Hell Freezes Over

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that senior house Democrats and the NRA have reached a deal on background check legislation both groups can accept. The talks started shortly after the massacre at Virginia Tech demonstrated the inadequacy of the current background check law. Fox News.Com reports that the legislation "would require states to supply more-thorough records, including for any mental illness-related court action against a would-be gun purchaser."

According to Post reporter Jonathan Weisman

To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators in weeks of painstaking talks. Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records. The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), a former NRA board member, led the talks. The Post quotes Dingell as saying

"I've been involved with this legislative effort for years, working to address the shortcomings of NICS. I'm confident that this legislation will do it. No law will prevent evildoers from doing evil acts, but this law will help ensure that those deemed dangerous by the courts will not be able to purchase a weapon."

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Jon Stewart Examines The Media's Reponse To V-Tech

Crooks and Liars has posted Jon Stewart's take on the response of the media, especially the Media Whores (tm) of Cable TV, to the Virginia Tech Massacre. You can follow the link to the Video. I would post it here but I don't want to run afoul of Comedy Central's copyright team. Well, actually I don't know how to do it, and saying that I am worrying about copyright makes me sound more lawyer like and less like a dolt.

Hey everybody, I added an image of Jon Stewart. Isn't that Glenn Beck over his shoulder? Cool

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Bagdad University Students Show Virginia Tech Support

Students in Bagdad have hung up posters in solidarity with the victims at Virginia Tech. Amazing 32 dead in Bagdad is a several times a day event. That is way cool. We need to give them something in return. How about peace?

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Rush Limbaugh--It Was All A Joke!

Apparently people like Blue Girl get results because Media Matters is reporting that:

On the April 23 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Rush Limbaugh claimed "I was making a joke" when he said on his April 19 broadcast that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui "had to be a liberal, " and "it's a liberal that committed this act" before adding on April 23, "I do believe that it was liberalism that got a hold of this guy and made him hate things, professors and this sort of thing." Limbaugh also lashed out at Media Matters for America, claiming that he had made the comments about Cho "as a means of illustrating on this show how the words of conservative talk show hosts are twisted and taken out of context," before adding, "And sure enough, Media Matters fell for it hook, line, and sinker. They had it up all over the place."

Another example of the comic stylings of Rush Limbaugh, or somebody who realizes that he took two steps over the line? You be the judge.

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Current Limbaugh Contact Information

The post below links to out of date contact information for Rush. Here is his current information. If you elect to write, be polite. Just tell him he is wrong and why.

Rush Limbaugh
rush@eibnet.com

Premiere Radio Networks
Premiere
Radio Networks

Premiere Radio Networks, Inc.
15260 Ventura Blvd. 5th Floor
Sherman Oaks, CA 91403

Main: (818)377-5300
Fax: (818)377-5333
Toll Free: (800)533-8686

The Rush Limbaugh Show
1-800-282-2882
rush@eibnet.com
fax: 212-563-9166

The Rush Limbaugh Show
1270 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

If you are wondering why I didn't just update my previous post, well I believe this is an issue we bloggers should take on. Both Rush and Newt Gingrich are working hard to tie the word "liberal" to Virginia Tech. One of them working the angle might be an aberration. Both of them? Well that implies that someone has decided people are viewing the word "liberal" a little more favorably than they should. Their branding of "liberal" and liberals is fading. That is bad for them. They know it. "Conservatism" is so weak intellectually that conservatives can compete only when "liberalism" is sufficiently diminished. What better way to refresh their brand than by tying the word to the Virginia Tech massacre.

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Shame on You Newt. Shame on You Rush

In his April 19, 2007, broadcast Rush Limbaugh said

If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other -- this guy's a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it's a liberal that committed this act. Now, the drive-bys will read on a website that I'm attacking liberalism by comparing this guy to them. That's exactly what they do every day, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just pointing out a fact. I am making no extrapolation; I'm just pointing it out.

This morning Newt Gingrich blamed Liberalism for the Virginia Tech massacre.

I don't know about you, but I am sick to death of these wacko conservative ideologues exploiting tragedies like Virginia Tech for political gain. Cho wasn't a liberal, and no sane American of any stripe would claim him. Mass murderers come in both no and all ideologies. Timothy McViegh was ostensibly an arch conservative. There were mass murderers before there were "conservatives" and "liberals." Ever read about Bloody Kansas before the civil war? Was Bloody Bill Anderson a liberal or a conservative? What about John Brown?

The truth is people like the Columbine killers, Charles Whitman, and Cho kill because they are mentally ill, and driven by feelings of inadequacy none of us understand. Others like Bill Anderson or Timothy McVeigh claim their killings are justified by their ideology. I think that is hogwash. They kill because they put their drive for personal power above the lives of others. Still others like Osama Bin Laden or any number of religious fanatics, such as John Brown, kill because they say their God has told them too. The truth is, mass murderers kill because they do not respect the lives of others. They are selfish to the extreme. Many suffer from the delusion that their victims are not human, not deserving of respect.

Why don't we all write Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and tell them what we think. Here is Rush Limbaugh's contact information. You can find Newt Gingrich here. Pass this forward. Millions need to tell these crass ideologues "shame on you." Its time to put a stop to this nonsense.

And if some "liberal" tries to blame "conservatives" we need to call shame on that indifferent fool as well.

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The Real Scandal Behind the Virginia Tech Killings

ABC News is reporting that "a court found that Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho was "mentally ill" and potentially dangerous. Then it let him go."

According to the "Temporary Detention Order" obtained by ABC News, psychologist Roy Crouse found Cho's "affect is flat and mood is depressed.

"He denies suicidal ideation. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder," Dr. Crouse wrote. "His insight and judgment are normal."

That information came to light two days after Cho, a Virginia Tech senior, killed 32 people and then himself in a shooting rampage on the university's campus.


'An Imminent Danger to Himself'

The evaluation came from a psychiatric hospital near Virginia Tech, where Cho was taken by police in December 2005, after two female schoolmates said they received threatening messages from him, and police and school officials became concerned that he might be suicidal.

After Dr. Crouse's psychological evaluation of Cho, Special Justice Paul M. Barnett certified the finding, ordering followup treatment on an outpatient basis

Apparently, Cho never went for that followup treatment. Nobody followed up. If they had they might have discovered the man capable of this.



Few people realize that a generation ago, for a variety of reasons, most states dismantled most of their inpatient mental health facilities. Nearly everybody is promptly released. In my community we call them the walking wounded. They are everywhere. Mostly they end up in jail, but only after they commit a crime. Apparently they are allowed one free murder. Then society will act. Just today
the Supreme Court heard the case of Panetti v. Quarterman which asks the question, just how crazy does a person have to be to avoid the death penalty? Apparently nobody is asking the more important question, just who was responsible for letting Panetti walk around Texas in the first place given his mental history? Make no mistake Panetti, like Cho, was known to be crazy, but was allowed to walk around right up to the moment he killed his in-laws.

The real scandal highlighted by Virginia Tech is that in the name of personal freedom, but really in the name of lowering State taxes, America seems to have adopted a rule that every crazy gets one free chance to commit murder.

Here is a link to MSNBC's slide show and video. It is very revealing. Cho wasn't just a young male loner. He was psychotic. He was psychotic two years ago, and somebody decided to let him loose. I wonder if it was because Virginia needed to free up his bed.

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Are the Conventional Signs Really Signs? Virginia Tech and Conventional "Wisdom"

The giant headline on this morning's Huffington Post is "There Were Warning Signs." The AP Article it links uses that old familiar phrase. "He was a loner." His teachers were alarmed by his "twisted, violence-drenched creative writing." He left a note.

A law enforcement official who read Cho's note described it Tuesday as a typed, eight-page rant against rich kids and religion. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

"You caused me to do this," the official quoted the note as saying

I guess the press and the officials have figured it out. Cho Seung-Hui was just like the Columbine killers. Nothing to see here. Move along. Of course, he wasn't just like the Columbine killers. They fed off each other. Theirs was a "group" atrocity. Most violence, from war to gang fights to domestic violence, is part of a group dynamic of some sort. Cho was utterly alone.

I have to wonder. How rare are young male "loners?" It seems to me in my long years I have known a lot of young male "loners" who didn't fit in. They stayed to themselves and brooded. They struggled with their aloneness. They were sad depressed figures. They were among my acquaintances growing up. For a while when I was about 15, I was one of them. Later, as a scout leader, I encountered several young "loners." Most of us made friends, recovered and led productive lives. It seems that for the loners I have known recovery started about the time they become valuable to the community and were accepted as men. Except for a very few who fought in Vietnam none of us killed anybody.

I also wonder whether Quentin Tarantino or Steven King were referred to psychological counselling by their creative writing teachers? Should they have been? Both have made millions of dollars writing stories that are very, very disturbing. Last I looked their body counts are all in their imaginations but their imaginations have produced stories read or viewed by millions of Americans. A mere glance at the history of American entertainment, it is obvious that tales of violence find a ready market for an industry aimed at the youth and young adult market. Violent "loner" fiction is a corner stone of American pop culture.

The pattern continues when we look at new media. Craig A. Anderson suggests that video games have been training young Americans to be violent. That may or may not be true, but I wonder if Anderson isn't studying an effect rather than a cause. There is and always has been a market for violence among young people.

I don't think the label "loner" and the references to his disturbing writings begin to explain why Cho killed 33 and wounded 30 more at Virginia Tech, but the label and the references do allow us to ignore trying to find out, and that seems to be important to a lot of people. Maybe we are afraid to look closely? Maybe we should?

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There is nothing wrong with grief

On a day when George and many bloggers, left and right, politicized a deeply felt event (a pox on all your houses to put the innocent aside at this time), there was this.

As always, grief is an individual moment. It is most human to live in a moment and feel despair, but human also to know that it will end. Finally, someone said it more eloquently than I have ever heard before.

From today's Convocation at Virginia Tech:

Poet Nikki Giovanni, the final speaker at the prayer service, delivered a
rousing speech and then raised her arms to encourage the chanting
crowd.

"We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while," said Giovanni, an
English professor at the southwestern Virginia university. "We are not moving
on. We are embracing our mourning. We are Virginia Tech," she said. "We are
strong enough to stand tall tearlessly. We are brave enough to bend to cry, and
sad enough to know we must laugh again."

Our thoughts are with all.

Update: Thankfully, someone gets it - leave it alone right now. (via Andrew Sullivan to CNN)

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WTF

Fuck John McCain... seriously.

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The Time for Reckoning is Nigh

We got our wake-up call today in Virginia. On both sides the noise machines cranked up - and promptly missed the point.

We need to have a national discussion, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be just about guns. That is naturally going to be a component, especially in the wake of this tragedy. But they are only a component.

We need to have a national discussion, and we need to deal with unpleasant realities. But we need to be talking about the underlying social dynamics that are fueling this pathology.

Let me make a deal with my brethren on the right – you stop talking about arming every Tom, Dick and Harry in the country so we can have contagious gunfire erupt on a regular basis because we have encouraged a vigilante culture, and I will try to keep my side from going nuts and trying to ban all guns.

You gotta get a muzzle on those calling for arming teachers and nurses and doctors and butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Guns and adrenaline are a dangerous mix. A father shot and killed his daughter who was hiding in the closet. An international student with spotty English knocked on the wrong door looking for a Halloween party, and was shot and killed. Just last week an FBI agent was killed by friendly fire. In all of those instances the shooters were responsible gun owners, and their lives have been forever altered. A bullet can not be called back. As bad as today was, everyone I have talked to from the trauma bay and the KCPD has agreed with me - it could actually have been worse.

You give us background checks at gun shows and close some loopholes, and I will do my best to convince my compatriots that more and more restrictive gun laws aren’t the answer. They never have been. Only insane people keep trying the same thing over and over, and expect a different result. Unless you are insane, try applying some new thinking. Please.

Everyone needs to accept the fact that we are a gun-saturated society, especially my fellow lefties. They are everywhere. Are you going to bemoan that fact, or are you going to try to find some way to deal with it? I vote we do the latter. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to get your hand-wringing done and your sleeves rolled up.

On the other side, you need to admit that social policies and programs are important. Education and awareness are how you prevent things like this in a gun-saturated society. Gun violence is a symptom, but it is not the disease. I don’t have a diagnosis, but that just means we need to keep testing. Do you give up when you are sick and your doctor doesn’t know right away what is wrong? No, of course not. Apply that same thinking to society and let’s try to solve some of the problems we face.

And for God’s sake, don’t declare war on anything. That kind of thinking on the societal level is likely a part of the problem.

Screaming at each other isn’t going to accomplish anything. Guns are not going away. Getting our collective heads around that is as good a place to start as any.

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