The cost of a single ticket to the North American International Auto Show’s Charity Preview, aka the Charity Preview or Car Prom, is $300, of which $290 is tax-deductible. That means the event is only spending about $10 per head, in the form of inexpensive champagne in plastic flutes, which is almost impossible to get. Not that anyone complains — it’s supposedly the biggest one-night money-raiser in the world, and a night when you can wear black tie. Or just fall out in random sparkles and, y’know, whatever floats your boat:

Alan gets a ticket as a reward for having spent nearly every waking hour at work for the past week; he worked all last weekend, left the house Monday at 6 a.m. and didn’t return until 11:30 p.m., and — you get the idea. It was a busy week, and the pregaming started at a local hotel bar, after which we went down to Cobo on the People Mover.

I think it’s the lighting that makes everyone look a little glittery and hallucinogenic. That shade of purple could go on a subcompact, but I think I noticed her because she wasn’t in black. Formal events are starting to look like dressy funerals.

This is my fourth auto show, and second charity preview, and while I spent my time climbing in and out of cars, I was mainly looking for people. I think I’d like this woman; it takes confidence to swig beer out of the bottle while wearing formalwear.

This was a Chevy Spark, and OH MY GOD I JUST NOTICED THAT WOMAN THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD. CARRYING A PARASOL.

A pickup bed makes a handy place to drop your evening bag for a moment.

But Nance, I hear you saying, what about the cars? Did you see any cars? Of course I did. Here’s the Hot Wheels edition of the Chevy Camaro:

Because once an American male gets a job, someone will try to sell his childhood back to him. And here’s a Mercury Lincoln concept; can’t remember what selection of letters and numbers:

Let’s see what we can see when the open side rotates around on the turntable.

See that thing between the back seats? It’s a refrigerator. There’s a famous anecdote about some executive at one of the Big 3, crowing that the American car industry forced cup-holders upon BMW and Mercedes. Wait until they learn they’re falling behind on the Refrigerator Gap.

Here’s the Cadillac version of the Volt, with the usual furiously changing video wall exploding behind it.

“I don’t care if you always wanted one, Bob, if it doesn’t have hat storage it’s a deal-breaker.”

Finally, the car everyone was talking about. Detroiters care deeply about the Corvette. Yeah, yeah, iconic American muscle car, but seriously. I would drive a Corvette if I were, ohhhh, a Hollywood-based screenwriter surrounded by Priuses and BMWs, but I would do it just to bug people. That’s a lot of money to pay to be a jerk, but it might be worth it.

There are approximately a million other pictures of the new out there, so let’s crop the car out and just take a look at the crowd. Nice gams on the product specialists, eh?

Farewell from the Motor City. My feet hurt.

In bloggage today, a great read for Inauguration weekend from the WashPost — one town (Fremont, Ohio) divided red and blue. It captures the crazy paranoia and depression everyone who doesn’t live in a navy-blue state has seen with their own eyes.

The Obamas at the halfway point: How the change has gone.

Baby farm animal power rankings. I’m on team baby goat.

It’s going to be a crazy week around these parts. If I don’t show up one day, no need to send the search parties. I just have a busy few days ahead.

All day long, I keep seeing social-media reminders that I should be ashamed — the world is paying attention to Manti Te’o, and not to the Notre Dame St. Mary’s girl who said she was raped! This is terrible, etc. etc.

I won’t apologize. This story takes Crazy to a whole new level. An invented tragic girlfriend is one thing, but an almost entirely hoodwinked sports media is quite another, and truth be told, I’m getting more pleasure out of watching the spinning by august outlets like Sports Illustrated and ESPN. A friend of mine asked me today, how could this happen? For a couple of reasons, which I mentioned in comments yesterday. First, because once something is reported, the chances of it being re-reported fall pretty sharply. There are, simply put, a lot of hacks out there. There are also a lot of overworked reporters doing more with less. And let’s also remember: There’s less and less time. For everything. But there’s no doubt that many people who should have known better failed to follow up, and missed what was sitting in plain sight. Which makes it a good story with a creamy layer of good-second-story icing.

And also, a lot of great Twitter action:

Since he’s Mormon, it’s possible Te’o has multiple fake girlfriends.

— Mick Farrell (@StumpWoodley) January 17, 2013

If Manti Te’o is really that naive, they should invent a new word: naivete’o

— Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) January 17, 2013

If you think it’s impressive that AJ McCarron’s girlfriend was Miss Alabama 2012, Manti Te’o’s girlfriend was Miss Narnia 2009, 2010 & 2011.

— She Ratchet (@RatchetAfrican) January 17, 2013

And so I would like to close out this week and start primping for the Charity Preview. I went out and bought some department-store foundation, a splurge for me. But I cannot deny it — this Almay drugstore crap just doesn’t blend. Because tomorrow is payday, I also went for a new lipstick, because that’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull. And as it usually takes seven hours to make me presentable, I’d better sign off now. But first, some links:

Six theories to explain why Te’o did it. A nice little condensation.

OID: Necromancy in the Motor City, or how a 93-year-old corpse ended up in his son’s freezer.

As long as we’re harshing on national magazines, did anyone getta loada Esquire’s profile of Megan Fox? Vice did.

You know what really makes a man’s outfit? A fancy watch. The Rolex Romeos speak:

Mike, who earned $400,000 last year, including a $120,000 bonus, even admits to driving his Lexus LS around the Jersey Shore in the summer, the windows rolled down and his wrist hanging out, on display.

“[The girls] will cheer and wave when they see my big watch,” he laughs. “It’s right out of a rap video!”

Have a good weekend, all.

Only one story to talk about today, and it’s long but amazing: Manti Te’o, punked? Or in on it?

(I knew nothing of this, which is what you get for ignoring the sports section.)

This little speaker, no bigger than a salt shaker, was a party favor at a holiday gathering, and looked so cheap I considered consigning it directly to the garage-sale stash, but decided today to charge it up and listen first.

Man. It rocks the llama’s ass. Not a whole hell of a lot of bottom end, but an amazingly rich sound — enough that I didn’t miss much during an extended session with the Miles Davis Pandora station today. It runs off Bluetooth, too, but I kept it hard-wired today, as I’m already running one Bluetooth accessory with the phone. Every so often I stop to consider this age of miracles we live in, and I can only shake my head.

Oh, and speaking of garage sales, ask me when we last had one. Yeah, a long damn time. Long enough that in the next one, you can pick up two end-table-size Kenwood speakers, at least 30 years old. It’s like selling a TV with a tube in it.

Oh, I have such good linkage for you kittens today. The story everyone’s talking about today, and for good reason: A dispatch from a deep embed on the set of “The Canyons.” And what is that? Why, that’s the new film starting Lindsay Lohan and a porn star, directed by a man who should know better (Paul Schrader), costing practically nothing ($225,000). And even though you think you don’t care about shitty movies (which this certainly will be) or Hollywood in general, you should read this story. Because it’s fabulous and hilarious and appalling and you will learn something.

And in Chicago, the Sun-Times is using the 35th anniversary of its great, great series on the Mirage Tavern to revisit the whole thing on its blog. As usual, scroll to the bottom and come back up. For those of you who don’t know this chapter in journalism history, it was made out of pure Awesome: To show how corrupt the city’s regulatory agencies were, the paper bought and opened a bar. Called the Mirage. Equipped with hidden cameras. And city inspectors, state liquor agents and more came to call with their hands out. It was really audacious. Relive the fun.

Finally, the story of a single striking news photo, and what came after.

What comes after this? The weekend. Have a good one.

Sometimes I hate Facebook. One of my friends is at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Another one just got back from skiing in Park City. One is eating spinach lasagna. Another is finishing a bathroom reno.

We ordered a pizza tonight. My life is pretty boring.

[Stares at screen for five minutes.]

Yup.

So in light of that, how about some good bloggage, again?

Soul Cycle, our own Charlotte’s baby cousin’s business, mentioned yesterday in The Hottest Comment Section on the Internets ™, gets a big piece in New York magazine. Although I will say, without a gift certificate, I won’t be joining in — $32 per class? Lordy, the skinny really are different from you and me.

The Atlantic photo blog, In Focus, looks at National Geographic’s best photos of 2012. A good balance of the beauty of nature (there MUST be a God!) with the degradation of humanity (there CAN’T be a God!).

If there’s anything that could make the Lance Armstrong story worse, it’s this: Oprah. Awk.

Wednesday, it is? Coulda fooled me. Have a good one, all.

The watchword for fitness this year is variety. I’m putting my gym on 30-day notice. If I can’t find enough different things to do there in a month, I’m giving up my membership and going back to messing around outdoors, dropping into yoga studios here and there and maybe taking a weekly weights class. But I have to give them a full month of chances, which is how I ended up in a 5:45 a.m. spinning class, my second in three days. Saturday’s was so grueling — ghastly music, a sadistic instructor — that I couldn’t let the taste linger. I like spinning; the hour goes by fast. So I came back yesterday morning for a palate-cleanser with a different instructor.

The music was, if anything, worse than Saturday’s speed-metal. The pace wasn’t quite as brutal, but I get really irritated with what spin teachers claim is sprinting on a stationary bike. I try to ride like an actual cyclist, and folks, we don’t go so fast our legs blur; if you’re trying to go fast, you go up a gear or three. But adding resistance on a stationery bike is just like adding a 30 mph headwind. It just sucks.

And if you’re going to make me sit through “Beat It” during one of these ordeals, at least make it the original Michael Jackson version, not some soundalike.

In my spinning class at that hour, I’d play Beyoncé and the Pretenders. But no one asked me.

And have I bored you to death yet? Sorry.

The punchline of this whole story was that I slipped on black ice in the parking lot on the way back to my car, falling directly on my knee. I’m starting to feel like Joe Namath.

Fortunately, though, I have good bloggage for you today, and you can read it without having to listen to “Blame it on the Boom Boom.” You’re welcome.

From Roy’s Tumblr, a letter from Alec Guinness to a friend, discussing a part he’d been offered, “fairy-tale rubbish but could be interesting, perhaps.” Three months later, he’s on about the “rubbish dialogue.” Bet you can’t guess what crapfest he was working in.

I love a story like this, which illustrates something most of us never think about, in this case, the ghetto economy. It’s about the valuable street substance that is craved, stolen and traded — Tide laundry detergent.

I can’t bear myself to read the Elizabeth Wurtzel essay this essay is about, but I’ll read this essay. Huh?

It’s true: Jack and Rose could have both survived the Titanic sinking, but noooo.

Finally, the best column I’ve read about Lance Armstrong in a good long time:

He cannot say he’s sorry for using performance-enhancing drugs. If he wants to confess, as reported on Friday by The New York Times, he has to leave it at that. The trained-seal routine for celebrities caught in a scandal won’t work here.

He doesn’t want forgiveness for his pharmaceutical adventures.

He wants his old life back. He wants to compete in sanctioned triathlons. He wants to return to the leadership of his cancer foundation. He wants to matter again.

Tuesday. And so the week is underway.

Deborah asked yesterday about the pay model that Andrew Sullivan’s trying. He wrote today that the first day of the fund drive raised $333,000, with more than 12,000 jumping in. I wish him well, really I do, but I won’t be one of them. And I don’t see a pay model for NN.c anytime soon, barring catastrophe (job loss, etc.). It will be very difficult to do even under those circumstances. I lack Andrew Sullivan’s towering sense of his own worth.

I don’t read the Daily Dish, and haven’t read Sullivan (much) since 9/11/Iraq war. (Isn’t he the one who came up with the infamous “fifth column” observation? Why, I think he was.) My boss is a fan, and occasionally passes stuff along, and I gather he’s not as much of a douche as he used to be. But the site simply isn’t important enough for me to consider it a cheap magazine subscription. If you read his initial post on this, you know it’s not the entire site going behind the wall, just some longer posts, and even then, you get a few freebies a month before the wall goes up. That will suit my Andrew Sullivan needs for pretty much ever.

Still, I want him to do well. Writers should be paid, and he obviously has lots of readers. I also want to see various forms of pay-for-content schemes duking it out in the marketplace. Maybe one will work for me.

When we were doing GrossePointeToday.com, we were approached by a micropayment site, whose name I forget now — Jingle, Ka-ching, something like that. Here’s how it worked: You designated a monthly amount you were willing to pay for online content, sort of like a public-radio sustaining pledge — $10, $15, whatever, billed to your credit card. When you read something online that you liked, and that site was a Ka-jingle member, you clicked a button. At the end of the month, your ten bucks would be divided between all your clicks. If you only clicked one, they got $10. Two sites, $5 each. And so on. I don’t think it got off the ground, as I have never seen their logo anywhere, but the idea is interesting.

After 9/11, when “warblogs” were all the rage, a lot of them had “tip jars” through Amazon or PayPal, but I could never bring myself to put one up. If I accepted even a dime, I’d feel obligated, and I have enough obligations already. I always tell myself that if this gets to be too much of a grind, I can walk away without guilt. Believe me, there are many, many, many days when I’ve given a little less than my all here. If it bothers any of you, you’ve been kind enough not to say anything.

To my mind, the best free-to-pay transitions will be like Sullivan’s (and Talking Points Memo, which is trying something similar): Most of the site remains free, and premium content is there for paying customers.

No, I’m waiting until I do something else, I hope a book (and not lose my job and tumble into the fiscal abyss). Then, I’ll ask you to buy it, but this joint, for now, is and remains what it’s been since January 2001 — just a little key-clattering for fun, to take or leave as you see fit.

John Scalzi, as smart about balancing the paid-writer/unpaid-blogger life as anyone, mentions just a few of the headaches here:

To anticipate the question of whether I would/should/could do something like this, my short answer is that even if I could – a proposition I consider questionable for a number of reasons — I would prefer not to. Among other things it requires keeping track of subscriptions and handling customer service issues and doing all sorts of other stuff that I already know I would rather drag my tongue across a razor than to do. If I were hard up for cash I would probably put advertising up on the site before I did a subscription scheme. But I would be far more likely just to write something and put it up for sale; that seems to me to be the easier and more effective route for me.

In the ’80s, when I lived in a four-unit apartment building across the hall from Jeff Borden, he made an interesting observation about the party culture of the time. This is when cocaine was starting to appear at parties among the cool set, and Jeff said the ritual surrounding it was interesting and a little depressing.

Marijuana, he said, was a social drug. Light up a joint at a party, pass it around, make some friends. Cocaine was anti-social; you found a buddy or two, maybe someone you wanted to impress, and asked them to meet you in the bathroom for a special treat. You probably saw these duos and trios coming out of a bathroom or back bedroom many times, eyes glittering, noses twitching, expressions smug and superior. Sucks to be you, loser. This site will remain marijuana for the foreseeable future, or at least early ’80s-era marijuana — cheap or free, just mildly intoxicating, a giggle at best, sometimes a headache. Those other bloggers can deal in stronger stuff in their paywall bathrooms. But not here.

Bloggage? Some:

This is so outstanding, but be warned, it’s the unbleeped version: “Downton Abbey” cast members mash it up with “Breaking Bad.” Stephen Colbert’s staff are geniuses.

And while we’re on the subject: Vince Gilligan talks about crafting the final season.

Ezra Klein: Good riddance to the worst Congress in history.

A good weekend to all, and the full-week grind restarts Monday.

I love babies as much as the next person — possibly more — but even I was sort of disappointed to learn the eagle video wasn’t for real:

It totally fooled me. I was talking once to a guy in the Upper Peninsula; we were talking about seeing a salmon that had chosen a nearby shoreline to wash up on, and the carrion-eaters that would soon carry it away. Raccoons. Eagles.

“I go walking on the ice in the winter with the dog” — a cairn terrier — “and sometimes those things circle around like they’re thinking about having him for lunch.” A cairn terrier weighs less than a six-year-old, but it’s always nice to have your worst fears confirmed.

But I guess this one is just a clever final exam in an art class. Still, en route to watching it, I did discover these driving dogs:

So that’s good. The only thing missing — not enough horn-honking. I always thought a world where dogs could drive would include a lot more honking.

It’s been almost a week since last Friday, and I’ve started to calm down, not tearing up unexpectedly, punching pillows, etc. But as the dust settles, it looks like I’m going to have to start fussin’ again, because I can’t get past something that now looks like a permanent part of the debate. That is, the pro-gun contention that “gun-free zones” are part of the problem.

I confess, I’d never been aware of it until 2004, when I spent some time in the Twin Cities and saw a big sign on the door to Minnesota Public Radio, advising the building was a gun-free zone. It was explained this was part of the new law, with lots of eye-rolling. OK, I get it: If you want to opt out of the state’s new yee-ha-freedom gun laws, you may invoke your other sacred right (private property) and do so. I stopped noticing them after about a day. And I assumed everyone else did, too.

The problem with carrying a gun, at least to me, is one of practicality. Those suckers are heavy. Holsters are big and clumsy, hot in warm seasons, impractical in all of them. There’s a reason cops are universally seen as lousy dressers; their sports jackets hang all wrong. I know a few people who pack heat in Detroit for reasons of their own, and they all opt for the time-honored Motor City holster — the glove compartment. Women have purses, but, again: Heavy. The slenderest, most compact ladies’ model Smith & Wesson would crowd out my wallet in even my roomiest bag, make reaching for the Tic Tacs problematic and eventually cut a rut in my shoulder.

So when we talk about gun-free zones, who are we talking about? Open carriers? Are there that many out there? You all live all over the country, so you tell me. One of my colleagues in Fort Wayne had a brother in Texas who wore a holster everywhere, all the time, but I don’t see it around here. (Of course, in Detroit, it’s wise to assume that every single person you meet is packing, which has resulted in our extremely civil, virtually violence-free metro area. But they don’t wear them on their hips, for the most part.)

If we’re not talking about open carry, how are gun-free zones enforced? No one asked to look in my bag when I was in Minnesota; it was all on the honor system. And because people who feel threatened enough to feel they must be armed at all times are unlikely to even approve of the idea of gun-free zones, much less follow the rules, I’ve just assumed the signs are like the old joke about wetting your pants in a navy-blue suit — a nice warm feeling no one notices.

Consequently, I have a hard time believing, as the current pro-gun talking point has it, that these mass murderers are choosing schools, movie theaters, malls, etc., because “they know no one will return fire.” I just don’e. It goes contrary to everything I know of crazy people, including the ones who believe this crap.

Which brings me to something I found via Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alan Jacobns in (yes) the American Conservative:

But what troubles me most about this suggestion — and the general More Guns approach to social ills — is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man” in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now — but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly.

Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.)

Yup.

So here’s my bottom line: We can’t have a discussion, or whatever, until some participants stop lying. Let’s start with that one.

And let’s do some bloggage!

Steven Rattner on the coming conclusion of the GM rescue.

Finally, why I was at the camel farm Tuesday. Link will work after 8 a.m. EST.

I thought perhaps another 24 hours or so would make me less jumpy, but it hasn’t. Although, hey, stress/disbelief/grief seems to be giving way to fury! Is that good? You tell me. If I hadn’t been alerted to this post by LGM, I doubt I’d have seen it. (I’m allergic to McArdle.) It’s long, and meandering, and not very good, but it does include this whopper toward the end:

I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea; all I can say is that both these things would be more effective than banning rifles with pistol grips.

You know, I was sort of waiting for someone to say this. As I recall, something you heard from this corner of the internet after the Virginia Tech massacre ran along these lines. It wasn’t a full-throated roar — in fact, if I’m remembering correctly, it mostly came from the terra cotta-toothed, since-disgraced John Derbyshire — but it was there, couched as a rueful observation about the decline of the American male: All those shots fired, surely he had to reload at least a few times. Why didn’t one of these young men rush him and take him down? What has happened to the masculine impulse? Were no first-graders brave enough to run at the madman with the gun? What sort of children were these?

I still haven’t gotten over the columnists who, after 9/11*, were back on their old hobby horses within days, in particular the conservative women who sneered at the stewardesses on United 93 who thought they might join in the rush to the cockpit, using hot coffee as a weapon.

* or, as paid-by-the-word Mitch Albom put it in Sunday’s column, “al-Qaida’s diabolical Sept. 11, 2001 attack.”

To Megan McArdle and her Libertarian buddies, I say: Sounds like a plan. You first.

I really need to stop this now. One last story, thanks to Jolene: How our gun culture is unique in the world, in four amazing charts.

Oh yeah, and this, too: How Newtown, given the opportunity to examine its gun culture and consider new ordinances controlling it, took a pass:

“This is a freedom that should never be taken away,” one woman said. Added another, “Teach kids to hunt, you will never have to hunt your kids.”

You know what Dr. Phil has to say about that.

Palate cleanser? PALATE CLEANSER, STAT. How about this, Professor Hank Stuever’s supplemental reading list to his class at the University of Montana, on the occasion of class’ end. Just scanning the list, much of which I’ve read but much of which I haven’t, made my heart soar like a hawk. I have a very busy day today and won’t have time to read much of it, but just looking forward to dipping into something tonight will carry me through the day.

And by then, I might be back to something approaching normal. Let’s hope so. Happy Tuesday, all.

Phrases I don’t want to hear anymore:

Shocked and saddened.

Our hearts go out to…

I know, I know — not everyone is gifted with the language, and these phrases are simply what we say in particular situations, like “pleased to meet you” and “I’ve had a lovely time.” But let’s at least admit that they mean nothing anymore. Not when you see them in places where they don’t belong, at a time when the only sane response is silence, or, failing that, a full-throated scream.

Someone in Newt Gingrich’s office, in Sarah Palin’s office, thought something needed to be said, and so they said that. My advice would have been to keep their yaps shut. But here I am, yapping, so what the hell. It’s a free country.

For whatever it’s worth, I don’t know that I have anything to add, other than to note some things you should read, if you haven’t. A lot of these have been widely linked, but what the hell, not everybody lives on the internet these days:

Garry Wills, “Our Moloch.” Elegant, spare and as incisive as a shiv:

The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence. Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?

“It is an object of reverence.” You got that right.

The most complete and concise single account of what happened in those 10 minutes that I’ve yet seen, from the Hartford Courant. A very tough read. This was the worst of it:

Lanza next arrived at teacher Victoria Soto’s classroom. Soto is believed to have hidden her 6- and 7-year old students in a classroom closet. When Lanza demanded to know where the children were, Soto tried to divert him to the other end of the school by saying that her students were in the auditorium.

But six of Soto’s students tried to flee. Lanza shot them, Soto and another teacher who was in the room. Later, in their search for survivors, police found the remaining seven of Soto’s students still hiding in the closet. They told the police what had happened.

…Police investigators were still stunned Saturday by the scene they encountered at the school a day earlier, in particular by the seven surviving — but shocked — children hiding silently in the closet in Soto’s classroom.

“Finally, they opened that door and there were seven sets of eyes looking at them,” a law enforcement officer familiar with the events said Saturday. “She tried to save her class” he said of Victoria Soto.

And I’m sure nearly everyone has seen this by now, “Thinking the Unthinkable,” another very tough read by a mother of a boy who sounds very much like Adam Lanza.

I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am Jason Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys—and their mothers—need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

And finally, we should end on a note of at least something resembling our better angels. The president’s speech Friday:

“This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we’ll tell them that we love them, and we’ll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight, and they need all of us right now. In the hard days to come, that community needs us to be at our best as Americans, and I will do everything in my power as president to help, because while nothing can fill the space of a lost child or loved one, all of us can extend a hand to those in need, to remind them that we are there for them, that we are praying for them, that the love they felt for those they lost endures not just in their memories, but also in ours.”

We need to be at our best as Americans. So let’s see if we do that.