I came across this is little story today, it's not breaking news. I suspect that a member of the housekeeping staff knows something about the bomb threat that required the sweep for weapons.
According to police in Secaucus, the bomb threat — which later was determined to be bogus — was called in to Hudson Regional Hospital on July 18. During a search, bomb detection dogs led investigators to an unlocked office closet containing dozens of firearms.
Among the weapons were 11 handguns and 27 rifles or shotguns, according to police. The closet also contained a .45 caliber semi-automatic rifle with a high-capacity magazine that was determined to be an assault rifle, and a 14-round high-capacity handgun magazine.
The arrested the guy the next day.
What the heck do you think this guy was doing? It sounds very ominous that he was keeping those weapons there.
“This is just another example of an awful lack of judgment from Donald Trump, which, combined with his past poor judgments, make him an untenable general election candidate for the Republican Party in 2024,” said Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who is considering a candidacy of his own.
Trump said he didn't know who Fuentes is. I wonder if that's like him not knowing Prince Andrew or Lev Parnas or George Papadupoulus or Paul Manaforte... or Stormy Daniel's.
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Mr. Christie speculated that hosting Mr. West and Mr. Fuentes served a desire particular to Mr. Trump: “He can’t stand not having attention all the time,” Mr. Christie said. “And so, having someone show up at his club — even if you believe that he didn’t know who Nick Fuentes was — and want to sit with him, feeds the hunger he feels for the attention he’s missing since he left the presidency.”
A man hungry for attention and power, who may still have secrets from the federal government in his closets, welcomes anyone who will praise him into the fold.
This is not as big of a problem in Alaska simply because there is so much BLM land and so few people.
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Across America, 15 million acres of state and federal land lies surrounded by private land, with no legal entry by road or trail. Most can be found scattered across the West, moated by ranches and corporate holdings. Such “landlocked land,” if it were one contiguous piece, would form the largest national park in the country, an area nearly the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut.
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Throughout the West, hand-held technology has added a volatile ingredient to an already simmering conflict between landowners and outdoor recreationists. In small town after small town, the increased visibility of property lines on devices has coincided with a generational shift in land ownership, as wealthy out-of-state buyers have scooped up vast portions of countryside.
Many of the new owners, after buying old ranches where hunting access was generally permissive, have converted them into tightly controlled private hunting experiences charging upward of ten thousand dollars for a single elk.
Such places, often teeming with game compared with public land, have become magnets for unwanted visits by the public. And where crowds increase, tension increases, too. Especially around the fact that public land — by definition owned by all Americans — is not always publicly accessible.
One of the issues in Alaska is modern ownership of land that includes portions of ancient trails used by mushers to travel from one village or settlement to another.
Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s.
This month, armed protesters appeared outside an elections center in Phoenix, hurling baseless accusations that the election for governor had been stolen from the Republican, Kari Lake. In October, Proud Boys with guns joined a rally in Nashville where conservative lawmakers spoke against transgender medical treatments for minors.
In June, armed demonstrations around the United States amounted to nearly one a day. A group led by a former Republican state legislator protested a gay pride event in a public park in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Men with guns interrupted a Juneteenth festival in Franklin, Tenn., handing out fliers claiming that white people were being replaced. Among the others were rallies in support of gun rights in Delaware and abortion rights in Georgia.
Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home. The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.
But the effects of more guns in public spaces have not been evenly felt. A partisan divide — with Democrats largely eschewing firearms and Republicans embracing them — has warped civic discourse. Deploying the Second Amendment in service of the First has become a way to buttress a policy argument, a sort of silent, if intimidating, bullhorn.
A sort of "silent, if intimidating, bullhorn"
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The occasional appearance of armed civilians at demonstrations or governmental functions is not new. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers displayed guns in public when protesting police brutality. Militia groups, sometimes armed, rallied against federal agents involved in violent standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco in the 1990s.
But the frequency of these incidents exploded in 2020, with conservative pushback against public health measures to fight the coronavirus and response to the sometimes violent rallies after the murder of George Floyd. Today, in some parts of the country with permissive gun laws, it is not unusual to see people with handguns or military-style rifles at all types of protests.
Maybe armed Protests are part of the process of Making America Great Again?
We are ever so much better at recognizing the human rights offenses of other countries and demanding accountability.
The difference is that we have recognized our defectiveness in the establishment of Indian schools but the Russians still continue to use children as pawns or worst. Our newspaper has a native American woman on staff and the sins of the school in our state is openly discussed. We have people in our community who are still traumatized by their experiences there and are willing to speak with groups. Hopefully some of the citizens of Russia are having the same group discussions about their leader's willingness to torment people. I read that he is still very popular at home but I don't too much of what I read anymore.
We re-watched West Wing right after the 2016 election. Yes, we were reminded that decency was still honored in the series but depressed by how so much is unchanged. What a wonderful cast they had.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
26 minutes ago, subee said:
The difference is that we have recognized our defectiveness in the establishment of Indian schools but the Russians still continue to use children as pawns or worst. Our newspaper has a native American woman on staff and the sins of the school in our state is openly discussed. We have people in our community who are still traumatized by their experiences there and are willing to speak with groups. Hopefully some of the citizens of Russia are having the same group discussions about their leader's willingness to torment people. I read that he is still very popular at home but I don't too much of what I read anymore.
We have family members who were born in the USSR. Their extended families live in the Minsk and Kiev regions today. The Belarusian family are pro-Putin.
It's not safe to speak out against the war publicly in Russian controlled areas. Violence and intimidation work to chill speech.
I think that we've only partially recognized the damage and death associated with our Indian schools and policy related to Native Americans. There has been no correction of broken treaties or payment for the things of value stolen from the Na-Dene.
I have been fortunate to find myself accepted into some native village life in the interior of Alaska. To sit and share a meal or get invited to a Potlatch and listen to the elders share the stories of their youth with the youth of the village is an honor. The school stories are difficult. To be honest, lots of the stories are difficult when they involve white folk.
My good friend has a copy of someone's photograph that includes an image of her father... in a gold camp near Fairbanks when he was a young man. The people in the image were identified with names roughly written above their heads; "Bob" and "the savage". He didn't even get a capitalized caption. I swallowed hard before I handed that framed copy of a photo back to the daughter of the savage.
I think that most of us are very insulated from the ugly realities of our native policies. I mean, in the contiguous states we rounded the natives up and forced them into lands and living conditions that were not capable of sustaining a prosperous people. We kept them separate. My exposure to natives in the Midwest was casinos...
We need more literature and art that tells these stories in emotional and moving ways.
SCOTUS has agreed to hear what could quite possibly be one of the most consequential cases [ETA: insert sarcastic font] of the year.
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The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear a dispute over a dog toy that got whiskey maker Jack Daniel’s barking mad.
Jack Daniel’s had asked the justices to hear its case against the manufacturer of the plastic Bad Spaniels toy. The toy mimics the Jack Daniel’s bottle and label but is a parody. While the original bottle has the words “Old No. 7 brand” and “Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey,” the parody proclaims: “The Old No. 2 on Your Tennessee Carpet.” Instead of the original’s note that it is 40% alcohol by volume, the parody says it’s “43% Poo by Vol.” and “100% Smelly.”
[...]
ETA: While it's highly unlikely to be one of its most significant cases, if SCOTUS upholds the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, it wiil be interesting to see if this might affect other currently protected parody speech.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
1 hour ago, chare said:
SCOTUS has agreed to hear what could quite possibly be one of the most consequential cases [ETA: insert sarcastic font] of the year.
ETA: While it's highly unlikely to be one of its most significant cases, if SCOTUS upholds the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, it wiil be interesting to see if this might affect other currently protected parody speech.
That is the definition of privatizing water, critics say. Worse, they add, it is being done with public funds: Seventy percent of the budget of 60 million euros (about $62 million) to build the Deux-Sèvres reservoirs is being covered by the French government.
Rather than forcing farmers to find less water-intensive forms of agriculture, the reservoirs will actually increase their water use largely to irrigate corn fields, opponents argue.
“Our president has decided this is the best way to fight climate change — creating the maximum number of basins at a national level,” said Mr. Guillet, the former mayor. “It’s not just the hogging of water by a minority, funded with our own money, but it’s wasted,” he added, pointing to reports on evaporation from reservoirs.
There are no easy answers and the clock is ticking.
Specializes in NICU, PICU, Transport, L&D, Hospice.
John Roberts’s Early Supreme Court Agenda: A Study in Disappointment https://nyti.ms/3hXjAyz
I thought this was an interesting look at the Roberts court.
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After finishing his first term on the Supreme Court in 2006, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was feeling pretty good. The court had issued its longest run of unanimous decisions in modern history, and he was ready to sketch out an ambitious and optimistic plan for the balance of his tenure.
His goal, he told Jeffrey Rosen, a journalist and law professor, was to protect the legitimacy of the court through consensus, narrow opinions and a vision of the judicial role that had no place for partisan politics.
The interview is worth revisiting, as it remains the clearest statement of Chief Justice Roberts’s early aspirations. Over the years, he has had only fitful success in achieving them. More recently, after a term that featured sharply divided decisions on abortion, guns, climate and religion, his project is in shambles.
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Mr. Rosen, who conducted the interview and is now the president of the National Constitution Center, said that the goals expressed by Chief Justice Roberts early in his tenure were worthy ones.
“Chief Justice Roberts deserves huge credit for trying to preserve the nonpartisan legitimacy of the court by promoting narrow, unanimous decisions,” Mr. Rosen said last week. “He recognized from the beginning that the success of his vision would depend on his colleagues, and it’s not his fault that he lost the votes.”
It didn't seem like Roberts had any chance of getting the modern conservatives to go along with his plan... especially after justices were seated in such blatantly dishonorable circumstances.
toomuchbaloney
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Another lapse of judgement?
Trump’s Latest Dinner Guest: Nick Fuentes, White Supremacist https://nyti.ms/3XsxusZ
Trump said he didn't know who Fuentes is. I wonder if that's like him not knowing Prince Andrew or Lev Parnas or George Papadupoulus or Paul Manaforte... or Stormy Daniel's.
A man hungry for attention and power, who may still have secrets from the federal government in his closets, welcomes anyone who will praise him into the fold.