The NRA's prostitution ring

The Denver Post's top headline after one of the gun lobby's very best customers killed 59 people from above read thusly: "NRA supports restriction."

Yes, the top story was what the NRA might do after all that killing.

It wasn't, "Congress admits cowardice in the face of carnage." It wasn't, "President lifts thumb to avert next slaughter."

It wasn't even, "Thoughts and prayers waft over Las Vegas."

It was, "What does the NRA think about this?"

Understand: The NRA's deigning to consider any restrictions at all on a hyper-killing device called a bump stock is headline news. It's: "China calls for safer toys." It's "Medellin Cartel urges: 'Just say no.'"

That "NRA supports (fill in the blank)" is Page 1 fodder may be the greatest indictment of our political system, next to Donald Trump's ascendancy.

The NRA is a group of hobbyists -- people with time and gun powder residue on their hands.

What a group of hobbyists says should be of no interest to anyone except to fellow hobbyists – say, if the next NRA convention opts for cold cuts over cutlets.

To make NRA an adviser for public policy on anything involving firearms is akin to the Fraternal Order of Vespa Riders dictating traffic policy.

What actual people think about gun policies – and solid majorities support stricter gun laws such as universal background checks – is immaterial.

The same applies, for instance, to environmental protection. But when the Trump administration wants advice on that matter, it turns to the special interests affected.

Recent news coverage has flagged Environmental Protection Administration director Scott Pruitt as one of the profligate offenders in the Trump administration's jetting around on taxpayers' dollars for spurious reasons.

What is more significant, though, is what the New York Times reports: that Pruitt's itinerary as EPA director reveals almost non-stop canoodling with corporations that have vested concerns in his decisions.

These include meeting with major campaign donors like coal mining behemoth Alliance Resource Partners, which is now thinking the $2 million it gave the Trump campaign was one heck of an investment.

Well, back to the NRA. Public disclosures reveal that it spent more on lobbying in the first two quarters of this year -- $3.2 million just through June -- than it did in all of last year.

You wonder where all those dollars went.

No mystery as to what those dollars have wrought. One of the first things Trump did as president was sign a Republican bill to roll back an Obama administration rule adding people deemed mentally incompetent to the national background check database.

Yes, this was Job 1 for a new president. Those gun hobbyists have clout.

Because the man who killed so many in Las Vegas passed a background check doesn't mean we should throw up our hands on the rightness of such checks for all gun purchases, including online purchases like the Aurora theater gunman used to amass his arsenal.

However, when President Obama sought to impose such a restriction after the massacre of innocents at Sandy Hook, the "thoughts and prayers" bravehearts in Congress shot it down.

No doubt the hobbyists' lobbyists helped steady the aim for the GOP.

This week conservative media are making a big production of the fact that some Democrats received campaign contributions from now-certifiably sleazy, if not criminal, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

This might concern us if Weinstein were, like Big Coal and the gun lobby, helping formulate public policy. He's not. It's hardly a concern at all.

We seem resolved to ignore what vested industries have done to steal our democracy.

In other news, the president of the Brazil Olympic Committee was arrested for buying votes to bring the 2016 games to Rio de Janeiro.

It's a criminal offense to buy a sports spectacle. But you'll never see gun merchants or big polluters doing a perp walk for buying our government.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

No wall, but Trump does have his foxhole

What a tremendous statue this will make:

Donald Trump aboard his golf cart, his polo shirt overstuffed, his ball cap pulled down to his brow, observing the world from his secure tee box.

An image for the ages, like Washington in the rowboat and MacArthur in the surf. Let us start carving the man for posterity.

He is a self-portrait in insularity: While Puerto Rico strangled on muck and cried out for clean water, Trump struck a pose behind a plastic windshield -- and picked maybe the most pointlessly venal fight imaginable.

You might say Carmin Yulin Cruz, mayor of San Juan, picked it. After all, she was in the midst of death and despair when she reacted to Trump's "really good news story" line about her Puerto Rico with, no, it's a "people are dying story."

Trump could have said, "Pardon me for being flippant. This is serious." Instead, he was flippant.

Trump's two-tweet response was that Cruz had "been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump . . . Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort."

Yes, that's our president: not interested in serving the people of this nation – and that includes Puerto Ricans. He's solely about self-service. The viceroy has been offended.

The mark of a great leader is the ability to see beyond the fray and lead where necessity lies. Trump sees what's on his TV cluster and gets a cramp in his Twitter hand.

What a glorious battle he waged against silent football players who might take a knee, exhorting crowds to boo and owners to fire the SOBs. History will remember this.

He said he wasn't criticizing black players. Of course, he knows what the whole matter is about; it's about being black.

He's not black. Why should he care?

Now, if difficulties arise for rust-haired, overly tan bankruptcy masters, you've got a fight from the man.

The racial divisions that are carving up this nation are getting more acute by the day, and Trump is happy to oblige.

As with his interchange with Mayor Cruz, he's not going to back down. He's not going to concede.

Stop that "come together" nonsense, people. The Trump presidency is going to be about trench warfare.

The man has dug his foxhole and spends every day fortifying it, digging deeper. These will be four years of poison gas and hand grenades. Right, Steve Bannon?

Every day and in every way, Trump and the Republican Party are making it known that they are determined to hold and administer power without the help of black and brown people.

Over and over, the courts have admonished the GOP for redistricting and vote-suppression shenanigans aimed at marginalizing people of color. The Republicans couldn't care less. That's how they plan to hold and administer power.

The Electoral College gives inordinate power to white-flight districts and white-dominated states. We get it. We got it. We got President Trump from it.

Yes, a lot of Americans needed to be reminded that Puerto Rico was, is, one of us. Of course, if you consider "us" to be human beings, that applies everywhere, say where desperate people seek refugee status.

The Trumpite response to Black Lives Matter is, "All lives matter." You really couldn't tell that after nine months of this presidency.

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

A small man in a big office

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear" – George Orwell.

This strand of freedom means nothing at all to Donald Trump.

At every turn he shows no grasp, and certainly no reverence, for the fundamental liberty enshrined in our Constitution: to speak one's mind without retribution.

So of course, pandering as he did to a red-meat Alabama crowd, he said the other day that football players who take a knee during the national anthem show "total lack of respect for everything we stand for."

Sorry, Sir, but per this precious freedom, you are the one showing no respect.

Yes, we hear people – many in that Alabama crowd -- exalt "freedom," but they don't really mean it. They exalt the type of liberty awarded to the motorist with the most horse power, or the developer with the best attorneys.

They exalt the type of freedom that will keep outsiders from moving into their neighborhoods.

They exalt the type of freedom that entitles a civilian to sling an AK-47 over his shoulder, or that which comes with imposing the majority's religion on everyone.

In the most recent matter, the one that just roiled the NFL, Trump seeks to be a royal demagogue over a handful of athletes who peacefully have registered their dissatisfaction with our country by kneeling during the national anthem. They do not jump around and shout obscenities. They register their grievance in the most respectful way possible. In the case of Colin Kaepernick, it's been at great risk to his career.

Trump is more troubled by this – by a player silently taking a knee – than a white supremacist chanting, "Jews will not replace us."

For someone in the most powerful position in the United States to act this way shows someone sorely out of his shoe size.

On the campaign trail he said people who burn the American flag should be jailed and kicked out of the country. The U.S. Supreme Court, with Antonin Scalia writing the opinion, said that's what totalitarians do.

You will bow to the flag, or your head will be removed. You know, like ISIS does.

A flag is a symbol, like these letters. The government can't dictate symbolic speech. If it can tell people how to comport themselves around symbols on cloth, it can do the same with all other symbols, and all other symbolic speech.

It's interesting: Before making that grandstand appeal as presidential candidate, on David Letterman's late-night show, Trump agreed when Letterman voiced disdain for an effort to amend the Constitution to ban flag desecration. Though not supporting flag-burning, Letterman said our nation "is far greater than that symbol, and that symbol is standing for freedom of expression."

Said Trump, "Sure. You're 100 percent right."

Sadly, in office, not only has Trump done the dictator's dance regarding that symbolic expression, he's called to change the laws so elected officials can sue the news media. Except in special circumstances, that's something a unanimous Supreme Court prohibited in the landmark Times vs. Sullivan ruling in 1964.

Libel suits by elected officials would have a chilling effect on a free and probing press, said the court.  Ah, but Trump has called the press "the enemy."

This man who is so very big in the high-rise world truly is a flyweight when it comes to the weighty matters that distinguish this nation from others marked by totalitarians and the tantrums of power.

A bigger man, George Washington, said this of free speech: If it is taken away, "then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."

Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.