Anger issues.

Jeez, what a fucking week. The local news is still filled with the Oxford school shooting, as you might imagine. I wish I could be impressed by the journalism, but it’s just depressing. A local PR maven took to his blog to proclaim that breaking national news here always causes local reporters to rise to the occasion and “punch above their weight.” Gotta say, I don’t see it so far. Chasing breaking news is 101-level stuff: Go to the press conferences, knock doors, that sort of thing. I’m not seeing incompetence, but brilliance hasn’t arrived yet.

Maybe on Sunday, you never know.

But the news out of the shooting has been all, ALL bad. The four dead students. The ones still fighting for their lives, with chest wounds and similar trauma. And the shooter, oy. Kind of a moonfaced kid with glasses, young-looking for his age, an only child as far as anyone can tell. He lawyered up immediately, and so did the parents, and for good reason – the gun was bought only four days previous. Yes, on Black Friday.

(“Do gun stores do Black Friday sales?” I asked Alan. “Are you kidding? Of course,” he replied, and followed up with links.)

Not only that, it was apparently not secured in any way in the household; the Crumbleys (that’s their name) were leave-the-guns-lying-around sorts of people. With a disturbed adolescent in the house, because that was another detail: the school had spoken to young Ethan, the shooter, about some “concerning behavior” on Monday, and on Tuesday both parents came in for a conference that morning. Ethan had the Sig Sauer 9mm semiautomatic in his backpack, and put it to use later that day.

So far, it’s just one depressing fact after another dropping, but as always, our state legislature goes the extra mile in dipshittery:

LANSING, Mich. — Michigan Rep. Steve Carra (R-Three Rivers) announced Wednesday a plan to allow teachers and school staff to arm themselves.

…“School and state authorities must be fully prepared if, God forbid, another violent attacker targets students at school,” said Carra. “Teachers and staff care for their students’ safety, and some of these professionals are willing to use their gun or taser if a tragic need for school defense arises. I am putting together a plan to enable educators to protect their students with lawful weapons, stored securely for an emergency we pray never comes again.”

Thanks, asshole.

I feel bad because I don’t feel sad. Instead, I am simmering with anger. How many years have we been doing this? My first mass shooting was…I guess Charles Whitman, but I was a kid then. The first one I remember as an adult was the McDonald’s massacre in 1984. Then the Luby’s shooting, in 1991. Then Columbine, Virginia Tech, and oh wait, can’t forget the post office shootings, which originated right here in Metro Detroit** (like carjacking!) and gave us the term going postal to describe titanic anger followed by violence.

Today I found a two-day-old Washington Post piece about the Oxford shooting that had more detail than I’ve seen so far. A girl in her AP Statistics class had bullets coming through the classroom door, so she handed out the closest weapon-like object at hand – calculators. Another girl crouched next to a toilet in the bathroom, holding hands with two others. And this was the reaction of our state Senate majority leader:

I hate to say it, but this country is so fucked. Personally, I’d welcome living a country I don’t recognize, maybe one where people don’t throw shit fits over wearing a piece of cloth in the name of public health in a grocery store, or where children don’t have to consider whether a Texas Instruments calculator is what stands between them and death. But that will never happen. Nothing ever changes. Time to move to Barcelona.

I hate to leave you with a bummer tonight. I’m headed to some craft shows this weekend, just to see pretty things and breathe a little. In the meantime, another France photo, the load-out of a classic car show near the Louvre.

Later, all.

** Hank, in comments, is correct. The first one Wikipedia notes was 1970, but it was targeted, in that the shooter went looking for one individual and shot him. What we later came to consider the mass, untargeted shooting with many victims started in Oklahoma, with 14 dead.

Posted at 6:09 pm in Current events |
 

47 responses to “Anger issues.”

  1. Deborah said on December 2, 2021 at 6:27 pm

    I read the NYT report of the Oxford shooting event and the thing that’s galling is the kid is pleading not guilty. Seriously? How can the kid’s parents allow that? He was caught red handed and there’s surveillance video to boot. I get that he’s their kid, and it seems like an only child too, but how can it be that they say he’s not guilty? The parents need to be charged with something for leaving guns around and not being decent parents to their obviously messed up kid. I hope the rightwing doesn’t turn this kid into a hero too. Enough is enough. The answer is not arming teachers, that is completely insane.

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  2. nancy said on December 2, 2021 at 7:06 pm

    Deborah, technically he stood mute at his arraignment, which means he entered no plea, which means the judge entered a plea of not guilty. It’s standard in cases like this. Hardly anyone pleads guilty at an arraignment.

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  3. diane said on December 2, 2021 at 7:55 pm

    Deborah,
    Part of the not entering a plea so early is to give the defense attorneys time to review the case and options, explore whether a diminished capacity plea would be a possibility, do plea negotiations and see what the prosecution will offer in exchange for a guilty plea, etc. etc.

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  4. Mark P said on December 2, 2021 at 8:35 pm

    Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

    We are well and truly fucked. The founding fathers took care of that. I honestly cannot see a way back to sanity for this country except its total destruction. Maybe from the bloody and smoking ruins we could make something better. It worked for Germany and Japan. Unfortunately there would be hell to go through first.

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  5. Heather said on December 2, 2021 at 8:58 pm

    Yep. Fucked. My friend posted this tweet on Instagram and while I laughed, it was hollow.

    -Can I get an abortion?
    America: Lol no you’re an incubator now. whore
    -Okay can I have healthcare and maternity leave and childcare and housing?
    America: absolutely not.
    -How are we supposed to…
    America: Here’s a gun.

    https://twitter.com/laurenthehough/status/1466441772410748932

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  6. alex said on December 2, 2021 at 9:05 pm

    I’d joint you all in the gloom-and-doom scenarios but just gotta know what’s with that bubble-butt Ferrari? A one-off? Never saw one of those before.

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  7. Suzanne said on December 2, 2021 at 9:12 pm

    Pissed? Yes, I am. A 20 year old shot his parents and sister to death last week (or was it this week? It’s hard to keep up), then shot himself at his home just north of Fort Wayne. His sister was 15.
    Besides the senseless deaths and the silence of the pro-life crowd in the face of it, what pisses me off is knowing that the gun loving friends and families of these killers still won’t likely change their minds on gun rights. Deaths caused by guns don’t matter to them, it’s simply collateral damage. Deaths by COVID of people they don’t matter to them either. It’s collateral damage to keep your freedom to not wear a mask or be vaccinated.

    We are a sick, sick society and I have no clue how to change it.

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  8. Deborah said on December 2, 2021 at 9:43 pm

    Thanks for setting me straight on the not guilty plea. But honestly I hope the parents of the kid are doing some hard thinking right now about where they went absurdly wrong. According to NYT the kid had the gun in his backpack when he and his parents were involved in a conference at the very school about his classroom behavior in the morning of the day he murdered and maimed, and his parents didn’t have a clue that a gun was missing or that their kid was so messed up that he was about to do what he did. Honestly that is mind boggling.

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  9. basset said on December 2, 2021 at 10:03 pm

    Sherri, how’d that zoning hearing go?

    Back on topic… saw a pissed-off-looking older man in a hospital parking garage this afternoon wearing a mask which read “This mask is even more worthless than Joe Biden.”

    Have a nice day, there.

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  10. Hank Stuever said on December 2, 2021 at 11:49 pm

    Er, correction request: There was a big post office shooting on Aug. 20, 1986 in Edmond, Okla., just north of Oklahoma City, which killed (I’m working strictly from memory here, not wiki) 14 people, I think, including the disgruntled worker gunman, Patrick somebody. I remember this because it was the day before I left for my freshman year of college. My father’s office was right up the street from that post office; in the afternoon I called him because he had sort of hinted that he might be able to write me a check before I left. He assumed I was calling to make sure he was okay. I was way too involved in my own world to put it together that the nation’s eyes were on this event. It was an awkward call.

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  11. A. Riley said on December 3, 2021 at 12:12 am

    I was scrolling through the comments on a couple of the WaPo stories, and what struck me is that no one calls the shooter a boy, or a young man — it’s almost always “kid,” the generic word for anyone from toddler age on up. The generic neuter noun.

    Does no one *really* notice that mass shooters in this modern age are all boys or men?

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  12. Dexter Friend said on December 3, 2021 at 2:11 am

    Well I never been to Spain, but I saw “Ride With Norman Reedus—Barcelona” and was amazed at the travelogue part of the show. I’d definitely go there if money rained down on me.
    When Indiana reintroduced the death penalty ( from the ‘nets : “On October 1, 1977, a new Indiana death penalty sentencing statute, modeled on statutes upheld by U.S. Supreme Court, took effect. It remains in effect today. In 1995, the Indiana Legislature passed, and the governor signed, a law making lethal injection the method of execution in Indiana.” END-
    well, I was against it as cruel and inhumane, as my fellows berated me and even called me the now-banned p-word.
    Now I am an old man and am much harsher. While fear of the needle doesn’t deter executioners of school children or co-workers, I suspect neither does fear/knowledge of facing a Gary Gilmore type firing squad , but who cares? Not many. And so, if no political solution can even touch the killing of students , shoppers, workers, neighbors, family members, who then cares or should fucking care if The State straps the killers to a pole, ties a blindfold, gives them a couple ciggies to puff on, then executes them via rifle fire, maybe even AR-15s. I qualified as expert on the M-16 when I was Shanghaied into the US Army so many years ago, so I know this kind of weapon could stop anyone from repeating their mass murders, forever, amen, amen. Human life is cheap, isn’t it? Republicans for example…have you heard any sentiment to do ANYthing about all these school murders , from any red politician? No.

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  13. David C said on December 3, 2021 at 5:58 am

    The arm the teachers crowd always blows my mind. Like coach isn’t going to shoot some poor kid in coach’s history class for saying that Andrew Jackson was a total asshole.

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  14. Randy said on December 3, 2021 at 6:45 am

    I wish I had the Twitter savvy to share it, a student in the high school kept their phone camera on, locked up in a classroom. These 16 year old kids were so composed, in the worst situation they could ever imagine.

    The “sheriff” knocks on the door, claiming he will lead them to safety. A student says “how do I know you’re a sheriff?”, and the “sheriff” says “come on bro, let me in”, leading that student to an immediate evacuation out the windows of the classroom. Saved their lives.

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  15. Jeff Gill said on December 3, 2021 at 6:55 am

    In the last year, in the US, about 8 million new refrigerators were sold, 14 million microwaves, 17 million cars (incl. light trucks & SUVs)…and 23 million handguns.

    I think you can support the 2nd Amendment & still say that’s just way too many guns onto the market each year.

    Hostess, for context, sold 300 million Twinkies.

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  16. Mark P said on December 3, 2021 at 8:51 am

    There was a story on the Atlanta news about a 13-year-old boy who accidentally shot and killed his sister.

    Now here’s the rest of the story. He was buying semi-auto gun parts or kits online, building ghost guns, and selling them out of his home. No background check needed. He was in the process of selling one to another kid, but that kid grabbed the gun and took off. The seller shot at him but hit his sister.

    Ah, America! I love the smell of gunsmoke and virgin blood in the morning! We truly are exceptional!

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  17. Deborah said on December 3, 2021 at 9:11 am

    This story will make you even angrier, it’s not about school shooters, so off topic. Some of the threats these poor women election workers in Fulton County were creepy and horribly frightening disrupting their lives https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-threats-georgia/ The mother and daughter are now suing Gateway Pundit, good for them.

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  18. Dorothy said on December 3, 2021 at 9:36 am

    In the mid 60’s we lived in a 3 bedroom row house. Our house was four houses from the corner. On the corner (Penn Avenue and S. Trenton) was a family whose patriarch was a policeman. One day their youngest child, who was maybe 4 or 5 at the time, picked up a gun and pointed it at his grandmother. “Put your hands up, Grandma!” he yelled. She laughed and did as told. He shot her; she died. It was an accident, of course. A tragic accident.

    A day or so later I heard my mother talking about this with my Aunt Ruth (who lived in the third house from the corner). Apparently the kid had several play guns but the real one, which his dad kept hanging from a nail in the holster or on top of the fridge or something, was accessed by the little one by using a step stool. I remember the commotion of the police being on the street, and the worried looks on my mom and Aunt Ruth’s faces. I think I was 8 or 9 when this happened.

    Irresponsible behavior with guns has always been with us. I think the parents in this Michigan case need to be charged.

    I’m trying so, so hard to be optimistic about the future. Maybe it’s because we have a new grandbaby on the way but I really believe good is going to prevail. But all indications seem to point otherwise. The pandemic, the Roe v Wade situation, that dumpster fire of a person who moved out of the White House almost a year ago – it’s beginning to snowball. I know all of you are smart and educated and mean well, but I think I need to take a break from reading this page, or commenting, for awhile. So much gloom and doom discussion is having an effect on me and I need to find ways to accentuate the positive. I’ll stop by in a few months – maybe after we’re settled in our new house. I wish everyone nothing but the best!

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  19. Maria said on December 3, 2021 at 9:53 am

    I seldom comment here, but I read this page every day. Will miss your comments, Dorothy, but I completely understand. We all need an occasional break from reality in these times.

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  20. Jeff Borden said on December 3, 2021 at 10:17 am

    Sandy Hook was the death knell for any hope of ever changing our insane gun laws. The victims were little white children and their white teachers. They were in an affluent community with virtually no crime. Nothing happened. In fact, this massacre birthed the nauseating NRA response that the only answer to “a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

    If we don’t choke to death on our own blood or we aren’t wiped out by a disease because of anti-science loons, we’ll see our nation continue to devolve into a fascist state. There’s a story out of Florida that the maniac governor wants his own private army, which would be called the Florida State Guard. He would choose the members, of course, and they would be bound only by Florida law, unlike National Guard members who are still considered part of the U.S. armed forces. Isn’t that just what every little fascist fuckhead wants? Their own private army? And this jackal will be your QOP presidential nominee in 2024 if the Orange King has a stroke or something.

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  21. alex said on December 3, 2021 at 10:18 am

    And on Slate (paywalled) it’s reported that Jeffrey Epstein’s former chauffeur testified yesterday.

    In addition to bringing “masseuses” to Epstein, his duties included cleaning up the room where Epstein received his “massages” and this involved washing a two-headed dildo after every encounter and returning it to Maxwell’s bathroom.

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  22. Mssr. Coffee said on December 3, 2021 at 10:41 am

    “Instead, I am simmering with anger.”

    Well, *that’s* different, anyway.

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  23. JodiP said on December 3, 2021 at 10:45 am

    Dorothy, good move. We will certainly miss you, but I hope it helps your mental health.

    In addition to all the issues above, the one I have been most concerned about for 25 years is climate change. Even with a Democratic prez we are not seeing the bold, radical action it will take. F*** all Republicans and Joe Manchin for standing in the way. I read quite a bit about it and there are just so so many things that need to happen.

    Molly Wood had a great podcast series this year called How We Survive. It focuses on just a one aspect: lithium batteries. She remains optimistic…but this critical part of the work is fraught with many issues and barriers. I highly recommend listening to it. She has left Marketplace to become an investor in companies that are addressing climate change, so I’m super interested in what that produces.

    Meanwhile I am in the middle of a performance review with one of my employees when her wife steps in to say their college-freshman son has COVID. Her day was already crap as she overslept and was a half hour late for our meeting. We ended the meeting so they could figure out what to do. When she came back online I’m like, “I’m am not going to stress about this review. I willsubmit for approval.Take care.” So much of being a leader during these times is ackowledging the humanity of staff and their needs.

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  24. Deborah said on December 3, 2021 at 11:32 am

    Sorry to hear Dorothy’s feeling stressed and needs a break.

    I’ve started reading actual books more so I keep myself off of the internet for chunks at a time, and being in NM where it’s always sunny helps. Only our next door neighbor keeps loaning me books by his favorite western writers like Tom McGuane, William Kittredge and Charles Portis (although Portis is a southern writer) mostly short stories. While they’re good writers the stories are often grim, it’s hard to read two stories in a row, especially William Kittredge’s “We are Not in this Together”. I sort of feel obligated to keep reading because I enjoy talking books with the neighbor and as I said they are good writers. The neighbor is an artist, he has a newer series of paintings he calls “Some Americans” http://www.dirkkortz.com/some-americans.html

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  25. Scout said on December 3, 2021 at 12:42 pm

    Anger issues… I’m a peacenik, aged hippie, who catches bugs and releases instead of killing them, but the current state of things has me so upset and enraged I hardly recognize myself. The right is gonna have a problem if enough of us get sick of their shit. So far, they’ve gotten away with it all because decent people don’t use their sickening tactics against them.

    I hope Dorothy is right and that good will prevail, but I do not blame her in the least for needing space from the worry of it all. I wonder if the myriad of health issues I’ve been having since 2018 are a direct result of the 2016 election with subsequent dismantling of decency. The stress I feel from the firehose of awfulness is palpable.

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  26. Sherri said on December 3, 2021 at 2:55 pm

    Basset, the hearing went off fine. We only had four speakers, all of whom were supportive of the changes. There was a fifth person signed up, who was opposed, but when we tried to call him, the call kept going to voicemail. The nasty group that has been yelling at city council constantly didn’t sign up, probably because they can’t yell at us in person. (And maybe because I made it clear the first time they came to planning commission that I wasn’t going to tolerate what council tolerates – we have time limits on speakers, which I enforce, and I don’t tolerate personal attacks.) We got a bunch of emails the next day from the group, but no speakers.

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  27. brian stouder said on December 3, 2021 at 4:34 pm

    ….and the terrible story takes yet another terrible turn, as mom and dad of the shooter appear to be on the run…..hopefully not to another abyss – but what does hope have to do with any part of this tale?

    And Sherry, I used to draw great comfort/reassurnace from regularly attending our local school board meetings. I found that sending the young folks off to school (let alone on a big ol’ bus!) – even as they go to schools I attended (umpteen years ago!) to be quite scarey – and this spurred us to always prioritize parent-teacher meetings at the schools. AT some point, the school board meetings seemed to be another place worth visiting…and indeed, I quickly learned that some odd clowns who seemed more interested in disruption than observation/learning/reassurance

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  28. beb said on December 3, 2021 at 6:39 pm

    Dorothy has done the wise thing, to retreat from all the awful news for a time. I’ve done that as well from time to time.

    I came here today to mention two things, one was the lawsuit against Gateway Pundit for encouraging people to attack or harass election workers. It’s about time people pushed back on these lying bloggers. I’d really like to see someone sue The Former Guy for continuing to insist without any proof that the election was rigged.

    The other thing was to note with surprise that the parents of the Oxford killer has been charges ith four counts each of involuntary manslaughter. I think there ought to have been a bunch of other characters — reckless endangerment for buying their troubled son a gun, contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Maybe even accessory before the fact for murder. Involuntary manslaughter is kind of an “oopsie, sorry your dead; didn’t mean it” charge; too light for what they did. Personally I would like to see anyone mishandles a gun causing it to accidentally discharge or leaving it where a minor can access it be charged with a felony and permanently banned from ever owning a gun again. If they can’t take properly care of a lethal weapon best they not have ever again.

    End rant

    We seem to have adopted a new kitten. The first stray cat that actually tried to rush INSIDE a house. Very friendly, very pretty, no diseases but will need isolation for flea treatment. My wife, the crazycatlady is not giving her up, period.

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  29. Julie Robinson said on December 3, 2021 at 10:09 pm

    Pics please, beb. Maybe with enough cute animal pictures we can entice Dorothy back.

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  30. FDChief said on December 4, 2021 at 1:18 am

    I’m resigned to the dystopian hellscape the GQP will make for us over the next twenty years; the Federalist Society loons that Tubby and Moscow Mitch shoved into the federal judiciary will see to that, even if the slow process of using the antiquated Constitutional structures that ensure the rule of the old, the white, and the rural doesn’t.

    As far as firearms, well…I was a soldier for 22 years. I own several shotguns and a rifle (an old British Lee-Enfield Mk. III, so not cool like the black stick…) and I cannot understand an iota of the thinking of these idiot ammosexuals.

    If you care, it’s worth going over to Jim Wright’s blog Stonekettle Station (I’m not going to link to it because everytime I do WP kills my comment, but Google “Stonekettle” and you’ll find it) and look up his essay called “Bang Bang Sanity”. Read what he has to say.

    The try and come up with an excuse…ANY excuse…for a sane, well-governed polity not to do what he recommends.

    I will put it to you; it is impossible unless you are a complete and utter fool.

    Or a Republican.

    But I repeat myself.

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  31. Dexter Friend said on December 4, 2021 at 2:23 am

    Jeff Borden: Sandy Hook was right there then and now as one horrifying day. It’ll be 9 years in 10 days, the anniversary.
    One face I remember, the ebullient 6 year old Jessie Lewis. His Dad went on TV a lot and also to Washington to deal with lawmakers to help with gun violence de-escalation. He was on with Piers Morgan for an hour as he told of rearing Jessie as a single dad, stopping every morning to buy Jessie a deli sandwich for school lunch. Jessie was his life. The agony that man showed was unforgettable. Just as the name Baylee Almond , a tiny toddler, killed at Oklahoma City by McVeigh is emblazoned in my recall. Just as David Hogg, a Parkland survivor has been saying on TV these past couple days, be ready, these shootings will not stop anytime soon in this crazed nation. Hogg blasted Biden for not aggressively doing more (somehow?) to get a grip on banning more guns being used for murder. Many of us have kids and grandkids in schools, also other extended family students. At least few are bandying about the tired “thoughts and prayers” mantra. We are past that, we want action, and nothing is getting done.

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  32. David C said on December 4, 2021 at 6:20 am

    “LOL I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught,”

    Isn’t that the most Republican text ever? Mom posted a mash note to TFG on Facebook. I hope involuntary manslaughter is just the beginning of the charges.

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/04/us/michigan-oxford-high-school-shooting-saturday/index.html

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  33. alex said on December 4, 2021 at 9:02 am

    No, it’s not your imagination. MSM really does try to balance our asymmetrical politics by pulling its punches from the GOP and sucker punching the libs:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/03/biden-media-coverage-worse-trump-favorable/

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  34. Suzanne said on December 4, 2021 at 9:25 am

    I work part time at the local public library. Yesterday, we had active shooter training. It struck me that no one, from the state trooper who presented to any of the participants, seemed to marvel that we need to do this. It’s now just a fact of life which most don’t seem to think remarkable. I am sure that most of the people there claim to be pro-life and I am once again reminded that for most pro-lifers, their right to bear arms supersedes my right to live because I am not a fetus.

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  35. Connie said on December 4, 2021 at 10:10 am

    I did live shooter training at a library several years ago and it sort of haunts me. It was meant to be realistic, I was shot more than once by a Nerf bullet. It was all Run Hide Fight.

    Harking back to Dexter’s comment. I have a cane in my car just in case. I have a rollator in my garage for events with crowds or uneven terrains. I have a wheel chair in my bedroom which gets me to and from bed after I have removed my foot, and to the bathroom at 3 a.m. And I have a wheel chair in my trunk that I use for hotel rooms and swimming in lakes.

    Last spring I swore I would stop going to my ENT doctor, where the entrance is uphill from handicapped parking. I had so much trouble staggering back down that hill – with cane, that a woman rushed out of her car to help me.

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  36. Heather said on December 4, 2021 at 11:12 am

    So, they found and arrested the shooter’s parents. What pieces of shit. Not only did they completely ignore (or even encourage) their son’s obvious violent urges, they were ready to leave him to face the music on his own. Lovely. What patriots.

    I was texting with a male friend yesterday and said something about being exhausted from a week of watching my entire gender’s bodily autonomy being debated. He said “oh right, I’ve been so focused on other immediate crises, I forgot about that.” NOT ME. I’m not sure most men, even the liberal/progressive ones, understand how much knowing large sectors of our government don’t think we are fully human weighs on us every single moment, even if reduced access to abortion is unlikely to affect many of us personally. Tht attitude has a way of seeping into everything, after all. (Luckily my friend acknowledged his privilege immediately, but still–must be nice.)

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  37. Jeff Borden said on December 4, 2021 at 1:01 pm

    Why do I find myself wondering if the odious Crumbleys were at the insurrection on Jan. 6? They fit the stereotype.

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  38. David C said on December 4, 2021 at 6:10 pm

    We had active shooter training at work. One thing they told us to do is throw things at them. But it appears that in Wisconsin, if you throw something at the shooter and they get scared, they can shoot you.

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  39. Mark P said on December 5, 2021 at 8:36 am

    David C, I think you meant to say they are allowed to shoot you.

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  40. Suzanne said on December 5, 2021 at 10:29 am

    We finished watching Get Back, the Beatles documentary on Disney+ last night. If you think it’s too long, the last episode makes it worth it. The rooftop concert is great with interviews of people on the street and their reactions along with a couple of cops who show up to the studio because of noise complaints and then don’t know what exactly to do when they realize it’s the freaking Beatles.
    Paul & John clearly relish the chance to perform and the joy on their faces is palpable. George looks a bit angry the entire time, like he’d rather be anywhere else. Ringo has got to be the most chill guy of the bunch, wearing a bright red coat and just doing his job like it’s another day at the office. It was great!

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  41. basset said on December 5, 2021 at 1:47 pm

    Sure was. I’d be interested in hearing what the original director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, has to say about it… he doesn’t look real effective in this cut.

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  42. Deborah said on December 5, 2021 at 4:24 pm

    We’re back out in Abiquiu and I’m hoping to see this comet early tomorrow morning https://www.npr.org/2021/12/03/1060881040/leonard-is-the-brightest-comet-all-year-heres-how-to-see-it. But it may be too low on the horizon and will be blocked by the mountain our land backs up to. I’m going to get up very early and give it a shot anyway.

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  43. David C said on December 5, 2021 at 5:08 pm

    Yes, that’s what I meant Mark P. Good catch.

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  44. Jeff Gill said on December 5, 2021 at 6:25 pm

    Basset, here ya go.

    https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/original-let-it-be-movie-michael-lindsay-hogg-peter-jackson-get-back-1250561/

    https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2018823241/michael-lindsay-hogg-the-unlikely-star-in-new-beatles-film-get-back

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  45. Dexter Friend said on December 6, 2021 at 1:14 am

    I felt like I was slogging through episode 1, then I got into it in #2, and yeah, the finale was fantastic. The elderly lady who complained the noise made her awaken from her sleep, that voice is the template for all actors when they find humor in old people. I recognized it immediately. We learned, no doubt, Paul , dubbed “Macca” years later in the tabloids, was the brains and the engine. John wrote as well, of course, but it was Paul who was the go-energy behind The Beatles. George’s talent was suppressed but he flowered as a solo artist. Ringo was way-cool way before, as the #1 band act in Blighty with Rory and The Hurricanes. It was so cool when Kent Horrmann of Fort Wayne’s media world brought Ringo’s All Star Band to Fort Wayne a few years ago; Ringo is the first Beatle to perform in Fort Wayne. It only took a half-century. If you are a patient listener, and a Beatles person, don’t give up at the foundation of the project, which is episode 1. Like some of us have noted, episode 3 makes it all worthwhile.
    A fly on the wall I’d like to be during the Pooty-Poot/Biden telephone conference. If Putin marches into Ukraine, Biden will be under intense pressure from his military commanders to go stop this. And a-one for the money, 2 for the show…3 to get ready now go cat go! And we wait….

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  46. Mark P said on December 6, 2021 at 8:29 am

    Let us hope Putin is not eager for apocalypse. He might be willing to play poker, but if Biden called his bluff, things could go south. It would be a conflict neither side could afford to lose.

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  47. Deborah said on December 6, 2021 at 6:11 pm

    Devin Nunes is resigning from Congress, not running for re-election to become Trump media’s CEO. What a bunch of sleaze bags. Maybe a Dem could win in that district though?

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