monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Quote:

Spare me the agitprop crap.

Probably not. As I pointed out, this is precisely what he was doing into the subhead and the first graph.

I've read that Ronald Reagan, when he was Governor of California, called for gun control legislation when there was a Black Panther scare.

The mayor of Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan, has described Donald Trump's visit to the hurricane-hit island as "insulting" and called him a "miscommunicator-in-chief".
Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described his televised meeting with officials as a "PR, 17-minute meeting".
The sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was "terrible and abominable", she added.
Mr Trump tweeted it had been a "great day" in Puerto Rico.
Tuesday's five-hour presidential trip to San Juan came two weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, and followed complaints that the US government's handling of the storm's aftermath was too slow.
Only 7% of the island has power and more remote parts of the island - a US territory - have been without food, water and basic medical aid.
It may have been a "great day" in Puerto Rico for Donald Trump, but more than 90% of the 3 and a half million people living on this island remain without power and phone communications.
It means many of them would not have heard his remark about how much the disaster in Puerto Rico was costing the US government.
Nor would they have seen that he only visited Guaynabo, a wealthy part of town, and joked with people there that they no longer needed the torches being handed out.
Many of those we have met who are aware of this week's visit say this is more evidence that the president views them as second-class American citizens.
During his televised meeting with emergency responders and officials of Puerto Rico, he went out of his way to praise - and seek compliments for - the federal response.
"Every death is a horror," the president said, "but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous - hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody's ever seen anything like this."
He then turned to the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosello, and asked how many people had died in the storm.
"Seventeen? Sixteen people certified, 16 people versus in the thousands," Mr Trump said, referring to the 2005 hurricane that killed 1,833 people in New Orleans.
Governor Rosello later clarified that the number of people in Puerto Rico killed by Maria had increased to 34.
Mr Trump also pointed to the impact of the cost of storm recovery on US domestic spending, which was already facing a budget shortfall of $72bn (£54bn), telling Puerto Ricans "you've thrown our budget a little out of whack... but that's fine".
After his meeting, he toured in and around San Juan, stopping at a church to hand out relief supplies and throwing paper towels into the crowd.
At one point he reportedly glanced at a pile of solar-powered flashlights and - apparently unaware of the ongoing power problems - said "you don't need 'em anymore", the Washington Post reports.
Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz told MSNBC after the visit that his meeting with officials had been a PR exercise in which "there was no exchange with anybody, with none of the mayors".
She went on to say: "This terrible and abominable view of him throwing paper towels and throwing provisions at people, it really - it does not embody the spirit of the American nation, you know?"
She said his comments about throwing the US budget out of whack were "insulting to the people of Puerto Rico", and his comparisons with Katrina "minimised our suffering".
"Well you know what? They are dying. They don't have the medical resources," she pointed out.
Ms Cruz said he had become "sort of like miscommunicator-in-chief" who showed no interest in reaching out to those who were suffering. But she went on to say "his staff, on the other hand, seemed to want to approach this a different way".
Ms Cruz had been called a poor leader by President Trump in a tweet at the weekend after she accused his administration of "killing us with the inefficiency".
On Tuesday, she shook hands with him and told him: "It's about saving lives, it's not about politics". He did not respond.
Following the visit, the White House announced it was preparing to send a $29bn (£22bn) disaster aid request to Congress.
Of that, $13bn would be for hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas, while the other $16bn would be for the government-backed flood insurance programme.

Oh, I know you won't. It's all you have,

An anti-abortion US lawmaker reportedly asked a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair to terminate the pregnancy.
Tim Murphy's lover suggested he was a hypocrite when he allegedly proposed she get an abortion during a pregnancy scare, a Pittsburgh newspaper reports.
In texts, the Pennsylvania Republican reportedly told her he "winced" over his public anti-abortion stance.
He voted on Tuesday for a bill that would outlaw abortions after 20 weeks.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported it had obtained text messages between the married congressman and his lover, forensic psychologist Shannon Edwards.
The lawmaker earlier this month acknowledged his affair with Ms Edwards after it became public in her divorce proceedings.
According to the newspaper, she sent him a text on 25 January reminding the congressman he had "zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options".
She sent the text after seeing a Facebook post by Mr Murphy lamenting US abortions and saying: "It is a tragic shame that America is leading the world in discarding and disregarding the most vulnerable."
A text reply reportedly sent from Mr Murphy's mobile phone maintained it was his staff who were behind the anti-abortion rhetoric, not him.
"I get what you say about my March for life messages," he wrote.
"I've never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don't write any more. I will."
It turned out the pregnancy scare was a false alarm, reports the Post-Gazette.
Mr Murphy's office did not respond to a request for comment from the BBC.
The claims were reported on Tuesday as the congressman voted in favour of a Republican bill that would criminalise abortions performed after 20 weeks of foetal development.
Mr Murphy, a member of the House of Representatives Pro-Life Caucus who is in his eighth term, was a co-sponsor of the bill.
He has been praised by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobby group, for his stance on abortion and family values.
Mr Murphy's anti-abortion bill is expected to fail in the Senate, where Democrats have enough votes to stop the measure.
He is not the only lawmaker to be accused of hypocrisy on the abortion issue.
Tennessee Republican lawmaker Scott DesJarlais repeatedly voted for anti-abortion measures, but it was revealed in 2012 that he had asked his ex-wife to have two abortions, according to court papers from his 2001 divorce.
The former doctor also reportedly urged a 24-year-old patient with whom he was having an affair to get an abortion, according to the Chattanooga Times Free Press newspaper, citing the court transcripts.

The gun lobby: See how much your representative gets
Attention is being thrust back on the gun lobby as lawmakers give gun control measures a fresh look in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting – the deadliest in modern U.S. history. Gun rights groups overwhelmingly support GOP candidates, contributing $5.9 million into Republican campaigns in the 2016 election cycle, compared with $106,000 to those of Democrats. It’s also the most money gun lobbyists have given in a campaign year since at least 1990.

Most Americans support stronger gun laws — laws that would reduce deaths. But Republicans in Congress stand in the way. They fear alienating their primary voters and the National Rifle Association.

Below are the top 10 career recipients of N.R.A. funding – through donations or spending to benefit the candidate – among both current House and Senate members, along with their statements about the Las Vegas massacre. These representatives have a lot to say about it. All the while, they refuse to do anything to avoid the next massacre.

Representative Tim Murphy, Republican of Pennsylvania, announced Wednesday night that he would not seek re-election in 2018 after a backlash over reports that he had suggested to his lover to consider having an abortion.

In a statement, Mr. Murphy, 65, an outspoken opponent of abortion who has served in the House since 2003, said his decision to retire came after discussions with his family and staff. Mr. Murphy was uncontested in his 2016 campaign for the heavily Republican district in western Pennsylvania that includes parts of Pittsburgh.

“In the coming weeks I will take personal time to seek help as my family and I continue to work through our personal difficulties and seek healing,” Mr. Murphy said in the statement. “I ask you to respect our privacy during this time.”

By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.

Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.

In a comprehensive review of firearm-control legislation worldwide, we identified a range of studies examining the association between firearm-related laws and firearm deaths. Three general observations emerge from this analysis:
1) The simultaneous implementation of laws targeting multiple elements of firearms regulations reduced firearm-related deaths in certain countries;
2) some specific restrictions on purchase, access, and use of firearms are associated with reductions in firearm deaths;
3) challenges in ecological design and the execution of studies limit the confidence in study findings and the conclusions that can be derived from them.

I'm a bit behind on the news. When Trump visited Las Vegas, did he throw out paper towels to help clean up the blood and guts? That would have been thoughtful.

According to the news the next morning, he "struck the right note of compassion", and "may have finally taken a step toward becoming consoler-in-chief".