Grading Schools, Grading Society?

To contact us Click HERE
I WAS GETTING MY HAIR CUT LAST SATURDAY and while waiting had time to read a good portion of the Cincinnati Enquirer. One story noted that President Obama's "approval ratings" were going up. That's good.

I  usually vote Democratic.

There was a story about Joey Votto and how the Reds' playoff loss stings. A third article focused on a missing bulldozer and driver down in Kentucky after his machine slid off a steep embankment into a coal slurry pond. That sounded a lot worse than losing a deciding fifth game to the Giants.

I also had time to read two stories that touched on education. The headline on one read:  "What Makes a Grade A School?" The other might not have looked like an education story; but considering the other it was:

"Teen Inmate Seeks Parole in Resentencing."
I suppose I could say, "Hell, I'm retired. Why do I care?" But it troubles me that in Ohio and elsewhere, politicians believe we can grade schools in simplistic ways. The school where I taught, Loveland Middle School, would doubtless earn high grades from the State of Ohio under the new system. (Rich, suburban district's usually do.) I'm just not sure what that proves. We had our slice of dysfunctional families and messed up kids; but for the most part, I was seeing bright, motivated teens come through my door.

So, how do you measure schools? Based on the dropout rate? We now have a system that says you do. I scratch my head on that one. Can a teacher make a kid drop out of school? A teen can join a gang and get in trouble with the law and drop out, as a result. A teen can get addicted to drugs and drop out. Is this the fault of the school?

I once had a student (a really nice kid, too) who, by the time I had him in eighth grade, had rolled up a long record of unnecessary absences. In seven years in the Loveland City Schools, John had racked up 452 missed days of class.

That's the equivalent of 2 1/2 years. So, do we grade the school in this situation, if John fails to make adequate yearly progress? The new system says we do. (I'm thinking we grade his parents. Or maybe we grade pediatricians!) If you're not a teacher, you might believe kids like John are rare.

You would be mistaken.

A study recently for the Chicago Public Schools found that the "average" student was out of class for 26 days. That means for every kid who shows up diligently and misses 1 or 2 or 4 days, you have another who misses 51, or 50, or 48.

Try that at work and see if your boss feels he deserves a failing grade based on your absences.

I TAUGHT A LONG TIME. I KNOW there are crappy teachers. I understand that; and we need to do the best job possible to get them out of America's classrooms. But grading schools is a shotgun approach and a stupid idea.

I also understand that teachers must try to save every child. I think I only gave up on one kid out of the 5,000 I taught during my career.

That doesn't mean it isn't ten times harder to save some than to save others--and nearly impossible to save some. Since I taught seventh and eighth grade, I saw girls come to school who were pregnant; and many of them ended up wrecking their educations. That wasn't the fault of teachers. I remember a girl, so wasted on drugs that she shit herself in class, passed out, and left our building on a stretcher. I remember the young man who came to us after he was released from juvenile detention. At the time he already had the longest criminal record of any teen in Hamilton County. And his chances for a quality education were hardly advanced one afternoon when he told his science teacher he was going to kill her.

So, what do our politicians decide to do to address these kind of problems, which, to a greater or lesser extent, beset all schools? Um....grade schools.

How does the other story fit in, you may ask? The one about the teen seeking parole? It involves the case of Emily Ball, 14, when she was charged with involvement in the murder of another teen, Travis White, 17. At a hearing to discuss her fate (now that she has turned 18 and is old enough to go to an adult facility) her public defender, Amanda Mullins explained to the judge:

“I’m not here to talk about a 14-year-old Emily Ball whose life was characterized by violence and chaos and extreme poverty. We are here today to talk about the 18-year-old Emily whose life is now filled with growth and progress and hope.

“This is a girl that has had an unwavering hope that life has something better in store for her. You have the opportunity today to let her continue to grow, progress and hope."

As a former teacher I notice that line about a girl "whose life was characterized by violence and chaos and extreme poverty." I worked in a good district; but I taught a few kids like that. My wife taught in a poor district; and she had to save all kinds of young kids like Emily Ball.

Regardless, the prosecutor countered testimony in Ms. Ball's favor, calling retired Covington police Detective Mike McGuffey to the stand. Mullins had told the judge that while her client did lure White into ambush she left the scene before she knew what was going to happen.

McGuffey disagreed:

"[He explained that] Emily left only after the ambush began and then returned three times to check on the progress. McGuffey knew this because Emily’s whereabouts was being tracked by an ankle monitor she was ordered to wear because she was a habitual truant.

"He had never investigated a crime where someone was so severely beaten during his 26 years in law enforcement.

"McGuffey recounted finding the 'huge' wrench, hammer and baseball bat used to kill Travis, whose body was stripped to his underwear, rolled into a red carpet and dumped along train tracks. Travis had been stabbed or hit more than 40 times. There were crude gang or satanic symbols carved into his chest. Cigarette burns were too plentiful to count."

It's a sad story all around, no matter what the judge might decide. But I read it like a former teacher. And I wonder: "How is grading schools ever going to help these kind of kids, kids who absolutely need help the most?"

I DON'T KNOW THE ANSWER. I do know politicians and school reformers are ignoring this critical question.

Saving Emily was never going to be easy?
How do we justify grading schools if they fail to do it?

Think this kind of case is rare? Think that schools can be tasked, realistically with saving every single child? Google "teen murders" and start asking yourself how.

Guns and Innocent Blood: What Are We Going to Do?

To contact us Click HERE
EVER AMERICAN SHOULD BE SICK TONIGHT. Gun-owners and non-gun owners, alike, it doesn’t matter. Every one of us should be ill. 

How else react to news of the incredible tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown? We now know that twenty children, mostly first graders, were cut down in a fusillade of gunfire. And we must now face up to the knowledge that an elementary school was reduced to a charnel house. Eight adults are dead, too, six of them men and women who rose this morning for work, never expecting to die, dedicated only to helping children learn to sing and spell and subtract and smile at the dawn of knowledge. 

Maybe, I’m too emotional.

I’m a retired teacher (and a parent) and I think about all the terrified children inside that slaughter pen and parents outside, not knowing the scope of the tragedy, praying sons and daughters were safe, learning, horribly, that they weren’t. I think back to my own experience in 1985, when a young man brought a gun to my school to shoot me. 

At times like this, most of us shake our heads and have no idea what to say. There’s no pattern to this kind of violence. It can happen any time, anywhere, we think.

The problem, though, is that there is a pattern. It keeps happening all the time and it keeps happening here, in America. In Ohio where I live, for example, a bloody shooting occurred at Chardon High in February. Before the carnage finally ended three teenagers were dead and two others badly wounded. 
You can find Demetrius Hewlin’s obituary on line if you care. Known as “D” to friends, he was one of the slain. Born March 8, 1995. Died February 28, 2012. A sixteen-year-old gunned down in the cafeteria by another teen with a gun.

That's the thread that runs through all these stories, the guns. Don't you see it? Don't you care? When do we admit that we are already the “best-armed” nation in modern history? When do we agree that guns are absurdly easy to acquire? Already, there are 88 handguns, rifles and shotguns in private hands for every 100 Americans. Boil down all the pro- and anti-gun arguments to their essence. You don’t read about people in this country killing each other with hand grenades. That’s because it’s not easy to get your hands on hand grenades.

Guns are easy, though. 

As a result, we lead all modern nations in murder rates and lead by a gory mile. The murder rate in Iceland is close to zero. In Japan it’s .5 per 100,000 people. If you study a list of 32 advanced nations The Netherlands comes in tenth, with 1 murder per 100,000. Finland is 31st with 2.5. The United States stands last with 5.2 per 100,000.

Guns in America are a problem and that fact is written again today in the blood of innocent children. Think of the guns, of the guns, of the guns. Twelve dead, fifty-eight injured in a theater in Aurora, Colorado. The massacre in Arizona that ended with 9-year-old Christina Green-Taylor and five others dead, twelve wounded, including Gabby Gifford. Thirty-two dead and seventeen wounded at Virginia Tech in 2007.

The list is long and horrific and comes down to guns.

Better than most, I understand what it's like to have a loaded weapon carried into a classroom. Twenty-seven years ago a young man brought a pistol to school to shoot me and to shoot one of his teammates on the wrestling squad. The other boy had been taunting him about weight and I had caught the boy during class drawing an obscene picture and told him to take it home and show his dad. That was all it took—a teen with emotional issues—easy access to guns—a potential disaster in the making. The boy carried a loaded weapon around all day, hidden in a book bag, but for reasons unknown never pulled it out to start shooting. He didn't shoot me. He didn't shoot his classmates by mistake, or his wrestling teammate, either. Ten years later, however, he picked up another gun—still easily accessible—and shot himself. 

IN THE END, THIS ISN'T about gun owners vs. non-gun owners, hunters vs. vegans, conservatives vs. liberals. This is about the massacre of elementary school kids. It’s about blood on the floor—in classrooms —theaters—and malls.

It’s about guns.

You can either address the issue in a reasonable fashion or you can keep burying the innocent—this time mostly six and seven-year-olds. Or you can make some absurdist argument that we’re all better off the more guns we have, that first grade teachers (and everyone else in America) should be armed and ready.

In the face of terrible tragedy every American should be asking today, “What are we, as a society, going to do?”

Say a prayer for the dead.

Problem Solved? Arm All the Teachers?

To contact us Click HERE
I GUESS I'M FINALLY CONVINCED. Those who cherish Second Amendment rights and guard against all limitations have shown me I'm wrong. I've been trying to argue that we can limit gun sales sales and ban military-style assault rifles and high capacity of ammunition clips. Now I understand. Tyranny is just one unsold pistol or rifle or shotgun away.

I didn't realize until now that we needed more guns. (We also need to turn our schools into forts, it would seem.)

Here, I thought, we were talking about children like Madeline Hsu, Charlotte Bacon and Olivia Engel, all 6, who died Friday after being hit in a spray of gunfire. Now I know. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This is an absolute truth, is it not? Or, as one no-limits-on-guns thinker sagely noted, we might as well ban forks and spoons as ban guns. People in America are fat and obesity kills.

True. SO true. And if we start banning guns, what comes next? I think that’s what he was trying to say. Are we ready to ban donuts?

I’m not being sarcastic at all. I’m not saying this kind of thinking is for idiots. I'm saying these absolutists are right. There's no other way to address the incredible carnage.

Except to get our hands on more guns.

You want to protect first graders in schools? You can’t do it by limiting guns. How could you think that? And now our greatest leaders are stepping forward to offer solutions. A member of Congress has already expressed sorrow to learn that Dawn Hochsprung, the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School, was unarmed at the time of attack. If only Hochsprung had had an assault rifle hanging on the wall in her office! (I’m not joking. That’s what he said.) Then she might have engaged the shooter and possibly won.

I’m embarrassed to say I’m a retired teacher; and all those years I spent in a classroom I never saw the logic of this kind of position. I had a student who brought a gun to school to shoot me and at least one of his classmates, years ago. Now I see. The gun that troubled young man picked up so easily at home, that wasn’t the problem. No, I needed my own gun for protection. He had a loaded pistol in his book bag. I should have had one holstered on my hip. It would have been hard to teach without turning my back to the class; but, hey, if it means protecting the Second Amendment, I could have adjusted.

NO WAY CAN WE LIMIT GUNS. We don’t limit freedoms in America. No sir. The Founding Fathers knew their freedom shit. (Okay, true, maybe some did own slaves.) Ignore that. We are talking here about teachers fighting back.

Fight fire with return fire, you might say.

Yes, it’s the deepest kind of human tragedy that Noah Pozner, 6, had to die, hit by gunfire unleashed by a disturbed individual with a military-style assault rifle. According to his mother, Noah hoped to grow up to become a doctor or maybe own a taco factory. He loved tacos, that wonderful little boy, and that way he could have tacos whenever he wanted.

He’d be alive today, according to gun-rights absolutists, if only his teacher, Lauren Rousseau, 30, had been armed.

Why didn’t we see this before it was too late? You can’t arm just one teacher in every building. What if that teacher is out sick? What if the shooter enters from a different direction? If we want children to be safe we have to arm every educator in the land. We do it for the kids (or maybe the gun companies, at least). Until recently, Ms. Rousseau had been a substitute teacher and until Friday she had to feel fortunate to land a regular job. What if the school had provided her gun training? Sure. We train every teacher in America in the handling of heavy weapons. Because, let’s face it, we all have Second Amendment rights and they cannot be infringed. Read your Second Amendment. Don’t make me quote it, now that I’ve seen the light:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

We can’t infringe on freedom. Not a spec. If we do we’re open to invasion by Iranians or North Koreans or maybe Redcoats. I know some no-limits Americans worry about invasion by U. N. inspectors coming to take our weapons away; or agents in black helicopters sent by Mr. Obama. What if they’re right! We can't limit guns. In one fell swoop, U. N. inspectors could grab them all, all 300 million currently in private hands. We can’t do psychological profiling, either, before we put assault rifles in private hands.

That would be crazy, right?

It may seem incomprehensible to most of us to think that Allison Wyatt, age 6, died with most of her friends in a room blown to bits like a set in a Rambo movie. But guns don’t kill people. Don't you see. Lack of guns kills people. Her teacher, Ms. Rousseau, would be alive today if only she’d been armed and ready. In fact, I want to apologize to NRA leaders who love America and freedom ten times as much as I do. I see now that they don’t have foul blood dripping from their hands. A first grade classroom in an elementary school in a peaceful town in Connecticut was turned into a slaughterhouse. Well, it was my fault. It was yours, if you think there’s a way to limit guns. One of the first responders on the scene was a veteran of two combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan; and he told friends what he saw in that room, with the torn bodies of twenty little children strewn about, was worse than anything he could have imagined even in wartime. And look, we have to have guns to stop guns.

ROUSSEAU SHOULD HAVE HAD AN ASSAULT RIFLE lying atop her desk, loaded and ready. She’d never hit any pupils. She’d be trained, don’t you see? Now that you think about it, she should have been wearing body armor. It's perfectly clear. In the future all teachers shall be issued body armor. This is America and we believe in freedom without limits. Again, I am not being sarcastic. We can only expect safety in theaters and malls and on college campuses if every citizen has weapons within immediate reach.

We're Americans. We don’t joke about freedom. If we ban clips that hold twenty or thirty or fifty bullets, only criminals will have clips that hold enough bullets to take out an entire first grade classroom; and then our teachers will have no chance to fend off attacks by maniacal intruders (or Redcoats).

The logic is clear. Cannon don’t kill people, people kill people. If there had been a cannon in the hallway, trained on the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary School, the principal could have stopped that killer cold. James Mattioli, age 6, and Chase Kowalski, age 7, would still be alive and excited about the presents wrapped and already under the family trees. Victoria Soto, 27, who dived in front of students to shield them, allowing some to escape, might be looking forward to the holidays to rest up and recharge—since working with first graders normally requires limitless energy. Too bad she didn’t have a rifle.

Or a cannon.

I’m not angry, except with myself. Those poor children, each hit at least three times, some as many as eleven, they’d be alive if we all had more guns.

What can we do, then, to insure that these kind of tragedies don't happen again? Let's follow the lead of the strident no-limits NRA types. There are six shopping days left until Christmas. Go out and get your child’s favorite teacher an assault rifle. After all, you're either part of the solution, or you're part of the problem.

AND SAY A PRAYER FOR THE INNOCENT VICTIMS.

P. S. If anyone thinks I'm being serious read the post again. Arming teachers is a LUDICROUS idea; I thought that was crystal clear.

Cut off guns before they reach the schools.

A Timely Warning from the Mayans?

To contact us Click HERE
USUALLY, AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, Americans are too busy searching for holiday bargains (or, if they watch Fox News, worrying about losing the imaginary "War on Christmas") to focus on world events. This year it's different.

Fear is building with each passing moment as we count down to the Mayan Apocalypse, just two days away. You think the fiscal cliff is a concern? Not actually a problem. Let them raise your taxes if you're a millionaire! Bah! Not one taxpayer is going to be around to pay the bills after December 21, 2012. The planets and stars are going to align and bam!

That will be that.

We're never going to know if President Obama and Speaker John Boehner would have compromised. We'll never learn who would have been this season's winner on The Voice. The Chicago Cubs will never ever reach the World Series again.

No one else will either.

Some skeptics, of course, may still be saying, "Screw the Mayans. I'm going Christmas shopping." This writer admits to being skeptical, himself, until he received this ominous letter from his dentist, who claims to be "retiring" after 46 years in the field. Look at the date! My god, he's just trying not to create panic:



Now that you understand how short the time you, personally, have left on earth you might like to know a little about these Mayans, who somehow knew, thirteen centuries ago, that we modern folk were going to be screwed. First, the Mayans were math wizards and expert at charting stars and planets and cycles in the heavens. They built impressive temples and developed a written language. They understood the concept of "zero" at a time when our European ancestors were scratching their heads and trying to divide and multiply with Roman numerals. The Mayan people were skilled farmers, working communally to build great reservoirs and irrigation channels. They grew corn and beans and actually liked squash.

An advanced people.

They had a monetary system (involving jade and cacao beans, the stuff of chocolate). They lived in cities like Tikal, population 60,000. They traded for hundreds of miles up and down the coast of what we know as Central America and out across the Caribbean. And they computed time backwards and forwards. According to their figures the first date in human history was August 13, 3114 B. C. Or is it August 10? My history books disagree.

Wikipedia says:  August 11.

Who cares! The Mayans knew we we're doomed. They knew it wouldn't make any difference, not even if Obama kicked Boehner square in the nuts.

THEN AGAIN, MAYBE THEY WEREN'T SO SMART. Their civilization collapsed around A. D. 900; and somehow they failed to predict that.

Maybe the Mayans are wrong about December 21; but maybe they still have a warning to offer. From what we now know, as their population grew, farmers cut down all the forests and planted more and more crops. With the forest cover gone there was heavy erosion and fields produced smaller and smaller yields. According to  archaeologist Richardson Gill, when a long drought hit the Mayan homeland around A. D. 900 water tables dropped so fast, "There was nothing they could do. There was nowhere they could go. Their whole world, as they knew it, was in the throes of a burning, searing, brutal drought...There was nothing to eat. Their water reservoirs were depleted, and there was nothing to drink."

It might make you feel safer knowing the Mayans never saw their own collapse coming. Maybe we have plenty of time left. Maybe the Cubs do reach the Series in this century.

Okay, that's the moral of that story:  It's time to quit worrying and head for the mall to do some serious shopping! When you get home, maybe, turn on the television and relax and watch Fox News. At Fox News, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, fear itself and labor unions. And Muslims.

Oh, and gay marriage.

Otherwise, Fox News is like a powerful sedative. Gretchen Carlson doesn't scare fans with stories about melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels. Sean Hannity doesn't bring up altered weather patterns and wonder why the Mississippi River was almost unnavigable last summer. The weather babes at Fox aren't interested in why Superstorm Sandy packed such an unusually powerful punch when it pummeled New Jersey. Megyn Kelly doesn't care if the Ogallala aquifer, which underlies the heartland of America is being drained at a fearful rate putting farming at risk. (Even the Wall Street Journal took note of that story). No one who works for Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes is ever going to tell you there's a problem when toxic chemicals show up all over the world in women's breast milk and traces of Prozac show up in fish.

Nope. Nothing to worry about when it comes to the environment. (And did you hear:  Steve Doocy says Obama is crazy because he's pushing for solar energy too.) So, sit back and crank up the volume because Sarah Palin is coming on after a commercial break. Listen to her coo seductively, "Oh, baby, oh baby, drill me baby, drill me!"

After that, it's time to listen to Bill O'Reilly fume about the "War on Christmas" again. So, yeah, screw the Mayans.

What did they know?

Arming Teachers: A Stupid Idea

To contact us Click HERE
VICTORIA SOTO, 27, WAS BURIED THURSDAY under a cold winter sky. Soto, as you may know, was the teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary who stood in front of students in a vain attempt to save their lives.

Jack Pinto, 6, another victim, was buried on Monday. Tragically, that promising young man will never know if his favorite football team made the playoffs. He was laid to rest in his New York Giants football jersey:  Number 80, Victor Cruz. (For Jack's sake, lets hope God hates the Dallas Cowboys.)

In stricken Newtown, Connecticut, Jack's best friend penned this sorrowing letter:



And now, with twenty-six fresh graves filled or to fill, what do the most strident gun-rights advocates want to discuss? What do Second Amendment absolutists (those who say the right to bear arms cannot be infringed) suggest that we do to protect innocents like Jack Pinto?

Of course! We arm people like Ms. Soto. We arm teachers.

Why is this idea stupid, you ask? As a former teacher, allow me to explain. First and foremost, it won't work. It won't guarantee the kind of safety our children deserve. And we, as a nation, can no longer afford the luxury of wishful thinking where these kind of attacks are concerned. We owe the victims of this horrendous attack better. We owe it to all of our children, both living and dead, to face reality and craft sensible national policies. Here are a few reasons why arming teachers is an absurd place to start:

1. If we place a gun in the office, ready to a principal's hand (or to the hand of some other school defender), as some absolutists are now suggesting, what happens if the heavily-armed intruder shoots his way in through a different doorway?

2. What if two maniacal killers are involved? Then one defender isn't enough (See: Columbine, 1999).

3. If the psychopath has a semi-automatic weapon clearly the defender will require (at minimum) a semi-automatic weapon. How exactly does this gun vs. gun strategy play out if the attack occurs at the start of the school day, or during a class change, when halls are crowded with children? How many bullets do the absolutists want to see flying around our schools?

4. How do we protect kids on a playground during recess if a psycho shows up and starts spraying fire? (That's already been done. See:  Stockton, 1989)

5. What if the psycho lurks by the roadside and waits in the morning until a bus loaded with children passes by? What if he opens fire at that them? (Same idea:  end of the day.)

6. What if the killer forces his way in through the kitchen and into the cafeteria at lunch? (Arm cooks with guns? At least they already have knives.)

7. How do we defend if the perpetrator calls in a fake bomb threat and the children empty out onto the lawn; and then he arrives to start shooting?

8. What do we do if the psycho pulls up in a car in front of any school, which is exactly what happened at Sandy Hook, and jumps out and starts shooting as students enter some morning?  (Same idea, exiting:  afternoon.)

9. What if the perpetrator parks his car, walks up to just about any first floor classroom in America and starts firing through windows?

10. Suppose a killer approaches a high school soccer field during the first period of a tie game and starts blasting? (Same idea: track meet, softball game, tennis match, marching band or cheer leading practice.)

AND LET'S NOT FORGET PSYCHO PLAN B:  What if the killer can't get into the school. What if he heads for a college campus, a theater, a Sikh temple or mall in frustration? (We do know that's been done, do we not?)

If the idea of arming teachers is dumb, what about doubling down on the dumb? After all, the Second Amendment is sacred, according to absolutists, and all gun-control is wrong. What choice, then, do we have other than to arm everyone in schools? Every teacher and, yes, the nurse too. Drop that mop, Mr. Janitor.

From now on you're patrolling the halls with an Uzi.

Is that really the sad state our nation is in? Are we too cowardly and too blind to face hard American-made facts? Can't we at least be honest about where we stand? If we have 300 million guns in private hands and those aren't enough, then guns for all educators is but a first tiny step. Next we need to issue every public school employee body armor. And there's the whole idea of child-size bullet-proof vests for kids to consider.

If we can't pass reasonable legislation, hell, let's just give the fuck up and armor the buses! Place guards on board, riding shotgun beside drivers, like stagecoaches of yore. Seal those first floor windows. Cancel outdoor school activities. (Maybe forever.) Come on, we want kids to be safe. So let's create schools that resemble bunkers. Screw it. Let's add 12-foot high walls. Let's require our teachers (when they're not preparing for standardized tests) to take turns guarding the perimeter instead of wasting time grading and creating lesson plans.

Maybe we need moats.

A conservative friend of mine suggested recently that I should stop "prattling on" about gun control. Maybe I am. Prattling on. I don't think so. I think I'm just pissed because Jesse Lewis, on the day he was murdered, told his father in an excited voice before heading to school, "Dad, this is going to be the best Christmas ever." I'm pissed because that little boy believed what he said and we as a nation allowed a killer to prove him wrong. I'm pissed because Ms. Soto, possessed of "captivating blue eyes," is dead. I'm pissed because Grace McDonnell is no longer with us and can never follow her dreams. I'm pissed to know that Anne Marie Murphy, another teacher at Sandy Hook, died cradling Dylan Hockley, 6, in her arms.

I'm pissed because all of them died in a "firestorm of bullets."

In the wake of great tragedy, is hard to imagine that gun-toting absolutists refuse to admit that it's an indictment of a gun-loving culture if teachers and children are swept away in a "firestorms of bullets." Like mechanical men, they keep repeating a single refrain:  "My Second Amendment rights cannot be infringed. My. Rights. Cannot. Be. Infringed."

So let's follow their logic and end with a look at the amendment in question:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Clearly, the rights of gun owners are sacred. Clearly, they cannot be infringed. Clearly, to protect our freedoms the Founding Fathers understood that what was needed was a well-regulated militia. Got all that? We need armed citizens to repel foreign invasions. Check. And to shoot back at government oppressors. (There's a strong element of anti-Obama paranoia at play in the minds of a number of absolutists.) Sure. There are already 300 million guns; but that's not enough, even though it's pretty much one for every adult in America.

In other words, we need to man up. A modern militia--even though the militia no longer exists--would logically require firepower. (You can argue, and should, that the National Guard is now our militia; but then you get stuck, because they already have their own guns.) Ergo: a private citizen, following absolutist logic, who thinks he's part of an imaginary militia, and thinks he's getting ready to repulse imaginary invaders (because, frankly, the U. S. Navy can't do it) or boogie man oppressors (Muslim Obama), has a god-given right to purchase any kind of weapon his heart might desire. And come to think about it that should include a .50 caliber machine gun, an M1A1 tank and an F-16 fighter jet if they want one.

SEE, THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS SACROSANCT. S we do the next best thing. We put ourselves in position to brag to foreign visitors (of the non-invading type), "Look, here in America, we build schools that double as forts!"

We owe Grace McDonnell and the others better than this.

China's National People's Congress May Boast More Millionaires and Billionaires Than Any Other Legislative Body on Earth

To contact us Click HERE
An amazing piece, at the Wall Street Journal, "Defying Mao, Rich Chinese Crash the Communist Party":

When the Communist Party elite gathered last month to anoint China's new leaders, seven of the nation's richest people occupied coveted seats in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

Wang Jianlin of Dalian Wanda Group, worth an estimated $10.3 billion and the recent buyer of U.S. cinema chain AMC Entertainment Holdings, took one of the chairs. So did Liang Wengen, with an estimated fortune of $7.3 billion, whose construction-equipment maker Sany Heavy Industry Co. competes with Caterpillar Inc. Zhou Haijiang, a clothing mogul with an estimated $1.3 billion family fortune, also had a seat. As members of the Communist Party Congress, all three had helped endorse the new leadership.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

China has been grappling of late with political and social tension over its murky policy-making process and its growing income disparity. The party has been especially sensitive this year during the leadership change about revelations about fortunes amassed by the offspring of political leaders, known as "princelings," by leaders of state businesses and by other politically connected people. Many ordinary Chinese blame high prices, poor quality food and pollution on guanshang guojie—meaning, roughly, officials in bed with businessmen.

As political families move into business, private tycoons are entering the political sphere—although precisely what is driving that isn't clear. Other Chinese business leaders have cultivated relationships with party chiefs without entering politics themselves. But the Journal's analysis showed that people appearing on Hurun's rich list who also served in the legislature increased their wealth more quickly than the average member of the list.

Seventy-five people who appeared on the rich list from 2007 to 2012 served in China's legislature during that period. Their fortunes grew by 81%, on average, during that period, according to Hurun. The 324 list members with no national political positions over that period saw their wealth grow by 47%, on average, according to an analysis the firm ran for the Journal.

The contradictions of communism. The Chinese political system is one of the world's biggest ideological frauds going. It's all about keeping the elite in power and suppressing the slightest bit of opposition to the regime.

A Weaker Tea Party?

To contact us Click HERE
Here's the headline from yesterday's New York Times front page: "Sidestepping Fiscal Showdown, Weaker Tea Party Narrows Focus."

The main thrust of the piece is to brush off the tea party as an irrelevant "fringe" movement following Obama's reelection and internal divisions among prominent organizations. There are indeed problems, but by no means is the tea party finished as a movement. The congressional elections saw some significant tea party victories and the tea partiers will no doubt have a strong voice in 2013, as their bread-and-butter issues of limited government and fiscal restraint prove more relevant than ever.

Note too that the tea party isn't so much a protest movement any more as it is a political tendency seeking to place activists into positions of power at all levels of government. I love the protests, but that energy has been increasingly channeled into electoral activities and organization. Leslie Eastman comments on that, at Legal Insurrection, "Tea Party tidal surge, not tsunami." And a local example is conservative activist Mike Munzing, who I first met at tea party rallies in 2009. He was elected to the Aliso Viejo City Council in November. A number of other local tea partiers either ran or were elected to the Orange County GOP Central Committee in recent years. Basically, the movement helped generate a mass of activists moving into formal political organizations.

Having said all that, the latest high profile conflicts at FreedomWorks are like catnip to the liberty-haters on the left. The Other McCain has the story with lots of links, "The Bloody Mess at FreedomWorks."

Either way, it's best not fall for the Democrat Media Complex's operation demoralize narrative. Taking back the country will require lots more activists to redouble their efforts at all the forms of grassroots participation. There's going to be ups and downs. Ignore these stupid memes about a "weaker tea party."

Zero Dark Feinstein

To contact us Click HERE
At the Wall Street Journal, "When a Hollywood script is more accurate than Senate Intelligence":

'Zero Dark Thirty," the film from director Kathryn Bigelow that opened this month, is garnering rave reviews for its unblinking portrayal of what it took the United States to track and kill Osama bin Laden. But a trio of Beltway critics are all thumbs down.

They would be Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Senator John McCain of John McCain. "We write to express our deep disappointment with the movie Zero Dark Thirty," the three wrote in a recent letter to Sony Pictures. "We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden."

You know it's a bad day in America when Hollywood seems to have a better grip on intelligence issues than the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the top two Members at Armed Services. The film depicts the "enhanced interrogation techniques," or EITs, used on the detainees held at the CIA's so-called black sites, and hints that the interrogations provided at least some of the information that led to bin Laden's killing.

What Ms. Bigelow intended by depicting the EITs is not for us to explain: This is an action flick, not a Ken Burns documentary. Yet the mere suggestion that such techniques paid crucial intelligence dividends—as attested by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden, among many others—has sent Mrs. Feinstein and her colleagues into paroxysms of indignation. They even have a 5,000-plus-page study that purports to prove her case.

We say "purports" because, so far, hardly anyone outside the Senate Intelligence Committee has laid eyes on this white whale. The report began four years ago as a largely bipartisan effort to examine the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs....

As for the report's methods, we got a taste of them in April when Sens. Feinstein and Levin issued a statement denouncing claims by former senior officer Jose Rodriguez that coercive interrogation techniques were in fact effective.

"CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier [Ahmed al-Kuwaiti] from detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques," they write in one characteristically slippery passage. Yet there's no small difference between knowing some piece of information and knowing why that piece may be significant.

"In the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, waterboarding produced misinformation," journalist Mark Bowden noted in an interview with the Daily Caller about the hunt for al-Kuwaiti, whose discovery ultimately led the CIA to bin Laden's Abbottabad hideaway. But Mr. Bowden also notes that "in this case the lie, contrasting so sharply with other detainee statements, actually proved helpful."

Mr. Bowden, by the way, is an opponent of coercive interrogations and a sympathetic observer of the Obama Administration who nonetheless can distinguish a moral objection from a practical one....

One day, perhaps, some of our liberal friends will acknowledge that the real world is stuffed with the kinds of hard moral choices that "Zero Dark Thirty" so effectively depicts. Until then, they can bask in the easy certitudes of a report that, whatever it contains, deserves never to be read.

Right. And compare that to the excitable Andrew Sullivan, "The Zero Dark Debate, Ctd."

America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption

To contact us Click HERE
The January/February issue of Foreign Affairs is now available online. I just finished reading Fareed Zakaria's marquee essay, "Can America Be Fixed? The New Crisis of Democracy." While I disagree little on the problems we face, I differ substantially on the remedies he identifies. (And my respect for the man has plummeted over the years amid his increasingly predictable progressive sensibilities, but especially of late because of the allegations against him this year of plagiarism, for which he acknowledged and apologized for publicly, with permanent damage to his reputation.)

The article is gated but a quick summary and block quotes are sufficient for the purposes here. Zakaria sees the fiscal cliff stalemate as a signal of our political immobility. The gridlock we're facing means that the political establishment once again is delaying needed reforms on some of the biggest problems facing the country, most notably for Zakaria infrastructure and entitlements. The fatal flaw of the piece is that Zakaria's a hopeless advocate for expanding the size and scope of government. He actually offers an excellent discussion of the entitlement problem, but he refuses to see any role for markets and for the possibility of scaling back government commitments. His biggest problem is on infrastructure. Again, while he puts his finger on the problem quite deftly, he ignores some facts that make his case problematic --- one of the biggest being the fact that the U.S. spent nearly $1 trillion in "infrastructure" and "investment" in the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus legislation, and the country has virtually nothing to show for it in terms of long-term economic growth. Indeed, the administration's stimulus was a crony capitalist boondoggle that will likely be repeated again and again if the so-called investments Zakaria proposes are to indeed become public policy. In any case, some key block quotes. Here's a bit on the problems identified in the paper:

As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge -- the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century. The focus in Washington now is on taxing and cutting; it should be on reforming and investing. The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve....

Is there a new crisis of democracy? Certainly, the American public seems to think so. Anger with politicians and institutions of government is much greater than it was in 1975. According to American National Election Studies polls, in 1964, 76 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "You can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time." By the late 1970s, that number had dropped to the high 40s. In 2008, it was 30 percent. In January 2010, it had fallen to 19 percent.

Commentators are prone to seeing the challenges of the moment in unnecessarily apocalyptic terms. It is possible that these problems, too, will pass, that the West will muddle through somehow until it faces yet another set of challenges a generation down the road, which will again be described in an overly dramatic fashion. But it is also possible that the public is onto something. The crisis of democracy, from this perspective, never really went away; it was just papered over with temporary solutions and obscured by a series of lucky breaks. Today, the problems have mounted, and yet American democracy is more dysfunctional and commands less authority than ever -- and it has fewer levers to pull in a globalized economy. This time, the pessimists might be right.

And here's the key bit on "infrastructure investment":

If the case for reform is important, the case for investment is more urgent. In its annual study of competitiveness, the World Economic Forum consistently gives the United States poor marks for its tax and regulatory policies, ranking it 76th in 2012, for example, on the "burden of government regulations." But for all its complications, the American economy remains one of the world's most competitive, ranking seventh overall -- only a modest slippage from five years ago. In contrast, the United States has dropped dramatically in its investments in human and physical capital. The WEF ranked American infrastructure fifth in the world a decade ago but now ranks it 25th and falling. The country used to lead the world in percentage of college graduates; it is now ranked 14th. U.S. federal funding for research and development as a percentage of GDP has fallen to half the level it was in 1960 -- while it is rising in countries such as China, Singapore, and South Korea. The public university system in the United States -- once the crown jewel of American public education -- is being gutted by budget cuts.

The modern history of the United States suggests a correlation between investment and growth. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government spent over five percent of GDP annually on investment, and the economy boomed. Over the last 30 years, the government has been cutting back; federal spending on investment is now around three percent of GDP annually, and growth has been tepid. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence has noted, the United States escaped from the Great Depression not only by spending massively on World War II but also by slashing consumption and ramping up investment. Americans reduced their spending, increased their savings, and purchased war bonds. That boost in public and private investment led to a generation of postwar growth. Another generation of growth will require comparable investments.

The problems of reform and investment come together in the case of infrastructure. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country's infrastructure a grade of D and calculated that repairing and renovating it would cost $2 trillion. The specific number might be an exaggeration (engineers have a vested interest in the subject), but every study shows what any traveler can plainly see: the United States is falling badly behind. This is partly a matter of crumbling bridges and highways, but it goes well beyond that. The U.S. air traffic control system is outdated and in need of a $25 billion upgrade. The U.S. energy grid is antique, and it malfunctions often enough that many households are acquiring that classic symbol of status in the developing world: a private electrical generator. The country's drinking water is carried through a network of old and leaky pipes, and its cellular and broadband systems are slow compared with those of many other advanced countries. All this translates into slower growth. And if it takes longer to fix, it will cost more, as deferred maintenance usually does.

Spending on infrastructure is hardly a panacea, however, because without careful planning and oversight, it can be inefficient and ineffective. Congress allocates money to infrastructure projects based on politics, not need or bang for the buck. The elegant solution to the problem would be to have a national infrastructure bank that is funded by a combination of government money and private capital. Such a bank would minimize waste and redundancy by having projects chosen by technocrats on merit rather than by politicians for pork. Naturally, this very idea is languishing in Congress, despite some support from prominent figures on both sides of the aisle.

The same is the case with financial reforms: the problem is not a lack of good ideas or technical feasibility but politics. The politicians who sit on the committees overseeing the current alphabet soup of ineffective agencies are happy primarily because they can raise money for their campaigns from the financial industry. The current system works better as a mechanism for campaign fundraising than it does as an instrument for financial oversight.

In 1979, the social scientist Ezra Vogel published a book titled Japan as Number One, predicting a rosy future for the then-rising Asian power. When The Washington Post asked him recently why his prediction had been so far off the mark, he pointed out that the Japanese economy was highly sophisticated and advanced, but, he confessed, he had never anticipated that its political system would seize up the way it did and allow the country to spiral downward.

Vogel was right to note that the problem was politics rather than economics. All the advanced industrial economies have weaknesses, but they also all have considerable strengths, particularly the United States. They have reached a stage of development, however, at which outmoded policies, structures, and practices have to be changed or abandoned. The problem, as the economist Mancur Olson pointed out, is that the existing policies benefit interest groups that zealously protect the status quo. Reform requires governments to assert the national interest over such parochial interests, something that is increasingly difficult to do in a democracy.

Every now and then we see a new story on some collapsed bridge tragedy or massive urban flooding from busted water mains or broken levees, and on cue progressives start wagging their fingers about how we've got to start spending on infrastructure. I don't research this area but my regular reading on the politics of the stimulus isn't very reassuring. The administration's push for "investments" was mostly about the Democrat politics of job creation, and that didn't turn out so well. Conn Carroll has a good example, "$787 Billion in Stimulus, Zero Jobs “Created or Saved”." And while Zakaria's obsessed with government spending as "investmnent," there's little in the record of the last couple years that recommends doubling-down on it. See Romina Boccia, "New Stimulus Plan Same as the Old: Spend, Spend, Spend." And notice while Zakaria minimizes the corruption inherent in "infrastructure" spending as possibly "inefficient and ineffective," the facts of the past few years are devastating to his case. See Veronique de Rugy, "Stimulus Cronyism." And Michelle Malkin, "Obama's $50 Billion Union Infrastructure Boondoggle."

The United States is not some developing country that's going to be eviscerated by "draconian" spending cuts or devastated by some horrible "austerity package" that leaves the poor to fend for themselves. That's Krugmanite scare-mongering. We need to unleash the natural dynamism of the American economy. To put it as plainly as possible: We need robust and sustained economic growth, in the 4 or 5 percent range. We need to increase incentives for private investment. We need to reduce regulations and taxes on business job creators. And we need to rely on the system of federalism to shift real infrastructure investment from the federal to state governments. This isn't rocket science. The solutions to America's economic problems are self-evident. And the political crisis is largely one of a dramatically change American electoral and political demographic. As the population base of the Democrat Party comes to increasingly favor policies of dependency, the productive, working sectors of the economy are required to bear a heavier load to keep everything afloat. Tea party Republicans, bless them, are resisting higher taxes because they know that'll be more of the same. As noted here yesterday, President Obama's not interested in fixing our politics or avoiding a recession should we go over the fiscal cliff. He's obsessed with punishing the most productive members of society in furtherance of his class warfare agenda of reducing inequality and promoting social justice. As long as we have one party that is objectively uninterested in growing the economy to create a rising tide that lifts all boats we will continue to have a crisis of political immobility. The electorate can fix the problem by choosing a government not fatally infected with cronyism and corruption. Both parties are implicated, although getting the Democrats out of power is the first order of business. We need to restore our faith in liberty and markets and unleash the innate innovation and dynamism of the individual. Our crisis is one of big government. Obama hasn't even been sworn in for a second term and its already clear that the public was duped in November. We must keep on with the hard work of real reform, which is what the tea party has represented, smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Without that we'll continue to stagnate and ultimately perish like the beached whale on the sand at Barbra Streisand's oceanfront estate.

BONUS: Zakaria dismisses the late Samuel Huntington's work in this report from the '70s-era Trilateral Commission: "The Crisis of Democracy." But our prospects for reform would be immeasurably greater if had more voices like Huntington's a less of those like Zakaria's.

The Timely's and the Godsend's

To contact us Click HERE
The year before J1 was born, we bought the house we still live in today. I remember my sister telling my mother "Aw, he bought her a dollhouse.", and that's exactly what it is. She, referring to my dollhouse, sits proudly in an old neighborhood, that's nice and flat, and is covered in a canopy of Oak and Walnut tree's that are older than she is.
When J1 was 18 months old, he met his lifelong friend Z. They met at what I like to call "Baby Harvard" which is the best child care center in the city. The center is housed up on the hill, where both Z's mother and I work. Soon after we met, they moved their family to my neighborhood, and our kids have gone to all the same schools. They are the Timely family.
A year or so later, the Godsend's moved into the old yellow and white Victorian across the street. The house had been broken into two units for decades, and the Godsend's, with all their children, grandchildren, and extended family, restored it to it's original glory of a single family home.
Together, our village has weathered many storms, both figuratively and literally, and we've all been there for each other. Recently, the Godsend's announced that they would soon depart our sweet village, and while I know that change is the only constant, it's a day I've always dreaded.
Once, when we were teenagers, my sister told me she dreamt that I had gone down the drain in the kitchen sink as a big blob of slime. No surprise there, but then she said I suddenly flew back out as a butterfly. I've never forgotten that dream.
I think I'm ready to talk about the long storm I've weathered, because I believe I'm coming out the other side. But this I know for sure, I would have never survived without the support of my village. And for me to tell these stories, you've got to know who the Timely's and Godsend's are, because none of it could have happened without them.

U.S. Policy is Making Syria Into an Anti-Western, Antisemitic Islamist State

To contact us Click HERE
From Barry Rubin, at PJ Media, "Proof of a Scandal":

In his article “The Revolt of Islam in Syria” (Jerusalem Post, December 12), Jonathan Spyer — senior fellow at the GLORIA Center — points out compelling information about the new Western-backed leadership in Syria.

The bottom line: if this is Syria’s new government, then Syria now has an Islamist regime.

This is happening with the knowledge and collaboration of the Obama administration and a number of European governments. It is a catastrophe, and one that’s taking place due to the deliberate decisions of President Barack Obama and other Western leaders. Even if one rationalizes the Islamist takeover in Egypt as due to internal events, this one is U.S.-made.

As Spyer points out, U.S. and European policy can be summarized as follows:

To align with and strengthen Muslim Brotherhood-associated elements, while painting Salafi forces as the sole real Islamist danger. At the same time, secular forces are ignored or brushed aside.

The new regime, recognized by the United States and most European countries as the legitimate leadership of the Syrian people, is the Syrian National Coalition, which has also established a military council.

Spyer’s detailed evidence for these arguments — much of which comes from raw wire service reports, for which praise is due to Reuters in this case — is undeniable. And if we know about these things, there is no doubt that the highest level of the U.S. government does as well.

Why is this happening? Because Obama and others believe that they can moderate the Muslim Brotherhood and this will tame the Salafists, despite massive evidence to the contrary. This is going to be the biggest foreign policy blunder of the last century, and the cost for it will be high. It should be stressed: such a strategy is totally unnecessary; the alternatives have been ignored; and the real moderates are being betrayed...

Continue reading.

Well, they don't call him President Clusterf-k for nothing.

Do You Believe the NRA's 'Grip on Congress' is Threatened?

To contact us Click HERE
I got a pretty good laugh out of this front-page story at yesterday's Los Angeles Times, "Gun lobby's grip on Congress threatened":

WASHINGTON — The gun-control debate sharpened Tuesday as President Obama backed an effort to revive the assault weapons ban spearheaded by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is poised to have a powerful new role as the head of the Senate committee overseeing gun laws.

Calls for federal gun restrictions were mounting following last week's shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. — even from lawmakers who had rejected them in the past. The National Rifle Assn. and its allies have successfully kept such efforts at bay for years, but the slayings of 20 children have roiled the politics of gun control and now challenge the gun lobby's hold on Capitol Hill.

I doubt it. The president's task-force on firearms is supposedly designed to freeze the politics of gun control. But even if it doesn't I don't think there's much support for gun control beyond a couple of token measures to make the left's extremists happy. We'll see. A good indicator going forward will be the direction the NRA takes in its press conference on Friday. The group exists to protect the rights of gun owners. It's not going to take all these pathetic attacks lying down. Word has it that the group's going to hammer mental health failures and the pop culture's glorification of violence. This oughta be good.

Smirking Spectator? Guilty as Charged

To contact us Click HERE
Folks must be sure to read this piece at Popehat, "Professor Loomis and the NRA: A Story In Which EVERYONE Annoys Me." (At Memeorandum.)

What defenders of Erik Loomis conveniently overlook is his long history of violent death-wish rhetoric spewed at his political opponents. Should he be fired for this? Of course not. But that's not to say I'm not amused by the whole thing, a fascinating spectacle, to be sure. Here's the quote I'm referencing:

I support, without qualification, people writing about Professor Loomis. I find his expression contemptible. But I also find the efforts to get him fired or arrested contemptible, and I find it highly regrettable that some blogs are, at the most charitable interpretation, acting as smirking spectators to that effort. The effort is not without cost, even if neither the police nor the University take action. Trying to get a professor fired for clearly protected speech promotes and contributes to the culture of censorship in higher education that FIRE fights and that Greg Lukianoff exposed persuasively in his recent book "Unlearning Liberty."

Perhaps I'd be more bothered by efforts to get Loomis fired if I hadn't been on the receiving end of identical efforts by his co-bloggers at Lawyers, Guns and Money and by his ideological allies in the progressive ASFL fever swamps. Indeed, I almost fell off my chair laughing at this mewling piece of "free-speech" grandstanding at Crooked Timber, "Statement on Erik Loomis." You'll notice in the comments that Scott Eric Kaufman "signs" the statement in solidarity, which is about as hypocritical as one can be ---- considering that the f-ker tried to get me fired, not for threatening him, but for simply pointing out that he loves using profanity in his teaching. There was some history of flame wars before that, but my post nailing Kaufman bragging about dropping f-bombs during lectures really must have hit a nerve. The next thing you know the guy was libeling me at my college (smearing me as a pornographer and sexual harasser), posing as a concern troll with the most demonic intentions imaginable. None of these same academic and progressive idiots said a word in my defense at the time, because they all hate me with the passion of the 1000 burning suns. But when one of their own idiots gets caught in the crossfire (metaphor) ---- and Popehat does indeed slam Loomis as an anti-free speech lunkhead --- they get all stiffer than a black-stallion steroid-pumped homosexual erection. These people are the epitome of double-standards and partisan posturing --- an example of hypocrisy also hammered at the Popehat post.

Here's my post on SEK: "The Lies of Scott Eric Kaufman — Leftist Hate-Blogger Sought to Silence Criticism With Libelous Campaign of Workplace Harassment."

And as regular readers know full well, Walter James Casper III used his blog, with his co-bloggers, to post my contact information and exhort his readers to contact my college. See: "Intent to Annoy and the Fascist Hate-Blogging Campaign of Walter James Casper III." And don't miss: "Roundup on Progressive Campaign of Workplace Intimidation and Harassment."

When you see the idiot progs get all bent out of shape like a bunch of homos, be reminded of Michelle Malkin's comments:

So, it’s come to this: Advocating beheadings, beatings, and mass murder of peaceful Americans to pay for the sins of a soulless madman. But because the advocates of violence fashion themselves champions of non-violence and because they inhabit the hallowed worlds of Hollywood, academia, and the Democratic Party, it’s acceptable?

Blood-lusting hate speech must not get a pass just because it comes out of the mouths of the protected, anti-gun class.

No one is as vile as these people. Loomis is just roadkill in the partisan wars, and he won't be the last on either side. Is it decent or fair? Perhaps not, but not so many people are as stupid as Loomis the Lumberjack. No one's as stupid to violently rattle off the death chants while still an untenured assistant professor at a research university. "Dim bulb" is charitable.

Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain's having a field day with Loomis, to the hilarious benefit of the conservative 'sphere. See: "#Metaphor: Academics Sign Their Own Death Warrants by Defending Loomis."

Screw these people. They reap what they sow. When they start calling out the workplace harassers among their own partisans maybe I'll give a f-k about stooges like Loomis.

BONUS: From Glenn Reynolds:

I KNOW I HAVEN’T: Don’t get too excited about Professor Loomis. “Professor Loomis’ vivid tweets are not actionable threats. That is to say, they aren’t ‘true threats’ outside the protection of the First Amendment.”

That’s right. They’re just hate-filled “eliminationist rhetoric” of the sort that lefties are always accusing people on the right of, but seem to engage in rather a lot themselves. Not a firing offense, but certainly worthy of widespread mockery.

RTWT.

Jake Tapper Joins CNN As Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent

To contact us Click HERE
That's great news. I've been recently posting ABC News World Tonight segments with Tapper. He's an excellent journalist who defies the goon stereotype of the Democrat Media Complex.

CNN reports (via Memeorandum):

Accomplished Washington journalist Jake Tapper, who has served the last four years as ABC’s senior White House correspondent and is a best-selling author, joins CNN as anchor of a new weekday program and CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, it was announced today by Ken Jautz, executive vice president of CNN/U.S.

Tapper has been a widely-respected reporter in the nation’s capital for 14 years and his most recent book, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, is currently on The New York Times best seller list. In his new role at CNN, he will be a key Washington, D.C. anchor and correspondent for CNN.

“We are thrilled to have Jake join CNN and take the helm of a brand new weekday program,” said Jautz. “Jake is an exceptional reporter and communicator, and we look forward to developing a program that takes advantage of all of his strengths, his passion and his knowledge of national issues and events.”

More at the New York Times, "Jake Tapper Leaves ABC News for CNN."

No word yet if Zucker's giving Soledad the boot. One can hope in the meantime.

The Timely's and the Godsend's

To contact us Click HERE
The year before J1 was born, we bought the house we still live in today. I remember my sister telling my mother "Aw, he bought her a dollhouse.", and that's exactly what it is. She, referring to my dollhouse, sits proudly in an old neighborhood, that's nice and flat, and is covered in a canopy of Oak and Walnut tree's that are older than she is.
When J1 was 18 months old, he met his lifelong friend Z. They met at what I like to call "Baby Harvard" which is the best child care center in the city. The center is housed up on the hill, where both Z's mother and I work. Soon after we met, they moved their family to my neighborhood, and our kids have gone to all the same schools. They are the Timely family.
A year or so later, the Godsend's moved into the old yellow and white Victorian across the street. The house had been broken into two units for decades, and the Godsend's, with all their children, grandchildren, and extended family, restored it to it's original glory of a single family home.
Together, our village has weathered many storms, both figuratively and literally, and we've all been there for each other. Recently, the Godsend's announced that they would soon depart our sweet village, and while I know that change is the only constant, it's a day I've always dreaded.
Once, when we were teenagers, my sister told me she dreamt that I had gone down the drain in the kitchen sink as a big blob of slime. No surprise there, but then she said I suddenly flew back out as a butterfly. I've never forgotten that dream.
I think I'm ready to talk about the long storm I've weathered, because I believe I'm coming out the other side. But this I know for sure, I would have never survived without the support of my village. And for me to tell these stories, you've got to know who the Timely's and Godsend's are, because none of it could have happened without them.

Semiautomatic Rifle Was Used in Attack

To contact us Click HERE
More details on the Sandy Hook Massacre, and an update to my previous report, "Ghoulish Walter James Casper III Exploits Connecticut School Massacre to Push Gun Control, Spread Lies and Disinformation."

At the Wall Street Journal, "Semiautomatic Rifle Was Used in Attack":

SANDY HOOK, Conn.—The 26 victims who were shot inside a Connecticut elementary school on Friday were each hit by more than one bullet, most of them from the high-powered semiautomatic rifle wielded by the 20-year-old suspect, the state's chief medical examiner said on Saturday.

Authorities worked into Saturday morning at a temporary morgue on the school grounds to identify the bodies, H. Wayne Carver II said, as state authorities released the names of those killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history.

On Saturday afternoon, authorities revealed the truth behind the grim numerical toll: a list of names, overwhelmingly female, heart-rendingly young. Twenty of the 26 victims in the school were just 6 or 7 years old.

"I believe they were all first-graders," Mr. Carver said.

Six adults also were killed in the school, including school psychologist Mary Jo Sherlach, the oldest victim, at age 56.

Mr. Carver said his staff would perform an autopsy Sunday on the two remaining dead in the spree: the suspect, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who took his own life at the school, and his mother, Nancy Lanza, 52, whom Mr. Lanza shot and killed in the house the two shared in town.

Mr. Lanza's body was found close to the rifle and two handguns he carried, police said, and he is believed to have taken his own life.

Continue reading.

It wasn't until today that the medical examiner could release these details, including the information on finding the suspect's body and the weapons used. As the report continues:

The forcible entry helped solve one of the many unanswered questions about the massacre Friday: how a heavily armed young man was able to pass through the locked security doors of an elementary school.

School staff members saw evidence of forced entry as they were ushered out of the school, said Mary Ann Jacob, a clerk at the school library who hid with others in a storage room during the shooting spree. As they left the building, Ms. Jacob said she saw that the plate-glass window next to the building's front door was broken.

But much remained unanswered, and much of what had been assumed in the rush of the crisis turned out to be wrong. It was incorrect, Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Connecticut State Police said, that Mr. Lanza's mother had had any connection to Sandy Hook Elementary, where early reports suggested she had been a teacher.

Law-enforcement officials initially said an assault rifle had been discovered in a car in the school's parking lot. In fact, said Mr. Carver, the medical examiner, it had been the primary weapon used in the killings.

Robert Stacy McCain live-blogged developments yesterday. In an update he mentions the dramatic shifts in what was known throughout the day, "Chris Rock Was Right":

When I got up Friday morning, live-blogging a mass murder was not part of my plan for the day. In fact, at the end of a post Friday morning about labor union violence in Michigan, I promised further developments on that story. As I was researching that, however, the TV kept updating with news about a shooting at a school in Connecticut and I figured this might be a story worth mentioning on the blog.

The original 12:15 p.m. ET post relayed reports that “three people have been wounded or injured and one person, the suspected shooter, is dead,” but added the caution that “early reports on events like this can be often be confusing and/or inaccurate.”

To say the very least.

By the time I added the first update, NBC was already reporting 20 dead and next it was 24, then 26, then 27, and all these changing numbers were coming amid a welter of confusing (and, as it turned out, largely wrong) details about the shooter, about the victims, etc. And this kept going for about six hours. Everything is still pretty sketchy, but we now have the bare-bones facts of the story.

Well, the actual facts of the story didn't matter to the radical leftists like Angie Coiro and her hate-addled followers like Walter James "Hatesac" Casper III. Indeed, it's not about "gun control" with these people. It's about literally destroying right-wing impediments to statist authoritarianism:

@damkina Because the #NRA is partnered w/ #ALEC, which is fueled by the #Koch brothers. Unending $$$. We can't tackle this in bits &pieces.
— Angie Coiro (@Angie_Coiro) December 15, 2012

RT @leftonmain: NRA Under Twitter, Facebook Attack After Shootings huff.to/U17j8V \\ Only a taste of what's coming to them & #ALEC.
— Angie Coiro (@Angie_Coiro) December 15, 2012

Yes, "Only a taste of what's coming to them."

Stalin couldn't have stated his plans for liquidation of political enemies any more clearly.

The right to bear arms guarantees citizens the individual protection against the state. That's the central liberty guarantee extant in the Second Amendment. Along with freedom of speech, it's perhaps the most important right Americans have to defend against tyranny. And the radical left would strip those rights in a split second, obliterating the civil liberties of millions of law-abiding people who had nothing to do with this massacre or any one before it. Indeed, mass shooting like Sandy Hook are possible explicitly because upstanding citizens obey the law and come to places of work and school unarmed. It's the criminals who violate those so-called gun free zone to wreak unfathomable evil. The left's policies facilitate the killing, and then these sick-fucks exploit the murders to bring about even more draconian policies that will ultimately bring about even more killing. It's the progressive death loop of ever-expanding gun confiscation. This is the evil the Walter James Casper III tweeted out yesterday in his utterly inhumane rush to politically capitalize on the deaths of those innocent children, 16 of them just 6 years old. This is why decent, intelligent and God-fearing people stand up for the truth. This is why decent, law-abiding Americans repudiate the left's lies. They know where it leads. They know the left's policies will bring the reign of terror and the camps. The piles of bodies stacked like cord wood is the "taste of what's coming." The leftists just lay it out there for everyone to see. It would be shocking but we've seen this play before and the millions of piled corpses before the final curtain.

Stand tall against it. Stand for liberty. Stand against the left's program of death and destruction of the individual.

Madness, Deinstitutionalization and Murder

To contact us Click HERE
From Clayton Cramer's research paper at The Federalist Society (via Althouse):

Studies in New York and Connecticut from the 1920s through the 1940s showed a much lower arrest rate for the mentally ill. In an era when involuntary commitment was relatively easy, those who were considered a danger to themselves or others would be hospitalized at the first signs of serious mental illness. The connection between insanity and crime was apparent, and the society took a precautionary approach. Mentally ill persons who were not hospitalized were those not considered a danger to others. This changed as deinstitutionalization took effect.

Be sure to read it all. For example:

Patrick Purdy, a mentally ill drifter, used his Social Security Disability payments to buy guns, while having a series of run-ins with the law. After one suicide attempt in jail in 1987, a mental health evaluation concluded that he was “a danger to his health and others.” In January 1989, Purdy went onto a schoolyard in Stockton, California with an AK-47 rifle, murdered five children and wounded twenty-nine others, before taking his own life.

Lots more examples like that at the link, but Purdy's is interesting. His crimes led to the passage of the federal assault weapons ban in 1994 (which expired in 2004). The left always uses these horrific killings to take away guns, and the media's working hard now to exploit Sandy Hook for the same purposes. See: "Media Sets Gun Control Narrative, Shuts Down Mental Health Debate."

 RELATED: At The Other McCain, "Guns Don’t Kill People …"

Connecticut Killer's Mother Taught Him How to Shoot

To contact us Click HERE
This story's at the New York Times, "Killer's Mother, His First Victim, Was a Gun Enthusiast, Friends Say" (via Memeorandum), and Telegraph UK, "Connecticut school massacre: Gunman's mother taught him to shoot."

She loved her guns, apparently, which is fine. But notice this bizarre and internally contradictory passage at the Telegraph's piece:

The killings have once again pushed America’s lax gun laws to the top of the political agenda. It was claimed last night that he had even tried to bolster his arsenal by buying another gun on Tuesday — three days before his murderous assault — but was refused because he did not have a “proper” permit.

The authors didn't think that through, eh? Connecticut's gun laws are not "lax," a point made even more obvious in the case of the suspect, who was turned down for another weapon by those very same not-so-lax state gun laws.

More here: "Semiautomatic Rifle Was Used in Attack."

Tragedy and Exploitation – the Progressive Way

To contact us Click HERE
I watched "Face the Nation" earlier. All the panelists were exploiting the tragedy to push for more gun control, with host Bob Schieffer being the most aggressive of them all, even broadcasting a big gun-control editorial at the bottom of the hour. It's really amazing to listen to this. Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer suggested the country was ready for action since Sandy Hook was "the tipping point" in the so-called national conversation. Surprisingly, Schumer sounded at times reasonable, especially when he slammed idiot progressives for wanting to take away Americans' guns. Here's the segment with Schumer's comments, "Is it time for tougher gun laws?" Also on the show was the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. Over the top, he said this massacre was the nation's "new 9/11" (and folks can just ponder the mind-bogging, incommensurable obscenities dripping from that remark). And what gun control love fest would be complete without the despicable "big thinker" David Frum, who befouled himself with a disgusting series of comments over the past few days. Frum's an objectively bad person and few have topped his inhuman posturing on this, and that's saying a lot.

In any case, here's Derek Hunter, at Townhall, "Tragedy and Exploitation – the Progressive Way":

I’ve said before how progressives will exploit anyone and anything to advance their agenda, but I’d always thought there was a line, somewhere, of decency they wouldn’t cross. I was wrong.

With the blood of the victims still wet, progressives began their call for gun control. They had no idea if the guns were purchased legally (they were, and stolen from the first murder victim, the killer’s mother), what kind of guns they were (they were pistols, not “assault weapons,” though a semi-automatic rifle was found, unused, in the killer’s car), or even if the killer was in custody or dead (there were stories of a hunt for a second shooter) before they succumbed to the siren call of their agenda.

Michael Moore, noted tragedy profiteer, took to Twitter with “Only minutes away from pundits & politicians say, "This isn't the time to talk about gun control." Really? When is that moment?”

A short time later he followed up with “The NRA hates freedom. They don't want you to have the freedom to send your children to school & expect them to come home alive.”

No fiction writer could do the sickness of that man justice.

But Moore wasn’t alone, David Frum was his usual self and joined a chorus of his fellow progressives that included Piers Morgan, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and nearly the entire homepage of The Huffington Post in calling for more gun control.

Actress Rashida Jones tweeted, “Gun control is our only road to freedom. Freedom from the fear of senselessly losing children. I'm so saddened. WE NEED LAWS NOW.”

The stupidity of these people is self-evident. States with the most freedom to own and carry guns have the lowest crime rates. Meanwhile, cities such as Chicago, where it’s illegal to own a gun, have the most gun violence.

But although the side of liberty has the statistics, progressives play on emotion. Facts don’t matter in a world of crying children, and progressives know it. A complicated issue is offered a simple solution that appeals to the feeling of helplessness and promises to alleviate it. It’s a tactic used by despots throughout history.

Actually, Hunter is only partially correct on the weapons used. We didn't know that the Bushmaster was used until yesterday, when the medical examiner issued a report on the findings from the crime scene. Initial police reports said only that two handguns were used. But Hunter is right to note that the facts don't matter to the despicable gun-confiscation leftists. Just to mention that the gunman may have had a semiautomatic rifle was enough for radical leftists to launch the most heinous campaign of lies and disinformation. These people are depraved. As Hunter continues:

The president was reserved and presidential in his remarks, and the White House said this is not the time to press an agenda (we’ll see how long that lasts). But their allies would have none of it. Progressive activists and their fellow travellers in the media have a storied history of dancing on graves to advance their agenda, but rarely have they danced so gleefully on such tiny graves yet to be dug. Time will tell which argument wins the day, but I have my suspicions. As President Obama’s former chief of staff once famously said, “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.”

Dancing on the graves. The blood hadn't dried and horrible, horrible progressive ghouls were demanding immediate action on gun control in Congress. Never let a crisis go to waste for these people, even before families are able to collect their loved ones. Godless and inhumane. Progressives are destroying this country right before our eyes. Don't let them. Stand for decency. Stand for liberty. Stand for reason and what is right, all that is the exact opposite of what the authoritarian collectivist left is pushing.