Morning Seditionists

December 15, 2012

Saturday

Filed under: Whatever — pjsauter @ 10:06 am

Well, yesterday was a pretty depressing day. 20 little kids and 7 adults all killed in a matter of minutes, thanks to a well-armed crazy person (who was really just a kid himself). Mike Huckabee says it happened because “we have systematically removed God from our schools.” I dunno, if there’s really a God out there running the show who allows somebody to go nuts and kill 5 year old kids, then I don’t think He was ever actually in our schools. In fact, Mike Huckabee’s God sounds like a dick.

One of the most nauseating aspects of what happened yesterday was the decision by NPR to go into full disaster coverage mode. Normally on Friday, I leave at 3:00 and get to listen to the last hour of Science Friday (where they don’t talk about stuff like Jesus riding on Dinosaurs and how the universe was intelligently created by some psychopath that allows bad things to happen to good people because He’s got a “hands off” management style – except when he’s smiting New Orleans over gay marriage or whatever). But yesterday, I had to listen to NPR’s live coverage of the shooting, which amounted to them repeating the same (very) limited information (much of which was incorrect) over and over and over….

Now I suppose we’ll hear that if the teachers in the school had only been packing heat, this tragedy could have been averted. In fact, probably the only education funding that could pass the Republican House would be to arm teachers with assault rifles.

President Obama was all broken up over the shooting yesterday (not that we’ll talk about gun control, of course – this just isn’t’ the time). I’ve never seen him get all choked up over a drone attack that takes out a family, but then maybe I just missed it.

Oh well, life goes on, I guess. For some of us, anyway.

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9 Comments

  1. I had another friend complaining about everybody being wall to wall on this. I guess it was to be expected. I was not so bothered by it. Say what you will, 20 5-10 year olds is pretty massive not to mention in a school setting. Of course, it is made to order for the media that loves to play off of the mawkish sentimentality and I really haven’t heard too much about the adult victims who I have to guess were as heroic as you can be facing off with a lunatic armed to the teeth.

    I was stuck at home because we had to replace 5 sidewalk squares so I was streaming MSNBC for the 6 hours ( :omg: ) it took for the incompetents to complete the job. Having spent countless adult hours in rekkid stores, I do have something of a tune out facility but it was just as you described with the same stuff repeated over and over and the shifting stories and avoidances of having a ‘Costas’ moment. They even named the wrong killer and couldn’t even figure out where his mother was killed. I am watching the Chris Hayes rerun just to see someone wring a little perspective out of this mess.

    I can only hope that there might be a little more attention paid to the US gun disaster because of the nature of this shooting but it’s already xmastime so short attention span Amurka will be over it soon enough and we will be off to the end of the world as the Mayans know it story shortly. At least the MS Blog disarmed a while ago.

    btw, I have to admit that although I listen to TotN a lot, I generally skip Science Friday. I do love the Political Junkie on Wednesdays.

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    pjsauter Reply:
    December 15th, 2012 at 3:25 pm

    I wasn’t especially bothered by it. It was to be expected, I guess. It just seemed rather pointless to be live on the air saying the same few things and then stammering over themselves trying to fill time. They could have just broken in to their regular programming every fifteen minutes with updates (or lack thereof).

    NPR had one of their science guys on, explaining that you had a much better chance of dying in a car accident than a school shooting, but that the media made such a big deal of these things that people feel afraid and vulnerable.

    I thought that was kind if ironic.

    vernon Reply:
    December 16th, 2012 at 5:03 am

    I just heard the replay of the Saturday edition of All Things Considered. They apologetically played their regular music feature, this week about Andre Rieu, because it was happy and upbeat. They also slipped a story about the Egyptian constitution election as well.

    I am watching this week’s Daily Shows and Colbert Reports to get away. They are done for the year so if we make it through December, maybe they can re-visit the story in January.

    If we make it past 12/21/2012, what will people say? “Never Mayan.” And 12/22/2012 may be the biggest shopping day since Black Friday.

    Comment by vernon — December 15, 2012 @ 1:20 pm

  2. Holy shit, working at the Post Office is not a cake walk. I’m trying my best to do the shit right but there’s guys there that have been working for decades watching me make the same mistakes over and over again. I can tell they’re pissed because of it.

    I think I was set up at one one point. I was told to move a container into a truck and the truck’s back hatch wasn’t completely up but down a few feet. So I go full speed into the thing with a box that’s above the top of the container, smashing into the door. Looking back on it now, I’m assuming the box had six feet long lights that may have been smashed. I don’t know for sure. Is it my fault. Sure. Could they have made sure that the door was completely up. Yes. There’s plenty of things that could have happened differently in that situation. No one has talked to me about it, so I don’t know for sure that any damage occurred, or even if lights were actually in the box, but it’s been on my mind for the last few days.

    There’s also priority mail that has to be sorted almost immediately before going onto a belt to a clerk a few feet away. Packages with Alaska destinations are called AMF and go to a separate bin. I occasionally (actually quite a bit by their standards) mess up and put them on the belt. The clerk is deaf and signs to me that I need glasses and gets all pissed off. Also there’s standards or fourth class mail that goes in yet another bin, yet I “occasionally” mess that up too and throw it on the belt for priority mail. It’s tough, man. I don’t know how many times I’ve messed up, but I’m trying my best under the circumstances.

    The work is exhausting and the warehouse is loud. I feel like all the mail in the largest state in the country, in the largest distribution center in the state, is on my shoulders, biceps and forearms.

    I’m really tired of dumb jokes about going postal too. When people ask me where I’m working, I’ll just have to say a warehouse to avoid that.

    Comment by Travis — December 15, 2012 @ 5:27 pm

  3. Someone on Fox Noise asked a priest how god could let the massacre happen. The priest said he knew from the bible and his personal experience that god would bring forth a greater good from this tragic disaster.

    How anyone could utter such stupid, thoughtless, BS I can’t imagine. I would certainly like to know what his personal experience was.

    Comment by Sue P — December 15, 2012 @ 5:54 pm

  4. These kids were 6 or 7 years old. Where was this “God” when that was happening?

    Comment by pjsauter — December 15, 2012 @ 9:23 pm

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    Comment by vernon — December 16, 2012 @ 4:29 am

  6. Well, this was Thursday night.

    Comment by vernon — December 16, 2012 @ 5:17 am

  7. Looking for America
    By GAIL COLLINS

    “I’m sorry,” said Representative Carolyn McCarthy, her voice breaking. “I’m having a really tough time.”

    She’s the former nurse from Long Island who ran for Congress in 1996 as a crusader against gun violence after her husband and son were victims of a mass shooting on a commuter train. On Friday morning, McCarthy said, she began her day by giving an interview to a journalist who was writing a general story about “how victims feel when a tragedy happens.”

    “And then 15 minutes later, a tragedy happens.”

    McCarthy, whose husband died and son was critically wounded, is by now a practiced hand at speaking out when a deranged man with a lot of firepower runs amok. But the slaughter of 20 small children and seven adults in Connecticut left her choked up and speechless.

    “I just don’t know what this country’s coming to. I don’t know who we are any more,” she said.

    President Obama was overwhelmed as well, when he attempted to comfort the nation. It was his third such address in the wake of a soul-wrenching mass shooting. “They had their entire lives ahead of them,” he said, and he had trouble saying anything more.

    It was, of course, a tragedy. Yet tragedies happen all the time. Terrible storms strike. Cars crash. Random violence occurs. As long as we’re human, we’ll never be invulnerable.

    But when a gunman takes out kindergartners in a bucolic Connecticut suburb, three days after a gunman shot up a mall in Oregon, in the same year as fatal mass shootings in Minneapolis, in Tulsa, in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, in a theater in Colorado, a coffee bar in Seattle and a college in California — then we’re doing this to ourselves.

    We know the story. The shooter is a man, usually a young man, often with a history of mental illness. Sometimes in a rage over a lost job, sometimes just completely unhinged. In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the air was full of experts discussing the importance of psychological counseling. “We need to look at what drives a crazy person to do these kind of actions,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, one of the highest-ranking Republicans in the House.

    Every country has a sizable contingent of mentally ill citizens. We’re the one that gives them the technological power to play god.

    This is all about guns — access to guns and the ever-increasing firepower of guns. Over the past few years we’ve seen one shooting after another in which the killer was wielding weapons holding 30, 50, 100 bullets. I’m tired of hearing fellow citizens argue that you need that kind of firepower because it’s a pain to reload when you’re shooting clay pigeons. Or that the founding fathers specifically wanted to make sure Americans retained their right to carry rifles capable of mowing down dozens of people in a couple of minutes.

    Recently the Michigan House of Representatives passed and sent to the governor a bill that, among other things, makes it easy for people to carry concealed weapons in schools. After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday, a spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger said that it might have meant “the difference between life and death for many innocent bystanders.” This is a popular theory of civic self-defense that discounts endless evidence that in a sudden crisis, civilians with guns either fail to respond or respond by firing at the wrong target.

    It was perhaps the second-most awful remark on one of the worst days in American history, coming up behind Mike Huckabee’s asking that since prayer is banned from public schools, “should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

    We will undoubtedly have arguments about whether tougher regulation on gun sales or extra bullet capacity would have made a difference in Connecticut. In a way it doesn’t matter. America needs to tackle gun violence because we need to redefine who we are. We have come to regard ourselves — and the world has come to regard us — as a country that’s so gun happy that the right to traffic freely in the most obscene quantities of weapons is regarded as far more precious than an American’s right to health care or a good education.

    We have to make ourselves better. Otherwise, the story from Connecticut is too unspeakable to bear.

    Nearly two years ago, after Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head in a mass shooting in Arizona, the White House sent up signals that Obama was preparing to do something. “I wouldn’t rule out that at some point the president talks about the issues surrounding gun violence,” said his press secretary at the time, Robert Gibbs.

    On Friday, the president said: “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

    Time passes. And here we are.

    Comment by Sue P — December 16, 2012 @ 9:39 am

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