How fitting that the same weekend the White House releases a photo of the president shooting skeet, the Washington Post publishes this fine Joel Achenbach profile of a gun nut, and yes, I respect our gun rights and so on, but this particular shoe fits:
(Rob) Farago didn’t used to be a gun guy. He was a car guy. He had a popular blog called the Truth About Cars. He sold it in 2009 and searched for a new consumer topic, landing on guns.
He bought his first gun a week before the debut of TheTruthAboutGuns.com. He took a firearms class. He filled out the paperwork and went through the background check to get a permit to carry a gun. He now owns 18 guns.
“Once you put a gun on, you gain situational awareness,” he says. After he bought his first gun, he says, “I felt grown up. It was like a coming-of-age thing. I felt like an adult.”
This guy, mind you, is 53 years old. But he didn’t “come of age” until he bought his first of 18 guns, maybe, what? Three years ago?
There’s lots more in the piece. It’s good to know guys like this think of people like me, who would not shoot an armed robber in a convenience store, who would not even shoot a person I caught stealing my damn TV set, as “sheep.” (They, of course, are “sheepdogs.”) And do check out this passage, when Farago goes out to eat with his buddy, another gun guy:
A couple of hours later, the two men dig into dinner at a swank Italian restaurant, both of them choosing chairs that let them face the entrance.
“Look at the way Robert and I are facing,” Kenik says. “Crime happens everywhere. There’s no place to feel safe.”
“That’s your opinion,” Farago says, distancing himself a bit.
“It’s in the back of my mind,” Kenik says.
No, I think it’s in the front of his mind. Show me a guy who feels he has to walk locked and loaded into an Italian restaurant in Providence, R.I., sit facing the door and give himself little tinglies thinking about his “situational awareness,” and I’ll show you a guy who’s going to shoot someone sooner or later, and probably sooner.
It’s more fun to laugh at how one little picture of the prez engaging in a gentlemen’s sporting activity sent the wingers into enough of a tizzy as to give Roy’s weekly roundup of the right blogosphere enough material to let him coast for a month.
Well, it was a bad weekend for shooters all around. Am I the only person who read that story and came up short with the news that the shooter, a Marine suffering from PTSD, was taken to the gun range by the deceased, who specialized in helping soldiers with PTSD. Why? Because firing guns is a good treatment for PTSD? I’d think yoga and long hikes in the great outdoors would be more effective, but what do I know?
Speaking of which, a change of subject is in order. Here are some tracks I found in my driveway after a very light snow last week:
Through some Googling, I learned this was a bounding animal, but the prints are way larger than you generally find on the suburban prairie. They were about two inches in length, which is how they caught my eye in the first place. The tracking guides suggest “members of the weasel family” as typical bounders, but again — unlikely this far from water. Thoughts?
Last bits of bloggage? Here’s John Carlisle on a typical crowd at a Detroit City Council meeting, bringing the crazy with both hands.
A cold, snowy week awaits. Let’s see how we can get through it.
Brandon said on February 4, 2013 at 2:08 am
A cold, snowy week awaits.
Not in Hawaii!
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Sherri said on February 4, 2013 at 2:32 am
Situational awareness? Those guys live in a fantasy world, and they think they have situational awareness. It’s like they walked around with basketball shoes in their backpacks ready just in case the NBA needed them to jump into the game and guard LeBron, only they couldn’t kill any innocent bystanders with sneakers.
(Incidentally, the NHL really does have emergency backup goalies – amateur players signed to one game contracts when a second goalie is needed: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/sports/hockey/31backups.html?pagewanted=all)
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ROGirl said on February 4, 2013 at 5:21 am
I wonder if the gun nuts have anything to say about this.
http://www.freep.com/article/20130204/NEWS05/302040039/Royal-Oak-to-review-suicides-at-Target-Sports-shooting-range?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE
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Linda said on February 4, 2013 at 6:01 am
I’m not sure the gun nuts would say anything about it, RO Girl. The wonderful thing about perfect certitude is that reality cannot intrude upon or destroy it. When KHOU carried the online story of Kyle’s shooting, the thread consensus was that it was a planned hit by Obama, because the Navy Seal knew too much–like Bin Laden was dead years before, and the CIA hid his body. At Free Republic, one soul ventured that maybe taking someone with PTSD to a shooting range for therapy was a bad idea. They were shot down (no pun intended) by the others on the thread, who then ripped on stupid little bureaucrats who wanted to take guns away from veterans just because they had PTSD. The morons!
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Basset said on February 4, 2013 at 7:22 am
Politics and conspiracies aside, that’s not what you would call outstanding form in the shooting pic – he needs to seat the gun lower on his shoulder and get his cheek closer to it. Unless, of course, he is really exhibiting the grand hailing distress signal of the Illuminati brotherhood or something.
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brian stouder said on February 4, 2013 at 7:33 am
The Illinois Illuminati – don’cha know!
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David C. said on February 4, 2013 at 7:39 am
Kevin Drum wrote a few articles a couple of weeks back surmising that there is a link between lower crime and lower levels of lead in the atmosphere. Now, I wonder how much gun nuttiness has to do with all the lead they are exposed to. They clean their guns and surely there is lead left in the barrel that they would be exposed to. I have a co-worker who has around 30 old lead-acid batteries in his garage so he can make his own bullets when the government outlaws buying them. I talk to the gun nuts at work, and there are a lot of them, and I wonder what universe they are living in. I certainly don’t recognize it as the same one that I live in. I sold my shotgun about 20 years ago because it was just collecting dust. I never felt the need to keep it loaded and ready for dusky marauders. But their world is full of them. They seem to be a separate, more frightened species from the one I come from and I really don’t understand them at all.
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coozledad said on February 4, 2013 at 7:52 am
A couple of hours later, the two men dig into dinner at a swank Italian restaurant, both of them choosing chairs that let them face the entrance.
“Look at the way Robert and I are facing,” Kenik says. “Crime happens everywhere. There’s no place to feel safe.”
They don’t make a gun that keeps you from eating spit. Oh, and do try the Lugioli. It’s fresh today, bitches: the kitchen staff’s got the flu.
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coozledad said on February 4, 2013 at 8:03 am
After he bought his first gun, he says, “I felt grown up. It was like a coming-of-age thing. I felt like an adult.”
Funny. That’s the way I felt about pussy.
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beb said on February 4, 2013 at 8:23 am
Using guns to treat PTSD does sound like the best approach since it’s probably the sound of guns going off that brings on the stress. Sure there’s a strain of psychiatry that holds that one must confront one’s fears to get over them, but it seems like that ought to be part of a larger treatment program and simply taking a guy out to a range for fire off a few rounds. The mother of the Newtown killer thought that teaching her troubled son to shoot would give him an outlet for his issues but it only taught him how to be a better killer.
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basset said on February 4, 2013 at 8:55 am
OK kids, Cooz wins the day, everyone else take a break…
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coozledad said on February 4, 2013 at 9:00 am
This country has come pretty far down the road of military fetishism*. The military loves itself enough without having the media and goober churches suck it off 24/7. There was a time, as recently as WWI, when snipers were regarded as murderers, by people from backgrounds as divergent as Robert Graves and Winslow Homer:
Winslow Homer’s first oil painting, which he made in 1863, when he was a twenty-six-year-old freelancer illustrating Civil War scenes for Harper’s Weekly, shows a Union sharpshooter in a tree, balancing a rifle for an imminent shot. The man’s perch is precarious. His concentration is total. Nature—soft tufts of dusky foliage, scraps of yellowish sky—attends indifferently. Decades later, Homer recalled having peered at a man through the telescopic sight of a sharpshooter’s weapon. The impression, he wrote in a letter, “struck me as being as near murder as anything I could think of in connection with the army & I always had a horror of that branch of the service.”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/08/050808craw_artworld#ixzz2JwD8Gakk
It’s beginning to sound a lot like the maundering of paramilitary vet groups infesting the Reichswehr in the twenties.
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brian stouder said on February 4, 2013 at 9:57 am
Cooz – and indeed, these same folks have already warmed up their “stabbed in the back” narrative for our departure from Iraq, and our imminent departure from Afghanistan.
One almost thinks they look upon Iran as akin to Poland/Eastern Europe – fit only to be a killing field
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adrianne said on February 4, 2013 at 10:03 am
Why, Nance, those tracks are of…an enormous hound! (Cue Sherlock Holmes theme music.)
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Judybusy said on February 4, 2013 at 10:03 am
Even though we should all just pick up our balls and go home after Cooze’s particularly splendid comments today, I offer this as a possibe,creative way to get at the gun lobby: cities taking a look at their relationships with gun manufactuers.
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Nick Eck said on February 4, 2013 at 10:11 am
“Look at the way Robert and I are facing,” Kenik says. “Crime happens everywhere. There’s no place to feel safe.”
Has anyone ever heard of the “Wyatt Earp Syndrome”? I was originally told that it is the macho behavior sometimes displayed by a rookie cop to assert the new found authority he feels with a gun and a badge. This sounds like the civilian vigilante version of that mindset.
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Dave said on February 4, 2013 at 10:28 am
Not to be contentious, but I thought it was the “Wild Bill Hickock Syndrome”. It was said Hickock would never sit with his back to the door until, for some reason, he did in Deadwood. His lapse has long made me wonder whether there was any truth to those stories, like most of the gunfighter fables.
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MichaelG said on February 4, 2013 at 10:31 am
The abominable snow squirrel.
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susan said on February 4, 2013 at 10:31 am
Raccoon.
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JWfromNJ said on February 4, 2013 at 10:35 am
Chupacabra, definitly.
Was I alone in thinking Anonymous had something to do with the Super Bowl power outage? they claim they did. I’m not sure we’d ever hear confirmation if they did because it demonstrates an ability to F with the man on a grand scale. There are so many national security and homeland security types involved with the Super Bowl because it such a juicy target.
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susan said on February 4, 2013 at 10:39 am
e.g., raccoon tracks in snow
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brian stouder said on February 4, 2013 at 10:42 am
The tracks in our snow this morning were clearly meandering bunny tracks – which made me concious that, when it snows:
It’s hard out there, for a bunny
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Prospero said on February 4, 2013 at 11:02 am
The most common comment I’ve heard about the Obama skeet shooting photo sound a hell of a lot like the bullshit spouted by the wingnut Selectric experts when the Shrub AWOL papers came out. I’ve been taken skeet shooting, but them damn skeet are always too wily for me to bag ’em, it is sort of fun shooting shotguns, though I prefer the non-moving target provided by clumps of misteltoe.
Could be a coyote. The tricksters do love to dance in moonlight. Could be raccoon, but pickings are so gras for urban coons, they run to obesity and probably don’t do a lot of bounding.
The Iraqi government was indeed set up to fail. US bought off the warlords in the insurgency during the “surge” to provide withdrawal cover, no matter what McCain says. After the money was gone, the Awakened Sunnis remembered de-Bathification and went back to revenge killing. US foreign policy has fucked with Iran and Iraq so much in the last six decades, it’s like they were Cuba and the Dominican. Installing the Shah, arming both sides, including with chemical weapons, in a 10-year long war that killed at least 200,000 non-combatants, telling Saddam the lie to his face that the US did not care one way or another about Iraq’s Kuwait grievances, being so painfully ignorant of the dynamics of Shia and Sunni Islam the moron neocons turned Iraq into a virtual fiefdom of Iran. Still, I’m sure Iraqis are glad Americans are gone.
A synonym for Farago is hodgepodge. That guy sounds like he needs a Ron Jeremy email and some Cialis, oh and a blow-up doll like Dennis “Feck” Hopper’s in River’s Edge. To be fair, didn’t all those GOPers like Dan Burton and St. Henry Hyde that were after Clinton’s pelt have their subsequently revealed “youthful indiscretions” sometime after their fortieth birthdays? They just hadn’t gotten their guns yet, I guess.
I thought Wild Bill Syndrome was getting shot dead in Deadwood while holding Aces and Eights.
The PTSD guy’s victim probably meant well but gutdom, taking PTSD guy to a place likely to cause him to hallucinate and putting a weapon in his hand was monumental stupidity.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/post-traumatic-stress-disorder/DS00246/DSECTION=symptoms
In honor of yesterday’s Harbowl, the Byliner website had a link to this excellent Cameron Crowe story on the Allmans, from 1973:
http://www.theuncool.com/journalism/rs149-the-allman-bros/
In a better world, the Superdome power outage would have wiped out halftime. Beyonce has a fairly strong voice, but I’ve seen better dancing from cheerleaders at HS basketball games. As for the game, when the announcers and the postgame dissectors make so many excuse for the officials, the refs blew it. People on ESPN were talking about “non-catchable” after the 4th dow. Nobody said it was interference, it was defensive holding. Full-contact mugging 10 yards downfield from LOS. Automatic call. And no, I had no dog in the fight, although the apotheosizing of Ray Lewis will continue to turn my guts as long as it goes on. Actually on the Niners’ final three offensive plays, Ravens committed PI, a flagrant helmet to helmet and holding. Shabby officiating, and the “at that point in the game” apologists are full of bull.
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susan said on February 4, 2013 at 11:03 am
As for the mind of the paranoid gun crank, driftglass linked to this [second generation] Twilight Zone episode, which is a perfect rendition of that deranged mind-set. And its probable consequences.
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Bitter Scribe said on February 4, 2013 at 11:04 am
“Because of all the people on the face of the Earth who should be pro-gun, the Jews should be right at the top of that list,” he says. “How many Jews have to die before they realize that ‘never again’ means being prepared — personally prepared?”
So let me get this straight. The next time I go to dinner in a decent restaurant, I have to worry about some asshole sitting next to me who is armed to the teeth and thinks the Nazis are after him?
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Peter said on February 4, 2013 at 11:09 am
Super Bowl Power: Well, first, it IS Louisiana, so that can explain a lot of things. I would agree with what I’ve heard that the problems weren’t in the stadium but with the power grid. Apparently they have two sources of power for the building, and while now that would be required for a structure that size, it’s still comforting to see that they went through with it.
However, it is interesting to note that one half of the stadium went dark. In more sophisticated buildings you would spend more money to have redundancy, and to also stagger the power source, so that one stretch is on power A, the next on power B, so that if something happens on the grid, the whole building is at 1/2 light, instead of one side dark and one side light.
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Charlotte said on February 4, 2013 at 11:10 am
The PTSD killing at the gun range. Sigh. Natural selection? Except now that poor guy is going to jail (sorry, don’t really have any sympathy for the sniper dude who was trying to “help”). As my guy said this morning — really? the solution for war-induced PTSD is *more* violence and guns?
As for the gun nuts, while I’m alarmed to find out that my buddy Walter Kirn had a concealed carry permit, I’m glad to read he’s given up the handguns. And his description of the dangers of downtown Livingston in broad daylight seem a good example of the sort of embellishment gun nuts are prone to — anyhow, here’s the link: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112194/walter-kirn-gun-owners
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jcburns said on February 4, 2013 at 11:12 am
I think those are Marten tracks. Or maybe a Wolverine.
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Dorothy said on February 4, 2013 at 11:35 am
The guide on this page http://ohiodnr.com/tabid/19449/default.aspx shows a “fisher” has prints approximately 2 1/4″ in length. What the heck is a fisher?!
My two pups and I were out frolicking (I watched – they frolicked) in the snow on Saturday when the bigger one spooked a rabbit out of some brush on our property. They’ve never chased a bunny before – we usually leash walk them because I’m so afraid they’ll run off and never be seen again. But we’re trying to let them run about with supervision. Anyway, back to the bunny chase. Just wish I’d had my camera – they were so excited!! I know it made their month, maybe their year, to get to chase one. They whine from the screened in back porch all the time when they see critters wandering our 3 acres and can’t get at them. After dark, though, they’re leashed. The frequent coyote cries and yips we hear are the primary reason.
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brian stouder said on February 4, 2013 at 11:36 am
Snowy thought of the day: today is the 75th anniversary of the original release date for Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which, as we learn from the day by day calendar my daughter got for my desk top, was the first English language Technicolor animated feature film. The thing quickly grossed $8,000,000, which was unheard of, especially amidst the Great Depression.
And as fate would have it, two nights ago we watched that Cherlize Therron (spelling?) movie Mirror Mirror – so there’s that
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BigHank53 said on February 4, 2013 at 11:53 am
More likely fisher than marten. Though both are supposed to be quite shy and avoid humans.
Farago doesn’t consider himself a watchdog. A herding dog’s job is to raise the alarm. He plainly counts himself among the wolves. It’s also pretty clear that just strapping on a gun isn’t quite enough to make him feel all grown-up. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be spending quite so much time looking for a target.
It’s exactly the kind of mindset that most police departments spend quite a bit of effort screening for and training against, as it leads to needless escalation. When the only tool you want to use is a hammer, every problems starts to like a nail, as the saying goes. The tragicomic parts is listening to wackjobs like Wayne LaPierre argue against background checks: fewer crazy people with guns means fewer potential targets for Farago and LaPierre. That goddamn government is trying to keep them from demonstrating that they’re real men, not little boys.
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MaryRC said on February 4, 2013 at 11:56 am
Deborah, this is a fisher. I’ve never seen one but something about them, other than their appearance, has always spooked me and I think it was because a fisher was the villain in some animal story I read as a child. I wanted to say that it was The Wind in the Willows but it can’t be since the fisher is native to North America.
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Dorothy said on February 4, 2013 at 12:03 pm
After I posted, MaryRC, of course I Googled a fisher, but thanks for the link. I love learning new stuff!
The snow is blowing around here, some of it sticking. We’re supposed to get 2-4″ by end of day. Is spring really just 6.5 weeks away?! Hard to believe that Ash Wednesday is next week already.
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nancy said on February 4, 2013 at 12:03 pm
I think Susan got it — it’s an obese raccoon, startled into a brief spurt of bounding. Time to get out the live trap.
We see martens up north all the time, frolicking on the riverbanks. They look like minks, and maybe some are, but there’s no way they’re in my neighborhood.
By contrast, the raccoons we see up north are all far smaller than their fat-assed urban cousins.
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Sherri said on February 4, 2013 at 12:09 pm
The worst non-call by the officials last night was in not ejecting Cary Williams after his two-handed shove of a linesman during the fracas between the two teams in the first half. I don’t care if it’s the Super Bowl; you lay hands on an official, you’re out of the game. That he was allowed to continue to play for the Ravens the rest of the game was absurd.
Now we can stop hearing about Ray Lewis all the time and my Seahawks can get down to the business of preventing whiny Jim Harbaugh from getting back to the Super Bowl.
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Peter said on February 4, 2013 at 12:10 pm
Well, the one (and I do mean one) item I can excuse with the guntards is their insistence of facing the door in a restaurant. It took me over 20 years of marriage to find out, but my lovely wife NEVER wants her back to the front door. Maybe it was growing up in the big city, or watching too many Untouchables episodes.
What I’ll never excuse is Adolf LaPierre. In my opinion, the whole alternate reality can be boiled down to one statement: when asked about the need for the automatic weapons and huge magazines, he said they were needed “when government breaks down”. Not IF, but WHEN. Well thanks to nut jobs like you, perhaps it really is a matter of when.
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Bitter Scribe said on February 4, 2013 at 12:17 pm
I’d always admired Jim Harbaugh, especially after he turned around the Stanford football program. But watching him constantly jaw at the officials got old fast. You’re not going to get every single call, and at some point you have to just shut up and get on with the game.
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Bitter Scribe said on February 4, 2013 at 12:19 pm
The biggest Super Bowl upset, for me: Go Daddy came up with an ad that was funny, clever, successful and NOT reekingly sexist.
(Unless you count the fact that all the couch entrepreneurs were male, while all their nagging S.O.s were, of course, female. But you take small victories where you can get them, I guess.)
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Jeff Borden said on February 4, 2013 at 12:26 pm
The best way to deal with gun fetishists might be the way I’ve always thought we should treat the Ku Klux Klan when they have one of their rallies: point and laugh at them. Here are two grown men in an upscale restaurant in Providence acting like a couple of 10-year-olds playing cops ‘n’ robbers in the backyard. It might get me punched out, but I’m not completely sure I wouldn’t make a joke at their expense if these dorks came strolling into an eatery where I was seated.
Regarding the NRA, it continues to use fear, hate and paranoia to spur the sales that benefit the guns and ammo industry. The more assholes like LaPierre preach the gospel of a malevolent government ought to get them, the more guns and ammo the lemmings purchase, which funnels ever larger amounts of money to the NRA to repeat the process yet again. It is, quite simply, a lobbying organization for multi-billion dollar arms merchants. It is as much a “sportsman’s organization” as the ACLU.
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nancy said on February 4, 2013 at 12:28 pm
Charlotte, if I’d been Walter Kirn’s editor on that piece, I’d have insisted on a fact-check on this assertion, in his description of the scene outside the Aurora, Colo., movie theater after the shootings there:
The haunted parking lot was strewn with popcorn, great yellow streaks of it spilled from trampled buckets, that conjured up the chaos and the panic and left me unable to enjoy the stuff.
So people jumped up from their seats and ran for their lives, but carried their buckets of popcorn with them, only dropping them when they got to the parking lot? Sorry, that sounds like the sort of too-perfect detail a novelist would invent.
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brian stouder said on February 4, 2013 at 12:30 pm
The only go-daddy I recall was the one where there’s a big kiss, and the emphasis – for a prolonged moment – is on the (exaggerated and essentially grotesque) sounds.
I know nothing about ad firms, but I’ll betcha whichever one made that one is also the one that makes those disgusting Hardee’s commericals, which only ever convince me to NEVER eat at Hardee’s.
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Sherri said on February 4, 2013 at 12:34 pm
You’d think it would occur to those guys with their “situational awareness” that unless they’re seeing all the food deliveries and garbage from the kitchen go in and out that front door, there’s probably another door. If they’re so situationally aware, then one of them ought to sit facing the entrance to the kitchen.
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Bitter Scribe said on February 4, 2013 at 12:38 pm
brian: Yes, that ad sucked. (Literally. I don’t even want to know what they used on the Foley stage.) But their other ad was the one I was referring to.
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Dexter said on February 4, 2013 at 1:02 pm
“If GAWD is on your side, who can be against you?”—victory platform answer to a question, Jim Nance to Ray Lewis.
Where’s my goddam Robert G. Ingersoll books?
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzwvjxSiU31qm4zvuo1_500.jpg
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Prospero said on February 4, 2013 at 1:39 pm
I just got an email asking for a signature on an on-line petition about this:
“They raped her… They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson raped that one girl… she is so raped.”
That’s what a local man, who has been identified and is known to the media and police, said on camera about the now-infamous gang rape of a teenage girl by members of the Steubenville, Ohio high school football team last August. In the 12-minute video he is barely able to speak through his laughter.1 He also tweeted that night that “Song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana.”2 The girl was carried, unconcious, to different parties and raped at multiple locations throughout the night. And the dozens of teens who were there didn’t try to stop them, get help or call the police–instead they took photos and posted jokes about the attack on Twitter.
Now, months later, local police are still dragging their feet and a special prosecutor has taken over the case. But only two people were arrested, and none of the teens who photographed or tweeted jokes about the crime have been held accountable. Despite the petitions, the protests, and the media attention, the sheriff announced that nobody else will be charged.4 The city even released a statement claiming that Ohio law gives them no recourse against people who took photos or posted comments online while the girl was attacked.5
But under Ohio law, failing to report a felony is a crime.6 And based on his 12-minute video, this man not only knew about the rape, but witnessed it.7 It’s outrageous that local authorities are sweeping this under the rug–but it’s not too late for the special prosecutors to charge him and others involved. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine is paying attention to the media coverage and public outrage about this case, and UltraViolet has joined with NOW, Justice for Children, and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence to call on him to prosecute the man. Can you sign our petition that demands that DeWine prosecute anyone who knowingly failed to report the crime?
Add your name.
Last August, the 16-year-old girl and her parents found out she was raped the next day by reading about it on social networks and the local news.8 In recent weeks, Steubenville has been under a media spotlight while photos, videos, and posts to sites like Twitter and Instagram have surfaced. The crime was documented online in real time by teens on their phones.9 It’s painfully clear that people were there, they knew about it, and some have even tried to cover it up after the fact.
But months later, only two boys have been charged with the rape. More than 70,000 UltraViolet members have signed a petition to Attorney General Mike DeWine demanding that everyone involved be held accountable. And just this Saturday, hundreds of people rallied in downtown Steubenville to demand justice for the survivor–the third rally since December. But the town is divided, and many people are supporting their local football heroes and blaming the survivor for the crimes committed against her.
We know the Attorney General is paying attention to the media scrutiny–just a few weeks ago, Ohio State University students delivered petitions to his office. He personally met with them to discuss the case and accept the 70,000 signatures from UltraViolet members. But we’re running out of time to make sure that others involved are charged. The law is clear–in Ohio, it’s a crime to knowingly fail to report a felony. Can you sign the petition to demand justice for the survivor?
The petition link:
http://act.weareultraviolet.org/go/482?t=3&akid=297.424786.y16l4q
It seems reasonable to me that GOPer assholes that want to blame violence in movies and video games for mass shootings can own shit like this on the rape law stylings of Akin and the Granny Starver and Rick Sanitarium.
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LAMary said on February 4, 2013 at 1:43 pm
Hey, JW from NJ said what I was going to say. Chupacabra. Definitely.
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Danny said on February 4, 2013 at 1:51 pm
Back from skiing and I can say that my “situational awareness” only extends to my commitment to never wear earbuds to listen to music on my mp3 player while on the slopes. You have to know what is going on around you if you want to stay healthy.
That was a great game yesterday. Though I am from Baltimore, I was somewhat ambivalent about the outcome because:
1. I moved to San Diego the year the Colts moved out of Baltimore and ripped our collective hearts out. I’m still bitter (screw you Irsay! Heheh) in the fun sort of way that Nancy explained years ago…where one can occasionally revisit an old grudge, rekindle it to luxuriate in it on a cold winter’s night and warm themselves with faux-ire. Plus, I learned the valuable lesson to never get too attached to professional teams. Me and the Chargers are dating, but we ain’t going steady.
2. And though, as Jeff (tmmo) pointed out years ago, the Ravens have the sweet, literary Poe allusion going for them, it does not offset the queasiness I experience when considering R. Lewis as an individual. Two people are dead and he is on top of the world. Plus, as Wes Welker’s wife pointed out two weeks ago, he is a “born-again” who’s apparently had five kids by four women who are not-his-wife. He must be dogmatically Old Testament… or just a dog.
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Prospero said on February 4, 2013 at 2:09 pm
What happens when a book designer doesn’t bother to read the book.
Urban Rocky Raccoons thrive on the larders of Mickey D’s dumpsters. They are fat and fearless. City rats are afraid of coons.
That Steubenville rape: it seems obvious to me that some ofthe bastards could be charged with kidnapping, but there would be howling and gnashing of teeth if the FBI stepped in.
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brian stouder said on February 4, 2013 at 3:05 pm
Pros – it looks to me like this is a corollary to the old admonition about never judging a book by its cover;
you cannot judge a cover by its book!
(come to think of it, the people who are worked up about conjured ills such as “chick lit” seem to think you CAN, in fact, judge a book by its cover)
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 4, 2013 at 3:16 pm
Sherri, you made me laugh out loud, and you are quite correct. What a poseur.
Three funerals in four days makes Jeff a dull boy. But I’ll give you an Appalachian funeral home wake crowd up against a Detroit council audience any time!
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Brandon said on February 4, 2013 at 3:19 pm
Now we can stop hearing about Ray Lewis all the time and my Seahawks can get down to the business of preventing whiny Jim Harbaugh from getting back to the Super Bowl.-Sherri
The Seahawks came far this season due in no small part to Max Unger, who grew up in Kona.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Unger
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Joe K said on February 4, 2013 at 5:05 pm
Thought the game was good, didn’t care who won, just wanted a good game.
Liked the Bud Clydsdale spot, and the Paul Harvey spot was great, Amy polher
For best buy was also nice, go daddy? Nope didn’t like them.
Busy week, flew 5500 miles this week burned 852 gal of gas, was at JFK this morning, lots of big airplanes and the city looked cool from the air.
Pilot Joe
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Deborah said on February 4, 2013 at 6:36 pm
Can I say that I hate February in Chicago. A miserable time to live here, grey, cold, slushy, dirty, damp, boring. That’s why I’m going back to Santa Fe next week, it’s not as cold there and there’s always sun. Counting the days. I’ll be there until the beginning of April.
I was going to say raccoon too.
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Suzanne said on February 4, 2013 at 8:12 pm
Surely the man shot in the shooting range messes with the NRA’s notion that arming everyone will raise the level of safety. It’d be hard to find somewhere with more armed people than a shooting range, and yet a “good” guy is gunned down by a “bad” guy right there.
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Scout said on February 4, 2013 at 9:39 pm
Jackalope.
I am taking great heart in the fact that 6 weeks after Newtown we’re still talking about guns. It’s not just going away this time, no matter how many idiotic articles like the one Nancy cites are written. Felt like a grown up indeed. A grown up what, exactly?
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dull_old_man said on February 4, 2013 at 9:42 pm
Deborah@53
I love Chicago in February. I can notice that the days are getting longer. Pitchers and catchers report next week. The Cubs and Sox will finish February without losing any games that count. I got eight gardening catalogs in the mail today–no work, all fantasy. Chicago looks good in grey–grey skies, grey snow, here in Hyde Park plenty of grey buildings. And if I can love February, then I must be well on the way to being a happy guy.
Have a great time in Santa Fe.
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Deborah said on February 4, 2013 at 10:01 pm
Oh dull_old_man whoever you are, thank you for that perspective of Chicago, I needed that. If I didn’t live where I do in Chicago (streeterville) Hyde Park would be my next best location. I just get tired of the struggle in February. I realized tonight that I’m going to miss some lectures while I’m gone, nothing that I can replace in Santa Fe. So it’s bittersweet.
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Deborah said on February 4, 2013 at 10:15 pm
Judy Busy, would love to hear some stories about warm sunny Puerto Rico about now.
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Crazycatlady said on February 5, 2013 at 12:10 am
I think those are possum prints. We have some mighty huge ones in my hood. And we have morbidly obese raccoons here too. Good eats! If you can catch one. Just kidding…I’m vegetarian…
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Brandon said on February 8, 2013 at 1:58 am
Chris Kyle was a member of the cast of Stars Earn Stripes. Nancy mentioned the show last year.
http://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/archives/stars_earn_stripes/2013_Feb_03_chris-kyle-killed
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