Republican megadonor Al Hoffman Jr. says he’s out: He will no longer contribute to any Republican candidate who does not support an assault weapons ban.
“For how many years now have we been doing this — having these experiences of terrorism, mass killings — and how many years has it been that nothing’s been done?” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “It’s the end of the road for me.”
Mr. Hoffman announced his ultimatum in an email to half a dozen Republican leaders, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida. He wrote in the email that he would not give money to Mr. Scott, who is considering a campaign for the Senate in 2018, or other Florida Republicans he has backed in the past, including Representative Brian Mast, if they did not support new gun legislation.
“I will not write another check unless they all support a ban on assault weapons,” he wrote. “Enough is enough!”
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I 100% support arming teachers: Arm them with higher salaries, smaller classes, more supplies, meals for their students, better benefits…Not with guns.
— Denizcan James (@MrFilmkritik) February 17, 2018
On this date at Daily Kos in 2010—Vice President Biden: ‘The test ban treaty is as important as ever.’
It’s turning out to be a rather eventful week for nuclear weapons news, on both the domestic front and the international stage. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to deal with what’s going on in the US in this post, and address international issues separately.
First of all, the Obama administration is in the home stretch regarding the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR); the President’s national security team met yesterday to discuss the options they will present to the president, so he can make his final decision regarding “U.S. nuclear policy, strategy, capabilities and force posture” for at least half of the next decade. It is a legislatively mandated review, and I’ve written about it in several previous posts. Since the meeting was behind closed doors, we don’t know many specifics, but national security expert and Ploughshares Fund president Joe Cirincione has laid out what form he thinks the final NPR should take.
Secondly, today, the administration continued to prove its ability to multitask on nuclear weapons issues. Vice President Joe Biden gave a speech at the National Defense University in which he basically expanded on his Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from several weeks ago, in which he discussed the proposed budget for the nuclear weapons complex, and why it is important in the overall national security picture.
As Travis Sharp noted over at the Nukes of Hazard, Biden’s speech today took the middle ground regarding criticism of the new nuclear budget.
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