Sheldon Adelson, the multi-billionaire casino mogul who already spent at least $5 million to help keep Republicans in control of the House next year, reportedly pledged $500,000 to just one House candidate, New Jersey Republican candidate Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

While half-a-million dollars sure sounds like a lot of money, it is chump change to Mr. Adelson. The casino czar’s net worth is just shy of $25 billion, or more than the gross domestic product of nearly two dozen nations put together. Indeed, Adelson is so rich that if he decided to give half a million dollars to every single Republican nominee for every House and Senate seat in the country, and to do so every single election cycle until his vast fortune ran out, he would have enough money to fund the GOP’s election machine for the next 186 years:

Rabbi Boteach, for his part, lavished praise on Adelson and on the Supreme Court that’s been so solicitous of right-wing efforts to buy and sell elections: “I think that Sheldon Adelson will bring democracy to the ninth district of New Jersey. What Citizens United has allowed is a challenger like me to be a real contender against [Rep. Bill] Pascrell.”

The weekend, Chicago Sun Times reporter Frank Main published an interview with “Chris,” a Chicago high school student and gang member and gunslinger who explains exactly how easy it is for he and his fellow gang members to obtain firearms, even if they have criminal records:

“I will make a call and say I need a gun. I will ride down the street on my bike and get it — five minutes.” . . . Chris calls them the “gun guys.” The cops have another name for them: “straw purchasers.”

“Gun guys” have clean records allowing them to obtain Illinois firearm owner’s identification cards. With FOID cards, they can legally buy guns at stores in the suburbs.

Then they illegally sell them to gang members banned from owning guns because of their criminal backgrounds.

Most of the guns recovered in crimes in Chicago were bought in suburban gun stores, according to a new University of Chicago Crime Lab study of police gun-trace data.

As Chris points out, many of these straw purchasers’ full-time job is trading on their clean criminal record to buy guns and then resell them at a markup to dangerous felons. Such professional straw purchasers should be easy to catch. Because federal law requires most gun purchasers to undergo criminal background checks before they can buy a firearm, it should be an easy matter for law enforcement to check whether the same person is purchasing guns over and over and over again.

Except that the so-called “Tiahrt Amendments” thwart such checks by requiring the Justice Department to destroy the record of any gun buyer whose purchase was approved within 24 hours. As a result, law enforcement is often blind to straw purchasers who are flooding the streets with guns right under their noses.

Nor is this the only aspect of federal law that “gun guys” can take advantage of. An estimated 10 percent of all guns used in a crime by juveniles were sold at a gun show or flea market where many of the dealers do not have to conduct criminal background checks on their customers. Indeed, federal officials are often forced to charge straw purchasers with paperwork violations due to the absence of an appropriate law criminalizing unlicensed gun trafficking.

As ThinkProgress reported on Friday, 19 people were shot in Chicago last Thursday evening. The night after we published that post, 17 more people were shot — 4 of them fatally.

Texas is the only state in the union where prostitution is a felony, according to the San Francisco-based organization Prostitution Research & Education. As a result, 350 inmates are currently incarcerated in Texas for prostitution, costing the state between $5 million and $7 million per year. Meanwhile, programs that would treat many of the underlying causes of prostitution, such as drug addiction, cost a fraction as much. As a result, one key state senator now believes that Texas’ unusually strict law does not make sense:

It costs $18,538 to house a convict in state prison for a year and about $15,500 in a lower-security state jail, according to Legislative Budget Board calculations. By contrast, a community-based program costs about $4,300 a year.

“She’s a perfect example of why these women should not be taking up expensive prison beds,” said Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire, D-Houston, who said that the 2001 felony prostitution law had broad support at the time and acknowledged that he voted for it.

“It’s nuts that we’ve got this many prostitutes in prison, people that we’re not afraid of, but we’re just mad at,” he said. “By locking them up, we’re not fixing the problem — we’re just spending a lot of money incarcerating them, warehousing them, when we could be spending a lot less getting them treatment so they can get out and stay out of this business.”

It’s worth noting that Whitmire is hardly known for an unTexas-like empathy for people convicted of crimes. Last year, Texas’ Criminal Justice Division eliminated the traditional practice of allowing death row inmates to chose their last meal after Whitmire wrote a letter to the division asking them to abolish this nod to these inmate’s humanity.

It’s also worth noting that Texas law also makes it a felony to hire a prostitute, although no one is currently incarcerated for this reason. Apparently, Texas is more concerned with locking up the women who are often forced into sex work than the men who take advantage of their services.

Last year, former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich delivered an authoritarian speech where he promised that if elected president he would ignore court decisions he disagrees with, wage a campaign of intimidation against judges, and even potentially impeach judges who interpret the Constitution in way he disapproves of. Gingrich lost the GOP primary, but his spirit lives on in the Republican Party’s draft platform:

Despite improvements as a result of Republican nominations to the judiciary, some judges in the federal courts remain far afield from their constitutional limitations. The U.S. Constitution is the law of the land. Judicial activism which includes reliance on foreign law or unratified treaties undermines American law. The sole solution, apart from impeachment, is the appointment of constitutionist jurists, who will interpret the law as it was originally intended rather than make it. That is both a presidential responsibility, in selected judicial candidates, and a senatorial responsibility, in confirming them. We urge Republican Senators to do all in their power to prevent the elevation of additional leftist ideologues to the courts, particularly in the waning days of the current Administration.

There’s something quaint about Republicans expecting the nation to still believe they care about judicial activism after they spent the last two years pushing an attack on the Affordable Care Act that, in the words of a top conservative judge, had no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” Or, for that matter, after many Republicans have declared everything from Social Security to Medicare to national child labor laws unconstitutional. Activist judging is the backbone of Republican constitutional theory, not the enemy of it.

Moreover, if Republicans really cared what our founding fathers thought about important constitutional questions like judicial independence, they would not even consider the idea of impeaching a judge simply because of a partisan disagreement. The Constitution provides that judges “shall hold their offices during good behaviour,” not so long as a political party agrees with them, and this principle was affirmed very early in American history.

In 1805, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, Jefferson loyalists in the House impeached Justice Samuel Chase due to decisions that Jefferson’s party disagreed with (and, in this case, with good reason for this disagreement). Nevertheless, the Senate acquitted Chase, with many members of Jefferson’s party voting for acquittal because they understood that an attack on a judge merely because a politician disagrees with that judge’s decisions is an attack on the independence of the judiciary itself.

This precedent served our country well for more than 200 years. It is baffling that the Republican Party now wants to abandon it.

Despite some initial confusion shortly after police shot a man believed to have just murdered his former co-worker on Friday, ballistics tests now confirm that every single one of the nine bystanders shot in the confrontation between the gunman and two police officers were struck by a bullet fired from a police firearm:

The veteran patrolmen who opened fire on the suit-clad gunman, Jeffrey Johnson, had only an instant to react when he whirled around and pointed a .45-caliber pistol at them as they approached from behind on a busy sidewalk, police said.

Officer Craig Matthews shot seven times, and Officer Robert Sinishtaj fired nine times, police said. Neither had ever fired his weapon before while on patrol.

The volley of gunfire felled Johnson in seconds and left nine other people bleeding on the sidewalk.

In the initial chaos Friday, it wasn’t clear whether Johnson or the officers were responsible for the trail of wounded, but, based on ballistic and other evidence, “it appears that all nine of the victims were struck either by fragments or by bullets fired by police,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters Saturday at a community event in Harlem.

Both Officer Matthews and Officer Sinishtaj are professionals who received significant firearms training as recruits. Moreover, New York City police must pass a semi-annual test to prove that they remain skilled marksmen. And yet, even these trained professionals injured nine innocents during the course of a standoff with a single gunman.

It’s hard to imagine a clearer refutation of the idea that America would be safer if only vigilante citizens could use their own concealed firearms to mow down violent perpetrators.