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Not that it much matters to Donald Trump and his Senate sycophant Mitch McConnell, but the heads of some 150 companies signed a national letter urging the Senate to act meaningfully to curb gun violence. From Airbnb, Conde Nast and Levi Strauss to Royal Caribbean Cruises, Twitter and Yelp. Also, interestingly enough, among the signees: Bain Capital and Thrive Capital. The former was co-founded by Mitt Romney, the latter was founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of the president’s son-in-law. In short, there’s serious societal pushback on a government that only does the politically acceptable minimum to combat mass murder. It complements what the consensus of polls now tells us: The majority of Americans support banning assault weapons.

But there were prominent no-shows on the national letter, including Apple, Bank of America, Citigroup, Facebook, Google, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Google’s rationale was deplorably summed up in a policy statement that said, in part: “Our primary responsibility is to do the work we’ve each been hired to do, not to spend working time on debates about non-work topics.” America is in crisis, and that’s Google’s overriding priority?

That has to change (in a country with 10 million AR-15s), because when the business community goes all in on something, something gets done. It has that much leverage, including political contributions. But when there are still impactful corporate giants on the sidelines, that leverage is undercut. When DICK’S Sporting Goods has more of a social conscience than Facebook, America is in crisis.

It’s all enough to prompt nostalgia for the 1994 assault weapons ban—part of an overall crime bill–that expired after a decade. But it’s sure in hell not enough to prompt action in this NRA- and-Trump-neutered Congress. It’s nothing like ’94 when a key ban proponent was Republican Rep. John Kasich of Ohio. Today, neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have said anything encouraging about prospects for reviving the ban. Not even California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who sponsored that ’94 ban, holds out much hope. “We don’t have the votes to pass it,” she bluntly assessed.

Amazon now offers an at-home rape kit (“PRESERVEkit”) for $29.95. Yes, there’s a market.

• The U.S. flamed out early in the (basketball) FIBA World Cup in China that was won by Spain. Yes, it’s startling and humbling, even if marquee NBA players opted out. It’s still BASKETBALL, and the USA–we would have thought–should have been able to beat Serbia with John Calipari’s next one-and-done Kentucky class. The “upside”: no awkward announcements or optics over a White House invitation had the U.S. won gold again.
• Too bad MLB, unlike its basketball, football and hockey counterparts, doesn’t have a salary cap. It creates a double standard, even with a luxury tax. This year’s payroll rankings: Boston Red Sox ($228 million); NY Yankees ($225 million); Chicago Cubs ($217 million); and Los Angeles Dodgers ($201 million) are the top four. Number 30—and last: the Tampa Bay Rays ($66 million). That the Rays are post-season contenders—despite poor attendance, Montreal distractions and some blindsiding injuries–speaks volumes about their front office and manager Kevin Cash.

• “Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply.”—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on the drone attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabian oil sites.
• “My advice to the Administration is, let’s focus on trying to shore up our relationship with Pakistan.”—Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.
• “I’m just thankful we got through Bolton’s tenure without him starting a war.”—Max Bergmann, Center for American Progress senior fellow.
• “John (Bolton) wasn’t in line with what we were doing.”—President Donald Trump.
• “Pompeo played the game of Trump whisperer better than Bolton.”—CNN global affairs analyst Aaron David Miller.
• “(Trump) supporters care far more about the persona than the policy.”—Brendan Buck, one-time spokesman for former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.
• “Trump is not a valiant defender of the West and protector of our allies. He’s a dangerous and corrupt patsy in the hands of strongmen.”—Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post.
• “While Mr. Trump’s thermonuclear politics may rally both his base and Democrats who slumbered in 2016, it is the paralyzing disorder and anxiety his bilious behavior creates that is a distressing turnoff to voters at the margins who will make the difference. To win, the Democrats will have to turn Mr. Trump’s negative energy against him without embodying it themselves.”—David Axelrod, former senior strategist for Barack Obama.
• “Confrontation, which has become the Democrats’ de facto political operating system on the Hill and in the presidential primaries, excites their increasingly doctrinaire base; but it turns off independents.”—David Winston, CQ-Roll Call.
• “I know people on the Second Amendment side go nuts when you say this, but what is the purpose of an assault weapon?”—New York Republican Rep. Peter T. King.
• “The United States has shown the world that it is capable of putting someone like Trump in office, and that can’t be undone. He’s left the whole country compromised.”—Michelle Goldberg, New York Times.
• “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”—The late author, essayist, poet and humorist E.B. White.
• “The message of this report is either we delay and pay or we plan and prosper.”—Christiana Figueres, former UN climate change official and a member of the Global Commission on Adaptation that has issued a report arguing for drastic increases in adaptation measures such as early-warning systems and resilient infrastructure.
• “I pray there are no schisms. But I’m not scared.”—Pope Francis, referring to some alienated conservatives within the Catholic Church.
• “We simply have to remove these attractive (non-tobacco) flavored (vaping) products from the marketplace until they secure FDA approval.”—HHS Secretary Alex Azar.
• “When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create. (Governments) need to move faster and start to catch up with the pace of technology.”—Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.
• “Like all other films we’d done, it’s an opportunity to understand who we are.”—Filmmaker Ken Burns, on his latest documentary project, the 8-part PBS miniseries “Country Music.”
• “I want to be the last father who could say, ‘I didn’t know what was going on in the schools.’”—Andrew Pollock, the father of a student killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas H.S. and the author of “Why Meadow Died: The People and Policies That Created the Parkland Shooter and Endangered America’s Students.”
• “Even where I’m from, which is a very conservative area, they want this offshore drilling ban—even though they follow Trump significantly.”—Congressman Francis Rooney, R-Naples, who sponsored legislation, which was passed by the House, to permanently ban offshore drilling off Florida’s Gulf Coast.
• “Publix respectfully requests that only law enforcement officials openly carry firearms in our stores.”—Publix spokesman Brian West.
• “There was once a perception that we could not grow international here in this airport. There’s pent-up demand in this market.”—TIA CEO Joe Lopano.
• “Our needs are more urgent than ever. We are out of space completely on the research side … On the hospital side, we have the same number of beds we did 12 years ago. We’re nearly always full or near capacity.”—Dr. Alan List, CEO and president of H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institution, who’s making a pitch for more state funding.
• “We are on a journey here. We are making fantastic progress, but we still have some milestones coming up.”—USF President Steve Currall, referring to the upcoming implementation of recently unveiled campus-consolidation plans.

• While President Donald Trump was unable to join many other leaders in Poland to commemorate the 80^th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of that country, he did forward on a message. “I just want to congratulate Poland.” Whatever.
• The president’s role during emergencies—such as devastating hurricanes—is to be the comforting, confidence-inducing public face of the federal government advisories—armed with facts, warnings, reassurances, hope, help and empathy. Alas, intemperate, uninformed presidential tweets and drive-by, off-the-cuff media quotes are not the same thing. And worse yet when they undermine NOAA and its apolitical credibility. That was the unfortunate upshot when the president recently relied more on a Sharpie than meteorologists in noting—and re-noting–that Hurricane Dorian was headed to Alabama.  And then the inexplicable acknowledgement that he’d never “even heard of a Category 5 hurricane,” which Michael was when it raked parts of the Florida Panhandle last summer. “Helluva job, Brownie” never seemed so eloquent.
• “The LameStream media and their Democrat partner should start playing it straight. It would be so much better for our Country.”—Yes, that was the patriot-in-chief.
• “I have no fear of being under oath … Bring it.”—No, that obviously wasn’t President Trump; it was Stormy Daniels. The porn actress was indicating that she’s ready to testify before Congress regarding Trump’s alleged role in hush-money payments.
• “The Wall is being built. It’s going up rapidly.”—Donald Trump. Yeah, and El Chapo, not budget sleight of hand at the expense of military families, will pay for it.
• “He isn’t winning friends in Europe. He’s losing friends at home. His is a government with no mandate, no morals and, as of today, no majority.” No, that wasn’t one of the Democratic presidential candidates lashing out at Trump. That was British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in reference to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has been getting pummeled by (Conservative) party defections over Brexit.
• “The Trumps will be a dynasty that will last for decades, propelling the Republican Party into a new party.”—That was Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, sounding every bit like a Trump campaign manager. It’s likely we’ll be seeing this line again—in either party’s primaries. Dynastic rhetoric doesn’t play well in most democratic contexts.
• Trump legacy: Corey Lewandowski, the punk who was Trump’s pre-Manafort campaign manager, is likely running for the Senate in New Hampshire. The GOP establishment wants Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen defeated, of course, but preferably not by the unsettling wise guy who insults mainstream Republican leaders. “Corey is the original lightning rod—some people love him, some people detest him,” points out Steve Duprey, the New Hampshire State GOP chairman. “But he’s pretty mainstream now because it’s a different party.” We’ve been noticing.
• You knew it was coming. “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”—a documentary of the flamboyant, ruthless and unapologetically defiant lawyer Roy Cohn–will be released later this month. You knew it was coming because Donald Trump was his protégé; from Cohn, he learned—and continues to practice—lessons that are manifest every day. That includes, points out Cohn documentarian Matt Tyrnauer, these familiar Trumpian “principles”: “Never apologize. If someone hits you, hit them back a thousand times harder. Any publicity is good publicity. And find an ‘other.’” For Cohn, the “other” were Jews as Bolsheviks and gays in the State Department. “With Trump, the other is Mexicans, Latinos, Muslims, fill in the blank,” says Tyrnauer. In effect, Trump has turned the presidency, unsurprisingly, into a Cohn job.

Before there was 9/11, there was the winter of 1962. It was an eerie precursor to what would tragically traumatize New York City nearly four decades later. The National Archives’ 2017-18 release of long-suppressed JFK files provided the forum, much of which deals with the CIA’s Mafia-outsourced operation to take out Fidel Castro.

But there’s also this: Castro wanted revenge for all those assassination attempts. The details are chronicled in Thomas Maier’s “Mafia Spies.” Among them: a payback plan to wreak havoc in New York for the Christmas holiday season. A well-trained terrorism expert, Roberto Santiesteban Casanova, posed as a United Nations diplomatic attaché. He was the ringleader of an elaborate sabotage plot to bomb Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and Gimbel’s—plus the Statue of Liberty, Grand Central Station, the 42^nd Street Port Authority Bus Terminal and military bases and oil refineries in nearby New Jersey.

BTW, “Mafia Spies” is a good, riveting read and another reminder that America’s had dark chapters before the chaos and existential threat of this Administration. But, imagine if that had been President Trump during the October missile crisis.

• The DNC has been criticized for not holding a climate-specific debate. Rightly so. Addressing the ultimate global threat is that important.
• Tech entrepreneur John Yang’s feisty supporters are an eclectic lot, including progressives, libertarians and some Trump supporters. He has a campaign acronym—MATH (Make America Think Harder)–that is even showing up, MAGAesque, on hats.
• “I think it’s really, really, really important that Donald Trump not be re-elected.” That was Joe Biden’s response to a reporter’s question on why, why, why he wants to be president.
• “He doesn’t think you need a revolution.”—Anita Dunn, media strategist for Joe Biden.
• If the Democrats still believe in demographics as destiny and really want to double down on appealing to an increasingly diverse electorate, they may want to consider a Kamala Harris-Bill de Blasio ticket. A black female married to a white man and a white male married to a black woman.

In the mid-1990s, Walmart stopped selling handguns. In 2015, Walmart stopped selling assault rifles. Now Walmart will discontinue the sale of handgun and short-barrel rifle ammunition (once inventory runs out). And Walmart is also requesting customers to refrain from openly carrying firearms in Walmart and Sam’s Club stores.

What’s next? Will Walmart stop supporting politicians backed by the NRA?

A November 2020 state ballot proposal would prohibit possession of assault weapons, but would provide an exception for people who own the guns at the time the measure takes place. These people would be able to keep their assault weapons if they register their guns with the state. Estimated cost of building such a registry: $4 million.

While too much of our politics are disingenuous, zero-sum bullet points, this one applies. Don’t do it. No nuance. No assault weapons for anybody—because nobody not with the military, local police or national guard has a need for such. And they can—and have—and will again be used in a mass shooting. The laws of unintended consequences are still on the books. So, save lives and dollars. It shouldn’t be a matter of registration and grandfathering–and a year to stock up. It’s a matter of common sense and public safety.

• Tampa International Airport is well known—nationally and internationally—and often honored for its logistics, aesthetics, location and passengers-as-priority mantra. Ask Orlando International what its model was. Now add this from the Airport Minority Advisory Council. It has named TIA “Airport of the Year” for bringing more diversity to its contracts in its recently completed, $1 billion, first-phase expansion.

This is about more than brick and mortar and planes and passengers. This is also about inclusiveness and prioritizing people working for a living. No, the Airport Minority Advisory Council’s honor isn’t as sexy and resonant as most other airport homages, but it matters a lot right here where it matters most.

• A shout out to USF for breaking into U.S. News & World Report’s top 50 public universities. USF is now ranked 44^th; last year it was 58^th. Other state universities to make the top 100: UF, #7; FSU, #17; and UCF, #79.