsidize a dying industry, coal mining, while their government is slashing the budget for a growing one that is responsible for four times as many jobs.
.. Trump’s budget would drastically cut money for historic preservation, and eliminate more than 1,200 full-time employees.
.. National parks are “as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical,
.. We could, for instance, not build Trump’s nonsensical border wall, which looks like it will cost upward of $20 billion, more than eight times the entire proposed budget for the Park Service. (Wait — wasn’t Mexico supposed to pay for that?)
.. Or we could keep the estate tax, which affects only about 1 out of every 500 people who die every year, and raises $20 billion as well.
Trump’s Sellout of American Heritage
For the U.S.A. has the greatest home for sockeye salmon on the planet in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. The Trump administration is putting it at risk in order to aid a foreign mining conglomerate.
This American carnage is led by a man whose job is to protect the natural world within our borders, the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt. As you may have heard, he has sealed himself off from the public with a $25,000 phone security system and an 18-member security detail. It took a court order to pry loose some of the details of his meetings. No surprise, he holds daily lap-dog sessions with the companies he is supposed to regulate.
Pruitt is the swamp, the only wetland the Trump administration wants to protect. He serves the oil, chemical and mining interests that propped him up when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. He now runs the oil, chemical and mining protection agency out of Washington, with our money.
.. National monuments — not the Confederate kind that Trump wants to preserve, but special places protected in somewhat the same way as national parks — are also in his sights.
.. Half the world’s wild sockeye come from this magical place, a bounty that supports 14,000 jobs. Alaskans are a cantankerous bunch who can’t agree on much of anything. Yet they voted by an overwhelming margin in 2014 to protect Bristol Bay from a gold and copper mine that could generate 10 billion tons of toxic waste.
And unlike big food producers in the heartland, the Bristol Bay salmon industry is not propped up by subsidies, chemicals or compromised politicians.
The Cancer in the Constitution
The disgraced former cable pundit Bill O’Reilly said all the recent carnage is “the price of freedom.” But it’s not the price of freedom in Canada or Japan or England. It’s the price of freedom only in the United States, where mass killings have surged. In every other free country, sanity has prevailed.