Anniversary: Sadness Follows Thirteen Years Later

September 11 again.

Last year, I was worried about how the world had remained a bloody, violent place since 2001 as the Syrian Civil War was well into its third year.  It's now in its fourth, and due to the extremist group ISIL it's bled over back into neighboring Iraq which still hasn't recovered from the ill-planned Bush/Cheney occupation.

Last night Obama gave a speech outlining how we were committing airstrikes against the Islamist State psychopaths.  We are remaking military commitments to a nation we tried to exit back in 2011, mostly because we as a nation failed to leave Iraq in better shape than when we invaded it in 2003.  Mostly because we dove head-first into a Middle East quagmire out of anger and blind rage.

We had no reason to invade Iraq in response to what Bin Laden did to us on 9/11.  The reasons were fabricated by a Bush/Cheney administration that wanted to invade Iraq for other objectives (finishing off Saddam, placating our allies in the region who didn't like having a dictator for a neighbor, seizing all that oil and natural resources).  We had no plan for what to do with nation-building.  Well, there was a plan: remove Saddam and his ilk, put in pet Chalabi on the throne, sign up all the oil rights, exit Iraq.  When it happened that nobody in Iraq wanted Chalabi and he wasn't the puppy Cheney thought he was, it turned out we had no Plan B.

Because with the Middle East there IS no Plan B.  Just an ongoing, 5000-year cycle of violence and madness that will only end when everybody's dead.

And we are all stuck.  The innocent people in the Middle East trapped between warring factions.  Other nations tied to the region through all that damn oil.  A United States that's morally and politically obligated to keep dropping itself into that quagmire because we've been breaking things there since World War II and we're stuck paying the bills for the next century.

We're bombing away in Iraq today.  Because the Towers fell thirteen years ago.  We have no idea when we can stop bombing.

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In the Navy Yard Shooting, These Are the Facts You Need To Know

Today was a bad day all around - even without considering the flooding disaster that is Colorado - when we found our nation handling yet another shooting spree... this time at a well-guarded Washington DC Navy Yard.

These are the facts as can be confirmed (EDIT 9/26/13, I feel the need to add a little more for those Google searchers pulling up this article, SEE BELOW):

1) Early reports of multiple shooters proved wrong, as usual: there's always confusion during these mass shooting incidents, with survivors and eyewitnesses confused about where and when the violence takes place.  There was just one guy.

2) The shooter brought with him just a shotgun, but used the fact he was shooting up a military installation to secure additional firearms - handgun and rifle - to continue the shootout.

3) The shooter had his own access card to the grounds.  Working for a private tech firm supporting the Navy Yard, he would need some form of access to get into work areas as part of his job.

4) The shooter was involved in a previous shooting incident in 2010 when he lived in Texas, when he was charged with shooting a gun he claimed he was cleaning when it accidentally went off.  Those charges were dropped.  He was also charged in 2004 shooting out a car's tires in Seattle.

5) The shooter had a background as a military reservist from 2007 to 2011 when he was discharged.

6) There are reports that the shooter had undergone - and maybe still undergoing - psychological treatment for sleep issues and anger management.

7) The shooter was African-American.
7a) The identities of the victims have not been established yet.  The authorities are most likely talking to victims' families first.
UPDATE: The identities were released to the public, Washington Post created a memorial site.  By the looks of it the shooter did not discriminate, he shot at White, Black, Hindu Indian, male, female.  Most of the victims were middle-aged or near retirement age.

8) There are currently 13 dead, with 8 wounded.

These are the speculations:

1) Would the current needs for universal background checks as supported by a broad majority of Americans stopped the shooter from getting a firearm?  Probably not in this case: since that Texas gun charge was dropped it wouldn't have shown up on the background check.  And I'm not sure if the 2004 charges would have expired otherwise, or if the psychological treatment would have been a red flag under the rules.

2) Would the shooting have been less tragic if there were more people at the workplace with firearms / conceal permits?  You have to be kidding: this was the Navy Yard.  There's supposed to be armed guards, fences, barricades, defensive systems across the place.  And yet I won't be surprised if we're gonna get gun enthusiasts arguing for conceal-carry and more gun permissiveness at a military base (again: they said this crap after the Fort Hood shootings).
UPDATE: This did not stop LaPierre of the NRA from declaring the shooting wouldn't have been as bad if there had been more "Good guys with guns," the blanket NRA excuse against sensible gun safety laws.  Never mind the fact that there were armed guards on the site, the cops responded within 2 minutes, never mind the possibility of a "good guy with a gun" getting confused at who to shoot, and then having the cops shoot at him thinking he might be a second shooter (refer back to the earlier point of the reports of multiple gunmen).

3) What motivated the shooting?  The shooter did not leave behind any obvious clue like a letter or a death threat on a website.  There is no evidence as of yet what triggered the shooting.  (any further speculation based on race would really be in poor taste until we get specifics)
UPDATE: Huff Post has an article that the shooter left a note, indicating the shooting was a twisted case of a mental breakdown.

4) The shooter is someone with a serious track record of gun ownership.  This was not an overnight impulse to buy a gun and shoot up someplace: he's had guns before.  And he's used guns before...

5) The more obvious point about the shooter is the anger management (lack of).  A huge red flag in any shooting spree.  Any kind of terror attack, really.  The patterns still all point to one thing: an angry guy lashing out at a supposed injustice and taking it out on a lot of people who had nothing to do with causing that anger.  Mostly the shooter is an angry white guy, but we've had angry black guys as shooters before, there's been angry Asian guys, there's been angry ethnic guys across the board.

But the common link is there: Anger.  There are a lot of gun owners in the United States, I will grant you that.  Most of them never pull the trigger outside of legal usage such as practice ranges and/or licensed hunting.  But you get the gun owner with the persecution complex, the rage against women/the job/next door neighbor who leaves the flood lights on.  It's the combination of rage and access to firearms that ought to be of concern.

It'd be nice to have a debate on the matter, on the problem of guns and anger.  But David Frum is right: we're never going to get a debate on guns at all anymore, are we...?
UPDATE: Still don't have a serious debate on gun safety.

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Presidential Character: Week Twenty, Garfield Died For Our Sins

No, NOT THE CAT.

The election of James Garfield as our twentieth President came during the height of the Spoils system within our government.  A political party winning the Executive office (Presidency) would expect to fill government job vacancies - well-paying and in some positions ripe for kickback abuse - by picking various "friends" and underlings who helped with the elections to fill said jobs.

To say corruption ruled within the Spoils system is an understatement: it was at its worst under the Grant administration (review his sad administration for the basic information), with the subsequent Presidency under Hayes doing its utmost to undo the damage (Hayes personally kicked one patronage figure Chester A. Arthur from the key post of Collector of the Port of New York (basically the tax collector at our busiest richest port)).

By 1880 government corruption was a major issue, and civil service reform a major topic.  Unfortunately, such reform needed a focused Congress to make the legislation, and Congress was - still is - a little too divided against itself to make meaningful legislation when it needs to.  Congress has to be prodded to do what's right from an external - sometimes painful - act.

Even though the Republicans at the time were the dominant party - and the one with roughly 16 straight years of corrupt office as a loadstone - they were large enough to have a reform faction gaining influence this election cycle.  Their candidate was Garfield, a long-standing Congressman with perhaps the most jaw-dropping political resume our nation ever saw: college professor and president, lay preacher, lawyer, practiced orator, Civil War volunteer corps leader promoted to battlefield general, voted into Congress and only taking the job (which meant resigning his battlefield position) by direct order of Lincoln himself, serving 16 straight years (which at the time was practically a record, and a clear testament to how the voters liked him).  Garfield had a blemish, accused of taking part of the corruption in Congress during the Grant years, but the charges were never proved and Garfield's performance before and after suggested he was incorruptible.

Garfield's faction - the Half-Breeds, apparently the 19th Century equivalent of RINO - had another candidate on the ballot (Blaine) but Garfield's name quickly rose as a compromise candidate against the Stalwarts (led by political machine boss Conkling) who were pushing for Grant on a third term (were they really THAT tone-deaf?).  After the fractured convention, Garfield was forced to take on Arthur as his Vice-President to balance the ticket.

It was one of the closest popular votes ever - Garfield had roughly 7,700 more votes than Democratic candidate (and fellow Civil War hero) Winfield Hancock - but the Electoral counts wasn't even close (214 to 155).  Garfield also won his Congressional seat again (some states still alow candidates to run for both offices) and was named as Senator-elect by his state of Ohio (making him the only man to ever be Congressman-elect, Senator-elect and President-elect at the same time).

It'd be nice to think that Garfield's reform efforts would begin in earnest and he would act as President with statements and deeds to demonstrate what Character he had.

Within the fourth month of his term of office, Garfield was shot in the back by a disgruntled job-seeker who was convinced he was owed an office under the Spoils system, and was equally convinced that by killing Garfield it would make Arthur President he would get a pardon and a cushy job out of it (I refuse to name the assassin here: most of these jokers do it for the fame and notoriety.  You don't even wanna know what this jerkass wrote as his legal defense during the trial).

The public and political response to such a shooting was, of course, total outrage against the Spoils system itself.  That such a minor nobody would think he "earned" a government job for campaigning for a guy - the best evidence we got that the assassin did anything for the Republicans during the election year was that he handed out some flyers and showed up for a rally or two - became a horrific concept.  Arthur himself, once a symbol of the Spoils system, would champion civil service reform and become its successful advocate (although to say more would cover what should go into next week's Character review).

Garfield's death so early within his tenure tends to make him an "incomplete" figure in Presidential reviews.  Which does a disservice to the man when one looks at what he actually did in those four months:

• He ignored Senatorial courtesy by nominating his Cabinet with people he wanted rather than take suggestions from the Senate first.  This went a long way to breaking the patronage power of Senators like Conkling (who resigned his office and hoped to get re-appointed to the Senate to spite Garfield's obstruction: instead Conkling lost to a party rival, and a victorious Garfield nominated some of Conkling's allies back to their old jobs, now under his patronage and not Conkling).
• Garfield on his own initiative (he was a skilled mathematician and economist) paid back $200 million in maturing bonds earlier than scheduled, which saved the government millions from national debt.
• Garfield pushed for criminal charges and investigations into his own party's involvement in corruption in the postal service.
• Garfield pushed for federally-funded universal education, an effort to break the illiteracy and lack of education for 70 percent of Blacks across the nation.
• His foreign policy focus was on South America and improving relations with neighboring nations.
• He nominated a handful of federal judges and one Supreme Court Justice, always a key legacy of any administration.

Even with this much evidence of what Garfield did and intended to do, it's tricky to nail down his character.  Arguably Garfield was Active (he was to the forefront of a lot of actions his White House undertook), but was he Negative or Positive?  His refusal to compromise on certain issues lean towards the Stubborn traits of an Active-Negative (and his micro-managing of things, he meddled in nearly every Cabinet's department by the sound of it).  However, his proactive efforts - paying off the bonds early, pushing for reform issues - made him a forward-thinking leader.  That most of his actions were not to his own self-interest but to the benefit of others makes Garfield a likely candidate for an Active-Positive President.

The big "what-if" of "what if Garfield hadn't been shot?"  He'd have been a little bit like Hayes, a fellow reform-minded A-P, and Lincoln.  And considering how he wiped out the likes of Conkling, he might have succeeded where Hayes couldn't in terms of getting civil service reform passed.  But it might have taken two terms to do it against a recalcitrant Congress.  It had to take the tragedy of Garfield's assassination to make reform a reality.

Next Week: Can the Office of President Change A Man's Character?  Yes, It Could...

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Meanwhile In Other News From the Crazy Week: This Is What We Get When We Deregulate, People

That other bad tragic event from last week - the massive explosion of a fertilizer factory in West, TX - has this not-so-shocking revelation:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security requires fertilizer plants and depots to disclose amounts of ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make a bomb, above 400 lbs. The West, Texas plant, West Fertilizer, reportedly held 270 tons of the substance, 1,350 times that limit.
"This facility was known to have chemicals well above the threshold amount to be regulated under the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Act (CFATS), yet we understand that DHS did not even know the plant existed until it blew up,"  Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Considering that the factory caught on fire when we were told there weren't supposed to be any flammable chemicals there... Considering that the factory EXPLODED with a force knocking out the surrounding schools and nursing home and apartments... This isn't shocking.  There were clearly flammable stuff there: there were clearly too much nitrate/explosive compounds there.

The reason this all happened was very simple: our nation's system of safety and regulation protocols surrounding dangerous chemicals has fallen apart.  Due to a combination of relaxed laws and serious budget cuts and failure to fully staff our agencies to ensure regulations are upheld, this disaster and other fatal accidents elsewhere have happened.

THERE IS A VERY GOOD REASON WE HAVE LAWS: TO PROTECT PEOPLE.

There is a very good reason why we have regulations: to make sure those laws are enforced.  To make sure the people we are trying to protect - workers, emergency responders, neighbors, entire communities - stay safe.

The arguments for deregulation - they're too expensive, they punish free enterprise, businesses can self-regulate - fall apart after each coal mine disaster, each crashed airplane, each exploding factory, each worker killed.  Every excuse or alternative can't explain away the facts that if we had stricter enforcement of factory safety with chemicals, if that company truly played by the rules, if our regulators like OSHA or the Chemical Safety Board had more budget and more staff, we wouldn't have had that explosion killing people.

And our Republican overlords want to cut even further into our government budgets, weakening our ability to regulate and ensure public safety even further as well.  All because they hate government regulations, and all because they hate raising taxes on the uber-rich to pay for sh-t our nation desperately needs.

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I'm Calling It: Third Craziest Week In American History

UPDATE: The second bomber reportedly captured alive.  This is important.  Alive means we get answers.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE (9:35 pm EDT): Andrew Sullivan at his Dish site linked an Onion article that is 5000 times funnier than what I wrote here but yeah, the sentiment's about the same.  Oh man, the Onion got that article out yesterday... Lord knows what Friday's crazy would have made that article...

As a student of history, moments like these stir the need to look back at other times to compare and contrast.  To be fair, there's been a lot of crazy days, and there's been weeks and months of bad/good/violent/weird things happening, but narrowing it down to the Craziest of the Crazy takes some doing.

For this week of April 15 - April 20 2013, this is the evidence at hand.

Monday April 15: the tragedy of the Boston Marathon Bombings.  The media and social media - Twitter and Reddit especially - go into overdrive covering this all week long.  It builds up in the background until late Thursday night.

Tuesday April 16: A Senator gets mailed a letter laced with ricin, a lethal poison that's favored by low-grade extremists, usually militia types.  Other letters - especially one to President Obama - get intercepted with ricin as well.  Authorities are quick to point out this has nothing to do with the bombings in Boston.

Wednesday April 17: A fertilizer plant in West, Texas (the comma is not a misprint) catches on fire and explodes, killing at least 14 (most of them volunteer firefighters).  Rumors of arrests or imminent arrest buzz about Boston.  An attempt to get a gun control measure setting near-universal background checks fails to clear a Cloture vote.  An arrest is made on the ricin letters: the suspect is a third-rate Elvis Impersonator with a conspiracy obsession.  (What does it tell you when a Elvis Impersonator attempting ricin terror attacks is the THIRD-most talked about story of the week?!)

Thursday April 18: Boston remains on edge as reports get louder that enough pictures and video have been found of the suspected bomber(s).  Obama comes to town to join in memorial services for the three killed on Monday.  That afternoon law enforcement releases official photos of the two men they suspect planting the bombs.  By 10:30 pm there's a shooting at the MIT campus, the bombers rob a 7-11, they carjack somebody, get chased out to Watertown - a suburban town west of Boston - where a prolonged shoot-out ends with one of the bombers dead and the other fleeing into the night.

Friday April 19: The entire nation is abuzz.  Boston goes into lockdown mode - people advised to "stay in shelter" - as a massive man-hunt for the second bomber gets underway.  News about the bombers get out: they're brothers, immigrated nationals from Kyrgyzstan but with Chechnya parentage, the oldest (the one shot) a wanna-be Golden Glove/Olympic boxer the other (19) a college student.  They'd been in the United States legally since 2002 when they moved here with their parents, having gained permanent resident/naturalized status.  As of 7:45 pm EDT, the 19-year old is still on the loose.  EDIT: Just as I post this, there's a shoot-out at a boat on the river in Watertown which may involve the second bomber.  May.  News is breaking constantly right about now...

So there you have it for this being the Third Craziest Week in U.S. History.  There's still Saturday to go...

My Number Two candidate is the week of October 14 to 19th in 1987: although it starts Wednesday and goes into Monday, it's long enough to count.  During which we had the Baby Jessica "down a well" saga, an increase in hostile action between the United States and Iran where the US Navy blows up two Iranian oil platforms, and the stock market crashes on one of its worst Black Mondays ever.

For the Number One... I have to go with the craziness that started on Tuesday September 11 2001, but in some respects that was one huge day and everything else that came after - invading Afghanistan, occupying Iraq, the use of torture and prolonged detention - one big ongoing thing.

I've had a fellow Horder on Anibundel's site - efgoldman - suggest the week of March 31 to April 6 1968, during which LBJ announced he will not seek a second elected term as President, Reverend King is assassinated which stirred nationwide riots, and a sporting goods gunpowder explosion killed 51 in Indiana.  Got to admit, that's a lot of stuff.  It might be Number One.

There's also the time period between July 1 to July 4th in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, when Vicksburg fell and the Union army stood at Gettysburg.  But as part of a massive event like the Civil War itself it might not count: and such events are intense, but not truly crazy (albeit war itself a crazy and messy deal on its own).

I'd put it to all seven of my readers here: which week truly deserves the Craziest Week in US History title?  Is there another contender?  Please comment.  Seriously.  I live for commentary... :whimper:

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In Boston

Tragedy on the streets of Boston today, echoing across the nation and the globe.

Why this happens, we've already figured out: there's a small group of assh-les on the planet either working in unison or individually who want to make themselves feel powerful by killing innocent people who have nothing to do with why said assh-les are truly powerless.

The trick is figuring out the How we can stop this madness from happening again.  Welcome to the sad truth of the eternal struggle of good people to stop evil from flourishing.

Take care of you and yours tonight, all.

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Tragedy July 20 2012

To the families and friends who lost people last night in Aurora, Colorado, my prayers and sympathies are with you.  These are weak words, they always are, compared to the suffering you all are going through right now.

These people went to the movie theater to be entertained.  Instead, they received pain and sorrow because of a sicko with a gun and with hate and fear in his heart.

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