Today, Donald Trump Meets America's Gun Owners
Greetings from Louisville, Kentucky, where this afternoon Donald Trump will address the attendees of the NRA Annual Meeting. I would be surprised if Trump received anything less than a cordial response from the crowd, and he could very well get an enthusiastic response. He was rather warmly received at last year's convention in Nashville. Trump's comments in support of gun control are apparently too far back in the past to be a political liability with these voters today: "It's often argued that the American murder rate is high because guns are more available here than in other countries," Trump wrote in his book, The America We Deserve. "After a tragedy like the massacre at Columbine High School, anyone could feel that it is too easy for Americans to get their hands on weapons. But nobody has a good solution." "This is another issue where you see the extremes of the two existing major parties. Democrats want to confiscate all guns, which is a dumb idea because only the law-abiding citizens would turn in their guns and the bad guys would be the only ones left armed," continued Trump. "The Republicans walk the NRA line and refuse even limited restrictions. I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun. With today's internet technology we should be able to tell within 72 hours if a potential gun owner has a record." There were certainly skeptics among gun owners; Bob Owens, editor of BearingArms.com, made his views explicit in February. "Of the remaining Republican contenders, front-runner Donald Trump is clearly the least conservative candidate based upon his own well-documented history of switching to the Democrat Party when doing so might help him personally profit," Owens wrote. "In the end, we have to agree with Senator Cruz: allowing Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee would be a disaster for the long-term future of the Second Amendment and gun ownership in the United States." But the NRA doesn't generally get involved in presidential primaries, and as former NRA President David Keene suggested in an interview with the Intercept, the organization is unlikely to spurn a Republican presidential nominee who's saying the right things now based on a sixteen-year-old book passage and off-the-cuff comments to Larry King. "The unfortunate thing," Keene says, "is you can't tell how someone will act as president until they're sworn in. Recently, this guy from Alaska called and said, 'Trump's gonna sell us out. We need to do something.' "I asked, 'What's your evidence?' We can't read people's hearts and minds." Trump will bash Hillary Clinton, and the crowd will applaud with good reason; she supports a wide variety of gun control proposals, including reinstating the assault-weapons ban. Never mind that gun crimes continued to decline after the ban expired. The dirty little secret that few gun-control advocates like admitting is that very few crimes are committed with so-called "assault weapons." A choice between an unreliable ally and a certain enemy is far from ideal, but most gun owners will see a clear distinction anyway. Feingold Staffers May Want to Seek Out an Alternate Commuting Route How would you like to be a campaign staffer for Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, and see this on your way to work every morning? 
That billboard, a few blocks away from Feingold's campaign headquarters near Madison, is one of several from Freedom Partners Action Fund focusing on Feingold's response, or lack thereof, to a 2009 memo when he was in the Senate. The current senator, Republican Ron Johnson, beat Feingold in the 2010 election. The man who blew the whistle on the rampant over-prescription of opiates at the Tomah VA Medical Center in 2014 is now calling out former U.S. Senator and current Senate candidate Russ Feingold (D) for not doing anything about the problem when he was in office, even though a memo sent out by a local government employees union suggests he was made aware of the issues in 2009. The TV ad was released Monday morning by Freedom Partners Action Fund, a Super PAC started and heavily funded by Republican billionaires Charles and David Koch. Ryan Honl, a former Tomah VA employee who filed a complaint about the opiate prescription problem and other issues with the Office of the Inspector General for U.S. Veterans Affairs in September 2014, is featured prominently in the ad. Honl criticizes Feingold for not responding to a April 17, 2009 memo sent out by the American Federation of Government Employees, which outlined many of the problems later reported by the Inspector General. On the memo featured in the ad, the words "hand-delivered to Congressman Kind, Congressman Obey, Senator Feingold" are written out in ink by AFGE Local 0007 President Lin Ellinghuysen.
"I found out that Russ Feingold got a memo in 2009 that outlined veteran harm and nothing was done. Russ Feingold ignored veteran's concerns while veterans we're dying at the facility," says Honl in the ad. Honl took to Facebook Monday morning to explain why he decided to take part in the ad campaign. "Russ Feingold, Ron Kind, and the American Federation of Government Employees have answers to give. 'We didn't know anything about that' is not sufficient. 'I was misinformed' as the Tomah union president states is not sufficient," Honl wrote in a statement. "The issues highlighted in the union memo were well known as early as 2009. The union never went to any other political party with any of these concerns because of politics (which it admitted)." Feingold says he never received the memo. "Despite all of the efforts to try and make Russ Feingold aware of the scandal at the Tomah VA, he continues to blame everyone but himself for what happened," said Freedom Partners Action Fund spokesman Bill Riggs. "The message of the billboards is simple: When Tomah veterans needed help, Sen. Feingold did nothing." ADDENDA: Brace yourselves: this week's TJAMS features Mickey's adventures in attempting to adopt a dog, what Captain America: Civil War got right, more inanity from Gwenyth Paltrow, and a lot of me ranting about some recent television series finales. SPOILERS AHEAD. I know the creative team of ABC's Castle faced a no-win situation. A ninth season is hard to make great in any circumstance, star Stana Katic announced she was moving on, and then the network suddenly announced there would be no ninth season after all. So a closing scene that was supposed to be a cliffhanger -- Castle and Beckett both shot, lying on the floor in pools of blood, reaching out and holding hands and wondering if this was their last moments together . . . suddenly and inexplicably cut to "SEVEN YEARS LATER", where we see the couple has had three children. No dialogue; just the kids running into the room, a family hug, and fade to black. (A couple cynics contended this was their shared hallucinatory fantasy as they died.) How rushed was that tacked-on finale scene? We didn't even get to learn the names of their children; the show might as well have just said, "And they lived happily ever after." But again, Castle's team had no good options. It was either end on that prewritten cliffhanger, destined to never be resolved, or just give the "hey, never mind, everything turned out fine" ending. Then there's NCIS; CBS had hyped the departure of actor Michael Weatherly for weeks, and they threw their audience for a loop. Viewers learned that longtime fan favorite Ziva David, the Mossad-turned-NCIS agent played by Cote De Pablo who departed the show two seasons ago . . . was dead, killed in Israel by a mortar attack. (Killed off-screen, no less!) That was bad enough and let Weatherly emote a lot about his lost, never-quite-fulfilled love; but then the show sprung the real surprise, that Ziva had a two-year-old daughter and Weatherly's Tony DiNozzo was the father. It gave the DiNozzo character a good reason to leave the team by the end of the episode -- as a single father, he couldn't live "in the line of fire" the way he had before. But the dramatic twist also had the significant side effect of making the Ziva character a horrible human being. She allegedly loves Tony, but leaves him and never mentions that he's the father of her child for two years. We learn she showed their daughter pictures of her father, but she never returned to introduce them, never called, never wrote. For most of the show's run, NCIS audiences were supposed to see the Ziva character as heroic; now we've learned she's the kind of woman who would hide a man from his own daughter and hide her daughter from her own father. It's the most inexplicable face-heel-turn since Mission: Impossible's Jim Phelps. Or did the NCIS creative team just not recognize how much this act would alter the perception of the Ziva character? Sometimes a creative team has a character commit what they're certain the audience will perceive as a heroic act, and thereby reveal their blindness to the moral ramifications. The film In and Out offered one of the most glaring examples of this, where Kevin Kline's character finally realizes he's gay and says so . . . at the altar when he's about to marry Joan Cusack's character. The filmmakers clearly want this to be a brave moment of self-realization, but it's asking the audience to avert their eyes from the fact that Kline dated, courted, and proposed to Cusack and has now just horrified and humiliated her in front of everyone she knows. He's not a heroic or likable protagonist; he's Jim McGreevey.  | 
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