The insanity of mass shootings continues in 2023. With the mass shootings over the weekend in Monterey, California; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, there has now been 36 mass shootings in 2023. (A mass shooting is defined as 4 or more victims in a single incident). That is more than 1.5 mass shootings per day. It is also a 33% increase over the same period of 2022. In 2022 there were 647 mass shootings and 44,287 deaths related to gun violence. So far 2023 is well above the 2022 figures. At what point do we stop this insanity?
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President Biden is not doing AG Garland any favors with the continued discovery of classified documents. Garland is caught in a catch 22. If Garland prosecutes the former president but not Biden, he is playing favorites. If Garland doesn’t prosecute either the former president or Biden, he is allowing the privileged to be above the law. Prosecuting both if they broke the law is probably the best option, but he will not be able to prosecute Biden while he is in office. I sure wish Biden would have had his act together and had this cleaned up before he decided to run for president.
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Per the Detroit Free Press on Friday, when Betty Henderson, who owns a 24-hour child care center in Detroit, was profiled in the Free Press several months ago, she wasn’t sure how much longer she could endure the struggle of keeping her center open. Besides the razor-thin margins — or even losses — inherent in operating a child care center and the exceedingly long hours required to run one around the clock, Henderson felt unsupported and uncertain about the future. “You don’t know how many times we providers call each other crying,” Henderson had said.
Many times since the article was published, Henderson has instead found herself crying tears of joy. The biggest splash came when she was gifted $20,000 by an emotional Kelly Clarkson on the set of Clarkson’s daytime NBC talk show. See my Orchid of the Day
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University of Detroit men’s basketball player Antoine Davis scored a season-high 42 points and moved into second place on the NCAA all-time scoring list behind only Pete Maravich on Saturday. The mark came in Detroit Mercy’s 89-77 win over IUPUI. Davis, a fifth-year graduate student, has 3,274 points. He passed former Portland State star Freeman Williams, who scored 3,249 points from 1974-78. Maravich’s total of 3,667 is the last remaining goal.
Kudos to Davis on this accomplishment as it looks like he will pass Pistol Pete before the season is over. However, I must put Maravich’s record in perspective. Davis is in his fifth year, while Pistol Pete accomplished his record over a three-year period at LSU in 1968-70, when freshman were not allowed to play and the three point line and the 30 second clock were non-existent. During the three-year period, Maravich averaged 44.2 points per game, while Davis has averaged 24.2 per game over his five-year career.
Dale Brown, who was an assistant coach on Maravich’s LSU team, has charted all of Maravich’s shots during his career. Brown compared Pete’s shot chart against the three-point line implemented by the NCAA and indicates Maravich would have averaged 57 points per game. See my Quote of the Day and Video of the Day
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Quote of the Day: “What ‘Pistol’ Pete did will never be duplicated. I’m not saying Twon won’t break his record. What ‘Pistol’ Pete did in his era was special. And what Twon is doing in his era is special.” Mike Davis, U of D’s men’s basketball coach and Antoine Davis’s father.
Orchid of the Day: Kelly Clarkson, see above story.
Onion of the Day: Macomb County Prosecutor Pete Lucido. Per the Detroit News, Lucido is a magnet for trouble, if his history is any indication. As a state senator, multiple women accused him of sexual harassment, triggering an investigation that concluded he behaved inappropriately and got him fired from the Advice and Consent Committee. As a prosecutor two years later, complaints from women and others continued, with a second investigation concluding that Lucido made inappropriate sexual comments to women, used race as a factor in making job assignments, and used county employees for personal and campaign matters. Just recently, Lucido called the investigation a “witch hunt” and “retaliatory” — though six months later he has been hit with a retaliation lawsuit himself. In U.S. District Court last week, a former assistant prosecutor sued Lucido, alleging his boss fired him as payback for cooperating with investigators in the second probe and telling them Lucido had engaged in sexual harassment along with race, gender and disability discrimination in the workplace.
As if the lawsuit wasn’t headache enough, a controversial social media post followed. One day after getting sued, and three days after Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Lucido’s Facebook page featured a photo and quote of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The post came down that same day, with Lucido apologizing for it, calling it “insensitive” and “inappropriate” − and saying his communications director posted it without his review.
You cannot make this up.
Question of the Day: What will it take for our politicians to do something to reduce mass shootings in this country?
Video of the Day: