Jamelle Bouie has some smart observations about the Democrats and their base:

If the triumph of Trumpism is the most important recent development in American political history, then the second most important is the mobilization of liberal and left-wing voters to challenge the president's authoritarian politics.

This mobilization drove the Women's March, where a day after Trump's inauguration, hundreds of thousands came to Washington to protest against his nascent administration. Millions of others joined them in cities across the country - a remarkable demonstration of opposition to a new president. It stiffened Democratic resolve to oppose the president at a time when some of the party's leaders were looking for bipartisan cooperation. It helped halt the Republican drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act - peeling critical support away from Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader - and last year powered an electoral wave that gave the Democratic Party its first majority in the House of Representatives since 2010.

If Democrats can be confident ahead of 2020, it's because of grass-roots activists who have strengthened the party's political position time and time again. And yet key Democratic leaders are still reluctant to follow their lead.

I think there's a deeper divide, between a politics that sees the grass roots as an asset to use and cultivate versus one that treats it as a complication to manage. It's a "leader knows best" approach that may squander the Democratic Party's advantage of enthusiasm and drive against a corrupt and unpopular president. It even seems as though for Democrats like Pelosi, the only political actions that truly matter are either in the legislature or at the ballot box. It's an understandable view for a leadership class whose political memories stretch back to the devastating Democratic losses of 1968 and 1972 (to say nothing of 1980 and 1984). But it's also bred of a deep aversion to risk-taking, even when circumstances warrant bold action.

If the Trump era has revealed anything about the state of American politics, it's that the realm of possibility is far greater than previously recognized. There are still limits and obstacles, but there are also opportunities to fundamentally shift the terms of political conflict and debate. There are Democrats outside of the grass roots who understand this and have adopted a tactical and strategic boldness that suits the moment.

Backed by the base of the party, liberal candidates like Doug Jones in Alabama and Stacey Abrams in Georgia have run aggressive campaigns in ostensibly hostile territory, making unheard-of gains in the process. Presidential contenders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have aimed their campaigns at that grass-roots sense of possibility with expansive policy programs and a transformative vision. Exemplified by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, younger lawmakers are speaking to and amplifying the grass roots, building powerful public platforms in the process. But Democratic leaders in Congress remain skeptical, seemingly stuck in an era when Democrats were on the defensive and backlash politics ruled the day.

Then again, Pelosi and Schumer are shrewd politicians with decades of experience. Perhaps their resistance to grass-roots Democrats, and to impeachment in particular, will pay dividends. But we should consider the reverse as well: that a Democratic Party that plays with excessive caution - and keeps its base at a distance - is one that might demobilize its voters and produce the same conditions that helped Trump win in the first place.

I've been watching this dynamic for years, and it does feel as if the Dem leadership believes Democrats will never vote for Trump so there's no reason to take any chances on their behalf if they can slide through without taking any risk. Maybe they're right. But in this environment having an enthusiastic, fired-up base seems like a cheap insurance policy.

BY the way:

Democrats are increasingly in favor of impeaching President Donald Trump, with 76 percent saying they support the move to oust the president from office, according to a new CNN poll. That marks a seven-percentage-point increase from April when support for impeachment stood at 69 percent among Democrats, according to the poll conducted by SSRS.

Buried under a late-May news barrage, Canada's government made small but important changes to the Oceans Act and Petroleum Resources Act that will strengthen protection of at-risk marine ecosystems. The most significant is that government will no longer have to wait for marine protected area designation to prevent harmful activities, but will have the power to implement "interim protections." Changes to the Petroleum Act "allow Natural Resources Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada to negotiate the voluntary surrender of a company's oil and gas interests" and compensate companies if marine protected area designation means cancelling projects.

Freezing harmful activities for up to five years will give government time to consult with provinces, territories, Indigenous communities, stakeholders and the public before it formally protects a marine area. The changes are in line with the government's goal of protecting 10 per cent of Canada's ocean territory by next year. It has made progress, with 8.27 per cent now protected, up from less than one per cent in 2015.

It's progress worth celebrating on World Oceans Day, June 8. Many Canadians may not know the UN declared this special day at Canada's urging. With three oceans surrounding the world's longest coastline and more than 350,000 ocean-dependent jobs, it makes sense for Canada to honour and protect these ecosystems and the tremendous resources they provide. But is it too early to pat ourselves on the back?

A Greenpeace study by York and Oxford university researchers argues we must protect at least 30 per cent of oceans by 2030, including areas outside territorial jurisdiction, "to address the crisis facing our oceans and enable their recovery." (I believe that falls short of what's needed.) The report, 30×30: A Blueprint for Ocean Protection, shows that a network of "fully protected marine protected areas" is feasible and something the world should consider as governments negotiate a global ocean treaty through the UN, expected in 2020.

The push for greater ocean protection marks a growing shift in our perception of the seas, from a resource storehouse and dumping ground for wastes to a source of life. Oceans are vital to our survival and contribute to our prosperity and quality of life. They produce more than half the world's oxygen and are the largest carbon sink. And they offer yet unknown potential for medical discoveries.

But we know more about Mars than the immense scope of ocean life. We've only explored about five per cent of the underwater world. Less then a half century ago, no one contemplated that a multitude of species could live around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Further altering our value system to put the environment first and look out for all species' needs will allow us to base development decisions on recognizing that we benefit from maintaining natural ecosystems.

Beyond Oceans Act amendments, Canada is also examining Fisheries Act updates to address increasing pollution, ecosystem destruction and declining biodiversity. This would include measures to rebuild fish stocks, many of which are severely depleted. Similar action has proven successful in the United States. However, fishing quotas aren't enough, as fish face numerous threats that only healthy, abundant stocks may be able to withstand. Marine protected areas help safeguard the diversity and abundance of plants and animals in and around them, improving their resilience to human activity, climate change and other, often unexpected, events.

We often take the oceans' gifts for granted, underestimating their value, resulting in devastation to local economies and cultural values. Attempting to balance priorities between the environment and the economy requires constant, exhausting renegotiation and compromise. The false assumption is that conservation activities cost more than the environmental impacts of growing industrial activity.

We must continue shifting our perspective. We can't continue to prioritize short-term economic objectives over the very ecosystems that sustain us. Acting for our immediate benefit can destroy the intricate balance and put a species or even the whole ecosystem in peril. A single oil spill could threaten the existence of southern resident orcas.

If we care about human prosperity, we must protect oceans. Supporting their natural resilience by restoring their biological diversity would deliver long-term benefits for food security and social and economic well-being. Let's stay the course on leadership and progressive action on this important issue.

The headline I most wish I'd written ran in an Irish newspaper when a certain beloved publican changed a Dublin establishment, and one of the local journals declared, "The Ship Is Deserting The Sinking Rats." If I'd have written it, it would be perfect for the story in The New York Times on Tuesday in which what appears to be a general revulsion toward El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago reached maximum volume in perfect harmony. The queue at the ratlines apparently looks like the one at the top of Mount Everest.

After being briefed on a devastating 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win, even though he is also trailing in public polls from key states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And when top-line details of the polling leaked, including numbers showing the president lagging in a cluster of critical Rust Belt states, Mr. Trump instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well. Mr. Biden seems to have gotten into the president's head - at least for now. And on Tuesday, the president will engage with him, if indirectly, for the first time during the 2020 campaign when they both make appearances in Iowa.

In a recent overarching state-of-the-race briefing in Florida with Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, Mr. Trump was consistently distracted and wanted to discuss other things, according to people familiar with the meeting. When it came to the campaign, his main focus was on his own approval numbers. Unlike nearly every recent modern president who sought re-election, Mr. Trump rarely if ever speaks to aides about what he hopes to accomplish with what would be a hard-won second term; his interest is entirely in the present, and mostly on the crisis of the moment.

Joe Biden seems to have burrowed into Trump's head.

He has shown no interest in formulating a new message for his campaign, instead continuing with the winning "Make America Great Again" slogan from his last race and adding that he also wants to "keep America great." Mr. Trump has griped about traveling too much, but then lashed out at aides, demanding to know, "Why am I not doing more rallies?" He insists on having final approval over the songs on his campaign playlist, as well as the campaign merchandise, but he has never asked to see a budget for 2019.

Mr. Trump may be indifferent to the mechanics of running a presidential campaign, in part because he continues to view his 2016 victory as driven almost entirely by his own force of personality and messaging. "His counterintuitive gut instinct that drove much of the 2016 race was spot on through the primary and the general elections," said Jason Miller, who served as a communications aide on Mr. Trump's 2016 campaign. "I wouldn't expect that to change going into 2020. He's always going to be the one who drives the message and makes the important political decisions."

Trump is not interested in bad news.

But just a week before the rally, Mr. Trump continues to function without a chief political strategist, people involved in his campaigns said. The president's lead pollster, Mr. Fabrizio, is someone Mr. Trump resisted hiring in 2016, and his blunt approach is not always welcome by a candidate who prefers good news and can take a shoot-the-messenger approach to receiving information he does not like.

(c) 2019 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

Thom Hartmann has long written and spoken on the topic of guns in the United States, along with many other topics. Of those topics he's dealt with that I know anything about, I have not always agreed with him on every detail, but on most I've found him highly informative and persuasive. His new book, The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, is possibly the best book I've ever seen on its topic, both to read, and to pass along to anyone in the United States, whatever their current opinion on guns and gun laws may be, as well as to share with anyone else on earth who may be trying to understand why the United States seems to be allowing its own ongoing slaughter, with guns the second-leading cause of death among children in the United States.

This book is not ideal for any reader because it pulls punches or obscures difficult truths or goes out of its way to be respectful of sociopathic cultural traits, but rather because it is honest, straightforward, incredibly concise (covering in few pages vastly more than the title suggests), and because what it proposes ought to strike any open-minded person as ridiculously reasonable and easily accepted. This also makes the book nearly as difficult to review as a poem. Rather than just a summary, let me try to convey what strikes me as most significant to add to current public conversation in light of this book and of the responses I've been receiving to recent articles I've written. If I note below any fact not documented in Hartmann's book, I'll cite or link to a source. Otherwise, my source is that book, which cites important studies throughout.

First of all, there's the scope and uniqueness of the problem. Over 1,000 people have been killed in the United States in mass-shootings over the years. But this pales in comparison with non-mass shootings, which kill about 34,000 per year, two-thirds of those being suicides, a small percentage being accidents, and a smaller percentage being police killings. Roughly twice the number killed are non-fatally (but often horrifically) injured. The direct financial cost of just the deaths, plus the lost productivity, is some $300 billion per year, but there's no way to put a number on the cultural poison, the fear, the anxiety, the hatred, the bitterness, the distrust, or the shame. None of this exists in a significant way in any other wealthy (I refuse to say "fully developed") nation, every one of which has long modeled cultural and legislative solutions that would almost certainly save many thousands of lives and radically benefit the United States if only the U.S. Congress were as open to plagiarism as Joe Biden.

Second of all, there's the question of factors that correlate with and possibly cause mass shootings and non-mass shootings. A primary factor is the number of guns distributed among society, a measure by which the United States dramatically leads the world. (It's more dramatic even than imprisonment. The United States has 4% of the world's people and 25% of its prisoners, but 50% of its civilian-owned guns.) Debating which other factors contribute the most to mass shootings is a fine topic, and taboos on which factors can be mentioned should be shattered. But we should remember how the problem of non-mass-shootings dwarfs that of mass shootings, as well as that the factor of availability of guns dwarfs other possibly contributing factors. We should also, I think, call off the search for the one, single contributing factor so important that it makes all other factors cease to exist. Not even the availability of guns does that.

Another primary factor, in a different sense, may be a U.S. cultural understanding of masculinity. While the United States makes guns far more available than other countries do, and more gun deaths result, and while some U.S. states make guns far more available than other U.S. states do, and more gun deaths result in those states, it is not the case that the United States' population, or that of particular states, is significantly more made up of males. It is, however, the case that virtually all mass-shooters are male, and 85% of suicides are male. It is also demonstrably the case that U.S. popular culture promotes a model of masculinity that glorifies violence. While people often think of legislative solutions as easier than cultural ones, this is not always the case, and one can follow the other. The legislation of rights for gay people has followed the cultural acceptance of those rights more than the reverse. Other countries may, of course, have equally violent or more violent notions of masculinity, but lack the same availability of guns and/or other contributing factors. That does not mean that improving the U.S. cultural model of a male wouldn't reduce gun deaths.

The reasons I've written about mass shooters being disproportionately military veterans (even accounting for gender and age) include the following. Nobody else mentions it, while an endless stream of articles touch on numerous other factors. Even the Parkland young people refuse to acknowledge that their murderous classmate was trained in their cafeteria at the expense of their parents' taxes. Making people familiar with guns, training them to effectively use guns, and praising them for learning to commit mass shootings and even for committing mass shootings (of the "right people") is more self-evidently a causal factor in mass shootings than other correlations are. Generating mass shooters at public expense is both more outrageous and more obviously amenable to correction than other possible factors.

As soon as we begin to discuss any two factors in gun deaths, it should become clear that they are not entirely separable from each other. Mass awareness of mass-shootings undoubtedly contributes to non-mass-shootings (which even include shootings of three or fewer random victims). Military veterans have found guns more accessible. The military has made guns more accessible to all, including non-veterans. Military veterans have been exposed to a particularly pro-violence conception of masculinity.

Other factors worth considering, despite their interlocking and possibly relatively minor role, or the relative difficulty of defining their presence (some of which are far more present among mass shooters than is military veteran status) include mental illness, drug use, misogyny, sexual assault, assault, racism, financial insecurity, unhappiness, and of course contributing factors to a culture of violence such as video games, movies, songs, etc. Some of these (such as violent movies) are hard to measure in influence on shooters versus non-shooters. Other factors correlate with each other, leading advocates of attention for one to dismiss another. Many are easily misunderstood or exaggerated. While the most likely description of the next mass shooter would include his being white, whites are not disproportionately mass shooters. While racism has been an explicit motivation of mass shootings, many countries have racism without having mass shootings. Racism may contribute to the acceptance of weak gun laws which in turn contribute to shootings that don't involve racism directly. Et cetera.

None of these factors works as grounds for bigotry or profiling. The vast, vast majority of people who fit any of the factors are not going to shoot anybody, not even themselves. But some of the factors, or their combination, could help to explain the difference between the United States and other nations. The availability of guns all on its own almost certainly explains much of the difference in gun deaths between the United States and other nations, in the sense that reducing the gun presence in the United States would reduce the gun deaths. But reducing various other factors could also reduce gun deaths with or without reducing gun presence, which is significant in some other countries, even if nowhere near what it is in the United States. The United States is economically the most unequal wealthy country on earth. It fights the most wars. It prescribes and illegally uses the most drugs. Et cetera.

Part of the culture of violent masculinity is the culture of the proliferation of guns, and vice versa. Ending the financial corruption of the U.S. government would probably be enough to significantly restrict the proliferation of guns, but so might ending the cultural acceptance of owning guns (and all types of guns) as a fundamental human right. Ending the corporate monopolization of communications systems might be enough to end the cultural acceptance of the human right to a semi-automatic weapon. Ending the legal acceptance of human rights for corporations might be enough to end both the financial corruption of the U.S. government and the corporate monopolization of the media. There are many ways to tackle what we're up against. A lot of them could benefit from an historically accurate understanding of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or what I've previously called the Wait-Just-A-Goddam-Second Amendment.

This is one of many areas in which Thom Hartmann's book shines. Hartmann documents overwhelmingly that the thinking behind the Second Amendment, and the original understanding of it, and the general understanding of it until very recently, have had nothing to do with a personal right to own guns. Among the rights that Jefferson, Madison, and others hoped to see in a Bill of Rights was a prohibition on a standing army (as well as a prohibition on corporate monopolies, but that's another story). The reason that the Constitution limits funding of an army to two years (and limits nothing else in that way) is an intention to avoid a permanent military. The same idea was found explicitly in early drafts of the Second Amendment, as was the right to conscientious objection to military service. The reason that a ban (or virtually a ban) on a standing military and a right to refuse to participate in a military, as well as the subordination of the military to civilian control, were all included in early drafts of the Second Amendment was that the Second Amendment was about exactly what it says it is about, namely a right to form well-regulated militias. The re-writing of the Second Amendment into its final form was driven by the fears of slave owners. The valuing of militias in the first place was driven by the desire to steal land from Native Americans and to maintain slavery.

Last year, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz published a book called Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. In it, she claims that the Bill of Rights was a bill of individual rights, and that it provided the individual right to own guns in plain English, and that doing so (owning guns) was very common at the time. In fact, some colonies had required white men to own guns and to never travel without them. Dunbar-Ortiz associates this position on the Second Amendment and the individual right to own guns with acknowledgement of ugly truths about U.S. history, namely the Second Amendment's basis in genocide and slavery. But Hartmann and I agree with her on that, as I think anyone who looks honestly at history must. The question is what was meant by the Second Amendment.

We can all, of course, agree that by "arms" this ancient law did not mean semi-automatic weapons. Many of us can probably agree that, no matter what it meant, we ought to be able to create better laws now and cease caring so much what it meant. But did it mean to create a personal right to own an ancient relatively harmless weapon?

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court claimed as much in a 5-4 decision. No U.S. court had claimed that in the previous 230 years. Four justices published a dissent rejecting the claim as nonsense and self-contradictory. The majority argued that "people" in the Second Amendment must mean the same thing as "people" in the First and Fourth Amendments. The minority pointed out that, in fact, the majority intended "people" in the Second Amendment to mean only "law-abiding, responsible citizens," whereas even felons and irresponsible citizens (and, I would note, non-citizens) can appeal to the First and Fourth Amendments. I would add that "people" shows up in the First Amendment only for the right to assemble, which is done only by multiple people, and in the Fourth Amendment only in discussion of the violation of the rights of "persons" (plural), whereas other amendments refer to individual rights without using the term "people" (the Third Amendment on the "Owner" of a house, the Fifth Amendment on the rights of a "person," the Sixth Amendment on the rights of "the accused") but the use of "people" in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments clearly has nothing whatsoever to do with individual rights.

The 2008 Supreme Court majority also invented the idea that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms "to defend hearth and home," a phrase and concept not documented to have ever entered into any discussion of the Amendment's creation or ratification.

Equally nonexistent in the creation and ratification of the Bill of Rights is any notion of the need for guns in order to rebel against the government, likewise a modern creation.

So, what, beyond proper understanding of the facts, does Hartmann propose? Well, undoing corporate personhood and money as speech, through a new Supreme Court, new legislation, or Constitutional Amendment. And these two steps: treating semi-automatic weapons like automatics, and regulating gun ownership like car ownership, meaning registration and title, a license one must qualify for, and mandatory liability insurance. How a fact-based analysis can find such proposals unreasonable is beyond me.

And by "fact-based" I mean to include, as Hartmann does, consideration of what other nations on earth have done, rather than engagement in the pretense that all is hypothetical speculation. Australia decided to require a license for a gun, to regulate semi-automatics as tightly as automatics, and to provide amnesty and funds to buy up guns. A hunter in Australia who passes a background test and regularly shows that he or she is using the gun for hunting can still get a gun. That supposedly important need is still completely fulfilled. Yet, in the years just after these laws were created in Australia in 1996, gun deaths dropped by over 40% and suicides by 77%. Who can possibly be against that who hasn't been paid to be?

I clearly love everything about books -- so imagine my delight when someone told me about the historic Morgan Library in midtown Manhattan. I was there in a flash. And it was awesomely beautiful too. Just imagine a vaulted sanctuary such as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel -- only also lined with tiers and tiers of bookcases stuffed with rare and beautiful leather-bound books containing all the wisdom of the ages. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." I was in hog heaven!

"But...." And, yes, there's always gotta be a but....

At the very back of my consciousness, I kept hearing a niggling small voice that kept telling me, "You know, of course, that all this fabulous splendor was built upon the backs of the misery, starvation and death of thousands of 19th-century American workers who were impoverished and practically enslaved by J.P. Morgan, the Robber Baron himself, right?"

"Oh shut up Jiminy Cricket and just let me enjoy the moment." But my conscience just wouldn't shut up.

Another one of the many other fabulous things to do in New York City is to walk the High Line, an amazing park-in-the-sky lovingly created by local volunteers who have turned some old elevated train tracks into a tree-lined pathway from 14th Street up to 34th Street. I went there next. Trees are beautiful too, right?

"But...." And, yes, there's always gotta be a but.

At the end of the High Line I also discovered the luxurious Hudson Yards office-complex-and-mall. Another thing of great beauty. And the "Stores at the Yard" were all selling beautiful high-end stuff like Chanel, Cartier, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Gucci, Coach and Dior. Who the freak can even afford to buy stuff like that? Certainly not me. I shop at free boxes, flea markets and the Goodwill. But somebody must be doing their shopping there. I couldn't even imagine who.

And another thing about the Hudson Yards that just screamed out "Conspicuous Consumption" was the huge amounts of wasted space there. Atriums and terraces and vaulted corridors were everywhere, right there on prime-time mid-Manhattan real estate -- real estate worth hundreds of dollars a foot. Real estate that could have housed hundreds if not thousands of tents for the myriad homeless families of New York.

Jiminy Cricket then went on to underscore his point. "Back in the 19th century, robber barons like Morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie created their castles of dreams on the backs of starving and dying American workers like our great-grandfathers. And now it is clear that, here in the 21st century, there is a whole new set of robber barons who are creating all this insane wealth as well -- only this time these castles of dreams like the Hudson Yards are being created over the dead bodies of murdered babies in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East."

Yep, my conscience is right. What good is awesome and extreme beauty if its very roots lie in the extreme swamps of inhuman heartlessness and greed? The one cancels out the other. How can anyone with any good conscience at all shop at the Hudson Yards, knowing that their extreme wealth mostly derives from manufacturing and selling deadly weapons of mass destruction -- to be used to massacre babies in far-away places like Yemen and Gaza and Syria and Iraq? How can these people even sleep at night?

And how can we Americans continue to let them?

To quote Dwight D. Eisenhower, "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both." Let's do whatever we can to stop our leaders from continuing to trudge down their current sad, immoral and decadent path to a beautiful future for them -- at the price of a living Hell for the rest of us.

Dear Unterfuhrer Pelosi,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your plans to keep der Fuhrer from being impeached, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Political Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 07-13-2019. We salute you Frau Pelosi, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence