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The shooter was a blur to me, but I was close enough to see the dirt fly with each barrage of bullets. Thank God for the diameter of a large willow oak just outside the right field batting cage.

The first shot rang out in isolation. We weren't even sure, at first, if it was a shot. But there was no question when the next five to 10 shots followed. Rep. Steve Scalise was shot in that first barrage. Rep. Trent Kelly stared down the muzzle from less than 20 yards, and the shooter missed repeatedly as he careened, zigzagging toward the first base dugout.

From my spot against the oak tree, I watched as Zach Barth and another staffer raced along the warning track from left field toward my location in right field. As they dove into the dirt, face first, the bullets sent puffs of dirt around them.

A 20-foot chain-link fence separated me from them. I felt helpless, with no weapon and no way to reach the wounded. Rep. Scalise lay at second base, but no one could help him.

Large, long series of shots rang out across the field.

The decision for all of us was: Should I stay or should I go? Which was riskier -- to make a run for it and expose yourself as a target or stay still and hope the shooter tired of using you as target practice? The danger in staying was that if the shooter advanced and came to point-blank range, it would be certain death.

As these thoughts went through my head, another barrage of bullets hit the warning track five feet to my right. A staff member jumped up to try to climb the 20-foot fence just as Barth cried out, "I'm hit." Within two to three seconds, the staffer cleared the chain-link fence, like Spider-Man in fast motion.

He and I crouched behind the oak tree. The question returned. Should we stay or should we go? Should we risk the run across the open field over two more chain-link fences, or should we remain behind the tree?

Shouts spread. The shooter was on the move. Though we could only catch glimpses of him, we could see congressmen and staffers shuffling and repositioning themselves behind the concrete bathroom, the cinder block dugout, and various cars.

Should we stay or should we go? We knew that we had two Capitol Police officers there, Rep. Scalise's security detail. Were they already dead? We took about 10 seconds to deliberate, not exactly a pros and con debate but monosyllabic, "Run? Yeah . . ."

To escape, we had to leave the protective shadow of our oak and sprint across an open field. We would become targets again. As we jumped up to run, we heard the report of pistol fire from Capitol Police. The cavalry had arrived.

In the ensuing gunbattle, Special Agents Crystal Griner and David Bailey showed heroism above and beyond the call of duty. Advancing against the shooter, they were seriously outgunned in terms of firepower. The shooter had a long-range semiautomatic rifle, and the police only had handguns. The report of the pistols, though, was louder than the rifle and more explosive in sound.

Without the presence of these brave officers, both of whom were wounded in taking down the shooter, it would have been a massacre. They saved dozens of lives.

Later in the day, in the aftermath of a killing field, as I walk through the basement of the Capitol, a loud cart follows me, banging -- BANG, banging at every bump. BANG, BANG but not really bang. Not really death impending, but death in verisimilitude -- jarring, loud, and uninvited but not shooting or exploding.

Every passerby that didn't smile -- didn't shoot. Didn't shoot. For that I am grateful.

It's unlikely they will shoot again. Be smart, look at the percentages. Of course, unlikely, very unlikely. A random event, nothing more.

Sitting alone near the end of the day, fortunate to savor or perhaps castigate the sun's last rays, I feel the sun on my face. I want to deflect the sun's gaze. I want to rebuke her for providing aid and abetting the sight lines in today's killing field.

Aim, aim what is the aim. The rifle juts through the chain-link fence, spraying hate and blowing bone and muscle to bits in a show of nothing.

In the pause between gunshot and echo, in the seam of what may be, but is not yet, I hear my breathing return to normal.

See the article here:
Rand Paul on being trapped on a killing field: Stay or go? - CNN

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

A quote attributed to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., after he and a dozen Republican colleagues were the target of a shooter who apparently was politically motivated is re-circulating on the Web as an example of the hypocrisy of the right.

The June 2016 tweet cited in the context of the shooting spree by a Bernie Sanders supporter Wednesday morning in which House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was seriously wounded states: Why do we have a Second Amendment? Its not to shoot deer. Its to shoot at the government when it becomes tyrannical!

But Paul never said those words, the senators spokesman told WND on Friday.

Sergio Gor, Pauls communications director, explained that a staffer was live tweeting a speech by Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, a fact thatwas indicated in earlier tweets.

Unfortunately, some dishonest hacks have chosen to take this completely out of context and perpetuate a fake news cycle, Gor said.

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The speech by Napolitano one year ago was part of the Young Leaders for Freedom lecture series hosted by Paul.

Republicans are getting what they want

A blogger for the Daily Kos posted the tweet Wednesday, after the shooting, with the comment: I think this tweet will be deemed as not aging well. Vox Media co-founder Markos Moulitsas tweeted Republicans are getting what they want and Democratic operative Jamed Devine, after retweeting the Paul campaign tweet, said the shooter used his Second Amendment remedies.

The fact-check website Snopes addressed the issue, acknowledging in its subhead: A genuine tweet posted by the Kentucky senator was circulated out of context after lawmaker Steve Scalise was shot in Virginia.

Among other places, the attribution to Paul turned up in asyndicated column by Bill Press published by WND, which ran a correction after the error was discovered.

In his column, after citing the tweet, Press writes: One can only hope the good senator had second thoughts about that kind of incendiary rhetoric when he himself was one of those shot at on the Alexandria ballfield.

The line remains in the corrected version of his column.

Press told WND in an email that as with many other journalists, he first saw the tweet yesterday and included mention of it in his column.

As soon as I learned this morning that it supposedly quotes Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, I immediately wrote a correction which was circulated to all of their subscribers by Tribune Content Agency, he said.

Press, however, argued that the tweet was sent by Pauls campaign, under his name, and asked: Why would he tweet out Napolitanos words if he did not agree with them?

If the senator himself disagreed with what some staffer tweeted out, why didnt he denounce it? And why has it remained up on Senator Pauls Twitter account for over a year? he asked.

If anybodys responsible for promulgating fake news, its Senator Paul and his staff, Press told WND.

Gor emphasized that the quote was taken out of context used by opponents of Paul to charge him with incitement and the spokesman said, regarding the right to bear arms, it is well known that Senator Paul is a firm believer and supporter of the Second Amendment.

Judge Andrew Napolitano

While many on the left have insisted or implied that Second Amendment rights are restricted to hunting and possibly personal defense, many conservatives, and libertarians such as Napolitano, have argued the Founders intent was to ensure that the people, as sovereign governors, could defend the republic and itsConstitutionfrom tyrants who violateits protections of their inalienable rights.

In a column for the Washington Times in 2013, Napolitano also made references to hunting and tyrants.

He wrote that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is an extension of the natural right to self-defense and a hallmark of personal sovereignty.

It is specifically insulated from governmental interference by the Constitution and has historically been the linchpin of resistance to tyranny, Napolitano said.

Further, he asserted the historical reality of the Second Amendments protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer.

It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us, Napolitano said. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.

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Left uses out-of-context quote to accuse Rand Paul of incitement - WND.com

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at an interview in Washington on May 24.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

If Senate Republicans want to meet their goal of passing a health care bill by the Fourth of July recess, they have exactly two weeks to do it. Congress is scheduled to recess at the end of business on June 30, which means Republicans have to move at breakneck pace while keeping debate to a minimum. Whats the rush? For any Americans who are aware that the Senate is racing to pass a tightly guarded health care billand if the GOP strategy works, there wont be many of them!Republicans are hoping their outrage dissipates over the holiday weekend. And the world goes on.

Jim Newell is a Slate staff writer.

Passing this secretly developed, still-unfinished bill within two weeks would be a world historic achievement in underhanded policymaking. Put another way: This is the moment Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was born for. This, reader, is his jam.

Ask a different member of the Senate Republican leadership whether they are sticking to the June 30 deadline, and youll get a different answer. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican, has always been more of an end of July guy. South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 3 Republican, treats it as more of a hope or an aspiration, a way of focusing the mind.

McConnell and his team, though, have not been deterred from the goal of a floor vote before the July4 recess, the Washington Post reports. [A]s McConnells team sees it, the options have all been vetted. Now, the difficult decisions about what to put in and leave out of the final bill are all that remain.

Much of the media has been operating under the assumption that the Congressional Budget Office would need two weeks to score the Senates legislation. Thats why senators were hoping to finalize the language by Monday night. Its now Friday, and the language still isnt finalized. But the CBO and Senate Republicans have been interfacing on legislative options for a while now, and leaders hope that the score could come quicker since CBO wouldnt be building an analysis from scratch. As Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso told Talking Points Memo, the issues theyre dealing with are dial-able so you can say, If you set this number, it does this and if you set that number, it does that. In other words, the CBO is just waiting for decisions on certain inputsgrowth rates for Medicaid spending, the length of the Medicaid expansion phase-out, expiration dates for certain taxes, lists of regulatory waivers that will be available to states, and so forth. Perhaps CBO could get a score done in, say, one week.

This is the moment Mitch McConnell was born for. This, reader, is his jam.

So whos going to make those tough decisions about which inputs to include? Its definitely not going to be all the Republican senators, and theres definitely not going to be anything like consensus reached. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, for example, are never going to agree about the proper growth rate for Medicaid. It will be up to McConnell and Cornyn to choose the proper balance that gets their conference closest to the 50 votes they need to pass the bill. Thats the phase they appear to be in right now. On the Hill Thursday afternoon, individual senators like Portman, Toomey, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins were ducking into McConnells office. The brainstorming sessions are finished, and now its about determining what each senator can live with.

Now, what about the Democrats? Lets be generous and say McConnell settles on a recipe by over the weekend, and the CBO begins scoring early next week. The score comes back early the following week, and McConnell posts the bill. Is there much Democrats can do to stop it?

One theory among progressive activists is that Democrats could leverage the vote-o-rama process. Under reconciliation rules, senators can offer an unlimited number of amendments during the 20-hour debate period; after the debate, each filed amendment would be considered with an up-or-down vote. That rapid-fire voting session is referred to as a vote-o-rama.

Ezra Levin, an executive director with Indivisible, suggested on Twitter this week that Democrats should extend the vote-o-rama well past a long nights work. He urged Democrats to threaten to filibuster by amendment, by filing tens of thousands of amendments to clog up chamber through the 2018 midterms.

But McConnell would have recourse. Though McConnell could let Democrats have their fun for a little whileat least to give off the veneer of a transparent, open processhe can eventually motion that the amendment process had become dilatory, the chair would rule in his favor, andbarring some appeals and other motions to draw the process outthe vote-o-rama would be finished. It might still be worthDemocrats while to push ahead this way,though,to see how long they candraw out the processbefore McConnell breaks, and to please their base.

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No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or puttethitunder a bed; but settethiton a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light. More...

It comes down to this: If McConnell and a majority of senators want to rush this secret bill to a vote before the Fourth of July recess, then they can. McConnell needs 50 votes for the bill, and he needs 50 votes to bust through whatever procedural roadblocks Democrats lay before him.

Some Republican senators have begun to speak out against the secrecy of the project, noting that it makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort, however, has not been palpable enough for them to exert real leverage over the way McConnell has conducted the process so far. Any three Republican senators could have told the majority leader in early May that they wouldnt vote for the bill unless it went through the normal open committee process. Maybe they didnt think it would get this bad. Or maybe they agree with him: Speed and secrecy is the only way to do this.

Read more here:
Can Republicans Actually Pass the AHCA in Two Weeks? - Slate Magazine

The latest outrage against the American people is that Mitch McConnells Republican Senate is drafting a vast health-care bill in complete secrecy and plans to rush it to a vote without hearings or scoring. There is outrage.

There is outrage about the likely contents of the bill, which will in one way or another throw millions of Americans off their insurance and give a big tax cut to the rich.

There is outrage about the process, which cloaks the contents from everyone who will be affected by it.

There is outrage about the flamboyant hypocrisy of it all, after President Trump promised to insure everybody and the GOP complained that Obamacare was written in the dark of night and rushed through Congress, even though the Obamacare process actually included endless hearings that were televised.

Well, you can skip the outrage over the hypocrisy part and save your breath. The GOP has already succeeded in neutralizing the very concept of hypocrisy. Republicans engage it in nonstop, because they have learned, or rather taught us, that it doesnt matter at all.

This is one thing that I have learned from the comments section of my blog. Unsympathetic writers engage in a continuous parade of criticism of progressives, using charges of behavior that in fact consist of exactly what Republicans do. Now to this endless game of I know you are, but what am I? one might be tempted to assign conservatives with the practice of projection, that is, attributing to others what you are guilty of yourself. But wait. A commenter the other day said it is members of the left that are guilty of this and are engaging in projection. I know you are, but what am I? continued, ad infinitum.

And so farther and farther into the house of mirrors, more extensive even than Trumps personal collection that he likes to regard himself in.

And the solution? Forget hypocrisy as a topic. It has been battered to senselessness in a case of American domestic abuse.

Save your energy for describing what Republicans actually are trying to do (take health coverage away from Americans), what the actual consequences of that are (increased wealth inequality and more dead Americans) and most important, stopping them (by voting).

Read the rest here:
Yes, the Republicans are wild and crazy hypocrites, and it doesn't matter - Washington Post

Republicans celebrate the passage of the House health-care bill in May. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Right-wing critics of Obamacare have been predicting for years that the law would enter an actuarial death spiral, in which healthy customers flee and insurers raise rates to unsustainably high levels as only the most sick and expensive patients remain. The alleged death spiral has played a crucial role in Republicans rhetoric, undergirding their claim that the law is collapsing of its own accord. When President Trump repeatedly insists Obamacare is collapsing, dead, or gone, he is popularizing in vulgar form an analysis that people like Paul Ryan have been spreading for years.

The most obvious sleight of hand in this argument is that, even if it were true that the Obamacare exchanges were entering a death spiral and collapsing, it would hardly justify the Republican health-care bill. The exchanges account for a bit less than half the coverage gains in Obamacare. The rest of the newly insured come from expanded childrens health insurance and, especially, Medicaid.

Remember, Medicaid expansion is how Obamacare provides insurance to the poorest Americans (those with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level). The allegedly collapsing exchanges only insure people with incomes above that level. And the spine of the GOP plan is hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid. Theres not even a patina of an argument that Medicaid is collapsing. The supposed death spiral in the exchanges is the Republican pretext for cutting a completely different program.

In any case, the death spiral is a fiction. An S&P analysis last spring found that insurers in most markets had found a stable and profitable price point. The conclusions received some attention, but the guts of the analysis deserve a bit more attention. What S&P found was that health costs of people buying insurance on the exchanges have converged with health costs of people who get insurance through their employer.

Look at the chart below from the report:

The dark blue line is the per-patient cost of people in the individual market. The light blue line is people in the employer market. Before Obamacare, individual insurance costs were much lower because insurers weeded out anybody who had a preexisting condition, and only sold insurance to people who were extremely healthy. Then, when Obamacare passed, the regulated exchanges enabled people with expensive medical needs to buy affordable individual insurance for the first time.

The costs of those patients ran well above the employer market in the first year or so it was available. That happened in part because many of the newly insured Americans had waited years for coverage and had a backlog of medical needs. Thats why the dark blue line shot up well ahead of the light blue line in 2014 and 2015. That trend is what a death spiral would look like the dark blue line would keep rising well ahead of the light blue line. But that hasnt happened. Since last year, the costs of patients in the individual market and patients in the employer market have converged.

So why are we reading all these stories about insurers pulling out of markets and premiums going way up? Oliver Wyman, an actuarial firm, examines the markets and concludes that at least two-thirds of the higher premiums next year are due to political uncertainty created by the Trump administration and Congress. The administration is threatening to withhold payments insurers are owed under the law, and also not to enforce the individual mandate. These deliberate efforts to subvert the exchanges are having their intended effect. But the underlying expected cost of insuring patients is low without a government engaged in deliberate sabotage, the firm estimates premiums would only rise 58 percent, a very modest level by the historic standards of health insurance costs.

Obamacare can be improved, especially in rural markets where hospitals and doctors are spread far apart and competition has always been difficult to produce. But the threat to the exchanges is the same as the threat to Medicaid: not any inherent flaw in the operation of the programs, but a governing party that ideologically opposes the transfer of resources that is needed to make health care available to the poor and sick.

Dont be complacent: High-rise building failures are never accidents, and contempt for the poor is global.

He left in place a policy protecting young undocumented immigrants while canceling protections for their parents. Its unclear whats next.

Jeronimo Yanez, who faced a second-degree-manslaughter charge, testified that he feared for his life.

Trump has made it impossible for Republicans to claim he is naive. Now, his behavior can only be explained by a guilty conscience or an unsound mind.

Look at this tweet, every time I do it makes me laugh.

The property was listed for rent on Thursday, and its already been snatched up.

The president is clamping down on travel to and trade with the communist country.

There are currently 8,400 U.S. troops in the country, along with 5,000 NATO soldiers.

That would leave Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand in charge. Heres what you need to know about her.

Michelle Carter sent her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, numerous texts urging him to kill himself.

Obamacares dead, says the man holding a gun to its head.

A Friday-morning tweet suggests Rod Rosensteins job is in danger and the special prosecutors is, too.

The investigation into the presidents son-in-law expands.

Asking him to subject himself to oversight comes as easily to him as it would to Putin or Duterte or Mugabe.

Because investigators are probably going to want to see it.

Its not clear what prompted Rod Rosensteins statement.

Lawmakers took to the field just a day after the shooting of House whip Steve Scalise.

Lynne Patton doesnt have any experience in housing policy, but she does have a lot of experience working for the Trump family.

The most expensive House race in history just got weirder and more heated.

The vice-president will be represented by Richard Cullen, a former Virginia attorney general.

More here:
Obamacare Is Not Collapsing Unless Republicans Kill It. Here's Proof. - New York Magazine