Still to Unravel

This painful, gaping 33-year-old mystery has yet to be full solved, not until we know the motive:

A former convenience store worker confessed to luring 6-year-old Etan Patz from his school bus stop in 1979 and choking him to death in a basement, police said Thursday, ending a three-decades long investigation into one of the nation's most baffling missing-children cases.

Pedro Hernandez, 51, of Maple Shade, N.J., was arrested on a murder charge after he told police he promised the boy a soda, took him to his store – just blocks from Etan's lower Manhattan home – and killed him there, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

Hernandez told police he put Etan's body in some trash about a block from the store, Kelly said, where it's possible it was picked up by sanitation crews.

...

Hernandez was questioned by police for more than three hours after he was picked up in New Jersey Wednesday, and gave police a signed confession, Kelly said. His motive was not yet clear.

Just one child? Did he really only do this once? Makes it all the more incomprehensible.

Let's just hope the really got the right guy.

Fire From the Right

Appalling:

A local Planned Parenthood clinic was targeted Sunday night in Grand Chute, Wis. No motive was immediately known, and though Wisconsin hasn’t played a central role in the debate over women’s access to contraception, the approaching GOP primary and the heated recall fight in the state have elevated tensions there.

Also appalling:

State Rep. Michelle Litjens (R), who represents Grand Chute in the state legislature, is a member of Wisconsin Right To Life and a strong critic of Planned Parenthood. She cautioned against associating the bombing with her fellow anti-abortion advocates and complained that the bomber, whatever his or her motivation, may tar the opposition to Planned Parenthood with the crime.

Can this and the murder of Dr. George Tiller really be separated from the violent rhetoric?

Abortion opponents have a long history of using violent rhetoric to attempt to justify their crimes and incite others to violence. They regularly refer to abortion providers as “murderers” in interviews and articles and utilize imagery associated with murder such as “wanted” posters and “hit lists” in their campaigns to end legal abortion. Unfortunately, instead of marginalizing these extremists, other opponents of abortion have picked up on this dangerous rhetoric to advance their political agenda.

The devastation this rhetoric can cause has been keenly experienced by the abortion provider community. In late 1992, Michael Griffin, who had no history in the anti-abortion movement, became involved with a local anti-abortion leader who took him under his wing and mentored him by showing him graphic anti-abortion videos and involving him in efforts to target a local clinic where Dr. David Gunn worked. Earlier that year abortion opponents had distributed western-style "wanted" posters featuring a picture of Dr. Gunn, his home phone number, and other identifying information. In 1993, Dr. Gunn became the first abortion provider to be murdered; shot to death by Griffin in Pensacola, Florida.

Following the murder of Dr. Gunn, anti-abortion extremists publicly advanced the idea that the murder of abortion providers was “justifiable.” Paul Hill appeared in media outlets, including the nationally televised Donahue show, calling for the execution of abortion providers. In fact, he was so well-known for making such inflammatory statements that reporters often asked him, “If you believe so strongly in killing doctors, why don’t you do it yourself?” One year later, Hill acted on the violent words he had been preaching when he shot and killed Dr. John Bayard Britton and volunteer escort Lt. Col. James Barrett, and injured June Barrett, in the driveway of a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic. Hill’s ideas were carried forward by others including James Kopp, who unsuccessfully attempted to use a “justifiable homicide” defense during his trial for the 1998 murder of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Buffalo, New York.

Scott Roeder, convicted last year for the murder of Dr. Tiller, also testified in court that his actions were justified and made repeated unsuccessful attempts to use a so-called “necessity defense.” Prior to murdering Dr. Tiller, Roeder had been in contact with others who advocated using violence against abortion providers, and was influenced by the media and what he watched on TV. He testified in court that he converted to Christianity as an adult after watching conservative programs like “The 700 Club.” Roeder stated that he believed Dr. Tiller was a murderer, a belief advanced by Bill O’Reilly, who repeatedly referred to Dr. Tiller on national TV as “Tiller the Killer.”

I'm all for free speech, but take responsibility for it. Right?

Humor of the Macabre

I didn't follow the Casey Anthony case and don't know if justice failed Caylee, but I do love this one specific tweet:



Oh, and Alan Dershowitz is right, something I can't always say.

Nightmare in Bahrain

It's bad -- the monarchy taking a citizens revolt and reframing it as sectarian violence, bringing in Saudi troops and indiscriminately killing average people.

The following video contains cold-blooded murder by the faceless soldiers of a guy in a polo shirt. You've been WARNED.



There's even worse video out there. These fascists in Libya and Bahrain seem to be winning now. Bad news, so sorry for their people, but at least this time, thanks so mobile and social, evidence of the rulers' crimes are documented and disseminated immediately, globally.

It's going to be a huge moral issue -- by all rights should become a traffic jam at The Hague.

Our Nation's Leader

Compare and contrast:

She's so little now. She will be shunned by more than before her response.

Obama did the right thing - he raised our national spirits. He tied this tragedy into the American democratic tradition. The timeless practice of constituents meeting with their democratically elected representatives. To the democratic dreams of a young girl who will not live to put her ideas into practice.

This was big narrative. He told an epic tale of the tapestry of decent, admirable, everyday heroic people killed, and noted their political divisions to emphasize how much more alike we are -- humanity is more important than politics. And he smiled in a surprisingly reassuring way when he did it, warm but strong daddy stuff. All that we're grateful for, spreading credit, not blame.

His goal: to inspire out of the darkness. "Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. Gabby opened her eyes for the first time. Gabby opened her eyes."



He led big time tonight. He's leading again. We'll see how it goes with the legislating, but his bipartisan schtick seems to be sincere. He hasn't wavered from his One America theme but he's not shying away from acknowledging the hard stuff in doing it. And he ended up inspiring hope.

This photo caught my eye:



Obama with the young hero who was so valiant and just happens to be a gay American. And there's Sen John McCain (R-AZ) looking on so irrelevant from somewhere in back.

You know, the man who gave America Sarah Palin.

For the record, I agree with Matt Osborne, "I Blame Jared Lee Loughner." I can't even bring myself to reprint his already iconographic mug shot in this blog. I took one look at that picture when they first released it and got it immediately. This guy is just going out of his way to look like the most major asshole he is. The type of asshole who would assassinate a politician and not care who he took down along the way, the most selfish type of organism alive, doing it for some psychotic pleasure, that itch that can never be scratched enough.

Maybe someone out there has the heart to pity his soul, but the way I see it, that's a long way off. He hasn't done the work.

So I don't blame Sarah or Rush or his poor parents or anyone else for this tragedy but the really awful malformation of humanity who planned it all himself and ruined countless lives just to satisfy his sick urges. All the hate mongers out there who feed off of the most atavistic American forms of resentment and fear, who make their living off of stoking it, they are just a more modest form of asshole.

That toxic young man is the real deal.

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today

He took us from black & white to color:



Lennon put himself on the line for peace during one that most volatile of eras, the 1960's, and as it all tails out with the end of the 1970's he's assassinated by the kind of madness he fought so vocally against. He'd be 70 now. What a different world it would be with him still there all these years, a generational voice of authority. People always wanted to know what John Lennon thought about political issues, and he was always able to write a hit. Maybe even a duet with Elvis Costello.

Mark David Chapman was out John Wilkes Booth. The fatal shot that came after the end of the Civil War.

What a huge rip-off for his family and what a huge rip-off for us.

Why We Don't

So here's a good reason to get out of Afghanistan:

The Feb. 12 nighttime raid left three women — two of them pregnant — and a local police chief and prosecutor dead. It was one of the latest examples of Special Operations forces’ killing civilians during raids, deaths that have infuriated Afghan officials and generated support for the Taliban despite efforts by American and NATO commanders to reduce civilian casualties.

The joint American and Afghan assault team shot five Afghans — all family members — from the roofs of buildings in a large residential compound near Gardez, in southeastern Afghanistan, where members of an extended family lived in different homes, survivors said. The Americans did the killing, they said.

At first, the American-led military command in Kabul said that the two men who died were “insurgents” who had “engaged” — in other words, shot at — the forces at the scene. The initial account also said that the troops then stumbled onto the bodies of three women “tied up, gagged and killed” and hidden in a room.

Military officials later suggested that the women — who among them had 16 children — had all been stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid, implying that their own relatives may have killed them.

But the military later said the men were innocent civilians shot after they went outside, armed, to investigate the presence of the forces conducting the raid. Then on Sunday night they admitted that the women were also killed during the raid.

...

In the interview, Mr. Yarmand said he did not know whether bullets had been dug out of the bodies. He said he would not dispute family members’ claims, but added, “We can not confirm it as we had not been able to autopsy the bodies.”

Here's more:



Select frames here.

Can you say "war crime?"

Crazy F**king Americans

What the fuck, America? Are you so high on self-righteous rage that you send Joe Stack of Austin Texas into an IRS building in his airplane, coming from setting his own house on fire?

In the California where Joe Stack started out as a fresh-from-college software engineer, fighting the tax man was, quite literally, a religion.


Back in the 1970s and '80s, California was not just the center of the "silicon revolution." The Golden State was also a teeming hive of anti-government activity, much of it aimed at the federal income tax code and the agency that enforced it — the Internal Revenue Service.

Tax protesters and self-styled patriots railed against exemptions granted to religious organizations, the Catholic Church in particular. They formed their own "churches" and invited others to join.

"It sounds like he went down that same path," said Dennis Riness, who did time in federal prison for running a church-styled tax shelter. "And ran into the same brick wall."

More like glass and metal, I imagine, but same idea. Meanwhile, psycho college professor Amy Bishop, who seems to have gotten off murdering her younger brother in an argument and sending a colleague a faulty pipe bomb, take out her self-righteous anger over not earning tenure (ironic, as she padded her resume to get the gig in the first place) by shooting up the faculty meeting. For instance:

In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Dr. Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!”
...

She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.

She was known to have cyclical “flip-outs,” as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory. On the day she shot and killed her brother, she ran out into the street with the shotgun and demanded a car at a local dealership.

I just saw Shutter Island last night and I get why some folks might be disappointed, but I think it's right on. We're a nation out of our heads. It's not the first time in American history, and it won't be the last.

And I'm wondering what we can do to stop it.

Haywire

Nothing but tragedy at Ft. Hood. The shooter suspect is still alive and, as he's a Muslim, the leading American Islamic advocacy group has come out with a statement condemning (duh!) the senseless slaughter.

Looks like the teabaggers picked the wrong day to capture the news cycle.

Oh, and I'm in agreement with George F. Will (on something other than baseball).

People Kill People

I'm not exactly sure what to think about this story, except that it backs up my fear of guns in the home. A Pennsylvania mother who lost her handgun license for a period due to wearing it openly to a soccer game has been killed by her husband in an apparent murder-suicide:

Some neighbors told the Lebanon Daily News they heard or saw the children — a 10-year-old boy and girls ages 2 and 6 — running from the house and screaming “Daddy shot Mommy!” shortly before the 911 emergency center was alerted at 6:20 p.m.

Debbie Mise, who lives nearby, said she heard a strange sound followed by the screams of the children. “I heard something heavy drop or fall, and then right away I heard the kids screaming, but I thought they were playing,” Mise said. “It was loud. But it didn’t sound like a pop.”

The backstory:

Meleanie Hain was thrust into the national spotlight when she took a gun, in plain view and holstered on her hip, to a soccer game Sept. 11, 2008, at Optimist Park in Lebanon.

Her permit to carry a gun was revoked by Lebanon County Sheriff Michael DeLeo on Sept. 20, 2008. DeLeo said Hain showed poor judgment in wearing her gun to the game. Hain’s permit was reinstated by Lebanon County Judge Robert Eby on Oct. 14, 2008, but the judge asked her to conceal it at soccer games. Hain said she would continue to carry it openly under the Second Amendment.

Hain then filed a lawsuit against DeLeo for $1 million in U.S. Middle District Court seeking reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and costs, emotional distress and lost wages.

This is, like, three types of crazy. First off, I don't care what anybody thinks about Second Amendment rights, there's no way I'd keep my kid at a game where a parent was openly armed, not unless Al Qaeda had invaded and we were all ironed up. Have you seen how pissed off some parents can get at these games? "That was no foul!" Bang! We've already had a parent killed by fists at a child hockey game, do we really want any of them packin' heat?

And what if some stupid kid grabs the gun, thinks its a toy, bang! That's a headline that come come from a blue state just as easily as a red.

Second type of crazy: a $1,000,000 lawsuit for twenty-four days without a gun permit? After bringing one to a game like that? Give me a break. She should have just gotten on the Teaparty gravy train and become a Glenn Beck star for a month, made those legal fees back in a jif and then some.

Then there's the crazy husband himself. Now, maybe this proves she needed to carry a gun, to protect against him, although I'd argue a concealed defense would work just as well. But to me this is a story about the tragedy of gun culture itself.

When such a family believes that guns can be relied upon to solve problems beyond, maybe, household defense in a high crime area, I don't want to be their neighbor. It's just not healthy thinking, it's caveman or reptile brain thinking. Sure, one can argue that the gun used in the murder-suicide "ended" things for Meleanie and Scott Hain, maybe the "ultimate solution" for their marital disagreements, but it sure has created a lifetime of problems for their poor orphaned children.

There are @ 30,000 gun-related deaths every year in America. Is that a number that should concern anyone? How about that @ 55% of these are suicides? (Assume that includes murder-suicides?)

I'm not for blanket U.S. gun elimination and stand with the President on Second Amendment rights. I do believe states should regulate as needed by localities. Most of all, I believe that domestic gun ownership should be treated by our culture as drunk driving has come to be treated: uncool and dangerous.

After all, having a gun in the home makes it three times more likely that you or someone you care about will be murdered by a family member or intimate partner.

Family values?

Fascists vs. The People

Praise Allah for our futuristic technology that allows regular people with cellphones to trump CNN during times of democratic revolution:



That's right, the people standing strong together event as bullets continually pop off all around them. The Revolutionary Guard regime of which Ahmadinejad is either evil puppet or enabler, who reportedly control 30% of Iran's economy, attempting to grab power even from the corrupt mullahs, are now targets for having committed murder. Just one case:

Gunfire from a pro-government militia killed one man and wounded several others Monday after hundreds of thousands of chanting opponents of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad marched in central Tehran to support their pro-reform leader in his first public appearance since disputed elections. The outpouring in Azadi, or Freedom, Square for reformist leader Mir Hossein Mousavi followed a decision by Iran's most powerful figure for an investigation into the vote-rigging allegations.

As my parents always taught me, exercising your right to vote is an honor in a world where people die for the right to participate the best of all imperfect systems, democracy. Take a look at these photos for a look at courage.

Andrew Sullivan is doing great public service with his blog, now turned green in solidarity with the protesters. His collection of Tweets alone is worth the visit. Nico Pitney in Huffington Post is another great source, with some understandable overlap. I don't know how else to say it, but this is history in the making, win or lose, and feels similar to the Corizon Aquino democratic revolution in the Philippines against dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-hoarding wife, Imelda, that had us glued to the television 23 years ago.

And how about this: Pat Buchanan praising President Obama for his contribution, virtually calling it The Obama Effect:

Nevertheless, Obama, with his outstretched hand, his message to Iran on its national day, his admission that the United States had a hand in the 1953 coup in Tehran, his assurances that we recognize Iran's right to nuclear power, succeeded. He stripped the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad of their clinching argument—that America is out to destroy Iran and they are indispensable to Iran's defense.

With the mask of patriotism and the legacy of true revolution lost through this election fraud, Iran's regime stands exposed as just another dictatorship covering up a refusal to yield power and privilege with a pack of lies about protecting the nation.

Take that, Mitt Romney and your fellow midgets. Here's how a real President reacts -- in measured, but no-uncertain fashion:



My favorite quote:

"I am deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television," the president said. "I think that the democratic process, free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent - all those are universal values that need to be respected."

When Americans see violence used to quell peaceful demonstrations "they are rightfully troubled," Obama said. To the protesters, he added, "I would say the world is watching and inspired by the participation."

Damn straight, I'm troubled by it. That's why we fought a Revolution. Americans left and right ought to be following this news -- we tend to paint everyone in the Iran with the same brush, and now it's time to acknowledge that those who fight for democracy are fighting for the ideals we hold most dear.

Death to fascists. Everywhere.