"Guns and Domestic Abusers Don’t Mix" Letter to the editor Tom Denton

Guns and Domestic Abusers Don’t Mix

            In March the New York legislature took a big step to advance protections for women threatened with domestic abuse.  With the passage of Senate bill S8121, the state will have a new law that removes all styles of guns from the hands of convicted domestic abusers.  It also adds to the list of “serious” misdemeanor offenses that would mandate removal, such as menacing and “obstruction of breathing.”  Also, in cases involving orders of protection, it allows a judge to order abusers to surrender weapons and to suspend their firearms licenses for the expanded offenses.  One dissenter in the 41-19 Senate vote was our local senator, John Bonacic, District 42.  A written statement explaining the senator’s vote isn’t available, but his office said the law as written might prejudice convicted abusers for physically non-violent cases, specifically, “coercion,” and it should have been refined in public hearings and debate before passage.  Can you imagine such a debate in our current legislature, dominated by the “three men in a room” style of government?  

            Unfortunately, it appears that Senator Bonacic is more committed to the principles of gun rights for donors than to real safeguards against the murder of women, over half of whom are killed by intimate partners, overwhelmingly with firearms.  What is the priority:  to protect the “right” of an abuser to his guns or to stand up for the lives of women, and often their children, who face the fury of a man who holds in his hands the ultimate instrument of his power and control?  Nothing more coercive than that.

 

Publishing History

 Times-Herald Record                       4/28

"Swamp Creatures" Letter to the editor Tom Denton

Swamp Creatures

So how has the swamp in Washington D.C. been doing lately?  The swamp that Donald Trump pledged to clean up?  Listen to Mick Mulvaney, Budget Director and head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (that’s the agency that is supposed to protect American citizens from predatory lenders and the like).  In an April 24 speech to the American Bankers Association, the ex-Congressman from South Carolina declared, “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you” (Washington Post).  He qualified his statement to include that he would meet with his regular constituents, regardless of their contributions, IF they showed up in his Washington office.  (What the heck, it doesn’t cost that much to travel from South Carolina to Washington.) 

But it would be difficult for Mulvaney to top the list of arrogant Cabinet members whose lodestar is the let them eat cake rule.  That honor must go to EPA chief Scott Pruitt.  His $50 per night rental of a Washington condo beats any time share deal out there (though he missed out on the free meal for listening to the marketing pitches).  And his $43,000 soundproof office phone booth?  It’s his idea of transparency without sound.  His scheduling director received a 72% raise; his senior counsel, 68%.  Hey, does he have any other job openings?

When Trump said he would drain the swamp, he meant, of losers.   Now he’s re-filled it with a royal court of big-time grifters and charlatans.  They’re laughing at us.

 

Publishing History

     Albany Times Union             4/28

"GOP dancing moves" Letter to the editor Tom Denton

GOP Dancing Moves

Politicians do what politicians do. The March 30 announcement ("FDR historic site could grow with land deal") of a congressional bill to expand the acreage of the FDR site in Hyde Park gave both U.S. Rep. John Faso, R-Kinderhook, and Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro the opportunity to take a swing at a giant softball pitch, in baseball parlance. (Note: both are running in November.) After the land was gifted to Scenic Hudson in 2014, the National Park Service’s takeover of the land, eventually, was inevitable. But fair is fair.  Republicans got their press conference and the favorable publicity.

 

But credit and accountability run in multiple directions. On April 17, the Dutchess County Republican Committee advertised a fundraiser with headliner former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke (VIP ticket: $1,000). Clarke has juggled lawsuits and federal officials over alleged abuses in his jail. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Watch tracks his incendiary speeches. He has called Black Lives Matter a “hateful ideology.”  He claimed, “Obama-Marxist types want to start a civil war in this country” by taking people’s guns away. He was temporarily banned from Twitter for threatening the “lying lib media”:  “Punch them in the nose & MAKE THEM TASTE THEIR OWN BLOOD.”

 

What is Rep. Faso’s view of David Clarke? At a 2016 gathering of Oath Keepers, a far-right group whose response to Parkland was to warn of “leftist ‘blood dancers’” coming for everyone’s guns, Faso said, “What a tremendous patriot we have in Sheriff David Clarke  . . . I truly appreciate what you are doing.”

 

Want to buy a ticket for the fundraiser? Too bad, it’s been cancelled.  Perhaps Faso and the GOP feared the event would take the sheen off of their feel-good ceremony and cast a light on the dark money that fuels extremism in their party.

Publishing history

Poughkeepsie Journal online,  4/8 & 4/11 amended

New Paltz Times     4/12