Check Out This Trumpian Headline From Yesterday

This was on the news source The Hill yesterday. I'm sure you can still find it there today. It's the 2nd part of this headline. It should be the lead story all by itself.

Overnight Defense: Army launches command probe after slaying at Fort Hood | 

'MAGA' listed as 'covert white supremacy' in military handout

"'MAGA' listed as 'covert white supremacy' in military handout"

That is incredible.  And says it all.

Thanks, Mr. President!

Thanks, Republicans!

Another psycho lashes out: do you suppose our representatives are paying attention?

This time, once more--though not always, of course--with guns.

The last time, you'll remember, was with an airplane.

Yesterday:

"A California man killed in a shootout with Pentagon police drove cross-country and arrived at the military headquarters' subway entrance armed with two semiautomatic weapons, authorities said Friday. The shooter apparently left behind Internet postings resentful of the government and airing suspicions about the 9/11 attacks."

One more person angry about our government.

Another gun-nut, conspiracy theorist, it seems, if the guy who did it is the guy with the same name who posted a bunch of rants on the 'net. We'll see. Stay tuned.

Doesn't it seem like there's been a lot of these lately?

For a brief update on recent attacks:

"The assault at the very threshold of the Pentagon — the U.S. capital's ground zero on Sept. 11, 2001 — came four months after a deadly attack on the Army's Fort Hood, Texas, post allegedly by a U.S. Army psychiatrist with radical Islamic leanings."

"Hatred of the government motivated a man in Texas last month to fly a small plane into a building housing Internal Revenue Service offices, killing an IRS employee and himself."

"The shooting resembled one in January in which a gunman walked up to the security entrance of a Las Vegas courthouse and opened fire with a shotgun, killing one officer and wounding another before being gunned down in a barrage of return fire."

It would be nice if this, then, would end this stuff but I wouldn't count on it.

What would also be nice, though, is if we knew all our representatives--especially the ones in Washington--were paying attention to this palpable anger and frustration on the part of the citizens of the country, regardless of the source of the anger.

What any and all representatives in Washington ought to take from this is that we have problems, we want and need them fixed and they need to stop the bickering and the partisan nonsense and the log-jamming legislation they've been doing and get to work, compromise, come up with good solutions and pass that legislation.

And quickly.

That's what should happen.

It won't, of course, but that's what should happen.



Have a great, sunny, warm weekend, folks.

___________________________________

Update:

The Pentagon shooting suspect died of his wounds.

What's that about living by the sword/dying by the sword?

Fair trial?

Think about this:

How likely is it, do you think, that this Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan--the guy reported to have shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood earlier this week, and injuring many more--is going to get a truly fair trial?

Really.

First, it was virtually immediately decided he's going to be tried in a military court.

That's a huge strike against him right there.

How open-minded are most people in the military going to be towards this guy?

Then, get this--he's also to be tried, so far, anyway--at the same Fort Hood where this all took place.

Right.

And then, it's only a few days since this horrible tragedy took place but think how much media coverage this has aleady gotten.

As proof of what I'm saying here, in general, and the media point, above, in specfic, check out what was released in an article on this today:

"The National Security Agency intercepted 10 to 20 communications over the past year between Maj. Hasan and Mr. Awlaki, who knew three of the Sept. 11 hijackers and hailed Maj. Hasan as a 'hero' after the shootings."

Don't most of us already have opinions on this guy and his case?

Sure we do. Don't kid yourself otherwise.

His attorney already says he's not getting what would be normal, fair treatment for even himself, as the guy's attorney, let alone the Major.

Then add to it that he's Muslim with a very Muslim and foreign-sounding name and you get the picture.

I didn't mention that they're going for the death penalty and on 13 counts.

I'm not saying we need to be all soft and forgiving on this, by any means.

All I'm saying is that he should be given a fair trial.

Remember those?

We used to always insist that was the type trials we had in the United States.

Link to story:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125804778767245615.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsThird

Gun laws in the US?

I've written, time and again, about our looney gun culture and our obsession with them and the shootings we end up with.

For more information on the subject, and in a rare case of re-posting, I put up the following, from Bill Mann and The Huffington Post, today:

Fort Hood Reminds Us: Our Gun Laws Are a National Disgrace

Our current lack of health insurance for all is a national disgrace. But so are our handgun laws -- or lack of them.

You'd think you might have heard a bit more about our heedless national pistolero mentality in the wall-to-wall TV coverage of the tragic shootings at Fort Hood this week. But no such luck. How many times have we seen this movie before? It's only the locations that change.

There was only scant mention in all the coverage that suspected mass murderer Nidal Hasan had bought his lethal cop-killer handgun at "Guns Galore" in nearby Killeen, Texas. How charming.

Why is it that comic Stephen Colbert seems to be the only one on national TV who regularly reminds us about this country's twisted love of handguns? (Colbert keeps his piece, "Sweetness," under his anchor desk, occasionally taking it out to smooch its barrel).

Something I've written in my newspaper columns about for years bears repeating here:

Any country with as many mentally ill people as the U.S. that allows virtually unlimited access to handguns is on a suicide mission.

Gun sickness is our most pressing national illness.

I live within sight of the Canadian border, and Americans who visit Canada are often surprised at how serious Canadian customs officials regard guns -- specifically, bringing them into relatively handgun-free Canada. Where are these people's priorities, they seem to be saying?

(Note: Canadian customs can -- and does -- turn people back at the border who have a DUI conviction. Again, different national priorities).

Canadians recognize handguns as a direct threat to civilized society, unlike here, where the NRA and the gun-toters evidently believe we're living in Tombstone, Ariz., circa 1885.

How many more mass shootings and troubled-loner gun sprees (what the New York Post calls "Slayfests") can we afford before we finally get serious about gun control? How much longer will network TV news continue to soft-peddle and play down this most basic issue?

I don't really care that much about what drove Hasan to apparently murder all those soldiers, which has been the prime focus of nonstop cable news. The fact is, he did. What I DO care about is how easy it was for him to get the means -- a lethal gun -- to do it.

Not to belabor the Canadian issue -- we Americans are, after all, the noisy, gun-toting downstairs neighbors -- but re-entering the U.S. after living in Canada for several years (which we did) was a maddening experience.

We lived a major metropolitan area, Montreal, for seven years. And even in the more disadvantaged parts of that city, you feel safe. You never feel you might get shot, either by a handgun-toting robber or a troubled loner.

Coming back into the United States you lose that peace of mind. It's like a slap in the face.

Don't believe me? Ask anyone else who's lived in a developed country in which handguns are restricted and can't be bought as easily as cigarettes.

We have millions of sick Americans who need health insurance. But there are even more of us who live in danger of being shot by an easy-to-obtain weapon. It's way past time for the media to pay attention to THIS life and death issue.
____________________

Great writing, Mr. Mann. Thank you for the logic, information and unimpassioned input.

(Side note to "Top of the Chain": We don't agree on this issue. You know it. I know it. I appreciate your reasonably calm writing but let's not go on about this. Let's agree to disagree. Thank you for reading, absolutely. In the meantime, several more people were shot and killed this weekend in Kansas City alone, on top of the Fort Hood slaughter and the shooting in Orlando last week).

Not doing the Muslim faith--or Muslims--any favor

So here we go again, it seems.

One more incident, to the Western eye, of a Muslim man "going postal" in the world--this time in Fort Hood, Texas.

Any and every time some terrorist straps explosives to their body and blows themself up, whether they take anyone with them or not, if they are also Muslim, the opinion in the West is that these are desperately ignorant people.

In this case, unfortunately, US Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan went on a shooting spree here in the States--at Fort Hood, Texas, just outside San Antonio.

The result?

At least 13 killed and 31 wounded.

And as usual, it makes no sense. It just ends up being another horrible, tragic event.

And the thing is, to the people of the United States and the West, this all too frequently looks like a pattern of a lack of education (read: ignorance), religious or otherwise zeal and virtually unthinkable violence, all rolled into one.

Leaders of the Muslim faith immediately came out to say that this is not the Muslim faith, fortunately--and of course--and that's good. But for too many people, they see these senseless, murderous acts repeated again and again and both don't like the results of them, naturally, and feel as though it's an ugly, ugly pattern that gets repeated far too frequently all around the world.

How do you deal with someone who thinks violence is an answer?

And the only answer, at that?

How do you deal with someone who has been taught by his elders (because most of them are men, in fact) that if they go on a successful suicide pact and kill "the enemy", they will go straight to "heaven"? Granted, that's not the case here regarding Major Hasan but that is the case for so many of the deaths in the Middle East.

How can we deal with a suicide mentality, locally, nationally and internationally?

In the case of this Major Hasan in Texas, it appears he was mentally unstable, as information comes out but it appears, given what information we have at this moment, that it also may have been borne out of religious fervor.

I hope that's not the case.

What's true is that religious leaders all around the world need to teach their followers in peace, acceptance and tolerance--not murder, death and suicide.


Link to story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_fort_hood_shooting_suspect