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Muskets were the "assault weapons" of their day and yes, you have the right to own them.

Illinois governor JB Pritzker recently insinuated that the Second Amendment is obsolete because the Founding Fathers owned muskets. This is an insult to the intelligence of every American.

In the 18th century the citizen and the state were equally matched on the battlefield. Both fought with the same weapons. It was just a matter of who had more muskets and soldiers. This makes the musket the "assault weapons" of its day. The Second Amendment was not written to encourage the citizen to go to war with the state. Instead, it is the other way round to prevent the state from waging war on the citizen. Otherwise, the Second Amendment would only have protected those other methods of defense in the late 1700s: sabers, pistols and pitchforks.

The American citizen and U.S. government have not been equally matched with regards to weaponry since at least 1880. Nuclear weapons, submarines, F-22s, Reaper Drones, the state security apparatus and many other things make the modern state almost invincible. This actually presents new challenges to democracy and a clear danger for the citizen in our current era. Despite their reputation semi-automatic AR-15s don't stand a chance against these real weapons of war. But they still provide the material for the intent behind the Second Amendment: a deterrent against the state declaring war on the individual.

That fact should only worry tyrants.

DEAN CANNON

Sandpoint

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Muskets were 'assault weapons' of their day - Bonner County Daily Bee

SYRACUSE As many Republicans across the country jockey for one man's support, Steve Wells is taking an old-fashioned approach to winning a congressional seat: He is running on the issues that he believes matter to the 22nd Congressional District.

He criticizes President Joe Biden for his handling of the economy and high inflation issues he feels he is equipped to address given his business background. (He is a founding partner of American Food and Vending Corporation, a Syracuse-area company.) As a former prosecutor in Fort Worth, Texas, he says there needs to be action to address crime.

On issues from energy to gun rights, he sounds like the type of candidate Republicans would've had no problem nominating before 2016. He panned the Biden administration's energy policy and the push to quickly shift away from fossil fuels. While he does not oppose what he described as a "low carbon future," he thinks there needs to be a balance with existing energy sources, such as nuclear. On guns, he agrees that there should be efforts to combat gun violence. However, as a longtime licensed gun owner, he supports the Second Amendment.

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But times have changed. Former President Donald Trump is viewed by most within the GOP as the leader of the party. If you aren't for Trump, you are labeled a "RINO" (a Republican in name only) and may encounter an uphill battle to winning the GOP nomination.

Wells is far from an unabashed Trump supporter. He has been asked if he would Trump for president in 2024, but has avoided a direct answer to that question by saying he will support the Republican nominee, whomever it is. The answer is reminiscent of when U.S. Rep. John Katko, whom Wells is seeking to succeed in Congress, said in 2016 that he would support the GOP presidential nominee. After the release of the infamous "Access Hollywood" video, Katko declined to support Trump for president. (He wrote in former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley.) Katko endorsed Trump ahead of the 2020 election, but also voted to impeach him after the Jan 6. attack on the Capitol.

For Wells, he is reminded of what his father told him as a child. His father's advice was to "talk about ideas, don't talk about people."

"I've always focused on ideas," Wells said in an interview with The Citizen. "I'm happy to debate ideas. I'm happy to be criticized for ideas. I'm happy to examine ideas. But it's about ideas. At the end of the day, I'm going to talk about ideas, about what's actually happening, but only insofar as it helps us bring out what we need to do to fix them, to move forward."

Wells was a late entrant into the congressional race. After a court-appointed special master redrew New York's congressional district lines in May, the Cazenovia Republican decided to run for the 22nd district seat. The district includes all of Onondaga, Madison and Oneida counties, plus a small portion of Oswego County. Wells quicklysecured the support of the GOP chairs in the new district.

There is one other Republican in the 22nd district race. Brandon Williams, who lives in the Cayuga County town of Sennett, is vying for the nomination. He has billed himself as the conservative candidate in the race he has been endorsed by the state Conservative Party.

Wells has largely avoided any joint appearances with his primary foe a fact Williams has mentioned during the campaign. He declined to participate in any televised debates. He has defended this decision by saying that his late entry into the race means he has to spend his time talking to voters. The primary election is Tuesday, Aug. 23.

He has been attending events throughout the district and released a pair of TV ads highlighting the main issues he wants to talk about, namely crime and inflation. In one ad, he pledges to stand up to Biden.

"People have to feel safe to go shopping, to go to the grocery store. We don't have that environment right now," Wells said. "Why am I the best person? I have a quarter-century of starting and building a business. To handle the economy, I know exactly what needs to be done. Crime... I've seen what works and what doesn't work."

This is not Wells' first campaign for Congress. In 2016, after the late U.S. Rep. Richard Hanna decided to retire and not seek reelection, Wells sought the Republican nomination. He lost in the primary to Claudia Tenney, who is now serving her second nonconsecutive term in Congress.

Wells said he learned from that first bid and it's one reason why he thinks experience matters.

"I did learn a lot just by standing up here and speaking to people. Talking to people, you learn a lot. You really do," he said. "I feel like, no question, I'm a better candidate than I was before."

Politics reporter Robert Harding can be reached at (315) 282-2220 or robert.harding@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @robertharding.

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Steve Wells hopes issue-focused campaign will get him elected to Congress - The Citizen

After the 2020 election, Americans were clear: they wanted a viable third political party.

In modern US history the country has been dominated by the Republican and Democratic parties almost to the exclusion of all others, effectively creating a near two-party monopoly on power in the White House, Congress and the state level.

Other parties, like the Reform party, the Greens or the Libertarians have never really broken through. In 2021, as the fallout from the 2020 election continued, polling showed widespread support among Americans for a fresh third party that would offer something different from the status quo. Even a majority of self-identified Republicans said they wanted a new party in the mix.

This should be prime ground, then, for the Forward party, founded in July by a group of self-defined centrists including the former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Republican New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.

People wanted a new third party, and they have been given one one that has boasted of already raising more than $5m. So what are the chances of Yang and co winning office, and holding forth on the floors of the US Capitol?

Slim to none, says Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University Bloomington. With an emphasis on none.

Third parties face resource problems, for one thing. Forwards $5m pales in comparison with the $1bn Joe Biden raised from donors during his 2020 election campaign.

Donald Trump raised $774m from donors, according to Open Secrets, while data from the Federal Election Commission shows that House and Senate candidates raised $4bn between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2020, spending $3.8bn.

The two dominant parties also have huge structural advantages: mailing lists, email addresses, existing supporters and name recognition, things that have taken decades to build.

A more fundamental issue is that the US election system just isnt set up to accommodate a third party.

The first-past-the-post system, in which one person is elected in each congressional district, means that a third party could, in theory, win 49% of the vote in a given area, and it would count for nothing if their opponent wins more.

Forward, which launched on 23 July, was formed from three existing political groups: Renew America Movement, made up of dozens of former Republican administration officials ; the Forward party, which was founded by Yang after his failed bid to become the Democratic partys nominee for New York City mayor; and the Serve America Movement, a centrist group of Democrats, Republicans and independents.

The rigid, top-down, one-size-fits-all platforms of the outdated political parties are drifting toward the fringes, making solutions impossible, Forwards website reads.

We stand for doing, not dividing. That means rejecting the far Left and far Right and pursuing common ground.

The partys mission: Not left. Not right. FORWARD, as its slogan lays out, is a noble one. But there are doubts about what a centrist party might actually look like and stand for.

There are a lot of people who would consider themselves moderate or centrist, who disagree very strongly with other people who consider themselves moderate or centrist. Its not one group, Hershey said.

The Forward party is yet to lay out a detailed platform. But once it does set out its positions on divisive issues like abortion, social security and tax cuts, Hershey said, some of that middle is going to disagree with other parts of that middle, and the so-called huge middle is no longer huge.

In a statement, the Forward party said it cant be pegged to the traditional left-right spectrum because we arent built like the existing parties.

The glue that holds us together is not rote ideology, it is a shared commitment to actually solving problems. The hunger for that simple but revolutionary kind of politics is immense.

In terms of how it will compete with Democrats and Republicans, the party said it isnt looking to drop a billion dollars in a 2024 presidential race.

Instead, it will focus on gaining ballot access and recruiting candidates to run in races across the country.

That takes money, Forward said. But more than money it takes people, and we are rich with them.

Forward is less than two weeks old, but has already attracted a good deal of both cynicism and criticism, not least for the false equivalency it deployed when describing the need for a third party.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post titled Most third parties have failed. Heres why ours wont, Yang, Whitman and David Jolly, another co-founder who was previously a Republican congressman from Florida and executive chairman of the Serve America Movement, appeared to offer disingenuous arguments for why their efforts were required.

On guns, Forward suggested that most Americans are rightfully worried by the far rights insistence on eliminating gun laws, but dont agree with calls from the far left to confiscate all guns and repeal the Second Amendment.

As Andrew Gawthorpe, a historian of the United States at Leiden University and host of the podcast America Explained, wrote in the Guardian:

These two things are not the same: the first is what is actually happening in America right now, whereas the second is a view that was attributed to Kamala Harris as part of a fabricated smear on Facebook and enjoys approximately zero support in the Democratic party.

Third parties can have an impact, said Bernard Tamas, associate professor of political science at Valdosta state university and author of The Demise and Rebirth of American Third Parties: Poised for Political Revival?. But theres usually a pretty specific formula.

Its always built on outrage, Tamas said. It has to be where the public is galvanized.

Tamas pointed to the Progressive party, founded in 1912. That party, led by former president Theodore Roosevelt, advocated for child labor laws and the establishment of improved working conditions, including and eight-hour working day and one days rest in seven for workers.

Roosevelt, who was shot during his campaign, won 27.4% of the vote, besting William Howard Taft, the incumbent Republican, but losing to the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But progressive reforms were eventually introduced.

What they have historically done successfully could be described with an analogy of sting like a bee, Tamas said.

They emerge, really often quite suddenly, and they attack the two parties [and] they effectively pull voters away from them.

And the two parties then respond, and in critical moments, they respond by trying to take away these issue bases, whatever is making the third party successful. They take those away, the major party changes, and then effectively the third party dies.

Forward, which has pledged that it will reflect the moderate, common-sense majority, has plenty of people skeptical as to whether it can sting like a bee let alone do more and actually elect candidates.

The way that theyre presenting themselves, it may not have the galvanizing message, Tamas said.

Simply saying: Hey, you know, lets all get together and work together is barely something that gets people running on the streets protesting.

Continued here:
Forward! Is Americas latest third party marching to power or oblivion? - The Guardian US

Garrison Keillor| Detroit Free Press

I turn 80 in a few days, and its a good age. I dont think about my health, I am living proof that bad habits dont matter so long as you give them up soon enough. I am quite happy, a BuddhEpiscopalian who doesnt care about material things, though I do fart a lot. I dont sit around dreaming of what I might do someday. Someday is now, and what I shall do is enjoy it fully.

Nobody expects more of me; if I walk into a room and dont trip on the doorsill, Im admired for it. My wife starts talking about air conditioning, and then she sees me and says, But why am I talking to you about it? Im from the time when we cooled off by driving around with the windows open.

It was a good time, my time. Back in the country I grew up in, namely this one, men didnt go into schools and shoot little kids. We never imagined such a thing, and whats the reason? Fewer psychiatric medications? Fewer therapists?

No. If drugstores sold licorice-flavored cyanide in drinking glasses, wed see more of that. I plan to expire before the Supremes decide the Second Amendment guarantees the right to carry knapsacks of dynamite aboard airliners. Why should we give up our rights on the jetway?

On the other hand, I do admit there have been improvements: I was in the Detroit airport, Concourse A, the other day and a man sat at a real piano on a low platform and played music, a very graceful jazzer, nothing about mans downfall, very danceable, and I put a ten in his jar. It was worth it. It made me feel all cheery in the midst of a merch carnival to hear genuine individual talent. It reminded me of that country I grew up in, when more musicians worked the streets.

I wish hitchhiking would make a comeback. In my youth, I was picked up by various men, some of them drunk, and in return for the ride, I listened to whatever they wanted to tell me, which sometimes was a lot. A fair trade. It was an exercise in mutual trust.

Then the Seventies came along, when young men affected the derelict look, and when you look like an outlaw there are no free rides to be had, even if youre very nice down deep.

With age comes a degree of wisdom. You learn to choose your battles carefully and not expend anger on hopeless causes such as fairness and equality and getting your home nice and neat. My battle is against the words monetize and monetization. What tiresome phony weirdo words they are. Just say sell or cash in or earn a truckload of bucks from! Even exploit is better.

Monetize is an attempt to dignify with pseudo-techno-lingo the common ordinary money grubbing that we all do. Stick monetize up your Levis. I am going to the mat on this. I refuse to be friends with or share a cab with or sit on a plane next to a monetizer. Flight Attendant, take me back to Tourist, a middle seat next to weeping children would be preferable to listening to this idiot vocalize.

And now that I have demonetized you, dear hearts, let me move on to the next battle, which is to establish kindness and amiability among friends and strangers alike. I admit Im still happy about that cashier at Trader Joes who said, How are you today, my dear? It reminded me of a bygone time. She was, I believe, a woman and I am, to my way of thinking at least, a man though of course there is fluidity involved, and as we all know, the rules of social exchange between W and M have tightened, so I didnt ogle, I looked at my shoes and said simply, Never better. Which is inoffensive, though untrue.

I wanted to hug her and did not. My people werent huggers. We were Bible-believing Christians who avoided physical contact lest we contract the religious doubts of the embracee and who knows but what it could be true? My brother was a Bible believer who married a girl who then catholicized him. I could say more but I dont want to cause trouble.

Garrison Keillor is an author, singer,humorist,and radio personality. He hosted the nationally syndicated Minnesota Public Radioshow "A Prairie Home Companion" for 42 years.

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Garrison Keillor: The view from 80 - Detroit Free Press

Dallas Former President Donald Trump made his return to the CPAC stage on Saturday, pushing his baseless election claims, bashing his enemies, and hinting at a possible 2024 run by saying, We may have to do it again.

If I stayed home, the persecution of Donald Trump would stop immediately, but I cant do that because I love my country and I love the people, he said.

Later in the nearly two-hour speech, he said, Americas comeback begins this November, and it will continue onward with the unstoppable momentum that we are going to develop in November 2024.

Trump did not announce another run for the White House in 2024, but he still comfortably won the CPAC straw poll, as he has in past years. In a straw poll with Trump removed from the list, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the clear favorite with 65%, and Sen. Ted Cruz coming in a distant second with 6%. All others had less than 5%.

BRANDON BELL / Getty Images

Trump pointed to the straw poll results frequently on stage, especially his approval rating among the conferences conservative attendees.

Trump spent a significant portion of the speech trashing moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have both signed onto the climate deal that the Senate was voting on while Trump was on the stage. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered the tie-breaking vote to advance the legislation as Trump was speaking. The bill received the support of all 50 Democrats and no Republicans. The Senate began debate after her vote, which will last for up to 20 hours before the Senate begins voting on the amendments.

Trump vowed to go to West Virginia, a state he won by nearly 20 points, and campaign against Manchin when he is up for reelection in 2024, as well as to campaign against Sinema when she also goes up for reelection that same year in Arizona.

Trumps former Attorney General Bill Barr, who resigned amid Trumps false claims after the 2020 election, warned earlier this week to CBS News Catherine Herridge that if Trump won in 2024, he would be a 78-year-old lame duck whos obviously bent on revenge more than anything else.

When Trump mentioned Barr, there were boos from the crowd. He also blasted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for allowing the deal to come to the Senate floor. Trump last month called McConnell, who refuses to defend Trumps actions surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, disloyal. On Saturday, Trump said senators are only loyal to him because of his fundraising.

Trump made a few references to the House Jan. 6 committee which has been holding public hearings to present their findings about the attack on the U.S. Capitol calling them disgusting.

During an earlier speech by GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert, there were shouts in the crowd to free the J6 defendants. Trump mentioned those charged in connection to the attack, saying, Look at these people whose lives are being destroyed.

He also mocked the testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who said that she heard Trump tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential vehicle.

So my hands fell around another powerful guy, strong as hell I know these people well, its just not my deal, Trump said.

He jokingly added, When that story came out, people said, I never knew you were that strong physically.'

Trump repeated the claim that he wanted to call in the National Guard ahead of the Jan. 6 attack, saying that former Defense Department official Kash Patel was a witness to that. The Jan. 6 committee has shared footage disputing Trumps claim about having 10,000 troops at the ready.

Not from my perspective, I was never given any direction or order or knew of any plans of that nature, Trumps acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said in a recorded deposition that the committee tweeted last month.

The biggest applause lines of the night, though, came when Trump discussed culture war issues, such as parental rights, and said he would abolish the Department of Education and keep men out of womens sports. He also said he would not allow the teaching of critical race theory.

But Trump did not focus heavily on some of the Republican partys biggest culture war issues over the years, making only a passing reference to the Second Amendment. He made no mention of the Supreme Courts decision in June to overturn Roe v. Wade, although it heavily featured throughout the conference.

Trump stuck to many of the themes of his previous speeches, hitting on crime, inflation and the U.S. being a nation in decline.

Trump began his speech by announcing many of his allies running for office, or already in office, who were at the conference. That included Kari Lake, who introduced him Saturday fresh off her victory this week in the Republican primary for governor in Arizona.

Trump gave the closing speech on the final day of the three-day conference, which also featured far-right Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, who has said he does not want Hungarians to become peoples of mixed race.

Saturday was the second speech in as many days for the former president, who visited Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Friday night, where he took a victory lap after a number of wins by his backed candidates in Tuesdays primaries.

This has been an exceptional week for the America First movement, exceptional, Trump said Friday.

Trump had targeted Arizona one of the states that swung toward President Biden in 2020 in Tuesdays primaries, in an effort to install his loyalists. His endorsed candidates in Arizona won the Republican primaries for Senate, governor and secretary of state, the states top election official.

Trump also had endorsed David Farnsworth, a candidate in Arizonas 10th state Senate district running against Rusty Bowers, who had testified about Trump and his allies attempts to install phony electors who supported Trump after the 2020 election. Farnsworth won that election as well.

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Trump on possible 2024 presidential run: "We may have to do it again" - WSGW