This is the letter:

If recent history is any guide, we will soon hear Republican members of Congress sending their thoughts and prayers to the victims of the most recent school shooting.

Am I the only person to notice that this "solution" to the problem does not seem to be working?

I erred and posted this under the wrong sub-thread; it belongs here and addresses your point:

By the way, where's my bump-stock ban? (#33)
by linea on Wed Feb 14, 2018 at 07:25:27 PM EST
I called for a Federal bump-stock ban while people here were still arguing whether the Vegas shooter had actual machine guns or not. The NRA even conceded the idiocy of bump-stocks. Nothing got passed! How can anything be done when even that can't get passed?

I am amazed that they even managed to expel the murderer. It is incredibly difficult to do so in schools these dayis.

My daughter, a K12 teacher, has had to go to the ER, as have some ofmher students, after attacks by a troubled student.

The best advice that she got? Get pregnant, and then the school district can do something -- the same school district that refuses to put the problem student in separate schooling, per the medical diagnosis and recommendation, because the district says that it already expended that part of the budget.

Oh, and teachers who report have been sued by parents and demoted by districts. And at the college level, too, as well I know, when administrators refused to do something about the student who took a class hostage and later attacked me in my office, or the student who stalked me and posted death threats -- and was a convicted felon.  But my "classroom command" was questiond . . . even though I never even had the latter student in class. (He just targeted women professors.) I had to go to court, at my own cost -- and then was threatened with a countersuit, too. And I also had to go to court again, when my ex used the situation to challenge joint custody, saying that I coukd not protect my children from the convicted felon stalker.

I have no doubt that the kids saved by his actions will be forever grateful, but the loss of someone who could have had many more years of being a positive influence on young lives seems exponentially greater when we consider how little, how pitifully, cowardly little, has been done to protect people from gun violence.  

Aaron Feis died because Nikolas Cruz shot him.  And Cruz shot him because the State of Florida decided that more or less unregulated gun ownership was a good thing.  And because this orphaned teenager, this disaffected, depressed kid couldn't or didn't get the help he needed and instead became easy pickings for a white nationalist group that likely stoked whatever was burning within him.

Look around, look at what this administration wants to do, the cruel, mean-spirited policies they want to legislate.  Combine that with no action on guns, and we're not going to lose fewer like Aaron Feis, we're going to lose more.  You can't engineer policy after policy after policy that push people to desperation and expect violence won't follow.

Just pointing out that the media speaks of heroes to keep everyone tuned in. When we are in the midst of loss we turn the TV off. They can't have that. So we move quickly to heroics, never actually grieve, all the film footage is sanitized.

Is "silence" a service?  Was it the consideration for her signing an NDA?

If it wasn't a payment, as such, if he wasn't compensating her for something she provided, then it must have been a gift.  Is Mr. Cohen going to be filing a gift tax return to report the excess over the $14,000 annual exemption?

As for Kevin's Tinkers-to-Evans-to-Chance payment scenario, I think that's too direct a line, and too easily followed.  I rather suspect Mr. Cohen has some familiarity - or knows people who do - with masking a money trail.

It probably doesn't really matter.  No one with a working brain believes he did this out of the goodness of his heart - these are people who like being owed for their so-called favors, although given all the publicity surrounding the payment/gift, pretty sure Trump will welsh on whatever reward Cohen was expecting, fully in keeping with Trump always reneging on his end of the deal.

Many women don't see Jennifer Aniston as attractive....

You of all people should know that words matter; I happen to believe that Cohen chose the word "facilitate" for a reason:

Just weeks before the 2016 presidential election, President Donald Trump's lawyer formed a private LLC to pay a former porn star in exchange for not speaking publicly about an alleged sexual encounter with the then-candidate, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the alleged encounter with Trump took place in July 2006 after a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe.
The company, Essential Consultants LLC, was reportedly created in Delaware -- which offers a higher standard of privacy to business owners -- by attorney Michael Cohen, according to the Journal's report, which cited corporate records and people familiar with the matter.

He may have used his personal funds, but he didn't pay her directly - he created an LLC, to which he transferred the funds, and the payment was made by the LLC.

He facilitated the payment.

Do you get now why "facilitate" matters?  

And I don't know what your being shocked or not shocked has to do with anything, but even if you don't think the Trump/Daniels thing is any kind of big deal, apparently there was enough concern on Trump's part that this whole payment/NDA thing had to be engineered.