Ohio Republicans Introduce Bill to Make Guns Tax-Free

In Ohio, there are no background checks required for handgun purchases, people can carry guns without concealed-carry permits, guns don’t have to be securely stored away from children, and domestic abusers are allowed to keep carrying their weapons—even when facing restraining orders. But that’s not enough for the state’s Republican lawmakers, who now want to allow people to buy guns tax-free.

House Bill 189, introduced by state Representative Al Cutrona, would remove sales taxes from guns and ammunition and give gun and ammunition manufacturers tax incentives.

The tax-free purchases would give gun buyers even more privileged status than they already have in a country where guns come before children’s lives. “Rights guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights should not be taxed,” Cutrona said on the bill, justifying the notion of people paying their fair share of taxes on everything but machines meant explicitly for killing.

Internalizing the flimsy logic too: “Life” and “liberty” are also invoked in the Bill of Rights; both are taxed every day by the number of mass shootings in this country—268 so far this year, four of which were in Ohio in the last week alone. So too are they taxed by virtue of our environments being poisoned by fossil fuels or people’s liberties being infringed through mass incarceration and the police state. One wonders if Cutrona would use his strained logic there as well.

On gun manufacturer incentives, the bill explicitly aims to offset the federal excise taxes these companies (like many other industries) are subject to. In other words, Ohio Republicans want to fill the pockets of massive corporations that should be facing further, not less, regulation. Shame, given Ohio’s East Palestine has been in the front seat of witnessing the consequences of such a dynamic.

The push by Ohio Republicans follows a shocking exhibition of gun violence across the country, on both small and large scales. Kids have been shot for playing hide and seek or accidentally ringing the wrong doorbell; on a larger scale, mass shootings have left cities like Nashville, Tennessee, and Louisville, Kentucky, in shock. Nevertheless, Republicans persist in their acceptance, and embrace, of such senseless, preventable death.

Former President Donald Trump may still have a classified document, one that details a potential Pentagon plan for attacking Iran.

Federal prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, obtained an audio recording of a meeting held in July 2021, during which the former president essentially admitted that he knows he can’t declassify documents at will. He brags explicitly about having kept a classified Pentagon plan to potentially attack Iran, and the sound of rustling papers can be overheard, as if Trump were waving that document around.

That meeting took place six months before Trump’s legal team sent 15 boxes of records and classified documents back to the National Archives, and more than a year before the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, seizing more than 100 documents.

But now, no one can find the Iran document.

Trump’s attorneys handed over material related to the document in mid-March, in response to another federal subpoena, CNN reported Friday, citing anonymous sources. But the legal team was unable to find the actual document in question.

Prosecutors were already skeptical that Trump had returned all of the classified documents he took. The special counsel’s team even reportedly asked a judge last year to hold Trump in contempt until he handed over all documents, but the judge declined. Trump’s team instead hired two outside people to search his properties again.

It is entirely unclear where the Iran document is, or if it was already returned to the government in one of the many boxes taken from Mar-a-Lago. Considering it lays out a plan to attack a foreign nation, it sounds like a pretty important document. Maybe someone should have kept closer tabs on its whereabouts.

Trump has been getting a lot of heat in recent weeks, as new reports continue to surface that he knew that he wasn’t supposed to keep classified documents and that he couldn’t classify them at will. But when asked about the recording during a Fox News town hall on Thursday, Trump denied all wrongdoing.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said. “All I know is this: Everything I did was right.”

Elon Musk wants to criminalize gender-affirming care, and he supports imprisoning any therapists and medical professionals involved.

The Twitter CEO on Friday morning promoted a transphobic documentary produced by the petulant, vicious, and dull extremist commentator Matt Walsh.

“Every parent should watch this,” said Musk, the global elite whose own daughter disowned him.

But that wasn’t enough. Amid his  bowing down to the far-right mob, which he so desperately wants to earn the approval of, Musk called gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18 “a major problem” that he will be “actively lobbying to criminalize.”

Far-right “thinker” Jordan Peterson hopped on to Musk’s tweet, adding his vision for what that regime would look like: “Prison. Long term. Without parole. No mercy,” he said, adding that he’d subject the therapists who support this medical care to such policing.

“Absolutely,” Musk responded.

This is how the CEO of Tesla, which used to celebrate Pride Month, is beginning it this time. “Musk’s words are not an empty threat, as anti-trans bills, many criminalizing medical professionals, are sweeping across the nation in state legislatures everywhere.”

Reminder once again that the richest man in the world is not taking on the rich and powerful. He is not only doing the bidding of power-hungry governments but welcoming and promoting content that punches down on some of the most marginalized among us.

A judge denied an attempt by a Donald Trump ally to dismiss one of writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation lawsuits against the former president on the grounds that he is being treated unfairly for being a “white Christian.”

Trump was unanimously found liable in May for sexual abuse and battery against Carroll in the mid-1990s, and for defaming her in 2022 while denying the assault. Carroll has two more defamation lawsuits against Trump pending: one from 2019 and one from last month after he bashed Carroll during the CNN town hall.

James H. Brady, a friend of Trump’s, filed a motion on Wednesday to dismiss the 2019 suit, saying he was “unwilling to sit silent and watch another white Christian be treated as poorly and unfairly as I personally have been treated” in the New York courts. Brady has been sanctioned by New York state and federal courts for filing so many lawsuits that he clogged up the system.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over Trump’s May trial, summarily dismissed Brady’s motion the next day. Kaplan explained that there are only two reasons for someone to intervene in a civil suit. One reason is an “intervention as of right,” meaning the person is entitled via federal statute or has a financial interest in the matter. The second is by “permission of the court,” meaning the person has been granted the conditional right to intervene or they have a law- or fact-based defense for the main action in the lawsuit.

“Mr. Brady does not satisfy any of these criteria,” Kaplan said in his decision. “Accordingly, this motion is denied.”

Carroll accused Trump in her 2019 memoir of raping her in the Manhattan Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s. She initially sued him twice for defamation: first in 2019, when he said she made up the rape allegation to promote her book, and again in November for posts he made about her on social media. Her lawsuits are civil, not criminal, because she waited too long to report the assault to police.

A New York jury unanimously found Trump liable of sexual abuse and battery against Carroll and of defaming her in 2022. They recommended she be awarded a total of $5 million in damages.

Carroll is not the only woman to accuse Trump of sexual assault, but her case was the first to make it to a courtroom. Trump continues to vehemently deny all of the allegations, including by launching fresh vitriol at Carroll during the disastrous CNN town hall. So Carroll sued him for defamation again.

It hardly bears saying, but Trump is of course not being prosecuted (nor persecuted) for being a Christian. He’s being prosecuted because he’s a convicted sexual abuser who simply will not learn to keep his mouth shut.

Donald Trump is sticking to a tried-and-true method of responding to bad news: Deny everything.

Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, obtained an audio recording of a meeting held in July 2021, during which the former president essentially admitted that he knows he can’t declassify documents at will. He brags explicitly about having kept a classified Pentagon document, and the sound of rustling papers can be overheard, as if Trump were waving that document around.

During a Fox News town hall on Thursday, Sean Hannity—a longtime Trump confidant—asked Trump about the recording.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump replied. “All I know is this: Everything I did was right.”

Trump then went on to accuse President Joe Biden of having almost 2,000 boxes of classified documents, “seven or eight” of which he had stashed in Chinatown, in Washington, D.C.

“Chinatown is very—it’s, it’s, it’s in favor of China,” Trump said, throwing a nice bit of xenophobia into the mix.

It’s no good denying or deflecting anymore, though. In addition to the recording of Trump acknowledging that he can’t declassify materials whenever he wants, Smith’s team also recently acquired a slew of records including handwritten notes, transcriptions of audio recordings, and invoices from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran. A judge ruled in March that some of Trump’s attorney-client privileges could be “pierced” after prosecutors for Smith’s team found that Trump intentionally misled his own lawyers, including Corcoran, about keeping classified materials when he left office.

Those records reveal that Trump knew he wasn’t supposed to keep classified documents. Not only did he do so anyway, but Corcoran was also prevented from searching Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago, where the FBI later found some of the most sensitive material.

Smith has not yet issued any criminal charges, but Trump has plenty of other legal struggles to keep him busy in the meantime. He is under investigation in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and he was indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump also was found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll—and last week, she sued him for defamation again over comments he made about her during a CNN town hall.