On Friday evening, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) decided he’d have dinner at a Houston restaurant after he had given a speech at this year’s National Rifle Association (NRA) convention.
But if Cruz was hoping for a peaceful meal, he got the exact opposite, with a TikTok user named Hopey posting a video clip with this message:
“So I was having dinner and got to see a show. Ted Cruz being accosted literally the whole time, lmao.”
In the video, a man is shown screaming in Cruz’s face:
“Why did you come here to the convention? 19 children died! 19 children died! That’s on your hands! Ted Cruz, that’s on your hands!”
Someone heckled Ted Cruz while he was eating at a restaurant last night
Cruz deserves to be dragged to Cancun and back. Thank you to this man who called Cruz out for his inaction after 19 kids were murdered. https://t.co/oKBgAd7vK9
— Michael Crawford 🏳️🌈 (@dmcrawford) May 28, 2022
The fact that Ted Cruz felt comfortable enough to go out to eat after this week’s events is what baffles me.
Speaking to the National Rifle Association (NRA) just days after a gunman shot and killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, failed, one-term, twice-impeached former President Donald Trump insisted Friday that there is no need for sensible gun control legislation.
Trump described the Uvalde shooting as “a savage and barbaric atrocity” and called for a moment of silence as he read the names of the 21 victims. The former president said those killed “are now with God in heaven” while the shooter “will be eternally damned to burn in the fires of hell.”
Trump then laid into President Joe Biden for urging Congress to take up gun safety legislation, saying Biden’s criticism of the gun lobby was really directed at gun owners across the country.
As for possible solutions, Trump sounded like his speech had been written by the NRA, and he offered nothing in the way of actually preventing such mass shootings in the future, insisting that the issue is one of mental health:
“While we don’t yet know enough about this week’s killing, we know there are many things we must do. We need to drastically change our approach to mental health. There are always so many warning signs. Almost all of these disfigured minds share the same profile.
“Teachers, parents, school officials, and community members need to be recognizing and addressing these alarm bells promptly and very, very aggressively. And our school discipline systems, instead of making excuses and continually turning a blind eye, need to confront bad behavior head on and quickly. And clearly we need to make it far easier to confine the violent and mentally deranged into mental institutions.”
However, the strangest part of Trump’s address to the NRA was him reading the names of the victims (and mispronouncing nearly every one of them), followed by a gong that made it sound as if a game show was being conducted, HuffPost notes:
The names of the 19 children and two teachers, broken up into hardly recognizable syllables in Trump’s stumbling pronunciation, were interspersed with the funereal sound of a gong.
This is just gross. They have Trump trying to pronounce and read the names of the dead children while the NRA rings a bell. Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/AADaVc4o0s
Novelist Stephen King has never been shy when it comes to saying what he thinks on any number of issues, and once again he’s using common sense to solve a problem that’s been on the minds of nearly every American this week: Mass shootings in the United States.
Uproxx notes that King calls his proposal “simple.”
King supplies a very “simple” take (he uses that word, too), one that cuts through all the deflecting from Texas Republicans like huffy Sen. Ted Cruz (who walked out of an interview while complaining that people are politicizing the inherently political issue of gun violence) and Gov. Greg Abbott (who couldn’t believe that Beto O’Rourke called him out for doing nothing to stop the madness). These confrontations, while necessary, will likely go nowhere. To that end, King appears to suggest that there’s no changing the minds of these public-facing representatives. Instead, transformation is only possible by pushing them out of office.
Here’s King’s recommendation:
“If the gun protectors in Congress are voted out, things may change. If they retain their seats, nothing will change. Pretty simple.”
If the gun protectors in Congress are voted out, things may change. If they retain their seats, nothing will change. Pretty simple.
King is absolutely correct. And it probably won’t surprise you when you see who has taken the most cash from pro-gun groups, with Aljazeera reporting:
The top recipients so far in 2022 in the US Congress were Republican Senators Rand Paul and John Kennedy, who each received over $38,000 from pro-gun groups, according to OpenSecrets. US House of Representatives Minority Whip Steve Scalise received $25,610 from pro-gun groups during that period.
In 2018, during his re-election bid, Texas Senator Cruz received $311,151 in direct contributions from pro-gun groups.
If every registered Democrat shows up at the polls this November, we can have sensible gun reform that will make all of us safer. We have the power in our hands, and now it’s time to use it.
There was a time back in the early 1980s when Herschel Walker was undoubtedly the greatest running back in the country, earning him the Heisman Trophy in 1982 as the best player in all of college football while playing for the University of Georgia.
Now, however, 40 years later, Walker is the GOP Senate nominee for the Peach State, and it seems every single time he opens his mouth these days, he winds up making little to no sense whatsoever.
Such was the case today when Walker appeared on Fox News to discuss the horrific mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 elementary school children and two of their teachers dead this week.
Walker, who has the full support of failed, one-term, twice-impeached former President Donald Trump, had this to say when asked about the most recent shooting in the United States:
“You know Cain killed Abel, you know, and that’s a problem that we have. What we need to do is look into how we can stop those things, you know, they talked about doing a disinformation.”
Cain and Abel? Last time I checked, Cain didn’t mow Abel down with an AR-15 and then go kill an entire village of people. And do we even have any factual proof that such an event ever took place?
But it was what Walker said next that suggested he isn’t fit to be elected to any office, let alone the U.S. Senate:
“What about looking at getting a department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media? What about doing that, looking into things like that? And we can stop that that way. But yet, they want to continue to talk about taking away your constitutional rights.”
A department that can look at young men that’s looking at women that’s looking at their social media. What in the hell does that even mean?!
Walker added:
“This has been happening for years, and the way we stop it, by putting money into the mental health field, by putting money into other departments rather than departments that want to take away your rights.”
Herschel Walker's solution to school shootings involves "a department that can look at young men that's looking at women that's looking at social media." pic.twitter.com/WAi7a4mwgz
Putting money into the mental health field is a good idea, and yet legislators in Walker’s former home state, Texas, have repeatedly slashed funding for mental health services. Why doesn’t Herschel call on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to convene a special session of the Texas legislature and allocate millions for better mental health infrastructure in the Lone Star State?
As for Walker’s suggestion of department to look at social media postings, the Brennan Center for Justice notes that there are already over a dozen federal agencies that monitor social media sites.
Herschel Walker was a great football player, and no one can ever take that away from him. But he’d be a disaster as a senator, and hopefully Georgia voters will reject his brainless gibberish in November.
As is so often the case when there’s a mass shooting in the United States, the vast majority of Republican political figures in the U.S. offered up the usual thoughts and prayers while failing to address the larger problem of guns, anger, and violence which permeates this country like a metastatic form of cancer that sits dormant in people for years and then one day takes the form of a horrific tumor which spreads like wildfire and consumes the innocent in a flash of hatred and self-loathing.
In Uvalde, Texas, 19 young children and two teachers were shot and killed Tuesday, once again leaving the country stunned, terrified, and sick to its soul.
Into this open wound steps Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who owns a bar where the servers are encouraged to openly carry weapons.
Here’s what Congresswoman Boebert had to say about the Uvalde massacre:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY was in no mood to hear Boebert’s empty homilies, and she made that clear in her response.
Why even be in Congress if you don’t believe in doing your job?
Just quit and let someone who actually gives a damn do it instead of acting like a useless piece of furniture when babies are shot with AR15s that we let teen boys impulse buy before they can legally have a beer. https://t.co/f9rdJ40kEJ
No, dumbass. That’s exactly what you do. That’s the whole purpose of being a legislator. You vote to make laws that help prevent evil from being evil. It’s not 100%, but it also will save lives.
Clearly, thoughts and prayers are not going to do the job. But thanks to Boebert and her ilk in Congress, we are NEVER going to get the job done, and that means in the very near future we are going to turn on the TV or look at our phones and see news of yet another mass shooting.
You can’t legislate away evil, Lauren, but you can sure as hell vote it the out of office and send it back to the rock it crawled out from under.
