OPINION: Trump golfs while he undercuts health care

March 29--I read the news today, oh boy ...

Sometimes all you can do is shake your head.

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President Donald "I don't have time for golf" Trump has spent a good part of his time since being inaugurated playing golf. Never mind all those tweets he tweeted about Barack Obama hitting the links.

And when the health care legislation went down in flames last week, Trump blamed the Democrats, complaining "not a single Democrat" supported it.

That after years of criticism from Republicans that not a single Republican in Congress had voted for Obamacare.

Now Trump's strategy is for Obamacare to "explode" with anything he can do to undercut it, never mind that real people will be hurt.

And why was the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., sneaking around the White House before releasing information that provided the tiniest bit of credibility to Trump's accusations of bugging but didn't come close to supporting Trump's tweeted charge that Obama illegally ordered wiretaps at Trump Tower?

I read the news today, oh boy ...

Some of our neighbors to the north in Georgia just can't get past the Civil War. A member of the state House there, Republican Rep. Tommy Benton, has proposed making April "Confederate History Month."

Benton says that's appropriate because April is the month Confederate states "began and ended a four-year struggle for states' rights, individual freedom and local governmental control, which they believed to be right and just."

Democratic Rep. Sandra Scott, a member of the black caucus, doesn't see it that way.

"This resolution is about hatred and racism," she said, according to The Associated Press. "It is about glorifying a culture that found slavery acceptable."

Also in Atlanta, the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia and the state are locked in a legal battle over a couple's desire to name their 22-month-old child "Allah."

I read the news today, oh boy ...

Back in Florida, Gov. Rick Scott seized the red meat that came his way when a state attorney in Central Florida, Aramis Ayala, announced she wouldn't pursue the death penalty in capital murder cases.

He ordered her removed from one high profile murder trial. There's talk of kicking her out of her job.

Never mind that prosecutors use their discretion all the time in deciding how to proceed. That's the way the system is set up, and that's the way it's always worked.

Never mind that Ayala will seek sentences of life in prison with no chance of parole, that the death penalty isn't a deterrent, that actually carrying out the death penalty can drag on for years, that the cost is much higher than imprisonment and that families of victims are forced to relive the crime over and over.

And never mind that Ayala was elected by the voters in Orange and Osceola counties. If they don't like her stance, they can vote her out.

But if one is running for the U.S. Senate, as Scott is, a tough-on-crime, law-and-order stance sells in Florida.

One now former public employee wrote this on Facebook about the decision by Ayala, the first African-American state attorney in Florida's history.

Ayala, he said, "should be tarred and feathered if not hung from a tree."

I read the news today, oh boy ...

And in Jacksonville, rumblings have risen once again about the Confederate soldier statue that dominates Hemming Park across from City Hall.

Suggestions that it should be moved from a place of such honor stir the passions of those who reminisce about the glorious South and the bravery of its soldiers and who argue the Civil War wasn't about slavery.

I read the news today, oh boy ...

Sometimes all you can do is shake your head.

ron.littlepage@jacksonville.com (904) 359-4284

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