I should have known. No sooner had I posted a lament about the abuse that my misspelled surname had suffered over the years, a letter from Sen. Rob Portman arrived to Nancy Zardn. She had prompted the attention of the Ohio Republican's office by writing to him with a complaint about Sen. Poutman's opposition to background gun checks.
In a standard form letter rejecting her plea for sanity, Sen. Porter repeated all of the things that he has been saying publicly to defend his troubled position, i.e., background gun checks are useless and we need instead to do more research on gun violence.
Like all of the others in the grasp of the National Rifle Assn.,the good Sen. Portnoy has yet to calculate the number of new victims of such gun violence will claim in the years - if ever - that it will take for the best minds to find a clue to societal mayhem.
But he did want Nancy to know that he has supported amendments to make sure that the mentally ill will get treatment. He didn't say how we will know who they are if they are not checked before they buy a gun?
Sen. Poorman does show more concern for the deadening effect of gun laws on "most private sales and private transfers of guns".
Huh? All the while Portmania is setting in with the friendly Ohio media for a divine
soft-spoken Republican who looks like a Republican to seek the presidency in 2016, even if he nearly always sounds like a mild-mannered open-collar public information officer of the Tea Party.
I mentioned earlier that one pundit even wrote that Sen. Portals had a "strong resume".
But it remains to be seen whether his mimeograph machine will ever be updated to learn how to spell people's names. By the way, Sen. Poobah, it's Nancy Zaidan - as in Zaidan. .
Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun control. Show all posts
Friday, June 14, 2013
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
From Grumpy's other life...
Thanks to the Sun News, the Cleveland weekly, we recently got a glimpse of Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci in action at a Town Hall meeting in Fairview Park. The dominant topic was guns, largely because a group of pickets showed up to protest his standardized Republican opposition to gun control.
As you know, the multimillionaire businessman (reported by Roll Call to be $35.8 million!) is comfortably operating out of the new Ohio 16th congressional district created just for him in northern Ohio.
Still, Renacci, now in his second term, is taking no chances; he’s not slipping out of the right-wing mask on this issue, and is advising his listeners that guns don’t kill people, only the mentally ill do. ” I believe that when it comes to guns, the biggest issue is the mental health issue,” the paper reported his comments to his restless audience.
Safe enough for the easily persuaded. But it’s right out of Wayne LaPierre’s playbook. The problem with it is, nobody – particularly tight-fisted Republicans – can tell us how, when, where and to whom does the country direct its attention on the mentally ill gun owners? (When the late Republican Gov. Jim Rhodes was advised of complaints about the state’s shabby mental health system, he shrugged, ”Those people [patients] don’t vote anyway.”
No one can deny that the mentally ill need all of the attention that society can offer. But it will require a lot more money than the budget balancers would be willing to spend over endless time. So when guys like Renacci try to divert attention from guns by addressing mental health, he should be asked: Where do you go from here? Specifics are never clearly offered and it becomes a talking points abstraction. On the other hand, simply limiting the size of magazine rounds alone would be helpful.
Renacci, the former mayor of Wadsworth, built his wealth with investments in nursing homes, motorcycles and minor league baseball. He describes himself as a “common-sense congressman,” and denies that that he is serving at the pleasure of the NRA – a group with which he was tied for first place nationally for campaign support. Renacci’s cut of the NRA pie was a mere $9,900, but when you have your very own safe district thanks to redistricting, you don’t need much more,
“You keep saying that I’m listening to the NRA,” Renacci protested to the Town Hall group, “but I’ve got to keep telling you, the NRA has never come to my office and said anything. I am a proponent of the Second Amendment.”
Can we then assume that the check was in the mail?
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- When will Jim Renacci give back campaign donations being investigated by FBI?
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